The Dilettante's Dilemma

Starbucks and the balanced diet

Posted on February 8, 2015 by hessd

This isn’t really about food. It’s about conversation. I will want to use the balanced food diet as a metaphor to help me explore the balanced conversational diet.

Here is the protein bistro box, which is my normal Starbucks breakfast. It’s 380 calories, 170, from fat, and with 13 grams of protein. And of course, there are salads of various kinds and sandwiches. And there is also junk food. The notion of “balanced diet” is meant to suggest many kinds of good food and, for emotional reasons, every now and then some bad food.

The original idea was that there is a certain kind of conversation—metaphorically, a certain kind of food—that I really like and that I would choose every time. That is not the way to choose a good diet. The easy way out of this dilemma is for me to simply refuse to always choose the food I like best; sometimes I would choose other kinds of food and together, those choices work out to a balanced diet.

That’s pretty straightforward if we are thinking about food, but conversation is a joint enterprise. What if the other people at the table[1] don’t like the same kind of conversation I like. What if they don’t like conversation at all?[2] I could stop by the table and see if the makings of “my kind of conversation” are there. If it looks like the chances are good, I put my coffee down and buy my protein bistro box; if not, I get my coffee to go and head home. Alternatively, I could try to formulate “the kind of conversation I like” as the work of the group while I am there and try to get everyone to buy in.

I don’t really like either of those.

Yet another alternative is for me to practice liking the kinds of conversations that take place at the table. One of the guys, let’s say, wants to talk about air pollution; one wants to talk about corporate capitalism; one wants to talk about home repairs; one wants to talk about some religion or other; one wants to talk about the subordinate state of women in the U. S. and what should be done about it. If I liked several of those topics, I could just enjoy each one in some way—some as entrees, some as appetizers, some as desserts—and call it good. I think that’s a pretty good strategy, but things aren’t always that easy.

I skated by just what a “conversation” is.[3] To be a conversation, as I am using the term, it has to be about something. All the examples in the previous paragraph are or could be “about something,” even home repairs. But every one of them could also be the occasion for the promiscuous trading of stories. Here’s how that goes.

Speaker 1. The way we treat women in this country is just shameful.

Speaker 2. That’s true. At the hardware store the other day, the clerk was lecturing a woman about electrical adapters as if the didn’t know anything. Here’s the electrical adapter problem as it is normally seen…

Speaker 3. I can see why the incident with the adapter interested you, but you’d have to admit that the quality of the air is a good deal more important. I was lobbying a legislator just yesterday…

Speaker 4. Most of the people I see lobbying these days seem to have a religious cause in mind and I wish they would just leave the public sector alone.

That collection of four statements is not a conversation. It is not about anything. To say what a conversation is…well, it’s hard. It’s a way of talking together, not some topic in particular.[4] For our purposes, I will call it a conversation if it is about one thing and if the participants act as colleagues in developing the topic.

Take the scattershot sequence I indentified as “not a conversation.” Numbers 1, 3, and 4 could easily be “a topic.” If we chose number one, and sometimes we have, we would have to take some time developing what we mean by “we” (in “we treat women”) and whether “this country” is the best scale for the discussion and just what the standards are by which “shameful” could be established. And there might just be someone in the group who wondered whether “shameful” was the most useful attribution to make; the most likely to lead to clarity, to action, etc.

If that were the conversation, it would be just the kind of conversation I like best. And that brings me to the other questions I wanted to ask. Is it really a balanced diet? No it isn’t, and changing from that topic to 3 or 4 would not make it a different “kind” of conversation. The balanced diet idea would require that I invest myself, sometimes, in the personal stories that are being told (Speaker 2, above); sometimes in personal issues (my wife nags me every time I go home). Of course, dealing with the issue of the nagging wife or the issue of why some people just need nagging could substitute for the stories, but that wouldn’t help balance the diet.

The idea here is that I need to learn to appreciate all kinds of conversation—even one story after another if they are related—and not insist on the kind I like best. This is a standard related to my own durability and wholeness. There is also the question, however, of what kind of conversational diversity it would take to keep the group together. At my Starbucks, we don’t have a deep bench; we have to play the players who show up. If one is a story person—you’ll never guess what happened to my kids on Hawaii—we will have to be a rewarding audience for those stories. The same goes for stories about gifted grandchildren, neurotic pets, and unattractive nursing homes.

And then, after the stories, maybe a conversation. What if, for instance, the members who tell the stories are asking, “Are you really interested in me as a person?” and mean by that “Are you willing to listen receptively to the stories I tell?” This person thinks of “who I am” in terms of the stories” and of “colleagues” or maybe even “friends” as “people who will listen to my stories.” And what if, after his stories had been listened to—some not for the first time—he said, “OK, now let’s have a conversation about something.”

Would that work? Is the price too high for that particular show? Will people make excuses and leave? OK, I need to go think. Maybe a quiet room would help me.

[1] I am thinking of the Northwest Corner Caucus, which meets at the Multnomah Village Starbucks in Portland, Oregon. The same people are not there every day, but the pool of people who show up at that table at that time of the morning is not a large pool. So when I think about “a balanced conversational diet,” I know who I am talking about.
[2] I talking this post over with the Northwest Corner Caucus, I stumbled on a view I had never heard before. “What about the relationships?” asked one of the members. “What about them?” I said, having no idea where this was going. The point was that the conversation was just a gimmick to enable relationships to form and grow. You need “conversation” in the group the way you need mayo in potato salad—just enough to keep it together. The conversation was just a means to the relationships; not a desiratum itself.
[3] We could say, broadly, that it is a “conversation” if people sit around talking about something. I would like to slice it finer than that.
[4] It is harder to talk as colleagues, of course, about some topics.

Posted in Getting Old, Living My Life | Tagged always choosing the same entree, balanced diet, having conversation, junk food, Starbucks, telling stories | Leave a comment

Repent! No, not you.

Posted on January 31, 2015 by hessd

Let’s think about “repentance” a little bit. My thesis is going to be that it is a really good idea sometimes and a really bad idea sometimes.

The Greek verb normally translated “repent” is metanoein, which can be narrowly translated as “change your mind.” In that way of looking at it, the prefix meta- is the “change” part. What is to be changed is represented by the noun nous meaning mind. But other things could be changed, too. Besides being asked to change what we think, we might be asked to change how we feel or what we intend or what we are doing.

Who should change what he or she is doing? Why?

The form in which this came to me yesterday was: “to change your mind, you have to have a mind.” And immediately after that, I remembered a discussion from my long ago legislative days. We were talking about when to lobby a certain Senator in the Oregon State Legislature and we decided to call him off the floor in advance of the vote. Why? Because much more powerful than any commitment he made to anyone was the persuasiveness of whoever talked to him last.

When we talk about a “mind,” we mean to imply some continuity of views. I can sit down with the Caucus at Starbucks and on any given topic, give the views that each of the members has been taking on that subject. When the possibility that someone has “changed his mind” comes up—and that happens with amazing frequency for a group of…um…mature…men and women—it is a change from that position. We have opinions that are retained in similar form from one time to the next and we change those opinions when we think we should; we know hold to hold ‘em and know how to fold ‘em.

Consider by contrast a person whose views don’t have that stability, that crucial component of what we call “mind.” Imagine a person who is pathetically eager to please and whose view take on the form of whoever he is with. That person doesn’t have a “mind” in this sense so it cannot be “changed” in the sense that metanoia presupposes.
Martin E. P. Seligman, in his marvelous book Helplessness, tells about “the Tuscaloosa Plan” for under-assertive men. It was a pretty simple treatment. Each man was given a meaningless task, like sanding and sanding and sanding a block of wood. Every now and then the workshop supervisor would come by and yell at him for doing it wrong. “You’re sanding with the grain!” he would yell. “What an idiot!” So the helpless schlub “repents.” Sort of. Changing in the direction of the person yelling at him is why he is in the workshop. He is an “over-repenter.” He needs to learn to stop repenting.

And in the workshop, he does. The next time the supervisor comes around, he finds the poor guy sanding against the grain of the wood as he was told to do. “What an idiot!” bellows the supervisor, “You should be sanding with the grain.” This goes on and on day after day until repentance, which is the life plan of this man finally runs out. He rises up in holy wrath and tells the supervisor where he can go and who his parents are. The supervisor apologized profusely—that is his job too—and the man is released from the workshop for the day and given whatever luxuries the center has to offer. Hot fudge sundaes, let’s say.

The next day, he is right back in the workshop being castigated for doing what he was told to do until he finally refuses to repent. Eventually, the day comes when the supervisor wanders by the bench and takes a deep breath and the former over-repenter wheels on him and says, “Don’t even think it!” At that point, the patient is declared cured and released from the treatment.

What was his problem? He was told to change his mind so often and so painfully that he decided it would be better not to have a mind. To every demand, a shrug and then compliance. He needs to stand up for himself in at least the rudimentary ways and that will require refusing to repent. He will have a mind and he will not change it.

John the Baptist came preaching, “Repent, for the Kingdom of God is at hand.” When we look at the population he was addressing, we have no difficulty knowing in general what he meant. The way they are thinking—and feeling and intending and behaving—is not in line with the way God wants it to be. That means they need to change it.

This familiar scene—familiar, by the way, to every street corner political activist or religious evangelist—does not imagine that each and every person in the crowd should repent. It means that you (plural)—that y’all—should repent. The idea that a culture could “repent” sounds odd only because we so seldom mix the taken for granted ideas of religion and apply them to politics or vice versa. But when you try to do it, it turns out that it is easy and natural. Furthermore, I have an example.

In 1960, Harry Bredemeier and Jackson Toby proposed a new kind of text for courses normally called “Social Problems.” The direction they proposed is not the direction textbooks went for those courses, but I was drawn to it right away. The subtitle of their book is “Costs and Casualties of an Acquisitive Society.” The way we have organized our society regularly drives people into difficult circumstances. I’ll pick a few. We drive people into over-conformity (p. 133) and deviance (under-conformity) p. 215; into ritualism—accepting means as ends (p. 290)—and into a “search for oblivion” (p. 428), where anything that makes it hurt less is chosen.

“We” are over-acquisitive as Bredemeier and Toby see it and “we” need to repent. We need to change our minds and change our ways in by those means, we will reduce the “costs and casualties” that “we” are producing by our current choices. John the Baptist would have been entirely at home in the world this text shows us.

But what about me? Do I need to change? What if I have been one of the few voices of social sanity. I have been arguing that we all pay the price of allowing our society to degenerate into camps of very rich (a small camp, but gated) and the very poor (a very large camp). I get pressed a lot about holding this view, let’s say, and even more for arguing that we should change the policies that sustain it. Hanging on desperately to my position could very well be my job. Changing my mind, as the word metanoein, taken without context, argues, is the wrong thing for me to do. All the bad guys are arguing that I should “repent,” but my conscience and the tattered remnants of my integrity urge me to hold firm.

I’m sure you see the point of that simple illustration and I can’t imagine that you would want to argue against it. I don’t either. But if we don’t, then we are left with “repentance” is a good thing for some people, but not for others. Changing the direction of the social contract—beginning to limit it in preparation for reneging on it entirely—is a change we ought not make. We should consider the case for change, reject it, and find a way to hold our commitments in place.

So the easy call for people to “repent” turns out to presuppose some constant position which is mistaken or inapplicable or harmful. If I don’t have a position at all, the best an advocate of repentance could do would be to urge me to take a position and hold it. If it is the right position, and if he has no message other than “Repent!” then he ought, on the basis of his values, leave me alone and find someone else to talk to. If I do have a position and the speaker thinks it goes in the wrong direction, he would have to show that the direction is wrong and why and why his direction would be better.

There is no reason those things cannot be done but both of them go beyond the call for repentance. If you are going to go seriously into the repentance business, what you really need is people who have a position. No position, no changing the position. You need people who have the wrong position. You don’t want to go changing the good positions just because you like to see change. And if persuasion is the preferred mode of inducing repentance, it would be a great help if people know why they are holding the positions they are holding.

I haven’t dealt with a person who “holds a position” because he will be punished if he does not. I know that’s a significant source of positions that ought to be challenged, but those people don’t need to be reformed; they need to be freed.

Posted in Biblical Studies, Living My Life | Tagged assertiveness, having a mind, repentance, resistance | 3 Comments

Selma

Posted on January 20, 2015 by hessd

Selma has been nominated for an Academy Award as the best film of the year. One of the things that means is that it is going to get talked about a lot. Since it is about race relations in the United States, it is going to get argued about a lot. For those of us who “remember” Selma, in the removed sense of watching it on television, it will evoke the ransacking of memories and the scratching of heads.

And it should. We live in the “docudrama era.” Is a movie like a document or it is like a drama? When we say it is “based on” a true story, does that mean it is true or does it mean that all the falsehoods it contains were added after the true story was written?

In a way, I am surprised that this is still so hard for us. In 1971, John Gardner wrote Grendel, an account of the familiar story of Beowulf, told from “the other side.” Fans of Beowulf did not rise up shouting that this story was false. Well, you say, but that was easier. No one was claiming that Beowulf is an actual historical event. Because it is a tale, one version is as good as another.

Is Selma a “tale?” Ava DuVernay, the director, puts it this way, “I wasn’t interested in making a white-savior movie.” Maureen Dowd was not charmed by DuVernay’s approach, as you can see here.

DuVernay’s point, I suppose, is that the story of Lyndon Johnson’s effect on the civil rights has been told as a “white savior story.” It may be that DuVernay thinks the white savior story isn’t true or maybe she is just tired of it. She could have written an article saying it wasn’t true or an editorial saying she is tired of that story, but she’s a movie maker, so she made a movie.

And what does the movie “say?” Obviously, it says quite a few things. It says that there was discord among the black activists about the best way to proceed. It says that Lyndon Johnson had an agenda of his own and wanted Dr. King to be a part of it. It says that Jesse Jackson was no part of the activities around Selma. It says that Dr. King was not unfaithful to his wife. The most central statement it makes is that the civil rights movement was about black people, not white people.

Here’s what that means. As the plans for the movie go forward, everything that shifts the focus from the intentions and feelings and actions of the black civil rights marchers in Alabama just has to go. If Gandhi had marched with them to Birmingham, DuVernay would not have covered it. It’s a question of where to point the camera. Selma is where the action is; Washington is a reluctant child who needs to be brought into line.

And just as there is only so much camera time, so there is only so much credit. The credit you award over there, you cannot award again over here. If President Johnson had a determination to pass a voting rights bill, that will need to be obscured so that Dr. King’s struggle—inside himself and outside—can be what causes the events we see. No congressional sentiments favorable to civil rights are shown. Support, even distant support, takes the credit away from the black marchers who faced mounted troops and unruly mobs.

That’s what you have to do to tell a story.

Now…is it a true story? I’m going to say No, but I want to stop first and trash the notion of “true stories.” All stories gain coherence by featuring some things, including other things, and excluding yet other things. If “true” meant that all the facts were included, we can easily see that no story is “true” in that sense.

That brings us to “our story” and “your story.” This is the cowboys and Indians problem. The settlers were peacefully farming their land when vicious savages murdered all of them except the one child who got away to tell the whole pathetic story. The Indians were peacefully living in their way on their land when soldiers came in and killed a lot of them and forced the rest into an arid ghetto. In Stan Freberg’s marvelous retelling of Christopher Columbus landing in the new world, he “discovers” the Indians living there. The Indians “discover” Columbus’s crew tooling around on the beach. As the chief says, “Is all how you look at it.”

Selma is “their story.” It proceeds as it must if it is to be their story. What I experienced in the 1960s as “what was happening” was “my story” and it has been told many many times.

So what’s the problem? Is there still a problem?

Yes there is. For me, there is. If you could add up all the stories—everything adds together and nothing is subtracted—you could just pile one story on another. I did that recently with a story about a girl I called Allison, who was a Goth and also a cheerleader and also an honor student. As a cheerleader, she had long fingernails painted in the school colors. As a Goth, she chewed her fingernails short and ragged. It doesn’t work. Someone will want to know what the fingernails “really looked like.”

We learn in Selma that President Johnson unleashed J. Edgar Hoover to wiretap Dr. King. Here’s Bill Moyers on the portrayal of that event.

As for Lyndon B. Johnson: There’s one egregious and outrageous portrayal that is the worst kind of creative license suggesting the very opposite of the truth, in this case, that the president was behind J. Edgar Hoover’s sending the ‘sex tape’ to Coretta King. Some of our most scrupulous historians have denounced that one. And even if you want to think of Lyndon B. Johnson as vile enough to want to do that, he was way, way too smart to hand Hoover the means of blackmailing him.

So…in DuVernay’s story, is it OK to portray Lyndon Johnson as an obstacle that must be overcome but not OK to say that he committed a deplorable act that he did not commit? We learn things about President Johnson that, according to Moyers, (that’s a very young Bill Moyers with LBJ) many careful historians have determined not to be true. Is this the price to be paid for DuVernay’s story to be told? If it is a necessary price, is it too high?

I was troubled by DuVernay’s depiction of President Johnson’s speech on behalf of the Voting Rights Act. Lyndon Johnson was one of the worst orators ever to hold the office of President of the United States, but I thought at the time that this might have been the best speech he ever gave. He was equal parts determined, frustrated, angry, and powerful. He dominated a packed House chamber full of people who looked and sounded as if they knew what was going on. It was powerful!

DuVernay has the speech in the Senate chamber, not the House. It is not a crowded room. The hearers are not enthusiastic. Johnson himself is clearly trying to seem determined, but we can tell that he is not. You can also see why it chafes Bill Moyers.

Johnson was more animated and passionate than I have ever seen him, and I was standing very near him, off to the right. The nation was electrified.

In all these things, she is “wrong” in the sense of being inaccurate. And she is “right” is pushing to the background the actions of a white man that would eclipse the actions of a black man. She is telling her story.

I feel the frustration of her telling a story that doesn’t line up with my own experience. In a more removed sense, I feel the built up anger that shows through her “white-savior movie” comment. I think there is real merit in having our various frustrations aired—hers and mine—in bars and coffee shops all over the country. I think we will all be better for that conversation

Posted in Movies, Politics | Tagged "true" stories, civil rights, Dr. King, narrative distortion, President Johnson, Selma, white saviors, white supremacy | Leave a comment

My teammates are not offended

Posted on January 18, 2015 by hessd

I was taken, recently, with the premise of the movie, Surrogates. I liked the premise so much that I tried really hard to like the movie. I failed, but I still like the premise so I am going to make use of it today. Surrogates is set in some unspecified future in which ordinary people spend their days in “stim chairs” and are represented in public by automatons who look just the way each of them would like to look. [footnote 1: “Including the fat and balding old man who chooses to inhabit a surrogate that looks like an incredibly sexy young woman.”] In this picture she is appearing in her surrogate; he is not.

You can see why that appealed to me. These people weren’t prisoners…exactly. They refused to appear in public as the people they actually were—inhabiting the bodies they actually had—and chose, instead to live all day every day sitting in a chair wired to connect them to their surrogates. This isn’t like not going to the dance because you “don’t have anything to wear.” This isn’t like skipping your high school reunion because you still have a lousy job and a disreputable car. This is a lot worse.

I let my condemnation of “those people” run free as I watched the movie, in part because I don’t make those particular mistakes. But there is the question of how to think clearly about the kind of mistakes I do make—the Dale kind of mistakes. I have an answer I’d like to offer, but first I want to prepare that answer with plausible starting points.

Here is the first such. A sociology text I read long ago attempted to define what the word institution means to sociologists. The author imagined a scene in a restaurant in which all the normal customers were sitting and eating. One man was standing at the window turning slowly left and right looking, apparently, for something. A young woman new to the restaurant thinks maybe she should call the manager and get that guy out of here, but one of the regulars stops her. “It’s OK,” he says, “he always does that.” When “always does that” makes everyone relax and go on with their business, “institutional status” has been achieved.

Here is the second. Imagine that I am a guy who just can’t hold his liquor. I drink a little bit and I get “funny.” [footnote 2: ‘thinking you are funny would be one of the great consolations of being drunk if only everyone else got drunk at the same time and alto thought you were funny. Alas, it is not always so.”] And then I drink a little more and I get sociable and I plan parties for us all to attend next week. Eyes roll. No date books are utilized. Finally I get mean and start to say really nasty things to these people who are my friends. “It’s OK,” says one of my longtime friends to a new acquaintance, “He always gets like this after the first six-pack. He doesn’t mean any of it.”

You see the similarity, of course. You feel the same way I would, I suppose, that if I can’t handle alcohol any better than that, maybe I should stay away from it. Good idea. Let’s move on.

Third starting point. Let’s say the difficulty isn’t alcohol. It’s a stroke and the effect of the stroke, for our consideration, is that I can’t feel the side of my mouth, which means I can’t feel the saliva that pools there. And I don’t know when I start to drool. This a failure of presentability. It’s serious. It is one of the things “one simply does not do” and now I can’t help it and don’t know when I’m doing it.

There is the Surrogates strategy, of course. I am so embarrassed about being the guy in the group who drools that I just don’t become a part of the group. Understandable, certainly, but not very satisfactory. And if I have been in a group where one or more of the members drools, then I know how I felt about it and about them. Naturally, I imagine that people are feeling that way toward me. The strong side of me doesn’t want to inflict that experience on the others; the weak part of me is just self-conscious and ashamed.

Fourth starting point. I was married for a long time to a wonderful woman who died very rapidly of cancer. In the short time between the diagnosis and the death, she experienced a bunch of really nasty treatments and felt really bad a lot of the time. And, of course, all her hair fell out. Marilyn wasn’t really the self-conscious type. She imagined that everyone either liked her or was looking around for a strategy that would enable them to like her. Here’s what that did for her.

She took her physical liabilities—the analog to the drooling man, above—as difficulties her friends were trying to overcome. There is a certain wariness people have when they sit down to a good conversation with a woman who is dying of cancer. You don’t know quite how to treat her. You don’t know whether she is self-conscious or frightened or angry. You just don’t know how to be.

Marilyn saw her job as finding a way to make them comfortable with her. She taught them how to be with her and rewarded them for continuing to try and for getting it right. She was a warm and generous woman and when she rewarded you, you knew you had been rewarded. No one avoided her. People continued to introduce her to their friends and to be introduced to her friends, just as they always had. In the meantime, her husband (me) stood there dumbfounded. I had not only never seen a performance like that; I had never imagined that there could be one. The faint beginnings of the concept and the repeated concrete actions occurring at the same time, day after day. It was dazzling. On the other hand, it set the bar pretty high.

Having started now at four different places, let me arrive at a strategy I think even I might be able to use. I tell my friends that I am sorry to be the guy in the group who drools and doesn’t know when it is happening. I tell them that I value their friendship and would like to presume on their good will for a favor. Since they can see the early stages of drool and I can’t, they can just give me a signal—I picture any one of them putting an index finger up to the corner of his mouth—and I act to prevent the occurrence. That’s it, really.

But I see the power of this in the establishment of the institution. I’m like the guy in the restaurant about whom they say, “Don’t worry. He always does that.” This difficulty I have isn’t like remembering not to get drunk and abuse my friends; this is about having had a stoke and needing friends. If this works the way I am thinking it will, these friends are my team. They have my back. They know the many ways we care for each other and the little signal, the finger to the corner of the mouth, is just one of those ways of caring.

People who would like to be offended by it will face a wall of people who are not offended by it. They would be violating a norm that my friends learned how to honor and then to value. The new people would run very quickly into the wall of “this is how we do it here.”

We are a team. About me they say, “He is one of us.” To other people, they say, “Don’t worry about a thing. We’ve got this under control.”

Posted in Living My Life | Tagged drooling, dying, I've got your back, presentability, stroke, what are friends for? | Leave a comment

Obamacare and “Death Panels”

Posted on January 11, 2015 by hessd

This is a question that has gotten a lot more attention than it deserves. Let’s take a look at it. A “death panel” would have to be a number of people (panel) that is empowered to take an action or to withhold it, the result of which would be that the person in question dies. That brings us now to two questions: a) are there any such panels and b) is there any provision in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) that facilitates the death of patients?

Are there death panels?

Yes. Of course there are. Not like these. Let’s try to imagine what it would be like if there were not. It would mean that there were no medical procedures that “cost too much.” For the very rich, of course, this is often true. If a procedure were available that extended a rich man’s life at the cost of a million dollars a day and he wants to pay the million dollars a day, he will be treated.

If that same procedure were recommended for a poor woman, the question of cost would come up. If the poor woman is insured, the insurance company will have to say yes or no.
If not, some payer of last resort will be looked for. Back when there were no procedures that cost a million a day, families sometimes pitched in, but we are out of the range of family resources here. In Oregon, I have seen tearful mothers begin media campaigns for contributions that will save the life of a child, only to see the child die before enough money was contributed. If there were some way to make it funny, it would be a terrific TV game show.
Here’s the truth. If there is a medical procedure to be done, someone is going to have to be paid to do it. Any group of people who refuses to pay the cost of a procedure, is a “death panel.”
2. What does Obamacare have to do with death panels?
Nothing. Let’s start the question at another point. Do you think that elderly people ought to have the right to make decisions about how their last days will be managed? Me too. If they don’t decide when they are able, someone will decide for them when they are no longer able.
Brief Excursus: The word I always use for this is “agency,” I want to be the agent—that’s Latin for “the one who acts”—in my own life. There is a nastier form of this consideration that uses autonomy instead. I am a big fan of autonomy when it is my own autonomy we are considering, but I am not such a big fan of the word anymore because “autonomy” is too close to “heteronomy.” Someone is going to “be the law” in a situation—that’s the nomos part. It will be me (auto-) or someone else, (hetero-). My hesitation about the word autonomy, considered in the light of its alternatives, is that it raises the question of alternatives. I don’t want that question raised. I want it presumed and “agency” does that for me. Incursus resumes here.
Presumably a woman and her husband will sit down with a knowledgeable person to talk about how they want their last days handled. Making my own decisions about that is important to me and having the advice of a doctor can help a lot. Question: who is going to pay the doctor for spending his or her time that way? Here is a little cut from Wikipeda, every piece of which, with the exceptions of the names of the cosponsors, I know to be true.
A bill to provide for reimbursement every five years for office visit discussions with Medicare patients on advance directives, living wills, and other end of life care issues was proposed by Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-OR) in April 2009—with Republican cosponsors Charles Boustany (R-LA), a cardiovascular surgeon, Patrick Tiberi (R-OH), and Geoff Davis (R-KY).[32][33][34] The counseling was to be voluntary and could be reimbursed more often if a grave illness occurred. The legislation had been encouraged by Gundersen Lutheran and a loose coalition of other hospitals in La Crosse, Wisconsin that had had positive experiences with the widespread use of advance directives.
Earl Blumenauer is a very good congressman, but I take special pleasure in noting his contribution to this issue because he is the only member of Congress who could greet me by name if we met on the street. So the answer to the question of who pays the doctor to be a part of this conversation is: Medicare. As important as these conversations are—they are the only way to guard agency and understanding at the same time—the doctors aren’t going to do them for free and they shouldn’t have to. So the “Obama death panel” controversy, from this standpoint is, “Should the doctors be compensated for their work in helping people insure that their wishes are honored when they are no longer able to insist on them?”
You don’t have to be liberal to like the sound of that.
The argument against this provision of Obamacare is that it could be abused, that “panels of bureaucrats” (Sarah Palin’s phrasing) would coerce elderly people to “choose” to have the government kill them. Any discussion can be perverted. I know that. Even teacher parent conferences can be perverted. I have been the student, the parent, and the teacher in those conversations. When the common purpose uniting the members of the conference falters, everyone has a “me first” substitute. I remember that most vividly when I was the child in question.
So here are two questions. What will happen if we do pay doctors to be a part of these discussions and what will happen if we don’t? Remember the reference, above, to LaCrosse, Wisconsin? Here’s why that is there. You can see the whole piece from Forbes Magazine here.

Imagine a town of 50,000 Americans where 96% of those who die have signed an “advance directive” codifying their conscious decisions about how they would like to die. This is quite an accomplishment given we haven’t been able to move the needle at a national level beyond 30% over the past 30 years. By definition every possible polarized constituency in this town– conservative and liberal, religious and secular, Republican and Democrat, rich and poor– agree on one of the most divisive political and social issues in America. Welcome to La Crosse, Wisconsin– a Midwestern everytown USA that has managed to transcend Sarah Palin’s death panel rhetoric not only to become the “cheapest place to die in America.” But, more importantly, they have transformed the entire “tenor of care” for end-of-life planning.

96%! How did they do that? By talking about it together. What a concept. And the effect on medical costs of this plan, which, in LaCrosse, is called “Respecting Choices Advance Care Planning?”

Nationally, the average cost for a patient’s last two years of life is $26,000 (in some hospitals average costs run as high as $65,000) the average cost in La Crosse, is just $18,159.

The “death panels” charge was a low blow. PolitiFact, which makes its living checking such charges, named it their “Lie of the Year.” It’s bad and everyone who participated in it should be ashamed. But the real cost, beyond the moral theater of it, is that we are not doing, nationally, what they have already achieved in LaCrosse. Agency is respected. Conversations are held. Money is saved.

Which of those three outcomes does anyone want to object to?

Posted in Getting Old, Politics | Tagged autonomy, death panels, end of life care, Obamacare, payment for services | Leave a comment

Walking Gladly in the Dark

Posted on January 7, 2015 by hessd

And I said to the man who stood at the gate of the year: “Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown.”

And he replied:“Go out into the darkness and put your hand into the Hand of God. That shall be to you better than light and safer than a known way.”
So I went forth, and finding the Hand of God, trod gladly into the night. And He led me towards the hills and the breaking of day in the lone East

King George VI—the king of The King’s Speech—read this poem to his British radio audience during his Christmas broadcast in 1939. Great Britain had, by that time, declared war on Germany. Germany had conquered Poland, virtually over the weekend, and Hitler was biding his time for the attack on western Europe. It was a dark time and finding the way in that dark time was daunting. You can see why it appealed to the king.

The poem was popularly called, ”The Gate of the Year.” Minnie Louise Haskins, of the London School of Economics, who wrote the poem in 1908 called it “God Knows.” You can see the whole poem here.

I have loved this first part of the poem since I first heard it. “The man who stood at the gate” engaged my imagination and asking only for a light and being told there is a better way and finally, treading “gladly into the night.” All those appealed to me. But something did not appeal to me and I’ve never known just what it was. Today, I want to poke around a little and see what I can find.

When I think of it as my own problem, rather than King George’s, I start at a different place. Here’s what I want: I what to tread safely into the unknown. I think it will not be “unknown” if I can see it, so I ask for a light.

The man said, “You will be better off trusting God because this trusting will be better than seeing where you are going and it will be safer than knowing where to go.” That’s how I read what the man said.

I have that sentiment myself sometimes. “Tell me what to do so that I can be safe,” I want to say. I formulate it in those terms, but I don’t say it out loud because I don’t approve of it. Safety first people don’t do improv, I’m sure. Safety first people don’t put their lives in the hands of local populations who may be friendly or not. Safety first people don’t catch a pass on a crossing route when cornerbacks of reliably hostile disposition are waiting for them. So safety is good, but “safety first” is not.

As I see it, there are two kinds of reassurance I might (probably would) prefer to trusting that I have put my hand into the hand of God. First is “the known way.” Familiar; habitual. “I could do this with my eyes closed,” we say, but we don’t often say it in inescapable darkness.

Second is “the observable way.” This is not a “way” we know, necessarily, but it is a way we will know how to react to if we can see far enough ahead. We trust our reaction time, rather than our foreknowledge.

I might have a shot at either of those, if I were entirely sure that I had put my hand into the hand of God. But it’s hard to be sure of that. It is easy to see that I am not calling the shots anymore, but it is not easy to know who is.

The image that comes to my mind—influenced, I am sure, by a rapidly increasing technophobia—is “giving control” over to my computer to someone as at “remote source.” If the tech at the “remote source” cares about this glitch as much as I do (unlikely) and if he or she is more competent than I am (extremely likely), then I can relax and watch the cursor jerk frantically from one menu to another and from one function to another while I watch. Do I trust this person to manage my computer better than I could myself? Absolutely. Do I trust God to manage my life better than I could myself? In principle. Do I know that the remote source now exercising control over my life is, in fact, the God whom Jesus referred to as “Father?” No. I don’t know that.

And if I did know that, would I turn control over to God with the wholeness of heart with which I submit to the tech at the remote location? My very best trust in God comes when there is no alternative.

When I have some notion, myself, of how things should work out, I discover that other, deeper, levels of myself have preferences. I know a little something about this “way,” I say, because I have been here before. I am asking for only a little light, not a lot, because I do trust my ability to respond to unforeseen events. If there are alternatives, like these two very partial ones, trusting that the Being to whom I have given remote control over my life is, in fact, God and that He will “guide my way”—then those are harder.

There is a solution to this dilemma. It is, to borrow a phrase of C. S. Lewis’s, a “severe mercy.” It is to trust, not that God will guide me safely along my path, but that God will direct me where He needs for me to go. When the weak point in a military position is just about to give way, any general will send more soldiers there That might not be where the soldiers want to go, but it is where they are needed, so it is where they are sent. I don’t think of my life as a battlefield, really I don’t, but in the battlefield situation, the contrast between where I need to go and where I want to go is nicely illuminated.

If I trust that I will be guided where I need to be, that will be “a mercy.” If that “place” is somewhere I will be humiliated or bored or fired or killed, that will be “severe.” But if I can tread gladly into the night, I will feel that it is trust well placed and I will gladly give up my known way and my attraction to safety.

Posted in Living My Life | Tagged severe mercy, the gate of the year, trusting God, wanting safety | Leave a comment

When you can’t go any further, you know where you are

Posted on January 3, 2015 by hessd

I went to the University of Oregon to begin my doctoral work in 1970. I knew that they didn’t give doctorates out for really good essays on what I did last summer vacation. I knew it would require original scholarly work. And I didn’t even know what I wanted to study.

I did know who I wanted to study with, however, and that worked our just as well. James C. Davies had written Human Nature in Politics in 1963. It was a serious consideration of important political ideas from the standpoint of research in social psychology. So I did two things in pursuit of my new doctoral field. I applied to be a graduate teaching fellow in the department of political science. They said No. So I applied to be the morning janitor at the public library in Eugene. They said Yes.

From the standpoint of the dissertation I eventually wrote—I called it Undimensional Man, having a little fun with Herbert Marcuse’s One Dimensional Man—both the No and the Yes were crucially important. This is all hindsight, of course. I really wanted the fellowship and, except for the money, I really didn’t want the janitorship, but you really can’t tell, at the time, what is a good outcome and what a bad outcome.

Just before I would open the library doors to the public at 7:00 a.m., I would dust the whole library floor. As a part of that process, I dusted past the theology section—and every other section—and in the theology section, three shelves up from the floor, was one of the ugliest book jackets I have ever seen. It looked like it was designed not to be mistaken for a deer in hunting season; it was orange (not green, like the example) and yellow and black. I noticed that cover for a month before I ever stopped to see what it was. It was Gordon D. Kaufman’s magnum opus, Systematic Theology: a Historicist Perspective. “Huh,” I said, “So that’s what it is. Ugly cover.”

A month later, I picked it up again and noticed that he said, “a Historicist Perspective” as he should, and not “an Historicist Perspective” as many do. Then I noticed that he was raised Mennonite, which is not a religious background I associate with Harvard Divinity School, where Kaufman was a professor, and which is similar in many ways to my father’s upbringing in the Brethren in Christ church. Eventually, I took the book out; I did have a library card, after all. I have read it maybe a dozen times by now. The Gordon Kaufman of 1968—he has moved on from his 1968 positions but I still hold them—is my “go to” theologian.”

When I started getting sold on Gordon Kaufman, I started working my way through his other books and by 1972, I had found God the Problem, a book of his essays. In one of the essays, “Transcendence without Mythology,” I found this passage.

Consider, for example, the situation of a man imprisoned in a cell outside of which he has never been and from which he cannot escape. If he seeks to conceive the restricting walls of his room—with their resistance to his efforts to push through them, their hardness and solidity and color—as (material) realities, he will be able to do so only in analogy with the experienceable (material) objects within the room. Thus, his conclusion that the walls are composed of some sort of thickness of material substance, however plausible, in fact presupposes an interpretation of that which is beyond what is directly experienceable by him, namely the bare surface of the walls. The conception of the ultimate limit of his movements is constructed imaginatively out of elements derived from objects within his experience that partially restrict and limit him; for the stuff or structure of the walls themselves—that “behind” their surfaces—cannot be directly known, though the restrictingness of the walls is, of course, directly experienced.

It was the picture that did it for me. A man in a completely dark cell. What he knows about where he is can be determined by not being able to go any further. He goes until he hits a wall and then he can’t go further. By keeping track of where he is and moving in different directions, he can determine the size and shape of his “cell.” He can learn the height of the cell and the makeup of the floor and what the inner surface of the walls is like.

And while I held that image in mind, I read a lot of anthropology and sociology and psychology and political theory and had conversations with a lot of really interesting professors and graduate students. I began to notice that “what stops us from going where we want to go” is like the wall of a cell. Skin color can be a wall; gender can be a wall; poverty can be a wall; being religious or irreligious or wrong-religious (depending on where you live) can be a wall. And how do you find out that there are walls there? By running into them and remembering where they are.

I was still thinking about walls when I read Amitai Etzioni on “inauthenticity” and how it is different from “alienation.” The guy in the cell in Kaufman’s example is alienated as Etzioni sees him. But look at this distinction: “The alienated man sees before him a tall unyielding wall; the man caught in an inauthentic situation feels entailed in a cobweb.” You can find that on page 633 of Etzioni’s The Active Society or you can find it as the quotation introducing a paper Dave Campbell and I published last year, “Turning Cobwebs into Walls.”

When I read Etzioni on inauthenticity, I realized that you don’t really need walls to trap people. Cobwebs will do the trick if the people have given up on going anywhere or if they are confused about where to go or even if the notion of “going somewhere” has lost all meaning.

The short way to end this story is that when I saw that cobwebs could function as “walls”—and in Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man, they do—I sat down and wrote my dissertation. That wouldn’t be a fair account, but it wouldn’t really be false. I needed to add some other pieces to that realization to bring me to inventing a “causal attribution journal” as a way to tell which were walls and which only cobwebs.

The work of devising the causal attribution journal has been on my mind since 1974. I have been presented by my undergraduate classes with dozens of ways to misunderstand it which I would never have thought of. And in all that, the image of the guy in the dark cell has continued to anchor all my speculation and all my teaching. And I had forgotten about it until just last week.

Posted in Political Psychology | Tagged alienation, Amitai Etzioni, causal attribution, Gordon D. Kaufman, inauthenticity | 2 Comments

2014 in review

Posted on December 30, 2014 by hessd

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2014 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

A New York City subway train holds 1,200 people. This blog was viewed about 5,800 times in 2014. If it were a NYC subway train, it would take about 5 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Simeon the Stubborn

Posted on December 30, 2014 by hessd

We just finished the season of Advent. On the church calendar, it is now Christmas. How awkward is that? Our whole society is saying “Been there, done that,” and the churches, the liturgical churches at any rate, are saying, “Wait. We’re just getting started.”

So it’s Christmas now. And at our house, it is the Christmas story according to Luke this year and that brings us to the character of Simeon. Bette once said that a mind like mine that makes connections by so many different modalities really shouldn’t be trusted with a blog that just anyone could read. She didn’t actually say that out loud, but I know the look by now. Today, my goal is to prove her right.

The thing that’s hard to get about Simeon is just how bad he wants it. Here’s what Luke says about him.

25 Now there was a man in Jerusalem, whose name was Simeon, and this man was righteous and devout, looking for the consolation of Israel, and the Holy Spirit was upon him. 26 And it had been revealed to him by the Holy Spirit that he should not see death before he had seen the Lord’s Christ.

The expression “the consolation of Israel” doesn’t have a single clear meaning, but everyone is sure it means that God will, at long last, take care of his people, Israel. It is something a devout man might feel very intensely about. He might want it more than he wanted anything. He might very understandably want it more than he wanted life, but that wasn’t a trade he was going to get to make.

It is easy for people who haven’t thought about it to imagine that “should not see death [until]…as something like the invulnerability of Achilles. And just as we think Achilles is “safe”—except for that little matter of the heel—so we might think that Simeon is “safe” until God provides the promised consolation; until, in Luke’s phrasing, he had seen “the Lord’s Christ.”

That’s not the way I’m thinking about it. Let me add a batch of entirely fictional, but also entirely plausible, “facts” about Simeon. He’s an old man. Let’s say he has rheumatoid arthritis. He is in pain all the time. He doesn’t sleep well, so he is fuzzy-minded all the time. He doesn’t have any friends and he doesn’t get around the way he once did. And yet, every day he goes to the office, so to speak. He goes to the temple to pray for the one thing that he can set beside his pain and his drowsiness and his loneliness in such a way that they all would be worth enduring. He wants to die, sure. He is eager to die. But he refuses until God makes good on His promise.

God looks down from heaven and pities the old man. He says, “Simeon, this is taking longer than I thought. It’s OK for you to let go. I know you want to die and it is a release you deserve.” And Simeon says, “No. Absolutely not. You promised and I am holding you to it no matter what it costs me. I will be here—I will be right here—until you keep your promise.”

Then one day the Holy Spirit says to Simeon, “Go to the temple. Now!” Simeon, being that kind of person, does what he is told and there he finds Joseph and Mary and their infant child. This is really the only way for the standoff between God and Simeon to be resolved. They put the child into his arms and he realized instantly that the two things he wants more than anything—but wants equally—are now his. He is holding “the consolation of Israel,” in his arms. God has acted, finally, and “the anointed of the Lord” is here. God has kept His word.

Now he can accept the other gift God has for him.

29 Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace…30 for mine eyes have seen thy salvation.

Some translations read, “Lord, now dismiss your servant…” The New Jerusalem Bible has “Now, Master, you are letting your servant go in peace as you promised…” And then, as I imagine it, Simeon dies. He dies, I am sure, with a smile on his lips. He can lay all that down now. He can die in peace. God’s honor has been preserved and Simeon’s waiting has been rewarded.

As I was thinking about Simeon this year, how badly he must have wanted it impressed himself on my mind. If Simeon had had a wife, she would have said to him, as Job’s wife said, “Why are you hanging on like this? Curse God and die.” And like Job, Simeon would have said, “No. I will wait.”

Then, yesterday, I thought of it another way. This is going to take us back to Jacob, later named Israel, wrestling with “the angel.” See Genesis 32 for the whole story. The being Jacob was wrestling—there is some confusion about who it was, exactly—said, “Let me go for day is breaking.” Jacob said, “I will not let you go unless you bless me.”

Jacob is not a character I have ever admired, but this year, I noticed that he was stubborn in the same way Simeon was stubborn. Simeon had God’s promise, “I will not let you go until I bless you.” In the fantasy I managed above, God tried to talk Simeon out of it but Simeon wasn’t having any. In that fantasy, Simeon said to God what Jacob said: “I will not…go…until you bless me.” Simeon knew the story and he was sticking to it.

As someone who has read the Bible all his life, I can’t tell you that I think these two passages—Genesis 32 and Luke 2—are related in any way. But the transactions they describe suddenly seemed to me to be oddly alike. This way of looking at it makes Simeon a lot more stubborn than he has been in the imagination of any commentator I have read, but it also makes me like him better. He wanted to die more than he wanted any thing—except one. And on behalf of that one thing, he came to the temple, day after day, to remind God of his promise.

Posted in Biblical Studies | Tagged Jacob, keeping the promise, refusing to give up, Simeon, spiritual stubbornness, waiting a long time | Leave a comment

Can you really prepare for Alzheimer’s?

Posted on December 29, 2014 by hessd

I think so.

Last night, I watched a really good TED talk my brother, Karl, sent to me. The talk is about Alzheimers disease and Karl is my older brother—the only one of the four of us to have cracked 80 so far. Alzheimers is something Karl and I care about, so when he recommended this lecture, I paid attention.

You can see it here and I hope you do.

But if you don’t—and most of you are a lot younger than I am—let me tell you what it says and let me start at another place. Here is Dylan Thomas’s well-known prescription:

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

He had death in mind, of course, not dementia. But the you—the person you are—is what is lost in dementia. Dementia shows that “who I am” is a shorthand expression referring to who I have been. I am proud of who I have been, but as that self slips away, I do not become no one at all. I become the person I am then. I may be shifting, frail, and confused. A disordered self, but a self, still.

As I look at the poem, I am struck that submission or acceptance are seen as one pole: the bad one. And rage is seen as the other pole: the good one. Really? Are those the options? Whatever a self is, it is associated with “agency,” that is, with the ability to intend an outcome and to act so as to achieve it. Is it worth spending the last penny of agency on rage? Maybe that’s a good use for some people. I don’t think it is for me.

Alanna Shaikh calls her talk “Preparing to get Alzheimers,” which is a little catchier than the title I would choose. She pictures herself as predisposed to get Alzheimers because her father had it—as my father did—but I still think I would want to say that I was preparing for the possibility of Alzheimers. There are three things you can do, she says, and I like all of them.

First, learn to do some activities that are not principally cognitive. She chose knitting. The idea is that you want to do things you take pleasure in and if the New York Times crossword is the kind of thing you take pleasure in, you are going to lose it quickly. You aren’t going to lose knitting quickly. You hands will know how to knit and you will be able to take pleasure in what they do.

That idea caught me because my favorite activities, apart from running on Portland’s famous Wildwood Trail, are cognitively demanding. I read a lot, I write a lot, I have discussions that require and that celebrate careful thought and careful use of words. Maybe I could make a regular routine out of shooting baskets. I used to be a pretty good shot. Maybe weeding garden beds is my kind of thing. Something. Alanna’s idea is that now is the time to start getting good at it and that, at least, makes sense.

Second, she proposes that becoming physically stronger and better balanced are worth doing. If Alzheimers offers a straight decline from whatever level of fitness you had when the decline started, then the higher the level, the more of the decline is at the good end of the scale. She wants to maintain her mobility for as long as she can, and who wouldn’t?

I have had a quibble for a long time now with the notion of “getting fit.” “Fit for what?” I always wonder. Here, at last, is a good answer. Fit for moving around safely under your own power. Fit as in not falling down and hurting yourself. Fit as in standing up and sitting down when you want to. Those all seem to me to be things worth doing and retaining the ability to do them longer doesn’t have, for me, any of that burring sulphur smell of “rage against the dying of the light.”

Shaikh’s third project is “becoming a nicer person.” I have my doubts about that one. I think becoming a nicer person is worth doing, but my sense of what Alzheimers does to you is that it takes you way back to your most natural and least processed self. I don’t think I am going to “regress” in my 80s to the person I started trying to become in my 50s. If it really works like that, I’m going to move toward the person I was as a little boy. That’s a mixed bag, I’m sure, but I was a pretty happy little boy, so maybe it will work out.

Apart from the specifics of Shaikh’s proposals, I’d have to say that I really like the idea of doing what I can now to give me more good time then. And if “then” never comes, how bad is that? I’m stuck with some new skills and a heightened level of fitness and some surplus niceness? Is that bad?

And then too, I just like being plan-full. It feels good to me.

Posted in Getting Old | Tagged Alzheimer's disease, giving yourself some margin | Leave a comment