The Dilettante's Dilemma

Why Social Services Fail

Posted on May 1, 2013 by hessd

It is a part of the malady of our time that we try to see everything as a question of having the necessary skills. Somewhere in the middle of my grad school experience, at a time when everything seemed to be too complicated, I ran across Fritz Heider’s book, the Psychology of Interpersonal Relations. He calls his approach “naïve psychology”[1] and he uses pretty uncomplicated words. He asks whether a person might be “willing” and also “able.” He is open to the idea that a person might be able, but not willing and also that he might be willing, but not able. That didn’t see too complicated to me.

Here’s a little clip to consider. I found it as I was cleaning out my desk after fifteen years at Portland State University.[2] I have no idea where it came from. I don’t have any trouble see why I wanted to keep it, though.

This small sample survey examines probation officers’ aims and strategies when working with street prostitutes within the context of the Street Offences Act, and the results of their work. It indicates that the officers fail in their main aim of encouraging street prostitutes to stay within the law because of the women’s intention to do otherwise.

You need to look at this from the probation officers’ point of view. The officers have certain duties, apparently, deriving from the Street Offences Act—the spelling of offences makes me think this is a British example. Their job is to “encourage” prostitutes to obey the law. Again, the language is our friend. Encourage is based on the Latin cor, “heart” and the French noun courage, spelled like the English courage, but pronounced a lot prettier. It means, obviously, “to give heart to.” The OED gives us “to inspire with courage sufficient for any undertaking; to embolden, make confident.”

The probation officers are required to imagine that these prostitutes are willing to give up their trade, but not able to do so. They don’t have the heart to do this; they don’t have the courage; they are not bold enough. That perspective is what “encourage” gives us. The officers’ job is to “encourage” the prostitutes.

The difficulty, as it is identified in this little clip, is not that they are not able—to borrow Heider’s categories—but that they are not willing. They are able to do what the officers want, but they do not want to, so they don’t.

I don’t mean to make light of prostitution as a public problem. Everyone I have talked to who knows anything about prostitution, particularly street prostitution, believes that the life of street prostitutes is truly awful and that most of them would leave that life as soon as they could. They are not, according to my friends, unwilling. They are unable.

I know that. But I just can’t help finding this little clip funny. It makes me smile. The officers are doing everything they can to encourage the prostitutes to do something they do not want to do. So…they aren’t doing it.

[1] That’s what his critics called it, too.

[2] I am not an “adjunct” anymore. I am a “Visiting Scholar” now.

Posted in Political Psychology, Words | Tagged encouragement, prostitution, social services | Leave a comment

What are pejorative words for?

Posted on April 25, 2013 by hessd

In 1893, Robert Louis Stevenson wrote a book called Catriona—a book I had never heard of until today. Nor did I know until today that the word I had in mind to begin this reflection on language, pejorative, was a form of the verb, pejorate. Here’s Stevenson.

You do not appear to me to recognise the gravity of your situation or you would be more careful not to pejorate the same.

To pejorate is to make worse. A “making worse” word is pejorative. With no more to go on than that, I would assume that every society would meliorate words that point to what they value most and pejorate words that point to what they value least. Presumably, there will be a range of words between these ends that are not so loaded with society’s values. Everyone would understand that these are between-the-extremes words.

The Tsarnaev brothers, who planted the bombs near the finish line at the Boston Marathon, were caught “on film,” we still say, by cameras that are now routinely put in public places. What shall we call these cameras? I think they are commonly called “security cameras” and if they are there to make us more secure, I can see the point of that designation. I think I would prefer that they be called “surveillance cameras.” Surveillance is what they actually do—or, more precisely, what they enable.

If we imagine a single society with a single set of values, which is the way I set up the dilemma, this society would want to pejorate surveillance. That is the direction in which “Big Brother is watching you” lies. No one wanted to see the woman taking her child out of the back seat of the car and shaking her in anger. But there was a camera there, so people did see it and if they see it, the law (in some states, Oregon being one) requires that they act on it. Surveillance is the process by which your dog is shown to have crapped on my lawn. Surveillance is the end of private meetings, where candor can be tolerated, and the beginning of long “walks in the park,” which provide an alternative in totalitarian societies.

There are, in short, reasons to pejorate surveillance. Unless, of course, it is necessary for our survival. If we are threatened by enemies foreign and domestic, we will want to invest in the technologies that can promise security. Cameras, which can catch enemies doing things when they believe they are unnoticed, can help us be more secure. This single society, with its one set of values, has every reason to meliorate security. We have a responsibility to protect ourselves and have only ourselves to blame if we fail to do everything we can. We are not only vulnerable to our enemies, but irresponsible as well.

Societies like ours are not simple, of course, and different parts of the society have different values to emphasize. Clearly, that is true about the surveillance/security dilemma. Let’s try another area. Women who make a living by selling sex could be called whores. The word is confined, the OED says, to “coarse and abusive speech.” Or these women could be called sex workers—just one of the many divisions of a modern workforce. A society that wanted to discourage the sale of sex would want pejorative terms. Whore is an ugly word. It is coarse and abusive. It is pejorative. That’s why a society would want to use it. The disapproval of the practices it names is built into the language itself.

So why would anyone be opposed to using such a word? Is there really a pro-prostitution community in the U. S.? If by “pro-prostitution,” we mean people who defend it as a valuable part of a complete society, I think the answer is No. The case I have heard for terms like “sex worker” is that it helps to protect the women who are in the trade. “Whores” are non-citizens for most purposes. They do not have access to help from the police, from social services, from health services. They are routinely abused by their employers, as well as by their clients, and have nowhere to turn.

If, on the other hand, they were “sex workers,” they would just be doing another kind of work. They would not be invisible. They would not be separated from society or from the services that societies provide for other kinds of workers. A term like “sex workers” does not ameliorate the practice of prostitution, but it does ameliorate the women themselves. It makes their lot better. It helps make available to them the services that are available to all other citizens. That is the signpost function—the “significance,” we say—of the term, “sex workers.”

What this means is that we would expect every community to establish what is “in bounds” and what is “out of bounds” by means of pejoration and melioration. The good path, the path we ought to follow, would be laid out with little lights along the path. Wandering off the path would bring you to the place where bad words would and should be used to characterize you and what you have done. This would be true in each and every community which has a common language and a common set of values. The values would be in conflict, we would imagine, so the languages adopted would be in conflict.

This gets us away from debates about whether that particular instrument is a “surveillance camera” or a “security camera” and it would bring us closer to the language values that each of these words exemplifies. It would do the same for “whores” and “sex workers” and I think that might be helpful.

Posted in Politics, ways of knowing, Words | Tagged Boston Marathon, prostitution, surveillance | 2 Comments

Gay Children with Anti-Gay Parents

Posted on April 19, 2013 by hessd

I am in Hawaii today because I am trying to illustrate to myself that I am no longer teaching at Portland State University–or anywhere else. That being the case, be alert for present tense verbs that have to do with my teaching–“what I try to emphasize for my students…”–and convert them all to past tense verbs. Please.

One of the wonderful advantages of teaching there is that they let me teach a course in political psychology, which I have studied, practiced, taught, and cared about intensely since 1972. It is articles like today’s in the New York Times that help me remember why I like it so much and how really valuable it can be. It shows quite a few people pushing and shoving to place their own view of what needs to be done right in the center of the debate. Fine. In the process, they obscure and distort views that really ought to be taken into account.

It is the “taking into account” that matters to me. I really don’t have a horse in this race.

Here’s the background. California passed a law last year banning “gay conversion therapy” for minors. Gay rights advocates celebrated and they should have. But there are some other sides that their celebration overlooks. Here are several.

One. This ban separates willing buyers from willing sellers. Libertarians ought to hate that. Capitalists ought to hate it. Our experience of that strategy in our prohibition of alcoholic drinks and of drugs and of prostitution ought to make us wary. People who want a product and people who want to sell a product will find each other. Preventing them from finding each other is onerous and expensive. That is not to say it should not be done. Some transactions are so costly to everyone that trying to prevent them is a proper task for government. Is this one?

Two. You would think that the parents of those minors would have views the government should take into account. There is no question that the legislature of the state of California thinks its views about “curing gay children” are better than the views of their parents. The truth is that parents have a way of influencing their children that is hard for governments to catch or to prevent. Having said that, it is also true that “therapy” can be an awful experience for the “patient.”

But so-called gay cures are notorious among gay men, with many saying they suffered deep harm when their parents pushed them into counseling that left them filled with anguish and guilt.

These gay men were children whose parents had a theory about the gender orientation of their children. They certainly thought it could be changed. They probably thought it was “sinful.” These children had not much say about being forced into “therapy” and their view as adults is that it cost them and continues to cost them a great deal. That means that the legislature has to protect these children from their parents if they are to be protected. It means that government has to say it should trump the values of the parents in this case. Neither of those is very attractive.

Three. Is homosexuality “natural?” I touched on that a week or so ago in a post called “Unnatural Acts.” And here it is again. One side wants to establish that sexual orientation is “largely inborn” and therefore cannot be changed. That describes the current consensus among scholars. On the other hand, no matter when you grew up there was, as you were growing up, a vigorous debate about whether “what children are like” is a result of factors that are “largely inborn” or “principally cultural.” It was called “nature v. nurture.”

I haven’t heard a scholar argue for a long time now that some behavior is the result of one rather than the other. Our view of “what children are like” has come to grips with the fact that there is no “nature v. nurture.” It is nature and nurture–always. Sometimes more of the one; sometimes more of the other.

That’s fine for scientists, but it doesn’t hold up very well in policy debate. The people who are against “gay therapy” argue that it doesn’t work and that it can’t work because it is “natural.” It’s like trying to talk someone out of being a mammal. The people who are for “gay therapy” argue that it is “cultural,” the result of some kind of disordered background. Each side is arguing what you would expect them to argue. Both leave behind the scientists who know that nature and nurture are always part of the same equation.

I offer the example of “identical twins raised apart,” which has been studied so much that some now refer to it as ITRA, as if everyone will know what that means. These studies show that there is a genetic component to whatever trait is being studied and an environmental or “parenting” trait. Of course there is. Who would think there would not be?

Four. The role of the state? I’ll just give you these two paragraphs from the article.

In its brief to the court, Liberty Counsel said: “The state has gone far beyond regulation of the profession to taking sides” in a scientific dispute.

Arguing for the law to take effect, the California government called it “an unremarkable exercise of the states’ power to regulate professional conduct.”

Five. We come, finally, to the question of whether a therapy “works.” I know it is important to ask this question, particularly given the state’s responsibility for licensing therapists. Still…there is the question of why placebos work. When you do a careful study, one group gets “the treatment” and another group, also randomly chosen, gets “a treatment.” This second designation means that the second group gets treated exactly like the first, except that the real intervention is withheld. If “the treatment” is effective, we will see substantial increases in what we are studying: more concentration, more discipline, more self-affirmation, and so on.

But the placebo group, who went through the routine but didn’t get the treatment is often found to be substantially benefitted. It is not unusual to see substantial improvements in 30% of the group who, according to the protocols of the research, was not treated at all. But something worked for them. What was it?

I offer this well-known conundrum as a question worth asking when the state is trying to decide what therapies “work.”

The proponents are arguing their cases, as they should. But a lot of us are not proponents and we need to see what each side obscures as well as what it highlights. No reason for us to be duped just because we were not paying attention, right?

Posted in Political Psychology | Tagged family rights, gay therapy, licensed therapists, willing buyer | Leave a comment

God Bless Oregon

Posted on April 17, 2013 by hessd

The question the federal government wants to ask Oregon is this: Do you really think you can persuade Oregonians to be sensible about their health?

Oregon’s Governor, Dr. John Kitzhaber (M.D.) has been saying “Yes,” but if he is the only one saying it, we Oregonians are going to lose a whole lot of money and we don’t have a whole lot of money.

So here’s the deal, as described by New York Times reporter Kirk Johnson on April 12.

Under an agreement signed with the Obama administration last year, and just now taking shape, Oregon and the federal government have wagered $1.9 billion that — through a hyper-local focus on Medicaid — the state can show both improved health outcomes for low-income Medicaid populations and a lower rate of spending growth than the rest of the nation. If Oregon fails on either front, the consequences are grave, potentially tens of millions of dollars in penalties a year, bleeding a state budget still wounded from recession.

So we get this right or we are looking at “tens of millions of dollars in penalties a year.” Can Oregon be sensible about spending money on “health?” Less, we hope, on “health care.” Here’s an example that will help to place the question. Let me note at this point that I served in Oregon government under Governor Kitzhaber. I say that not to alert you to any possible bias but only to tell you that I have seen him give this pitch any number of times and he is extremely persuasive.

Mr. Kitzhaber, in an interview in his office at the Capitol, said the anecdotal interventionist health care story he imagines is that of a poor 92-year-old woman who develops congestive heart failure in a heat wave because she has no air-conditioner.

“Under the current system, Medicaid will pay for an ambulance and $50,000 in the hospital,” he said. “What it won’t pay for is a $200 window air-conditioner, which is all she needs to stay in her home and out of the acute medical system.”

Everyone agrees that it is prudent to spend the $200 rather than the $50,000. Not everyone agrees that when you start spending money on preventing things, you have no easy way to stop spending.

Let’s say, for instance, that this woman is not the only senior citizen who would like to have the state buy an air conditioner for her. Very sensible people will say that this expenditure is justified by all the money it will save. I’m not quite that sensible. I picture the process by which someone will serve as an advocate for this woman. The very moment the advocate begins to focus on the air conditioner and not on the money the state will save, the whole program begins to teeter on the brink of insolvency.

The bad thing about preventing health crises is that you never really know what the relationship is between what you did (as a state) and what did not happen. Let me stop and emphasize that again. It is the value to us of what did not happen that matters most. The Feds have, of course, aggregate goals for health spending and health savings. It is meeting those aggregate goals that will determine whether Oregon wins or loses. I get that.

But the decisions are not made in the aggregate. Let me illustrate. In Eugene, home of my alma mater, the University of Oregon, there is a Community Advisory Council. It is their job to spend money to make things not happen. How about this? Stock gift cards at the doctors’ offices and give them to pregnant women who agree to “go tobacco free” and thereby save the state a lot of money on neonatal costs. You spend the money on the gift cards; you give them out; then you wait for something (the increased cost of treating their babies) not to happen.

How about treating the moss in low-income housing? How about getting people to walk more and drive less? No one denies that those are good ideas, but in every case, the state puts out the money and then waits for some event to fail to happen. Will there be, for instance, a reduction in the money we spend for cardiovascular care for the people who are walking more and driving less?

It might work. The states are often called “the laboratories of democracy,” especially when a state does something that actually works. Maybe this will work in Oregon and then everybody else can try it. That’s not normally the way it goes, but maybe it will be this time.

The advantage is that Oregon is a collegial state. Not “collectivist,” really; just used to cooperating on things everyone cares about. We also do a lot of planning and we do a lot of measuring of results. We’re good at it and we’ve been doing it for a long time.

On the other hand, Oregon is a state bristling with class antagonisms. We are, in that way, like all the other states. I once saw a state senator come out of his chair with anger at a meeting of the Senate Education Committee, of which he was a member. A very sensible sounding bill had been introduced and the committee was having hearings. “So what you are proposing,” the Senator said, “is for middle class people to tell poor people how they should raise their children?” The proponents said No, but he had nailed a nasty truth and the bill died shortly afterwards.

Poor people in Oregon like to live their lives the way they want to. They don’t care all that much about aggregate federal health costs. They don’t want to be told by some bureaucrat–even a very local bureaucrat–how they should act. That applies to a host of behaviors that have direct and predictable healthcare costs.

Gov. Kitzhaber is betting that we can get people to do the things that simple self-interest would ordinarily get them to do. If we can do that, a lot of healthcare costs can be avoided and Oregon stands to be a policy leader yet again: less spending on healthcare and better health outcomes.

I’m a Kitzhaber fan and I am a very proud Oregonian, but I don’t know that we can get this one done. I agree with Mark Pauly, of the University of Pennsylvania, who said, “We don’t know whether Americans are ready for coordinated care, but Oregon keeps trying. God bless them.”

God bless us all.

Posted in Politics | Tagged const containment, Governor Kitzhaber, healthcare | Leave a comment

Unnatural Acts

Posted on April 2, 2013 by hessd

In the war currently being waged about gay rights (are there any?), there are people who say there is nothing at all wrong with homosexuality and people who say there is everything wrong with it. It almost goes without saying that the proponents don’t have the same ideas about just how something gets to be “right” that the opponents have. The result is that those of us on the sidelines of this fight get to hear a lot of really bad arguments.

Most often, I don’t have strong views about social claims of right and wrong. It’s not my department. I’m sure someone is covering that. I tend to have stronger feelings about how cases are made. A patchy and disreputable case on behalf of a social value I favor will probably make me angry. A case that bad on behalf of a value I oppose will leave me dyspeptic.

The U. S. Supreme Court has recently heard two cases that have engaged the gay and anti-gay communities. The odd commonality these cases have is that no one seems to want to defend them. The State of California is not defending its Proposition 8 measure, which defined “marriage” in exclusively heterosexual terms. The federal government is not defending the case that its 1996 Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), which allows other states to refuse to recognize legally binding marriages made in other states, is unconstitutional.

People don’t have trouble saying that they do or don’t like gay and lesbian marriages. It is in saying that they are “right” or that they are “wrong” that has proved difficult. Are they wrong because they have bad effects? “Bad” compared to what? And according to whom? Are they wrong because they are illegal? Lot of things used to be illegal and are legal now because people wanted the values embedded in those laws to be changed and went out and changed them.

The most interesting part of this argument, to my mind, is the charge that homosexuality is “unnatural.” Let’s spend a little time with that argument. “Natural” is the adjective form of “nature.” So a charge that something is “unnatural” is a charge that it is not to be found in nature. Homosexual behavior is, in fact, found in nature. If you look up this article in the New York Times, you can see the hyperlinks. The first one takes you to a set of studies by the World Health Organization (WHO). The scientists at WHO who study this regard the expectation that homosexuality occurs naturally the way climatologists regard the claim that the atmosphere is warming. It isn’t something they debate about among themselves.

The good part about the argument that homosexuals ought not to be allowed to marry because homosexuality is “unnatural” is a good claim because it asks questions that can be studied. Does homosexuality occur naturally or not? It does. OK, that’s the end of that. It isn’t “unnatural.” (Some things are not unnatural, but they are very difficult. I have an example here.)

People can still say it is wrong, of course, but if you can’t say it is wrong because it is harmful, you are left looking for some other basis. Sacred texts are very persuasive for the communities who have pledged themselves to honor those texts, but there are so many sacred texts and sacred communities and government in the U. S. is formally secular. People expect to be free to practice their religions and to be free from the demands that they practice any religion at all. So saying that homosexuality is “wrong” is the very broad sense is hard to do.[1]

There is another meaning of “unnatural,” however. This meaning does not have to do with nature as such, but with human nature. Humans have, by this argument, “a nature” and things work best when we honor the nature we have. We violate this foundation of our species not when we do things that are “against nature,” but when we do things that are against our nature.[2]

I haven’t read anyone in a long time who thinks there is “a human nature” in the sense that we can say what it is. Some people are still hospitable to the idea that there is such a thing, but no academics I have seen recently want to say what it is. Ethnologists have had a shot at it. Animal behaviorists have had a shot; evolutionary anthropologists have had a shot; philosophers have had a fusillade.

For my own contribution to this issue, I would like to ask two questions. The first is, is “natural” good? If you think it is good, you will talk about “violating” our nature. If “natural” is good, then being in conformity with our nature is good and deviating from it is bad. That’s why we say “violate.” On the other hand, we believe a lot of bad things will happen if we allow our human nature free play. Philosopher Thomas Hobbes said that without society—without, that is, constraining our nature by social regulations—our lives would be “solitary, nasty, poor, brutish, and short.”

According to these philosophers, we can “transcend” our natures by making agreements—society—among ourselves. This view holds that our nature is not good in the sense that what we do “naturally” is the right thing to do, but that a part of our nature is the ability to make social contracts to constrain our conduct.

Two football players were convicted recently in Steubenville, Ohio for raping a girl at a party. Is what they did “natural?” Would they have said that what they did was a perfectly natural thing to want to do, even had they been sober, and that the court that found them guilty was “unnatural” because it was a social construction? Would violent retaliation by the girl’s family be natural, and the laws against that retaliation invalid because they went against nature? Are questions like this useful questions?

I said there were two questions. The first was, “Is natural, good?” Here’s the second. What does it mean to talk about the “nature” of a radically evolutionary species like ours? It’s an awkward question, really. You can take a given population and demonstrate “what they are like” for ten thousand years. That is their nature. But then something happens. Tools happen. Agriculture happens. Moving from the forests to the savannah happens. Language is created. Then languages. Tribes are linked together into clans. We learn to live in oppressively hot and prohibitively cold environments and the bodies of the survivors in those environments adapt to its demands.

Are all those our nature? Surely not. Would it make more sense to say that our nature, such as it is, is innovative? We are the species that has adapted so well to so many kinds of environment that we have learned how to buffer ourselves against the most extreme environments. We are the species that has learned how to live in small nomadic groups and in large ordered groups and in huge impersonal societies. It’s the adapting, rather than any particular adaptation, that characterizes us. We are a “grab the brass ring when it comes around” kind of species and “grabbing it when we have a chance” is our nature.

It is a little difficult to picture our adaptation to stable agricultural communities as a kind of “brass ring” that we “grabbed,” but we really didn’t need to do it. Many early groups chose not to do it. They continued in social forms they found more “natural” even as their brothers, the agriculturalists, came to feel that the production and consumption of foodstuffs was “cooperating with nature.”

It is hard for me to think that “human nature” is a very useful idea. It is sabotaged in the short run by the way we define ourselves as members of our societies. That feels pretty natural to us. It is sabotaged in the long run by how aggressively we have pursued opportunities—I have given language, tools, and agriculture as instances—which have fundamentally changed who we are.

So I ask these questions and find no ready answers to them. I’ve done this for a long time. It seems so…well…so natural to me.

[1] It is not hard to do in a fundraising letter, of course. Saying it is right and needs to be defended is the other way to write a fundraising letter.

[2] Theologians, by the way, come at this from an entirely different side. Christian theologians can and do say that humankind has a “nature” and a Creator, whose “image” we share, and that we have allowed that image to become seriously corroded, but that there is a way to get the crud off of it and so on. None of this is empirically verifiable, of course, but it hangs together very nicely given the first premises.

Posted in Living My Life, ways of knowing, Words | Tagged DOMA, homosexuality, nature, Proposition 8, society, unnatural acts | Leave a comment

Angleworms

Posted on March 31, 2013 by hessd

Why are they called “angleworms,” do you suppose? Right after I learned that they are not native to North America, I began to hope that we had imported them from England and that they might rightfully be called Angloworms. It was not to be. Partly, I was hoping to put it in my file next to Anglophile; partly, I was hoping I could salvage the –gloworm part and put it in a popular song. That was not to be either.

They are called angleworms, it turns out, because anglers use them. “Fisherfolk,” we now say, sometimes, but it isn’t just catching fish. The first disciples Jesus recruited were “fishermen,” but they were not anglers. To be anglers, you have to use a hook and the most prudent anglers put bait on the hook as well.

It is, in fact, the “angle” of the hook you use that makes you an angler. The Old English form is angul and it means “fishhook.” But angul is a version of ankle, which derives, ultimately from the Indo-European ang-, which is a variant of the verb ank-, meaning “to bend.” The ankle is the bendy part joining the lower leg and the foot. I remember that even though my own ankles are not as bendy as they once were. A fishhook is not bendy, but it has been bent and unless it is overmatched by a sizeable and energetic fish, it stays bent.

The worms you use to help you lure fish to your hook, thence to your frying pan—the worms you use in your angling—are angleworms.

Note: This is mere whimsy, of course, but I once did ten year-worths of these for my daughter, Dawne, who dutifully sent me a Word-A-Day calendar on my birthday every year. There were no readily available pictures online back then and I know Dawne would like them better with pictures. Here you are, E. B.

Posted in Words | 2 Comments

Local Eats

Posted on March 29, 2013 by hessd

During the growing season, from early in the spring until late in the fall, Bette and I get a good deal of the food from Bette’s garden. Bette’s the principal grower and I am the principal “cook,” if you call cutting salad greens out of the garden and mixing them with vinegar and oil, “cooking.”

In Portland, you can find “local eats” at some restaurants, too. Not quite as local as Bette’s garden, just outside our office door, but pretty local. One of the reasons we keep going back to Meriwether’s Restaurant in Portland is the local veggies. It isn’t just that they serve them; it’s that they pitch them.

Here’s a section from the menu:

This spring has been a little dry for our taste, so the rain we got mid-week was mighty welcome! The plants we have planted out in the field are now chard, lettuce, kale, and cabbage. It is exciting to think that by May or June, the kale will be ready for harvest. Until then, we have overwintered kale to harvest..

This notice comes, it says at the bottom of the page, from Caitlin Blood, Farm Hand.

You could say that is just marketing, but I don’t think it is “just” marketing. Bette ordered pasta primavera, which means pasta with “first greens” and first greens is what came with the pasta—little leaves of kale and some raab.[1]

According to the menu, this week they are harvesting: collard greens, kale raab, thyme, leeks, fingerling potatoes, cabbage raab, salad greens, tatsoi raab, and chives. It’s enough to keep us going back at least until Bette’s garden starts to kick in.

[1] The menu says, “Raab looks like a small head of broccoli that brassicas grow toward the end of their life cycles. They are means to keep growing, flower, and put out seed but…we snatch those sweet and crunchy parts right off the stem.

Posted in Living My Life | Tagged fresh veggies, local food | Leave a comment

Everyone Deserves to Live “Long Enough”

Posted on March 26, 2013 by hessd

Daniel Callahan is my kind of guy. I first ran across him 20 years ago in his book Setting Limits: Medical Goals in an Aging Society. Everything I have read since then has been a refinement of or an extension of his argument in this book. The question at the heart of all his writings is this: “How much is enough?”

Here is what admiring fellow authors say about him on the jacket blurbs. Earl Shelp says that Callahan “poses hard questions and proposes provocative answers.” Marylee Wilson calls this book “a thought-provoking and heart-jarring assessment of medical goals…today.” Gilbert Gaul says Callahan’s book is “thoughtfully crafted and often troubling.”

Callahan is, apparently, the kind of person who will not be dissuaded from saying out loud in public truths that really can’t be avoided but that no one wants to talk about. What’s not to like? You know the person who does this is going to be misunderstood, sometimes deliberately. The arguments will be parodied and the findings contested. The proponent himself will be vilified. Callahan was 57 when he wrote the first edition of this book. He is in his mid-80s now, i.e., he is now the age of the people he characterized as “the elderly” when he wrote the book.

The problem Callahan is trying to deal with is talked about all the time as a negative proposition. People will say that we are going to have to deal with rising healthcare costs. They will say that a larger and larger percentage of those costs come from extending the lives of the elderly. Callahan wants to approach it as a positive proposition instead. He wants to see medical expenditures cut back for people who have lived long enough.

That sounds like a good approach to me although I am sure I would not want to pay the price that Callahan has paid for saying it out loud. I would not like to pay even the price Oregon Congressman Earl Blumenauer paid for his proposal that Medicare should pay for the conferences that elderly patients are supposed to have with their doctors about how they want their bodies treated when they can no longer say what their preferences are. Blumenauer’s opponents called those conferences “death panels.”

So talking about this issue in public is going to lead to stone throwing. Maybe some sticks, too.

The genius of Callahan’s proposal is that he proposes a way to curtail expenses for people who have lived “long enough” so that we will be able to offer crucial medical services to people who have not yet lived long enough—people who deserve, by our most commonly expressed values, our help in living longer. If that sounds scary, let me outline the edges by trying to express the alternatives. One is that crucial medical services to people in the midst of their lives ought to be cut back so that people who have already lived a long time can be supported even more. That doesn’t sound so good. Another is that everyone ought to have a valid claim on all the medical care they would like and that the total cost should be borne by the taxpayers. That doesn’t sound so good either. The last one is that everyone who can afford it should have all the medical care he wants and that people without resources should be denied all but the most basic medical care. I don’t like that one either.

Where does that leave us? It leaves us where Callahan begins. We need to get some kind of grip on what “enough” means, when we are talking about spending to prolong human life. Then we need to constrain expenditures for people who have reached that landmark status so we can provide more services to people who have not yet lived long enough.

See what I mean? When you say it positively rather than negatively, it just sounds like common sense. On the other hand, a lot of things sound like common sense when they are phrased in terms of public policy and then they stop sounding like common sense when they are applied to actual persons. So let’s think about these proposals in terms of an actual person. And how about letting me be the person?

Have I lived long enough? Have I already had, that is, a great deal of what people think life is about?

I think that second question is a better one. The first question sounds like it is about numbers. I’ve lived 70 years or 80 or 90 and that’s “enough.” Enough for what? But if you look at some widely used markers of a rich life, you are not just using numbers.

I have some markers in mind. Susan K. Gilmore, who is a counselor and a writer about counseling and who was, in the early 1970s, my counselor says it is often helpful to think about work, relationship and aloneness. I met Sue while I was working on a graduate degree in political science so I added “politics” to the list. I was influenced partly by the fact that adding politics gave me a set of values captured in the acronym WRAP, but I was also in mid-career as a professor of political science so I imagined that I was going to spend the rest of my career talking to undergraduates about the allocation of values in the polity.

And I have. I retired from that occupation today.

So Callahan’s question could be refined by asking, first, whether I have had as much work as anyone really ought to expect. I have, surely. I started teaching in 1960 and just now retired from it. That’s fifty-three years. And I had a brief fifteen year “sub-career” in politics in the middle of that. I’ve been hired and fired and overpaid and underpaid and overappreciated and underappreciated. I’ve had all the kinds of benefits I know about in my work life and some I just discovered when they happened to me. If that’s not “enough,” how could “enough” possibly be defined?

So I’ve had enough of the advantages people are looking for when they plan a career. How about relationship? Well, I haven’t been a hermit. I’ve been a son and a husband and a father (and a stepfather); I’ve been a lover; I have served others and have been served by others. I’ve chaired committees and written minutes and proposed agenda items. I’ve celebrated the lives of others and have been, in my turn, celebrated and treasured and—even more—been really understood. That last one has been a little unsettling sometimes, but it profoundly affirming.

So I’ve had most of the experiences people say they value when they talk about relationships. I’ve been rich in relationships. All my true relationship needs have been met, at one time or another. I have had, by even the most generous accounting, “enough.”

“Aloneness” isn’t the absence of other people; it is only the opportunity to come to grips with who I am, myself. I have had every opportunity to become comfortable with who I am, as well as with what I’ve done. I don’t know of any good metric to measure my own internal life; not even one good enough to use, myself. But I have had plenty of opportunity to learn that sweet spot between being comfortable with myself and challenging myself to do better. I have had a very rich array of models. I have had people who are willing to honor me with their affirmation and with their criticism. I’ve had the leisure to be thoughtful about myself and my life. I had, for example, a long commute to work for a number of years and it provided a good deal of leisure for this kind of speculation.

Separating achievement, which I admitted I didn’t know how to measure, from opportunity, I would say that I have had “enough” aloneness. At the very least, it makes no sense to me to claim that I have a right to more than I have already had.

Politics, my own addition to Sue Gilmore’s list, defies careful measurement as well. I have never aspired to public office, but I’ve been a policy analyst and a lobbyist. I’ve written and delivered testimony to legislative committees. I have ghost-written a lot of letters for a lot of governors. I have defined for many generations of undergraduates just what public values will have to be attended to and what they will have to know to act on their own values in the public arena. I was a teacher, after all. If those are all “politics,” and that is what I would call them, it cannot be said that I have not had abundant opportunities to hone and practice my craft.

Now comes the last little half-step. I have defined “enough life” as “enough of all the components of a life like mine.” I have touched on each of those components—work, relationship, aloneness, and politics—and have concluded that I have already had more than anyone could claim to have a right to. The last half-step is to conclude that I have had enough life.

And what does that mean? It doesn’t mean that I don’t want to keep living the life I am living. I like it very much and I want to keep doing all the things that I love and that I am still able to do. It doesn’t mean that I renounce the medical expenditures that would keep my life vivid and that would help me keep living this kind of life. It does mean that I have no claim to the simple extension of my life—just making it longer—rather than to the restoration to a health that is still possible for me. If I could live the kind of life I value if only my doctor would prescribe antidepressants for me, then I would claim the right to the antidepressants. If a feeding tube could successfully extend my dying for two months, I would say I do not have a right to that. The antidepressants would give me more “life;” the feeding tube would only postpone my death.

I want to say, on my own behalf and on behalf of all other old people who would like to associate themselves with this standard, that I affirm the first and reject the second.

Posted in Getting Old | Tagged death panels, long enough, medical costs, old age | Leave a comment

Narrative Integrity, Jesus and Allison

Posted on March 17, 2013 by hessd

I want to write about the character of Jesus today. I admit I have a grievance and blogging about it seems to help. The pivot point, the point I will keep returning to until I start to feel better, can be called “narrative integrity.”

“Integrity” isn’t just a good word for me because I have gotten used to seeing “integer” in it. It is the wholeness of the integer, the fact that it has not been divided up into fractions, that makes it a good model for the notion of integrity. “How is the character of Jesus to be understood?” is the question for today.

Twenty years ago or so, I started pulling apart the birth narratives provided by Matthew and Luke. Raymond E. Brown, in The Birth of the Messiah, divides the book very sensibly into two parts: what Matthew tells us and what Luke tells us. My practice over the last couple of decades has been to read the Matthew part one year and the Luke part the next year. Slowly, my imagination began to be rescued from the Advent Goulash that we have invented by throwing the stories together.

That was when I started to understand what narrative integrity is. It turns out that the story Matthew tells is surefooted, effective, lucid, and even—leaving out the genealogy—rather spare. Luke isn’t spare at all, but all the embroidery has a purpose in Luke, and the characters, not too many of them, are richly drawn. It is things like that that you find out when you read the stories one at a time and it is things like that that I have in mind when I talk about narrative integrity.

Raymond Brown has also written a book called The Death of the Messiah. I have maybe six to eight years of work into it. The division of the gospel accounts can’t be handled simply, the way they can in the birth narratives, but if you begin with the instinct for narrative integrity—for what each account, taken on its own terms, has to offer—you can come to see how very different the accounts are. For most purposes, it is good enough to divide the accounts into three: Matthew/Mark is one narrative stream; Luke is another; John is yet another.

I have jokingly called the process of getting away from the Gospel Goulash and understanding the separate accounts as “getting clean and sober.” Like getting clean and sober, it takes a long time and it requires discipline and relapses retard whatever progress you were making. I was making a lot of progress in getting clean and sober about the stories about the arrest, trial, and crucifixion—called, as a group “the passion narratives”—when our church choir began rehearsing a goulash-style oratorio to sing at our church’s Lenten services. The music is really quite nice but the narrative is awful. Truly awful. And there is no recognizable Jesus in it at all. This is the problem of “the character of Jesus” to which I alluded at the beginning.

Now let me start at another place, just to try to illustrate for you how bad this is and why publishing companies don’t allow their authors to do things like this. In a good novel, there is a real array of characters. Well beyond the good guys and the bad guys, there are the comics and the pathetics and the schmucks and the recognizable bit parts, like the hero’s mother-in-law who makes wonderful yoghurt in her kitchen. You get the idea. But every one of those characters obeys the laws that govern narrative. If you want readers to care about your book, you want them to care about your characters. That means they have to find them credible. That means that if a character does this, she simply can’t also do that.

So here is Allison, the daughter of Steve and Martha, whom you might remember from some other stuff I have written. These are all completely fictional, by the way. Allison is in high school. She is a cheerleader. She belongs to the local Goth faction. She is a top notch student. She chews her fingernails down to the quick in her Goth life, but as a cheerleader, her nails are long and painted with the school colors, which, it seems, are green. She is in a state of perpetual conflict with her teachers, which is pretty much required as a Goth, but is in a very close relationship with them as a cheerleader and as a serious academic talent. She sits in a corner of each room, as she changes classes at the high school; sullen, aggressive, withdrawn. But during each class session, she participates actively in the discussions and very often asks permission at the end of class to give a little plug for the team in the upcoming game.

Got a good grip on what Allison is like? I hope you like her character because I am going to send it to a major publisher and I want to be able to forward to you all the rejections that tell me that nobody—nobody at all—is going to be able to attach to Allison. She is incredible, in the worst and most literal sense of the word. Making a narrative about her is simply a waste of time.

There is a way to save this book. It’s easy and it has often been tried before. You just have three narrators. Allison is described by the advisor of the Honor Society; by the member of the counseling staff who has seemed most effective against the Goth invasion; and by the sponsor of the rally squad. The Honor Society tells about the successes of Allison the Good Student; the counselor tells about the tribulations of Allison the Goth; the sponsor bubbles over about Allison’s athletic abilities and her perpetual good humor.

Now it is true that each narrative will leave out some material. The sponsor will tell you about the manicured green fingernails, a detail that fits beautifully into her narrative. The counselor will tell you about the brutally chewed nails, which advance the narrative he is telling. Each has a story in mind. In each story, there is an “Allison” who comes to life in that narrative and who is vivid enough to drive the plot forward. Readers can believe the cheerleader and the academic and disbelieve or pay no attention to the Goth.

That could work. The Goulash Allison will not work. No one will be able to make any sense of her—not enough to empathize with her situation or to deplore her friends or even to criticize her persistently bad choices. If this bad book receives any awards, it will become the kind of book that people know they need to refer to, but no one will really read it and no one should.

Now let’s come back briefly to the Passion Narratives. You will not be surprised, at this point, to learn that different writers have seen Jesus in different ways and have written compelling narratives about his arrest, trial, and death. You might have seen Matthew/Mark, Luke, and John in my Honor Society, Goth Enclave, and Cheerleader. You were supposed to, so I hope you did.

Beginning with the Gospel Goulash, I have been working at getting clean and sober. I have been having some success. I understand that the Jesus we see in Matthew/Mark is really a truly different from the Jesus of Luke. The Jesus of Matthew/Mark is a recognizable character. When you see that A happens to him, you are ready to expect that B will happen soon. In Luke, when you see that C happens to him, you are ready to expect that D will happen soon.

In Mark, the relationship between A and B—between the agony of Jesus as he prays in Gethsemane and the abandonment he feels as he dies alone on the cross—makes sense. You can feel the loneliness; you can see Jesus looking hopelessly down the barrel of the gun the Romans have pointed at him. In Luke, the relationship between C and D—between the appearance of an angel to strengthen Jesus for the ordeal and the connectedness with the Father he feels, even as he dies that awful suffocating death—makes sense. It isn’t pretty, of course. It’s a ritual execution by torture. But it does make sense. It is a real narrative with a real character. This Jesus—either the one Matthew/Mark tell us about or the one Luke tells us about—is someone you can care about; someone you can invest your emotions in, as you can in any well-drawn character.

This Jesus does not shed understanding and empathy the way Allison does. If he did, there would not be a church. You will not be surprised, by now, to see what effect it had on me to sing a chorus about Jesus dying on the cross alone, abandoned even by God. And then, immediately after, sing a chorus in which Jesus confidently commends his soul to his beloved Father, knowing that even in this awful moment, the Father’s purposes will be achieved and that God suffers with Jesus through all the pain and mockery. Jesus turns, in the midst of all this, to pardon a thief who is being crucified along with him. This Jesus is full of compassion, not despair.

So we sing about the despairing, abandoned Jesus; then about the confident, caring Jesus. The one right after the other.

If we were trying to get the general readership to care as little about Jesus as they have learned to do about Allison, I can hardly think of a better way to proceed.

Posted in Biblical Studies, Paying Attention | Tagged crucifixion, Gospel Goulash, jesus, narrative integrity | Leave a comment

There’s Always a Chance for Redemption

Posted on March 10, 2013 by hessd

“There’s always a chance for redemption when it comes to the NFL.”

So says Steven Gerwell in The Bleacher Report. That’s his opening line in a piece that names Peyton Manning the Comeback Player of the Year in the NFL for 2012.

Redemption: now there’s an interesting idea.

I’ve been thinking, during Lent this year, about Peter the Apostle. If there is to be a comeback player of the year for the year Jesus was arrested, tried, and crucified—apart from Jesus, of course—I’d pick Peter.[1]

People who want to build up Peter’s resume go to, “I say that you are Peter and on this rock I will build my church.” See Matthew 16 for the context. That text never meant much to me for some reason. Recently, however, I found one that means a lot to me. I’ll tell you what it is, but first I want to tell you why I missed it all my life.[2]

Luke gives us a scene (Chapter 22) in which Jesus says to Peter, “And the Lord said, “Simon, Simon! Indeed, Satan has asked for you, that he may sift you as wheat. But I have prayed for you, that your faith should not fail; and when you have returned to Me, [a translator’s addition] strengthen your brethren” That’s the King James Version, which was simply “the Bible” when I was young.[3]

But the “you” it turns out, is a plural. The devil has not desired Peter particularly; he has desired to brutalize all the disciples of Jesus. “Brutalize” might seem a little over the top as a verb to substitute for “sift,” particularly if you bake pastries from time to time and know not to measure the flour until you have sifted it several times. That’s not the kind of sifting we are talking about. If you want to remove the part of the wheat you want to eat from everything else, you begin by using a flail and you beat the living crap out of it. Like these guys are doing. If you were doing it to a person, you would call it “scourging.” Then you take it outside on a windy day and throw it into the air repeatedly until the wind has blown the chaff away.

Those experiences are what the devil has in mind for Jesus’s disciples, but it is not going to happen. Why? Because Jesus has prayed for Peter. The shift from the plural to the singular accomplishes all this and because they are the same in English, I never noticed. The devil has horrible plans for the disciples, but these plans are going to be defeated because Jesus has prayed for Peter. For some reason—possibly because it is about people and not about buildings—this way of putting the preeminence of Peter has a lot of resonance for me.

This is not all good news for Peter, however. Peter’s job is to “strengthen your brothers” but that is not his first job; it is his second job. His first job is to return. You get your choice of phrasings here; I think I would choose “turn back.” The New Jerusalem Bible has “recover.” Jesus is saying, without saying it in so many words, that Peter is going to be led astray. I like to use the verb seduce to picture this kind of dilemma, built as it is from the Latin verb ducere, “to lead,” and the prefix se-, “aside, away.” Sometimes we say “astray.” The great advantage of “away” is that it requires that we understand that there is a way to go; a way you should go. Being led “astray” means that you did not go the way you should have gone.

The devil will seduce Peter. Peter will be seduced. On the same night Jesus tells him this, Peter will deny three times that he knows Jesus or has ever had anything to do with him. Peter’s first job is to recover from that in whatever way he can. I have been raised, as you have, in an era where the psychological explanations are the “real” explanations. We are inclined to imagine Peter “owning” the awful betrayal or embracing his dark side or getting trauma therapy. Making a mistake of this order, denying the Lord, to whom he pledged unwavering loyalty, is a truly horrible act. He needs to admit it and move on.[4]

He needs to move on because Job 2 is staring him in the face. He is called upon to “strengthen his brothers,” who were sifted, just as Peter was—were flailed and tossed just as Peter was—and who would be crushed if they were not strengthened.

The prayer of Jesus for Peter has certain poignancy. He does not pray that Peter will not deny him. He knows Peter is going to deny him. He prays that Peter will not be crushed by his guilt and remorse and that he will be strong enough to move on to the task for which he was spared; to strengthen his brothers.

Amazing. And as we consider who is to become the next bishop of Rome, we might wish for him that he understand how important it will be for him to leave behind those times when he has denied his Lord and turn to the crucial task of strengthening his brothers and sisters.

[1] I got to poking around in the field of papal candidates a few days ago and discovered a Ghanaian cardinal whose nickname is Peter the Roman. That led me to his predecessor, Peter the Galilean and, in time, to a reflection about Peter’s amazing comeback.

[2] I wasn’t the last one to realize this, I see. Here’s an internet commentary: “Simon, Simon! Indeed, Satan has asked for you, that he may sift you as wheat”(Luke 22:31) “Only occasionally do we have glimpses into the interaction between God and the devil. Though certainly much has gone on behind the scenes it the struggle between right and wrong, God has seen fit to reveal only a small portion to us. Yet what we do know leaves us interested and often confused. Here Jesus tells Peter that the devil has requested him specifically, with an undoubtedly evil purpose at heart. While much remains hidden, what can we learn from these verses? Why did Satan ask for Peter?”

[3] As is often the case, I like the New Jerusalem Bible a good deal better. Here it is: “Simon, Simon. Look, Satan has got his wish to sift you all like wheat; but I have prayed for you, that your faith may not fail, and once you have recovered, you, in your turn, must strengthen your brothers.”

[4] I learned a few weeks ago that the liberal political group “MoveOn.org,” is named that because of their first political stand. They were unhappy that the news was saturated day after day with stories about President Clinton’s private infidelities—he was “seduced,” as I say. Their proposal was that the House of Representatives should “censor and move on.”

Posted in Biblical Studies | Tagged guilt, Peter the Apostle, redemption | 2 Comments