Month: October 2013

Piercarlo Valdesolo reviews research into the psychological and behavioral consequences of a belief in “pure evil” (BPE):

According to this research, one of the central features of BPE is evil’s perceived immutability. Evil people are born evil – they cannot change. Two judgments follow from this perspective: 1) evil people cannot be rehabilitated, and 2) the eradication of evil requires only the eradication of all the evil people. Following this logic, the researchers tested the hypothesis that there would be a relationship between BPE and the desire to aggress towards and punish wrong-doers.

Researchers have found support for this hypothesis across several papers containing multiple studies, and employing diverse methodologies. BPE predicts such effects as: harsher punishments for crimes (e.g. murder, assault, theft), stronger reported support for the death penalty, and decreased support for criminal rehabilitation. Follow-up studies corroborate these findings, showing that BPE also predicts the degree to which participants perceive the world to be dangerous and vile, the perceived need for preemptive military aggression to solve conflicts, and reported support for torture.

Meanwhile, Father C. John McCloskey reviews an updated version of True or False Possession: How to Distinguish the Demonic from the Demented, a 1960s guide by French neurologist Jean Lhermitte:

Written primarily for health professionals, True or False Possession is nonetheless of interest to any educated Catholic, in that it recounts from a Catholic viewpoint genuine suspected demonic possession and helps the layman, priest, psychiatrist and even family members to distinguish the real thing from mental illness and fakery.

However, when and if it is necessary to bring the victim to an exorcist for treatment, [editor] Dr. [Aaron] Kheriaty points out, “This author knows the permanent limitations of his science: This book does not attempt to detail cases of what may be considered true possession, for these by their nature would be outside the scope of the author’s clinical expertise. In such cases, the physician and priest need to collaborate responsibly and with respect for the insights of both science and theology.”

Not surprisingly, given the profession, the medical emphasis of the book is paramount, yet the author writes as a convinced Catholic and, as such, gives what is almost a short history of diabolical possession from the time of Christ’s exorcisms, as recorded in the Gospels, up to his own time. The author recounts examples of saints to whom the devil appeared, such as doctor of the Church St. Teresa of Avila: “She depicts the evil one as possessing hideous form, with a terrifying mouth and a regular proteus, able to transform and to multiply himself.” …

Many seeming cases of diabolical possession were in fact cases of simple insanity or mental illness, as Lhermitte explains. And many more were simply frauds that, in turn, caused mass hysteria in others who simply suffered from neurological illnesses that produce symptoms having nothing to do with the devil or hidden demons.

(Hat tip: Books, Inq)

A reader reminisces:

I read with interest your post on Evangelicals and the morphing of Halloween into an adult celebration. I’m 65 and enjoyed Halloween in the post-WWII days that were unencumbered by the shibboleth of razor blades in apples.  It was a heady time of kids roaming the streets after dark unsupervised in mashed together costumes from parents’ closets and corked faces.  It was giddy and wonderful and the “evil” abroad was pretty much limited to the naughtiness of smashed pumpkins, trees festooned with toilet paper and car windows spattered with shaving cream.  My sister and I never engaged in the tricks but we, sheltered Catholic school girls that we were, never went home until people stopped opening their doors to us sometime after 9pm.

My generation got to fully indulge in the permission to be libertine for one night of the year.  We grew up to put on a costume as adults and use the excuse for a party, but for us it was never the event on steroids that it became for the generation that followed.

Parents became paranoid that their own neighbors were trying to poison their kids.  They raised their kids with the conscious message that anyone they didn’t know was a stranger who needed to be distrusted. Their Halloweens were anemic chaperoned affairs conducted in commercial costumes heavily influenced by TV characters or the witch/ghost/clown standards in acetate and screen printed masks.  At home, before they got to tuck into their loot, parents had to go through it to make sure there was nothing so onerous as a homemade cookie or popcorn ball and that each item was commercially prepared and individually wrapped.

No wonder their kids grew up to embrace the goth well beyond Halloween and usher in the slutty adult costume.  They didn’t have any idea how to “do” Halloween for their kids, so they huddled them together into suburban parties and marauded shopping malls. Eventually they hurled them into the sad church-sponsored Trunk or Treat things that are only marginally better than the gratuitous Halloween Horrors things they first used to hammer home their point and now do as annual fund raisers.  If they give out candy, they do it resentfully grousing that someone may have come into their neighborhood for a rotten 5¢ candy bar or that they’re “too old” and not entitled to have some fun.

Each year I still remember the fun I had.  Unfortunately, it’s also tinged now with sadness for what Halloween has been turned into.

Speaking of parents’ paranoia about poisoned candy, Dan Lewis dutifully debunks that enduring myth by detailing the “only known example of a person intentionally poisoning Halloween candy and providing it to neighborhood trick-or-treaters”:

On Halloween, 1974, an 8-year-old boy named Timothy O’Bryan died. His candy had, indeed, been poisoned. A few days prior, his father, Ronald Clark O’Bryan, took out a $40,000 life insurance policy on Timothy and Timothy’s sister, Elizabeth (then age 5), as an unimaginable way to get out of debt. The only way to collect required that at least one of his children die, so the elder O’Bryan laced some Pixy Stix with cyanide and cajoled his son into eating one before bed.

As murder would negate the insurance policy, the father had to cover his tracks. Already showing a wanton disregard for the lives of others—children, at that—he decided to potentially kill a few. He distributed some of the tainted candy to at least four other children (including his daughter), according to the Houston Chronicle, setting up the story that a neighborhood madman or demented factory worker had caused the tragic death of his son. Fortunately, he was unsuccessful. None of the other children ended up eating the poison, in part due to a quick reaction from authorities and in part due to dumb luck—an 11-year-old tried to eat the sugar in the Pixy Stix he received, but could not undo the staples that O’Bryan had used to reseal the package.

Like our reader, but from a very different perspective. Liz Galvao issues a cri de coeur to “rise up and take back our holiday” – for goths:

These days, a plague of indifference has consumed the goth community when it comes to Halloween. Even when I was a wee kindergoth, we had respect for the true meaning of All Hallow’s Eve. It wasn’t all Nightmare Before Christmas screenings and weirding people out at the mall. Sure, it had pagan origins or something, but at least we knew it didn’t belong to the posers in the store­-bought witch costumes. Goths these days couldn’t care less about the holiday. They’re more concerned with their Tumblr reblogs and sideways cross jewelry than with protecting the history of their people. …

I write to you now a reluctant but natural leader, like Robin Tunney’s character in The Craft. We must fight to end the commercialization of Halloween, because it is the only way we can survive. If we do not seize Halloween from those that would sell it to us, what is to become of our rich gothic subculture? Why avoid the sun and dye our hair black (red, green, purple)? Why pretend to understand Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari? Why read Poppy Z. Brite over Charlaine Harris? We might as well give up and name our dogs Bella. I stand here today, a proud gothic American, and I pledge to stand with you and fight. For if we do not reclaim Halloween for goths, then like Bela Lugosi, we are dead.

Previous Dish on goths here, here and here.

The creators of the possessed board had to scare their way to a patent:

[T]he chief patent officer demanded a demonstration—if the board could accurately spell out his name, which was supposed to be unknown to [investor Elijah] Bond and [his sister-in-law Helen] Peters, he’d allow the patent application to proceed. They all sat down, communed with the spirits, and the planchette faithfully spelled out the patent officer’s name. Whether or not it was mystical spirits or the fact that Bond, as a patent attorney, may have just known the man’s name, well, that’s unclear, Murch says. But on February 10, 1891, a white-faced and visibly shaken patent officer awarded Bond a patent for his new “toy or game.”

How it works:

Ouija boards work on a principle known to those studying the mind for more than 160 years: the ideometer effect. In 1852, physician and physiologist William Benjamin Carpenter published a report for the Royal Institution of Great Britain, examining these automatic muscular movements that take place without the conscious will or volition of the individual (think crying in reaction to a sad film, for example). Almost immediately, other researchers saw applications of the ideometer effect in the popular spiritualist pastimes. In 1853, chemist and physicist Michael Faraday, intrigued by table-turning, conducted a series of experiments that proved to him (though not to most spiritualists) that the table’s motion was due to the ideomotor actions of the participants.

Lizza asks Jonathan Gruber, a key architect of Romneycare and Obamacare:

Gruber broke down the A.C.A. “winners” and “losers” for me. About eighty per cent of Americans are more or less left alone by the health-care act—largely people who have health insurance through their employers. About fourteen per cent of Americans are clear winners: they are currently uninsured and will have access to an affordable insurance policy under the A.C.A.

But much of the current controversy involves the six per cent of Americans who buy their own health care on the individual market, which the A.C.A. has dramatically reformed. Gruber argued that half of these people (three per cent of all Americans) will have little change to their polices. “They have to buy new plans, but they will be pretty similar to what they had before,” he said. “It will essentially be relabeling.”

The other half, however, also three per cent of the population, will have to buy a new product that complies with the A.C.A.’s more stringent requirements for individual plans. A significant portion of these roughly nine million Americans will be forced to buy a new insurance policy with higher premiums than they currently pay. The primary reason for the increased cost is that the A.C.A. bans any plan that would require a people who get sick to pay medical fees greater than six thousand dollars per year. In other words, this was a deliberate policy decision that the White House and Congress made to raise the quality—and thus the premiums—of insurance policies at the bottom end of the individual market.

Avik Roy, a staunch Obamacare critic who has cherry-picked facts in the past, claims that roughly a third of Americans will lose their current coverage. He bases this on quotes from a June 2010 edition (pdf) of the Federal Register, which publishes notices from government agencies:

“The Departments’ mid-range estimate is that 66 percent of small employer plans and 45 percent of large employer plans will relinquish their grandfather status by the end of 2013,” wrote the administration on page 34552. All in all, more than half of employer-sponsored plans will lose their “grandfather status” and get canceled. According to the Congressional Budget Office, 156 million Americans—more than half the population—was covered by employer-sponsored insurance in 2013.

Another 25 million people, according to the CBO, have “nongroup and other” forms of insurance; that is to say, they participate in the market for individually-purchased insurance. In this market, the administration projected that “40 to 67 percent” of individually-purchased plans would lose their Obamacare-sanctioned “grandfather status” and get canceled, solely due to the fact that there is a high turnover of participants and insurance arrangements in this market. (Plans purchased after March 23, 2010 do not benefit from the “grandfather” clause.) The real turnover rate would be higher, because plans can lose their grandfather status for a number of other reasons.

How many people are exposed to these problems? 60 percent of Americans have private-sector health insurance—precisely the number that Jay Carney dismissed. As to the number of people facing cancellations, 51 percent of the employer-based market plus 53.5 percent of the non-group market (the middle of the administration’s range) amounts to 93 million Americans.

Architectural historian Keith Eggener ponders haunted houses past and present:

When Americans portray haunted houses, they usually look something like Hill House [in 1963’s The Haunting] – old, dark, full of turrets and dead-eyed windows, rambling and eerily picturesque. It’s hard to imagine the cinematic Hill House – in actuality, an ancient English manor rebuilt in the mid-19th century – having ever looked new or welcoming. … Commentators have often noted that haunted house stories appeal to us by subverting our ideals of domestic tranquility and security; they are modern versions of the romantic sublime, where we watch in safety while terrible, thrilling things happen close by.

They also support American myths of egalitarianism, our conjoined attraction and aversion to aristocracy and wealth, our envy of the rich and our suspicions about how their gains were got. The lavish Victorian Gothic, Queen Anne and Second Empire haunts of popular fiction and film present the Janus face of the Gilded Age, whose ruthless corruption and relentless capitalism were excoriated by Mark Twain, Mother Jones, Upton Sinclair and other progressives. They closet the skeletons upon which great fortunes were built and reassure us that crime, though it sometimes pays very well, comes with long, nasty strings attached.

But while the classic haunted house is “hoary, dusty and timeworn, full of shadows and memories,” Eggener believes that “even in our brightly lit and efficient modern houses, we are never entirely safe from our own imaginations”:

In The Architectural Uncanny, Anthony Vidler describes how modern architects, “formed by futurism,” sought to eradicate traces of the past from their work. Old houses were to prone to manifestations of the uncanny, or unhomely – that unhealthy and “fundamental propensity of the familiar to turn on its owners, suddenly to become defamiliarized, derealized, as if in a dream.” To avoid this, Modernists cleaned house. They built glass walls to deny the shadows. They filled their buildings with light and good intentions. They removed the cellars, the attics, the bric-a-brac, “the weight of tradition and the imbrications of generations of family drama.”

The program backfired, however. Erasure of the past only created more ghosts – “the nostalgic shadows of all the houses now condemned.” The skeletal modern houses that replaced them were themselves ghostly – schematics evoking past houses, uninhabitable in the minds of many, rootless, reflective, vulnerable.

(Photo: The Warwickshire mansion that served as Hill House in The Haunting. By Richard Croft.)

Willa Paskin praises the French show The Returned – premiering tonight on the Sundance channel – as an eerie, contemplative alternative to the bloody orgy that is The Walking Dead:

[It’s] about people who have come back from the dead, but they neither hanker for brains nor have no brains themselves, qualities I consider definitional for zombies. The previously deceased on The Returned appear normal, sentient, seemingly healthy, as troubled by the meaning of their reanimation as everyone else around them. Unlike with zombie stories, the problem with The Returned’s resurrected is not that they are undead—it is that they are all too alive. …

The people they come back to have always changed more than the dead themselves.

A young man (the exceedingly handsome Pierre Perrier) who died the day of his wedding appears as his fiancée (a fragile Clotilde Hesme) is about to remarry. A small boy attaches himself to an isolated female doctor (Celine Sallette). A murderer comes back. The dead are connected to the living in various graceful and complicated ways that I will not spoil for you, but suffice it to say that as stately as The Returned is, I definitely wanted to know what happened next. Meanwhile, the water level in the town is dropping dramatically, the lights keep flickering, none of the newly living are sleeping very much, and everyone keeps wondering if this is a sign of the resurrection—Jesus came back from the dead once, after all—or something less reassuring. “Are we sure I’m not a zombie?” Camille asks at one point, and it is the fact of her not zombie-ness that gives The Returned its deliciously shivery quality: Zombies are scary but familiar; who knows what Camille is?