Category: The Dish

by Jessie Roberts

Reviewing literature that explores “the intersection between memory, memoir-writing, and science,” Cara Parks praises contemporary attempts to investigate identity:

“Autobiographers flush before examining their stools,” wrote William H. Gass, and the tendency exists even this super-sensitive mode of memoir to skip the boring bits in the search for self-justification. But these memoirs serve a valiant role:

they force questions of memory and illness out of abstraction and into a temporal context, demonstrating how the search for identity, the struggle for sanity, and our comprehension of our own minds will change as scientists look more deeply into the dark recesses of the brain. “We are comfortable with the idea that physical health is not just a single number but a multiplicity of factors,” [Michael] Kinsley concludes in his New Yorker piece. “That’s where we need to arrive about mental problems.”

Perhaps the most engaging element of these books of memories lost and memories found is their focus on questions instead of answers (forgetting everything seems to shake one’s sense of certainty). “Our fate is to face the world as orphans, chasing through long years the shadows of vanished parents,” Kazuo Ishiguro wrote in his novel When We Were Orphans. “There is nothing for it but to try and see through our missions to the end, as best we can, for until we do so, we will be permitted no calm.” We do not yet have answers to our biggest questions about memory, but with the help of science and narrative, we are slowly discovering the path we will take toward them.

by Jonah Shepp

John Knefel explores the controversy over harm reduction as an approach to heroin addiction:

Though some advocates in the U.S. express hope that their country will one day have supervised injection facilities, even less controversial methods are by no means universally accepted. Needle exchanges, for example, are still effectively illegal in about half of the states, and federal money can’t be used to fund them. President Obama lifted that ban in 2009, but Republicans in 2011 fought successfully to reinstate it. …

Other observers criticize exchange programs for not being aggressive in promoting detox and rehab for heroin users, and suggest a harsher approach.

“Using the criminal justice system to force them to go into treatment has proven to be very productive,” David Evans, special adviser to the Drug Free America Foundation, tells me. “The drug courts that do that have an outstanding record of success of freeing people from their addictions.” (Critics of drug courts argue coerced rehabilitation actually expands, rather than lessens, a punitive approach to drug treatment.)

Some opponents of harm reduction also express skepticism about expanding naloxone access to family and friends of drug users. “Naloxone can save lives in an overdose situation, but many opioid users do not use with their family,” John Walters, who was drug czar under President George W. Bush, writes in an email. “[T]hey may use alone or in the company of other users, who may not be a reliable source of emergency medical care.” Using alone is dangerous, without question, but available data largely contradicts fears that other users can’t administer naloxone effectively. A 2013 scholarly study found that overdoses are overwhelmingly witnessed by other users, and, in the study, administration of naloxone was 98% effective in reversing the overdose.

by Jessie Roberts

In an interview with Gary Gutting, philosophy professor Philip Kitcher – who describes himself as “a humanist first and an atheist second” – offers a view of religion he calls a “halfway house” between belief and thorough secularism (NYT):

P.K.: … I think there’s a version of religion, “refined religion,” that is untouched by the new atheists’ criticisms, and that even survives my argument that religious doctrines are incredible. Refined religion sees the fundamental religious attitude not as belief in a doctrine but as a commitment to promoting the most enduring values. That commitment is typically embedded in social movements — the faithful come together to engage in rites, to explore ideas and ideals with one another and to work cooperatively for ameliorating the conditions of human life. The doctrines they affirm and the rituals they practice are justified insofar as they support and deepen and extend the values to which they are committed.

But the doctrines are interpreted nonliterally, seen as apt metaphors or parables for informing our understanding of ourselves and our world and for seeing how we might improve both. To say that God made a covenant with Abraham doesn’t mean that, long ago, some very impressive figure with a white beard negotiated a bargain with a Mesopotamian pastoralist. It is rather to commit yourself to advancing what is most deeply and ultimately valuable, as the story says Abraham did.

G.G.: And so, since they don’t regard them as factual, refined believers don’t have to deny the stories and metaphors of other religions.

P.K.: Right, they don’t have to pick and choose among the religions of the world. They see all religions as asserting that there is more to the cosmos than is dreamed of either in our mundane thoughts or in our most advanced scientific descriptions. Different cultures gesture toward the “transcendent” facets of reality in their many alternative myths and stories. None of the myths is factually true, although they’re all true in the sense that their “fruits for life” are good. Prominent examples of refined believers include William James, Martin Buber and Paul Tillich, and, in our own day, Karen Armstrong, Robert Bellah and Charles Taylor. When refined religion is thoroughly embedded, religious tolerance thrives, and often much good work is done.

by Tracy R. Walsh

Arguing that our current political system doesn’t do enough to take the interests of future citizens into account, philosopher Thomas Wells calls for 10 percent of all votes to be set aside for “trustees” acting in their interests:

Trusteeship has played a political role before – indeed it is the very model for the role of elected legislators that Burke himself advocated, as did the British political economist John Stuart Mill a century later. All the same, we would certainly need to introduce some new rules and legal instruments to ensure the success of this novel kind of political trusteeship by organizations, and especially to protect them from improper ‘presentist’ influence by partisan or commercial interests. To ensure their independence, these organizations might have to demonstrate popular support (say 50,000 unique citizen members), be non-profit-making, comply with electoral campaign financing legislation and so forth. …

[T]he presence of trustee voters has the potential to benefit democratic deliberation in general. They would make sustainability an unavoidable political topic, one that politicians have to treat in a way that is credible to these cognitively sophisticated agents. The improved quality of politicians’ attention to the future would also help the merely human voters who struggle to turn their moral concern for the future into effective political choices. At least to some degree, the myopia built into the institutions of democracy would be overcome.

Alex Tabarrok favors a different mechanism:

Robin Hanson’s government of prediction markets (“futarchy”) is a better approach. It is now well understood that relative to other institutions, prediction markets draw on expertise to produce predictions that are far-seeing and impartial. What is less well understood is that through a suitable choice of what is to be traded, prediction markets can be designed to be credibly motivated by a variety of goals including the interests of future generations. …

We can also incorporate into our measure of welfare predictions of how future generations will define welfare. We could, for example, choose a rule such that we will pass policies that increase future environmental quality unless a prediction market in future definitions of welfare suggests that future generations will change their welfare standards. It sounds complicated, but then so is the problem.

Meanwhile, Corey Robin Robin Hanson is dismissive of the whole idea:

We could also give votes to people in the past. While one can’t change the experiences of past folks, one can still satisfy their preferences. If past folks expressed particular preferences regarding future outcomes, those preferences could also be given weight in an overall welfare definition.

We could even give votes to animals. One way is to make some assumptions about what outcomes animals seem to care about, pick ways to measure such outcomes, and then include weights on those measures in the welfare definition. Another way is to assume that eventually we’ll “uplift” such animals so that they can talk to us, and put weights on what those uplifted animals will eventually say about the outcomes their ancestors cared about.

We might even put weights on aliens, or on angels. We might just put a weight on what they say about what they want, if they ever show up to tell us. If they never show up, those weights stay set at zero. Of course just because we could give votes to future folks, past folks, animals, aliens, and angels doesn’t mean we will ever want to do so.

by Matthew Sitman

In an interview about her debut novel, Cutting Teeth, which follows a group of thirty-something Brooklyn parents and their young children on a weekend trip to the beach, Julia Fierro explores how being a woman and young mother informed the story she told:

The focus of the book is on relationships, and I’m always surprised when women writers complain about their book being tagged by bookstores, book sites, and blogs with “relationships” and “women.” I understand the larger issue that’s upsetting them, and thank goodness we have the VIDA numbers to act as a neon sign broadcasting the truth about gender inequality in the literary world, but I am a woman, and I will always write about relationships. I am inspired by psychology and emotion, conflict and drama. The world is most significant to me as a web of relationships. If a story isn’t filtered through a psychological lens, you’ll have trouble keeping my attention. Humanity’s individual, and collective, fears and needs and desires are the only religion I’ve got and I am obsessively devoted. So I try to embrace the fact that I am a woman writer writing (mostly) about women, although the male characters in my work are often “liked” most by readers (even if they commit the worst crimes—how about that?). Recently, I even had a brief thought—maybe I am writing with women readers in mind? I am, after all, living a life that only another woman could truly understand. I am going through a phase of life—early motherhood—that is complex in a way that is unique to a woman’s experience. What I feel in my body, in my thoughts, and the ways I interpret the world uniquely, all stem from my experience as a woman. But I have to think more on that before I commit.

In a self-interview, Fierro explains how she wrote a novel and founded the Sackett Street Writers’ Workshop, all while raising two children:

My lifelong insomnia has been a blessing in disguise. I pretty much sleep four hours a night, and am doing my best to ignore conspiracy theories like this, that simultaneously attempt to cut my productivity in half and promise my inevitable doom.

It is amazing what you can accomplish if you abandon all household chores that aren’t absolutely essential. Sure, we’re living in chaos, but mom’s making great progress on her next novel and the number of Sackett Street writers attending classes has doubled in the last three years. It turns out that women can “have it all”—they might be miserably tired, suffer from high blood pressure, and not have enough time to eat well, exercise or have meaningful relationships, but you can do anything when you don’t give yourself a reason not to.

Read a sexy excerpt from Cutting Teeth here.