Canada Invades

Today after getting the turkey in the oven I sat on the couch to take a breather, with the pups surrounding me. The dogs were pretending to be companionable, but their fervent sniffing of every millimeter of my apron for spills revealed their true motives. Meanwhile I spotted the arrival of a flock of Canada Geese in the marsh. There was a certain amount of posturing from the resident Pilgrim Geese, but in the holiday spirit, no battles. Here's a shot of the visitors -

Low Tide Always Returns

For you nice people who wrote to me concerned about how high the tide was this morning, here's the same scene is a few hours later:

HIgh Tide During Today's Snowstorm

Seeing Your Thoughts: Neuroimaging Part II

Yesterday I started talking about possible consequences of reductionist science – when something intricate is abridged into a simplified explanation. Diminishing complex and interactive processes can change what they mean, and those reductions are not necessarily neutral.

In genetics you might read of a gene being switched on or switched off, and it’s easy to picture the kind of light switch you see on a wall. The switch has only two possible states, on and off. There is no maybe.

Yet most so-called genetic switches are more complicated than those that control our lighting. A change in a person’s physical state is rarely a one-to-one correlation with the finding of a certain gene in their body. Most likely a “switch” is a statistical observation. With many disease genes having the gene means that a higher percentage than what might be otherwise expected in the population has this gene and also has an illness. But then you’ll discover possibly large numbers of people who have the gene and don’t get sick, and people who get sick who do not have the gene.

Reducing poorly understood and very complex processes associated with genes to metaphor nouns like “switch” changes people’s behavior. Companies can create and market tests for popular disease genes and make some real money, because the potential market isn‘t the relatively small number of people who are sick, it’s the number of people who are worried about being sick.

Consequences of simplistic portrayals of statistics includes clogging the medical system with unnecessary tests, dividing who has access to medical information according to income, the stimulation of unnecessary procedures and surgery, and use of the information by insurance companies and employers. What is less clear is whether people are helped and lives are saved.

Human genetics has acquired some notoriety for these reductionist explanations and products. One can see skepticism increasing, and there is some legislation now limiting the use of genetic information by insurance companies and employers. Currently, we’re possibly seeing a repeat performance from some portions of the neuroimaging business, as researchers start explaining how our minds work from observing changes in the metabolism of brains.

In talking about neuroimaging, let’s be clear that I’m not criticizing people for getting x-rays or MRIs or other pictures of their insides. Neuroimaging refers to taking pictures of the brain, via several possible methods, to focus on the processes of the brain – not what the brain looks like, but what it “does.” Neuroimaging tries to capture changes in brain metabolism; people who do this work speak of the brain “lighting up.” This is a metaphor, like “switches” in genetics, based on statistics. Neuroimaging itself can be useful in medical research or diagnosis of disease or injury. Problems arise when the tool is misused. I have three areas of concern about the use of neuroimaging to explain how humans think.

First, neuroimaging is far from an exact science, as much as we constantly read of the brain “lighting up.” There are concerns about the qualifications of some who take measurements and read results, as there are no particular professional standards enforced over who does this kind of work.

Also, the tests themselves can be questionable. Some studies of the accuracy of neuroimaging say that up to 20% of results are false positives. If the statistical correlations are not that strong to begin with, then an error rate of 10 or even 20% false positives can devastate the conclusion that anything meaningful happened – much less what it might portend.

Second, we have the problem of correlation. Yesterday I mentioned my pup’s correlation of my mailbox buzzer with what I do. There’s the story of a study showing European cities with the highest birth rates having the highest population of storks. We love to make connections between seemingly related events, even when true cause and effect hasn’t been proven.

Finally there is the problem of a new industry, based on novel uncertain science, purporting to tell us how and when and why we think. I thought nothing could be more intimately intrusive into human affairs than some of the gee-whiz genetics of the 1990s. Now in the 21^st Century my very mind is being deconstructed and reduced to metaphorical lights in my head.

The ideology of science is based on methodology that is accountable and neutral. The real-world practice of science is heavily influenced by politics and by money. Funding from government agencies, foundations and corporations skews what happens and what is concluded in some science. Medical information is also not always neutral. If a genetic test shows I have some disease-correlated gene, will it cause me to be denied insurance or employment? If my brain is shown lighting up in certain areas that are interpreted as mental disease or disability, or potential criminal behavior– if these sometimes dubious tests are used as a basis for conclusions about my thoughts we could see a terrible sorting of our population, with resulting changes in medical care, employment and education.

There is no doubt that good science saves lives, feeds people, and reduces suffering. There is also ample reason to be wary of science that is coopted by greedy companies, unscrupulous politicians and credulous media. Our minds, our thoughts and our feelings belong to us, and like our genetic life substance, the highest possible vigilance and skepticism is needed to safeguard who we really are.

Reduce, Regret: The Perils of Neuroimaging Part I

The marsh is covered with diamonds this morning from a deep overnight freeze, and the wind has shifted to its winter habit of blowing steadily right down the Dyer River into my face as I head for the back door. The winter is a very complicated time of year around here, which you can experience best if you resist the temptation to dart from car to house. Even in his black hoodie, little Jimmy the pup has become deeply committed to his indoor puppy pads.

The beauty and mystery of nature’s astonishing complexity are part of what drives me to resist over-simplification of the world around us. There is an unfortunate tendency of some in the science-industry-media complex to promote abridged versions of our experience. Very intricate processes are reduced to obvious little chains of cause and effect. For some, mystery is a temporary problem to be solved (“just one more grant will do it”), while complexity is addressed by sufficient distance to let us see only the important stuff, without the confusion of detail.

Genetics is still is the grip of such over-confident reducers. We’ve been told all about the little machines in our bodies, and how they work like switches, turned off or on, producing predictable effects. We had the “gay gene,” we had various genes for breast cancer. We have genes – now I’m getting close to home – for the illness that killed my wife.

Except, not really. What we have is the creation of an expensive test that lets us see if a certain configuration of amino acids is present. Then we have statistical correlations – often really weak ones - with something in the world to that chain. Weak or not, we sometimes act on those statistics.

Let me give you an example. I have a little gizmo taped to the inside of my mailbox door that sounds a buzzer in my kitchen when the gizmo is moved vertically. Somewhere in the world, a set of computers runs a program that sorts through received data and causes a machine to print out a bill from Central Maine Power. The machine gets the bill into the mail system. When Glenn comes by with my mail and opens the mailbox, the gizmo sets off the buzzer. I get the mail, sit down at my computer with the bills, log onto my credit union account, and pay Central Maine Power for the electricity that runs the mailbox buzzer and my computer.

In the World of Jimmy, every afternoon there’s an sensational sound that causes The Master to go out the front door. Then the sound happens again and then The Master comes back in the door. This is an immensely loud and exciting time, involving much racing around and tail wagging. Jimmy would go on public television I’m sure, and tell his pup audience all about the noise that makes The Master go and come back, and pat Jimmy on the head.

Aside from my discomfort with bad science, greedy technology and idiotic television, I think we run some real risks and sometimes palatable harm from reductionism: the condensation of unknowns into owned knowns. We’re going to look at this problem some more using neuroimaging as an example – how taking pictures of blood flow inside people’s heads results in some people narrating the worlds of physiology, psychology, philosophy and even religion. 

The Very Thin Blue Line

I’m working on some health care issues to share with you, but today I want to point out a few things about the images that flooded the media over the weekend as seated kids were chemical sprayed by a policeman in Davis, CA.

First, police violence against non-violent demonstrators is not that uncommon in the USA. It’s been frequent enough in our history, and I saw the same police tactic in Seattle a dozen years ago when seated demonstrators were sprayed at very close range in the face. I saw one Seattle cop bend down and force open the eyelid of a young woman so he could spray teargas right into her eye.

Second, it’s worth noting police violence, which I think is almost always on some level a reflection of policy, happens in places that by most measures would fit the US definition of liberal: Oakland, Davis, Seattle, LA. Any temptation to frame the problem of police misconduct as emanating from the authoritarian tendencies of conservatives isn’t supported by what we see happening over time. Police viciousness against non-violent people addressing their government emanates from government policy – that’s who runs police departments, even on campuses.

Third, how police treated people in Davis is entirely without justification. But the huge storm of media attention may be connected to those victims of police cruelty being white and not poor. Police brutality occurs more routinely in poor communities in the US and in places like Tahrir Square. When I was election observing in Chile 20 years ago, I was gassed more in a couple of days in the center of that country’s capital than I was in all the US demonstrations I attended in the 60’s and 70’s.

Fourth, our candy-coated domestic media consumption leaves us clueless about the political significance of these images for the rest of the world. Many of us missed the heavy impact of Abu Graib and Guantanamo on other people’s willingness to accept our lofty rhetoric about democracy and human rights, much less undertake our concrete UN and International Court proposals.

Even though I have only the most minimal broadcast TV reception from “basic cable,” I’m able to see some odd channels in the high triple-digit numbered neighborhoods of my channel lineup. I’ve been watching how a channel called RT is covering the Davis events.

RT is a huge Russian TV network, with 22 satellites and millions of viewers around the world and in the US. They broadcast in Russian, Arabic, English and Spanish. You ought to see how Davis looks through their eyes. And this is not an “image” issue or a PR problem. It’s fundamental politics, played out worldwide.

What should we do? I think we once again need to attend to the standards maintained for people paid to enforce the law. When citizens endow a group of government employees with the ability to use violence forbidden to most people, control is always an urgent problem.

I also think we’re at a point – not for the first time – of examining what we’ll allow as speech and political involvement in our country. We faced this all during the Civil Rights movement, at Kent State, and from many individual groups ranging from Act Up to Earth First. One protection for peaceful demonstrators is their non-violence. Another is their knowledge that fellow citizens will not permit harm to befall those who express divergence from what the government and its agents prefer.

But most of all, we’re seeing that many levels of government in our country are unwilling to permit appropriate challenges to their authority. What makes the stark and very uncomfortable portrayal of our nation on Russian TV difficult to watch is not that those mean Rooskies are mis-stating or exaggerating the facts – but that they’re not.

“There’s nobody in this country who got rich on his own”

“There’s nobody in this country who got rich on his own”

Today’s New York Times attributes this quote to Elizabeth Warren and it provides a nice starting point for this next Occupy post. Before we get to politics, a word about tactics.

I have strong personal feelings about public demonstrations – group expressions of emotion based on shared goals or values. The first demo I remember joining was the 1959 bomb-banning march I told you about yesterday, the one Pete Seeger and I disagreed about. I was at The March on Washington in August of 1963, I was in the Dan White demonstrations (the press calls them riots) that took place in the area of San Francisco between The Castro and City Hall, I was in the shrieking crowd of a million people in Santiago, Chile in December of 1989 when Patricio Aylwin was elected president following 18 years of Pinochet – and countless others, most of them just handfuls of Quakers with signs.

I’m not putting on my brag hat here, I want you to know that I have held a lifelong faith in the importance of public demonstrations and I’ve loved to be in them.

While people of all ages have been seen in the Occupy villages, these like most demonstrations are a kid’s crusade. It is not a small point that young people dominate OWS.

I remember early one morning going to meet someone in a church in downtown Seattle during the 1999 WTO demonstrations. The church was a sanctuary for some of the tens of thousands of kids who had come to demonstrate. The lobby, pews, choir loft and sanctuary aisles were entirely covered with sleeping young people; the air had a sharp smell from the chemical sprays the police were blasting into these kid’s faces, day after day.

Seeing the sleeping children I was overcome with a cross of parental endearment and political ecstasy. I wanted to cradle their sleeping scruffy bodies, and in fact I was interviewed after leaving the church and said that – I tried to find the film on the internet so you could see it, but I’m not a competent enough Googler – anyway it used to be out there.

The question I’m answering in these OWS posts is, what do I think of this movement, do I approve? My answer is aesthetic/romantic as well as political – we’ll get to politics next. First, I adore these kids, partly because they are using themselves as their political tools. There’s no mediation by blogs or ballots – they offer all they have: their bodies. They put themselves in harm’s way. They also (I assume) screw in tents, smoke dope, and argue through the night. They create an entirely wonderful experience for themselves, a sense of embodiment as a community on their terms.

The choice of these kids to leave relatively comfortable and way over-mediated lives to become their own implements of personal change – this in fact transforms them.

The Occupy movement also has its political aspects. It begins however with the personal renovation of thousands of people who will from now on act in different ways, because they have encountered their and other’s power in the most intimate and personal manner possible. And so are our children altered and therefore, so are the rest of us.

Looking at OWS as personal alteration discloses a huge gulf that I want to especially point out: the press sees the demonstrations as symbolic and that’s how they portray them to the rest of us – these events are about something. For the participants something else is going on. These demonstrations are something, they are experiences, actions – not representations or symbols or images.

On that basis, the Occupy movement has already been a substantial success. The lives of the participants have been altered and our country will be different as a result. All the analysis including mine is beside the point if we don’t notice the non-symbolic, primary if not primal nature of these actions for the people who have been participating.

Part two of answering the question is to hold these Occupy events up against some kind of standard of social change, to see if aside from being personally transformative they are politically relevant.

Back in the late 60’s I was helping out at a summer Quaker peace retreat up in the mountains of southern Pennsylvania. My boss sent me on a two hour drive to an little airport to pick up a Catholic priest who was a guest speaker. I spent the whole drive out congratulating myself for being such a dedicated cadre that I was willing to spend a total of 4 hours locked in a car with some musty fusty old church guy. Thus I spent four hours spellbound by Fr. Daniel Berrigan, who sat cross-legged next to me and described his trip to Hanoi, read me his poetry, and literally talked to me about his soul. By the time I dropped him back at the little prop plane, I would have followed him into flames, but also, through Dan I met his brother, the late Father Phil Berrigan, a charismatic Josephite priest who with Dan ended up on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted for pouring blood on draft board files.

I’m raising the Berrigans because their two early and most famous public demonstrations involved four people and then nine people. These were not mass movements.

The Catonsville Nine grabbed onto the front edge of the peace movement in the United States like a puppy with a sock, and they shook that edge from side to side and then they pulled it way outwards from where it had been. Their deeply personal activities became highly transformational public actions. Phil and Dan and their tiny band of radical Catholic activists and seminarians changed the United States.

For reasons that we can talk about maybe another time, the media like to focus their examination of movements like OWS on how it will function in the mainstream of US politics. They think it’s helpful, not to mention rational, to analyze OWS in the same way they do John Boehner or Bank of America.

I think it’s more useful to see OWS as having multiple layers of significance manifesting differently over time. There are the aforementioned changes the participants create for themselves that will echo in our country for a generation. And there is the pointing of the media’s attention towards the roots and results of economic injustice in our country.

By the way I want to congratulate these kids for doing a better job than my generation did forty years ago when we got mired in ideological abstractions like imperialism and hegemony and Marxism in its seeming infinity of flavors. The modern Occupy movement prefers to focus on the behavior of people and the practices of institutions. I think these frames are a lot more practical for dealing with what plagues us, compared to the severely theoretical and abstract agendas of 1963.

So the Occupy movement changes its participants, redirects the press, and then does something the media call “moving the debate.” I’m not exactly sure what they mean – but for us, it can be quite Berrigan-like. Yesterday I talked about how the Nestle Boycott created activism on a scale to match the development of a new level of social problem: globalization. Similarly, given the domination of our political system and our means of communication by big financial companies, OWS is refusing to meet the bankers on the turf they own. Instead they’re making transformative actions on their own terms. The misapprehension of the movement by most of the media is not a problem, it’s a confirmation of the success of OWS, because the Occupiers are reframing the media not as the tools of the financial status quo that owns them, but as the estate of the people who are the “consumers” of that media. The inmates run the asylum.

There’s no better confirmation of this than to look at the supposed (and probable) godfather of the OWS movement, Kalle Lasn, founder of Adbusters and a popularizer of culture jamming. For many years Lasn has been perfecting the disruption of commercially-oriented memes and symbols by coopting the mechanisms that produce just what he’s jamming. He’s an advertising executive who figured out how to use advertising to disrupt advertising and the culture and values it represents and supports.

Culture jamming refuses to accept the power characteristic of institutions like our financial industry, by using that industry against itself. This is difficult for the media to understand, in part because they’re not permitted to understand it, and in part because they themselves have become the unwitting instruments of OWS. Subject has become object.

Just as the Nestle Boycott succeeded in part simply by coming into existence, Occupy Wall Street has already been a success in its transformation of the lives of its participants, its pulling of the national discussion in the direction of its choosing, and in its disruption of one of the principle tools of its target, the tool being the mass media and the target being the out-of-control institutions of national greed and perverse hyper-materialism.

There is no need to predict where OWS will end up. The seeming jumble of messy camps, evicted kids and strange tribal rituals will be the only determinant of what happens next – a prospect in our scripted age that is most likely a very frustrating feature of the movement for those in power, who have become quite accustomed to running the world.

So I congratulate OWS: their disruption, unpredictability, and apparent lack of coherent ideology and obvious leadership may redeem us all.