October 2009 Archives
Whatever investigators and courts ultimately decide about three deaths and a number of alleged injuries in a "sweat lodge" program at his Arizona New Age retreat, the guru James Arthur Ray has no plans to abandon his mission. And to judge from the positive reaction of many prospects, the risk might even make the program look more attractive -- no pain, no gain and all that. (There's a theory that as technology makes motoring and other activities safer, some people compensate by craving new risks.) According to the Los Angeles Times,Though shaken by the deaths, Ray has quickly returned to the road, teaching his secrets of success even as he uses them to cling to his own.Self-help gurus--and their disciples--have exasperated skeptics for over a century, at least since the debunkers of the Russian-born spiritualist Helena Blavatsky, whose Theosophy movement has survived its early detractors to become a presence on the Web. Even negative publicity keeps leaders in the news, and weren't many of the founders of today's great religions denounced in their own time as charlatans?
"I've taught that we're all going to have adversity and we can't run from it," a somber, teary-eyed Ray said Tuesday night at the beginning of his free recruitment session in Denver. "I've certainly learned a lot in the past 10 days."
Some weren't aware of the Sedona deaths until Ray addressed it. But Lyle Guthmiller, 44, a heating and air conditioning technician, said it didn't dissuade him from considering signing up for one of the retreats. "When you're pushing the limits, unfortunately, things can happen," he said. "I'd rather live that life than be a couch potato."
Video in particular favors today's prophets, with their often spellbinding performances, over less charismatic naysayers. Ray was featured on the Larry King show, as the self-help critic Steve Salerno notes with dismay in the Wall Street Journal. Even accomplished investigators of alleged occult phenomena like the magician James Randi, who offers $1,000,000 prize for proof of the paranormal, can't expose the advice of motivational speakers in the same way. One of Randi's blog contributors does have an illuminating account of a post-tragedy appearance by Ray. It should not be so surprising that Ray and his followers have taken the offensive; over 50 years ago, a Chicago end-of-the-world movement was not dissolved but galvanized into action after its Armageddon deadline passed, helping inspire the psychological theory of cognitive dissonance.
There are many sins in the self-help industry. One is the dogma that anybody can be a great success at any time simply by drawing on inner resources. It's one thing -- and a good thing -- to show how many people have overcome poverty, illness, disabilities, and discrimination. It's another to deny the role of factors beyond our control, especially chance (despite some evidence that our attitudes can affect our luck) and circumstances. For example, in 1996 magazine interview, the great computer scientist Donald Knuth observed that people with exceptional programming aptitude existed and exist where there was no opportunity to display their gifts: "I imagine there are computer scientists in the pygmy forest." Some people's gifts may no longer be profitable; others' not yet. And then there's the insidious Just World Hypothesis, recently exposed here by Jonah Lehrer. Louise Hay, the publisher-doyenne of New Age healing, told the New York Times Magazine writer Mark Oppenheimer that while she would not confront victims with guilt, she could see justice even in genocide:
"Yes, I think there's a lot of karmic stuff that goes on, past lives." So, I [Mark Oppenheimer] asked, with a situation like the Holocaust, the victims might have been an unfortunate group of souls who deserved what they got because of their behavior in past lives? "Yes, it can work that way," Hay said. "But that's just my opinion."Should we condemn all self-help books? Some are recommended by mental health professionals, as Daniel Goleman observed years ago, before going on to write a best-seller of his own. The monarch of the genre may still be Samuel Smiles, author of the original Self-Help, a Victorian sensation still in print after 150 years.Smiles was a disillusioned political reformer who argued for individual effort. Reactionary propaganda or progressive politics by other means? Make up your own mind here. Smiles glorified the work ethic, not wealth or social status, and admired his protagonists for the sacrifices they made, for example the French Protestant ceramicist Bernard Palissy supposedly fueling his furnace with his household furniture as a last-ditch measure. This and many other anecdotes in Smiles have been questioned by more recent scholarship. But his message was the opposite of most of today's movement. He taught at workers' schools and declined lucrative offers to memorialize self-made industrialists.He preached no Secret but perseverance and dedication to the work for its own sake rather than for external rewards.Smiles the Scots Calvinist may have been the last great apostle of the Protestant Ethic, but he was also a forerunner of twenty-first-century ideas like self-efficacy.
Photo Credit: Flicker User Casey Serin
In flu season, what price prevention? That's a question the Philadelphia Inquirer is asking as religious and medical leaders discuss the ethics of the handshake. While there is medical debate about avoiding the gesture -- some doctors say a ban is only minimally effective, others carry hand sanitizer in bottles with them -- some people fear a moral contagion. One mother whose family had swine flu last summer called avoidance"extreme. . . . That's who we are as human beings. We do shake hands. We do hug each other. We do kiss our friends on the cheek. If we let go of all that, then what do we have left? We're just walking by each other as strangers."Philadelphians' concerns on such questions have deep historic roots. Handshaking was once a common form of greeting in Europe, then displaced in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by hat doffing and bowing, only to re-emerge as an allegedly English innovation. But it was the Quakers, first settlers of Philadelphia, whose founder George Fox promoted the gesture as a symbol of the equality of believers -- at a time when authorities considered refusing to doff a hat to magistrates something between heresy and treason. Philadelphia even has a handshake historian with a classics Ph.D.She still shakes hands, kisses cheeks, and refuses to use hand sanitizer, even though Har Zion Temple in Penn Valley, where her husband is the rabbi, recently installed dispensers after a member made the request.
There's a sinister side of anti-handshake campaigns. Mussolini cited hygiene in officially banning the handshake in favor of the "Roman Salute," a gesture that has its own scholars. (Some historians think the Duce just wanted "excuse to avoid one form of human contact.") And Youtube hosts a virtual festival of conspiracy-theory handshake videos like this.
Despite hygienic reservations, the handshake, like the chair, is a Western custom that has made its way around the world. Influenza did not reverse the trend even after the 1918 pandemic, so it's not going to do so now. Some alternative gestures like elbow bumps make as much sense (outside their original cultural contexts) as rituals of safe blood brotherhood. In fact the small risk makes the clasp even more meaningful. So handshakes, perhaps followed by discreet private disinfection, are here for the duration.
(Photo: Flickr/star5112)
A Newark Star-Ledger report on this year's Nobel Prize for Physics shows how the twentieth century's greatest innovation in imaging was the indirect result of two research "failures." Wired has more details of the internal politics.The breakthrough of Willard S. Boyle and George E. Smith, the charge-coupled device (CCD), had a curious motivation. What catalyzed it was the peculiar agenda of AT&T in the late 1960s. Managers of Bell Labs thought that a new technology called bubble memory was about to replace semiconductors and let researchers on the latter side know they they needed a great new idea fast to prove semiconductors were worth continued funding. Bubble memory turned out to be a bubble and is now only a memory, but pressure, based on an erroneous projection of the future, helped create another future. It also made it possible to capture the images of Apollo 13. Yet the videotube that used the first CCDs became a dead end itself. AT&T's Picturephone service was based on a very rational early fear of cable and television as rivals of the telephone in building new, high-speed networks, as the historian Kenneth Lipartito has confirmed in his standard account of the program.
Veterans of Bell Labs are rightly proud of the organization's record. To quote the Star-Ledger:
Bell Labs, the research and development arm of Lucent Technologies, has now produced 13 Nobel laureates and more than 31,000 patents since 1925. During the 1960s and 1970s, the lab in Murray Hill was regarded as a crucible of some of the most innovative research in the world.
"Everything we take for granted today -- digital music, digital art, lasers -- came from Bell Labs," said A. Michael Noll, emeritus professor of the Annenberg School of Communications at the University of Southern California and a former Bell Labs research scientist.
But it also noted the changes and research group closings under Lucent:
Many Bell Labs scientists, past and present, say their research community has never recovered.
"The environment that was there back then, the excitement about being around creative people who were open to talking about their work, was not duplicated during its time," said Dan Stanzione, a former director of Bell Labs.
Ironically some non-profit research laboratories like Battelle and Germany's Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft have been able to support themselves at least in part through income from the innovations they helped sponsor -- like dry photocopying and the MP3 format, respectively. I have found no information on royalties received by AT&T or Lucent for the invention of Willard Boyle and George Smith at Bell Labs -- possibly because original patents had expired before the digital imaging boom. (I'd welcome information from readers in telecommunication and imaging.)
This prize for 40-year-old work raises an intriguing question. Has something been lost from American and world science by the dispersion of so many great researchers? Some of them have profited personally; at conferences I've met former technical staff members who have made fortunes in finance and entrepreneurship. Others, like the late electrical engineer and perceptual psychologist Bela Julesz, a future MacArthur Fellow whom I met while I was a science editor, flourished in academia and became mentors to a generation of students. Still others have had the best of both worlds, with high-salaried tenured teaching jobs plus lucrative industrial ties.
But is society better off with so much talent redeployed? Are great innovations more likely to arise in the newer, decentralized, and more responsive global environment? Does everything important get discovered independently anyway, regardless of what happens to one organization? I'm not so sure. In Jeremy Bernstein's Three Degrees above Zero, Bela Julesz said Bell Labs had no counterpart in Europe or elsewhere and was "an absolutely unique treasure . . . for the whole world," a "baroque organ" for the maestro who needs "to pull out every register." Maybe the old Bell Labs resembled the Hollywood studio system, where massive resources and depth of skills could be deployed to produce qualitative leaps. The Labs set a high standard for the reconfigured world of global science.
(Photo: Wiki Commons)
Consider this idea of the Harvard philosopher and television ambassador Michael Sandel as summarized in the (London) Times Higher Education. (I have not been able to get Sandel's new book itself yet and will correct this post if it turns out I am misinterpreting the original.)
In other words, Professor Sandel's allegedly consoling message would imply, academic brilliance, work ethic, athletic prowess, musical talent, community spirit, leadership, and resilience aren't everything! It isn't your fault that you are relatively lacking in one or more of them. We're sure you're good at something.
Sandel's proposed words to the winners, as quoted by the Times Higher, are as transparently flattering as the ding letter is implicitly devastating.
In other words, don't be proud just because you are a naturally superior person, but you are also exactly what society needs at the moment--you lucky dog.
Seriously, don't use a great philosopher's concepts to sugar-coat a bitter pill. I propose a different message that could be adapted by other leading colleges and that could go to admits and rejects alike.
Adopting the philosopher John Rawls' argument that a person does not merit success merely because he or she was lucky enough to be born with gifts that are in demand, Professor Sandel says a "philosophically frank" university should tell those it rejects that "we don't regard you as less deserving than those who were admitted" and that "it is not your fault that when you came along society happened not to need the qualities you had to offer."This is supposed to "lessen the sting" (as the article quotes Sandel's book) of rejection--telling unsuccessful candidates that "society," with the Harvard admissions staff as omniscient arbiters, doesn't need "the qualities" you are offering. But look at the qualities that the Harvard Admissions office lists in its FAQ:
There is no formula for gaining admission to Harvard. Academic accomplishment in high school is important, but the Admissions Committee also considers many other criteria, such as community involvement, leadership and distinction in extracurricular activities, and work experience. We rely on teachers, counselors, headmasters and alumni/ae to share information with us about an applicant's strength of character, his or her ability to overcome adversity and other personal qualities - all of which play a part in the Admissions Committee's decisions.
In other words, Professor Sandel's allegedly consoling message would imply, academic brilliance, work ethic, athletic prowess, musical talent, community spirit, leadership, and resilience aren't everything! It isn't your fault that you are relatively lacking in one or more of them. We're sure you're good at something.
Sandel's proposed words to the winners, as quoted by the Times Higher, are as transparently flattering as the ding letter is implicitly devastating.
"You are to be congratulated, not in the sense that you deserve credit for having the qualities that led to your admission--you do not--but only in the sense that the winner of a lottery is to be congratulated. You are lucky to have come along with the right traits at the right moment."
In other words, don't be proud just because you are a naturally superior person, but you are also exactly what society needs at the moment--you lucky dog.
Seriously, don't use a great philosopher's concepts to sugar-coat a bitter pill. I propose a different message that could be adapted by other leading colleges and that could go to admits and rejects alike.
We have done our best. But remember, we not only admitted but honored, during the Third Reich, Hitler's piano man Putzi Hanfstaengl We rejected Warren Buffett and accepted the future Unabomber. Our short-lived independent alumni magazine 02138 delighted the national press a few years ago with highlights of our mistakes, and archive.org has saved a copy of the original, or at least its first page. Even if the seven percent of candidates we accepted are on average five times as likely to be as outstanding as the 93 percent we rejected--not likely because most applicants are self-selected as qualified for Harvard academic work--the latter as a group will have twice as many notable people as the former by their sheer numbers. So whether we accepted or rejected you, let our decision motivate you to work harder at learning and prove us right in the first case or wrong in the second.Rejection, like other arts, is best learned young. To overcome it, begin by calling it by its rightful name.
Who thought up the white-coat policy for doctors meeting with President Obama in the Rose Garden to advocate health care reform? Since when do physicians attend political gatherings in semi-ritual clinical garb? I haven't seen many caps, gowns, or hoods at higher education conferences. More importantly, why choose a custom that has itself been targeted for reform? Authorities in Scotland recently banned white coats from hospitals on the grounds that long sleeves can transmit MRSA and other infections. They substituted a new set of unforms, barred, incidentally, from street use Meanwhile, the AMA is still studying the question. This article in Slate notes other disadvantages of the symbolic attire, including inspiring enough fear to raise hypertension in some patients. Seven out of eight doctors don't wear them at work. Business suits are the dress code of Mayo Clinic doctors. (On the other hand, older patients seem to like the coats.)White coats may turn out on balance to be a bacteriological menace, a potent placebo, or both. But for an Administration that wants to break from conventional thinking, why go out of the way to proclaim tradition? The AMA declares judiciously:
Although your Reference Committee appreciates the intent of the [dress-code] resolution, the action requested ... may have unintended consequences, a concern raised by some speakers who testified.Whatever the AMA decides, the President seems to find symbolic theater irresistible, not necessarily to the advantage of his own causes. But at least he didn't follow suit, as George W. Bush did during a (non-medical) laboratory visit in 2007.
Photo Credit: Flickr User Waldo Jaquith
Was there ever really a generation gap? Recent obituaries of the retailing billionaire Donald Fisher make me wonder. Fisher apparently called his clothing and music store The Gap with reference to that unstoppable 1960s concept -- the name actually was suggested by his wife as an alternative to his original "Pants and Disks." Significantly, he was an outsider to the garment industry and retail; his real estate background prepared him for all-important skills of store location.As for that lower-case gap that inspired the stores, Fisher's career are reasons to reconsider the pop social science fixation on generational differences. First, in some ways contrasts within an age cohort may be greater than those between different age cohorts -- for example, in religious and political issues -- though the balance does change. Germans recognize a flakhelfer generation pressed into anti-aircraft and other combat service as teenagers in the later years of the Second World War, but apart from this military experience and ensuing controversies, what do Pope Benedict XVI and the novelist Günter Grass really have in common?
Second, age boundaries are fluid except when laws (like those conscripting the flakhelfer born in 1926 and 1927) create sharper breaks. Usually the balance of attitudes and values is a continuum over time, but is treated in discrete units. Compare the color spectrum. Culture and language lead children of each society to recognize a different set of colors according to psychological studies, even though humanity perceives the same wavelengths through essentially the same eyes and brains. Generational differences also can be arbitrary ways to slice what's really smooth.
Third, and the most relevant here, the culture of each "generation" is shaped by men and women somewhat older -- in the case of The Gap by a 41-year-old businessman whose 20 or so years' seniority over his customers did not impede his success. His own disappointment with the cut and fit of jeans in other stores was evidently shared by many younger people. Even the defining musical superstars of the 1960s and beyond weren't Baby Boomers themselves; John Lennon and Ringo Starr were born in 1940, Paul McCartney in 1942, George Harrison in 1943, and their legendary producer George Martin in 1926. Bob Dylan and Joan Baez were both born in 1941. The leading orator of the Berkeley student revolt, Mario Savio, was vintage 1942, his German counterpart Rudi Dutschke, 1940. Even France's Daniel Cohn-Bendit (1945) doesn't strictly qualify; most definitions of the Boomer generation cited on the Web give 1946 as its beginning, reflecting the demographic bulge that is the name's original basis.Speaking of California protest, whatever your opinion of Ronald Reagan's policies, his recalled comeback to a student spokesman while governor of the state is still the best commentary I know on generation gaps, even though I haven't been able to confirm it so far in another source; it might be applied to the "Millennials" and the Internet, too. When the student expressed doubt that his generation could be understood by people who had not grown up with space satellites, rockets, and computers, he says he retorted: "You're absolutely right. We didn't have those things when we were your age. We invented them."
Photo Credit: Flickr User Eleanore H. and LittleMissCupcakeParis
Edward Tenner
