There’s an intriguing exchange at the Boston Review Forum on the use and justification (or lack thereof) of empathy. The spar is between psychologist Paul Bloom and a host of star-studded critics (among them Jesse Prinz, Simon Baron Cohen, Peter Singer and Sam Harris). I have a personal interest in this topic as I work with prisoners, and much of the work I do with them involves empathy based support. I don’t have time to delve into merits and demerits of what Bloom says, but what he does say is worth thinking about even if what he says is puzzling or just plain false. Case in point:
Empathy is biased; we are more prone to feel empathy for attractive people and for those look like us or share our ethnic or national background. And empathy is narrow; it connects to particular individuals, real or imagined, but is insensitive to numerical differences and statistical data.
The takeaway line seems to be we’re all thoroughly biased in favour of looks, height, hair length/colour, ethno-tribal/national similarity, etc., thus too incapacitated for genuine empathy. And when we are genuinely empathetic we’re too focused on individuals as opposed to collectives or masses.
I’m lost on what all this is supposed to prove, assuming it proves anything apart from Bloom’s prior convictions. Assume we (Bloom as well?) are prone to feel empathy for attractive people, and equally assume we’re just as likely to feel empathy for those who share our ethnic or national background as we are for those who are attractive. What does that say about empathy as such? How do our inclinations towards “attractive” people underscore the biased or unbiased nature of empathy? Whatever the aetiology of our inclinations, they in themselves say nothing about empathy. Thus Bloom’s point is not only overblown but a blatant non sequitur.
As for empathy’s specificity, I’d like to know what Bloom has in mind for broad empathy, focused on groups or collectives or masses and what it would look like. Empathy only works on persons. And, without begging any essential questions, groups qua groups, collectives, and masses aren’t persons.
I highly recommend reading this blog post by James Stacey Taylor at BHL on local government. I couldn’t agree more with Taylor’s central claim–that local government matters, and that anyone interested in politics should spend some time observing or participating in it. But I think I disagree with the specifically libertarian inference Taylor draws from the experience he describes with the Hopewell, New Jersey Planning Board. (I spent a decade living in the same general vicinity as Taylor, and like him, used to teach at The College of New Jersey. So I have a first-hand sense of the issue he’s describing.)
Taylor seems to infer from his experience that we ought to have less local government rather than more. I agree that when it comes to Planning Boards, we ought to limit their powers. I also agree that local government ought to be more evidence-based and transparent. But I don’t think the general lesson–less government–is the right one.
For one thing, I don’t think Taylor’s experience is really unique to local government. You find the same sort of behavior everywhere, including in the “organic, voluntary” activity he favors. Just imagine that the patch of land he describes was handed over to private developers without the intermediate step of having to pass through the Planning Board. Is there any reason to believe that developers wouldn’t have wanted to create a mini-city in the middle of what is now an open field? If there’s money to be made, they’d do it, and as for unintended consequences, if they could shift the costs to someone else, they’d ignore them and insist on the privacy of their non-existent data.
You might say, “They shouldn’t be allowed to shift the costs to someone else.” Correct. But that requires extensive government enforcement of laws that demand the internalization of externalities. Put it this way: would Taylor advocate the outright abolition of local Planning Boards? Having spent a fair bit of time observing them (in New Jersey), I would say “no.” They need to be put in their place, not abolished.
Second, I wonder whether Taylor would agree that in many cases, the unregulated parts of our lives could use more regulation. Regional differences may be at work here. Taylor lives in west-central New Jersey. I live in northeastern New Jersey. Patterns of life are quite different in the two places. But consider aspects of life that a northeastern Jerseyite would want regulated more tightly by government.
My first pick is traffic. I’ll just assert the proposition: we need more, and stricter, enforcement of traffic laws. We need to force people to slow down, to get off their cell phones while driving, to yield at yield signs, to stop at stop signs (or lights), to use their turn signals before they turn, to pay tolls, and not to honk their horns for purely expressive reasons.
Second pick: noise ordinances. Most towns have noise ordinances on the books, but many towns treat their noise ordinance as though enforcement of it were a frill or luxury. I see violation of a noise ordinance as a rights-violation fully on par with battery. Just imagine living next to a construction site and being woken up every damn morning by construction activity that’s begun before it’s legally permitted to begin (or that continues well into the night). Or imagine living next to a golf course where the landscapers habitually start work–with mowers and blowers–at 4:45 am, three hours before it’s legally allowed. You call the police and they act as though they have better things to do than enforce the law. My inference: we need more government.
Incidentally, it’s an interesting thing how one is to enforce noise-related violations within a private contract. Right now, my upstairs neighbors are making enough noise to wake the dead. That violates the lease agreement we’ve all signed with the landlord, which involves a promise to one another to keep the noise down. But how do I get that “legally enforceable” promise legally enforced? I could go to the landlord. He’ll ignore me. I don’t have standing to take my neighbors to landlord-tenant court. I’m not a landlord. But the lease’s being violated is a clear-cut rights violation. It’s a breach of contract. What’s happens to rights violations like this? The answer is that in the name of less intrusive government, they go unenforced. But the result is a diminution in some people’s quality of life. (Lovers of quiet are, to paraphrase Ayn Rand, America’s most persecuted minority.)
Third, idiosyncratic example: parking. For most of my adult life, I’ve lived in apartments where parking was tight. In one case, I rented a garage on the rental property so as to guarantee having a spot. In other cases, there was assigned parking. What do you do if someone parks his car in front of your garage (ignoring the NO PARKING sign as though it wasn’t there), or parks in your assigned spot (and you’re not willing to park in someone else’s)? If you complain to your landlord, you’ll be told, reasonably enough, to call the police. But if you call the police, the bizarre answer you will get in New Jersey is: “Sorry, we can’t do anything about it. You’re on private property.”
Pause on the absurdity of that answer. If someone were breaking in to your apartment, and you called 911, it would make no sense for the police to say, “Sorry, we can’t do anything about it. The break-in is taking place on private property.” But I’ve repeatedly had the “sorry, can’t help you” experience when I’ve called the police re parking. As it happens, the police’s “sorry, can’t help you” response involves a misstatement of state law (I’ll spare you the details*), but the fact remains that as written, state law is simply too weak on this issue. It puts too much of the onus on the victim of the rights violation to rectify the situation and not enough on the person who’s blocking one’s garage or parked in one’s assigned spot. Again, my inference: we need more, activist government in the name of rights enforcement.
I would defy any anarcho-capitalist to produce the non-governmental version of the resolution of disputes of the preceding variety. I had the opportunity to see what such attempts at “resolution” might look like when I spent time in the West Bank city of Bethany, which effectively lacks a government. (Officially, it is in Area B under the Oslo Accords, under joint Israel-Palestinian control. But de facto, it lacks a government.) Bethany is practically a controlled science experiment in anarchy. Suffice it to say that things really didn’t turn out the way anarcho-capitalists claim they will. Bethany is a case of “the Wild West” in the Near East–or maybe the Wild West in the Wild West Bank. (Incidentally, I don’t mean to be saddling Taylor with anarcho-capitalism. I have no idea what his views are on that. I just mean to be saddling anarcho-capitalists with Bethany. And yes, it’s that Bethany, the one where Jesus was buried. Burying him was one of the things that the Romans “did for us,” by the way. I’m not sure Jesus would have been buried under anarcho-capitalism.**)
Give me long enough, and I could extend this list pretty much indefinitely.
Anyway, I’m grateful to Taylor for a thoughtful post which broaches some interesting and important issues.
*Postscript, added later: The link in the text goes to the section of New Jersey’s state code governing private property and non-consensual towing. But here is the written response I got from the local Police Department after complaining about their refusal to tow vehicles that were blocking my egress from my garage.
The area of the garages at [name of apartment complex] are private property. The owners of the property basically give authority to building management to maintain the lands. If management feels a vehicle is parked on their property (that does not belong or parked improperly) [they] will call the Police. The Police will issue a summons (management will be called to court as a witness/complainant). The Police cannot tow the vehicle, because it is on private property. Management actually calls for the tow truck. The main road of the complex is considered quasi-public. In this area, the Police can summons and tow.
It’s worth wondering how any of this convoluted legal analysis is supposed to help someone whose garage is blocked but needs to get the car out of it to go to work. I ended up taking a taxi to and from work at a cost of over $100. That happened several times before I made my complaint to the police. In fairness to my local PD, they’ve been pretty responsive about other things, including my insistence that they paint a stop line at an ambiguous intersection so that it was crystal-clear where to stop. From an email to me from the local police chief: “Stop line placed on Watchung roadway. —Chief Goul.” Thanks, Chief.
**Postscript, added later: On second thought, the last two sentences before the asterisk are ridiculous assertions which I’ll leave in the text but now disown. Tradition has it that Jesus was buried by Joseph of Arimethea, who wasn’t in any relevant sense a Roman. I only wrote what I wrote as an excuse to throw Monty Python into the mix, but it’s totally inaccurate and potentially offensive–to Christians, anarcho-capitalists, and above all Christian anarcho-capitalists–so I hereby repent and take it back. I concede: Jesus might well have been buried (and for that matter, crucified) under anarcho-capitalism.
Apologies, but I’ve been too distracted by the Peshawar attacks and by grading to write the posts I promised to write on the psychiatric medications symposium. I promise to get to that soon. (I have a lamentable tendency to promise multi-part posts and not deliver on them, but I’m making it a New Year’s resolution to do otherwise.) Meanwhile, Peshawar it is.
There’s been some good commentary on Peshawar, much—though not all–of it by Pakistanis. I linked to some of this commentary in a previous post. Here’s some more–a lot more.
Here’s a good symposium in The New York Times—C. Christine Fair, Ahsan Butt, Musharraf Zaidi, and Pir Zubair Shah. The discussion, however, is misdescribed by the Times as a “debate.” In fact, the four contributors mostly agree with one another; no one says anything particularly controversial or new. It’s still worth reading, however, since much of what they say is true. Irfan Husain makes similar points at Dawn (Karachi) in “The Poison Within.” But the best single piece of analysis I’ve seen is this short piece in The Friday Times (Lahore) by Najam Sethi, “Deja Vu?” If you read just one thing about Peshawar, read that.
Nadeem Paracha’s brand of humor is probably an acquired taste, but I found his “Anatomy of an Apologist” (in Dawn) both grimly accurate and screamingly funny.
A few things I’ve read strike me as worth reading on diagnostic grounds for the muddled thinking they involve. This well-meaning piece by Imtiaz Gul (Friday Times) is a perfect example. Much of what Gul says is perfectly sensible, but I had to shake my head at this passage:
A Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) revenge strike was expected since the army launched the Operation Zarb-e-Azb in North Waziristan on June 15. As the army focused increasingly on Waziristan and the Khyber region and exuded triumphant confidence, the TTP carried out the lethal attack last month at the India-Pakistan border, killing at least 60 people watching a flag-lowering ceremony. The month of Muharram passed relatively peacefully, prompting many of us to empirically conclude that the graph of violent acts had come down considerably.
But as it turned out with the Peshawar mayhem, the TTP, though badly bruised by the combination of the Operation Zarb-e-Azb and the CIA-led drone campaign which saw about a dozen strikes between mid June and early this month, had something else up its sleeves.
What Gul describes as an “empirical conclusion” is actually a blatant non-sequitur. The army launches an anti-Taliban operation; the Taliban strike back in November. A month passes, and Gul thinks: “Well, that’s that! They won’t attack again!” Then they attack again, and he concludes: “If the events of the last weeks were an indication the Peshawar attack was in the making ever since.” So which is it—did he expect them to attack, or did their attack come as a surprise after what he thought was a downward trend in attacks by them? Gul’s simultaneous presence on both sides of that question strikes me as representative of a deeply-rooted confusion in the Pakistani intelligentsia—caught between commonsense and wishful thinking.
For an even deeper muddle, I’d suggesting reading “Pakistan’s New Warriors Against the Taliban” and “Peshawar School Attack Indicts Pakistan’s Misplaced Priorities,” by Rafia Zakaria in Al Jazeera America. I have a lot of respect for Zakaria’s intellect and for her activism on other issues, but here her claims really border on the preposterous. The “new warriors against the Taliban” turn out to be Imran Khan and Tahir ul Qadri–names that will be meaningless to non-Pakistani readers, but will strike many (most?) Pakistan-knowledgeable readers as an inadvertent joke rather than a serious suggestion. (See below for discussion of Imran Khan.)
The second article of Zakaria’s articles claims, offhandedly, that the Peshwar attack proves that military options won’t work against the Taliban; hence we should dispense with them. That claim is a textbook case of ignoratio elenchi: a single successful attack by the Taliban cannot prove that military options against the Taliban are a failure; after all, the failure to use military options against the Taliban might lead to even more successful attacks by the Taliban. As Zakaria herself concedes, no policy is foolproof, so it makes no sense to seize on a single event as conclusive evidence of the failure of a policy. In saying that drone attacks “have done little to diminish the Taliban’s capacity to carry out such operations,” she flouts both common sense and systematic empirical evidence to the contrary. There is no conclusive evidence either way, but the existing evidence suggests that drone strikes are the best of the available options. I can’t really do justice to Zakaria’s argument as a whole right now, but some of what I say in the combox of my last post (in response to Matt Faherty et al) is relevant to Zakaria’s arguments as well.
Some Pakistanis have refused to condemn the attacks altogether. Notable among them is Zakaria’s hero Imran Khan, who is misdescribed as “condemning” the attacks in this statement (You Tube video, in Urdu). What he says in the statement is little more than a well-crafted contribution to the art of prevarication. He offers his condolences to the bereaved, tells us that he has postponed his own political activities for later in deference to the collective need for mourning, tells us that he’s on his way to Peshawar to seek more “details” before saying anything substantive, and then offers a very vague criticism of “whoever” might have committed this dastardly deed (“jis nay yeh kiyah“). As everyone by now knows, the Pakistani Taliban have taken responsibility for the shooting: though Khan speaks of the nation standing together in unity, what “everyone” knows seems to exclude Khan himself. I am not sure how Rafia Zakaria’s proposed “warrior against the Taliban” can deserve the description she gives him if he can’t even manage to condemn the Taliban for having engaged in a massacre of 130-odd children (not the Taliban’s first massacre, by the way, and not their last: just another massacre that “Taliban Khan” has failed to ascribe to the Taliban and failed to condemn under that description, while insisting on negotiations with them and ignoring the past history of failed negotiations with them).
Another Taliban-apologetic-seeming figure is Maulana Abdul Aziz, the imam of the notorious Red Mosque (Lal Masjid) in Islamabad who, when asked to condemn the attacks on a television talk show, refused to do so. Here’s the video (in Urdu). (Note: I had some technical difficulties in watching it all the way through. It breaks up a lot.)
Like Imran Khan, Maulana Abdul Aziz mostly engages in uncontroversial offerings of condolences, then changes the subject to the sins of Pervez Musharraf, then finally admits that the massacre “shouldn’t have” happened. There’s no disputing that it shouldn’t have happened, but saying that neither answers the question he was asked nor amounts to an authentic condemnation of the act. I admire the acuity and persistence of the show’s hostess, Nadia Mirza, who three times asks Abdul Aziz exactly the right question to ask under the circumstances: Does Maulana Abdul Aziz sahib intend, morally speaking, to equate the military’s campaign against the Taliban with the Taliban’s campaign against Pakistan? There’s nothing more clarifying than an answer–or a non-answer–to the right question asked in the right way. What we get here is a non-answer which licenses the inference that Abdul Aziz’s implicit answer is at least a yes: he at least equates the two things and may well regard the Taliban’s campaign as more justified than the government’s. Incidentally, Maulana Abdul Aziz can be very adamant about giving and demanding straight answers when it suits him to do so. (The preceding link goes to a You Tube debate in Urdu.) So we shouldn’t assume that he’s habitually too wordy to get to the point on the massacre.
There has been a popular uprising of sorts against Maulana Abdul Aziz and against the Lal Masjid as an institution. As an imam, Maulana Abdul Aziz is on the government’s payroll, and ordinary Pakistanis justifiably want him off of it. I agree with that, but I have to say that I find some aspects of the anti-Lal Masjid backlash a problematic and ill-conceived misplacement of priorities. It’s true that the “clerisy” has apologized for the Taliban and for terrorism. That’s evil, but it can’t legitimately (or efficaciously) be fought by anti-hate speech regulation, which is what many activists are now calling for. Pakistan needs more free speech, not less. Unless they’re making specific threats, the immorality of the “clerisy” ought to be brought into the open, and exposed to the light of day–not suppressed, repressed, and driven underground. Mill’s argument in chapter 2 of “On Liberty” is pertinent here. I wonder if anyone has ever translated it into Urdu.
Actually, what needs exposure and discussion is the connection between mosque and state in Pakistan, not a campaign of retaliatory anti-blasphemy laws, whether religious or secular. (Locke’s Letter Concerning Toleration is pertinent here. Urdu translation, anyone?) A suggestion for inquiry: think about how Pakistan resembles Israel, and look at the trouble that Israelis have brought on themselves by insisting on the Jewish character of “the Jewish state.” Another suggestion for inquiry: think about the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and how such an amendment might work for or fit into Pakistan’s constitution. It might not, but it’s more worth discussing than the viability of anti-hate-speech legislation targeting the mullahs.
For deeper analysis, I’d recommend reading the work of Ahmed Rashid. You probably couldn’t go wrong by hanging on every word Rashid writes about Pakistan, but I’ve found his recent work for the New York Review of Books and the Financial Times particularly enlightening. It’s all good stuff, but I’d particularly recommend “Pakistan Must Unleash the Military Against the Militants,” “Pakistan’s Offensive Against Militants Is Right,” “A Different Pakistan,” and “The Motives Behind the Taliban’s Brutal Attack” (all accessed via the preceding link). Much of this functions as a riposte to those, like Rafia Zakaria, who think that the Taliban can somehow be handled by non-military means.
I disagree with Rashid, however, that the military means in question should be American. Rashid’s long to-do lists for the American government-in-South-and-Central-Asia are an unwitting description of the mechanics of imperialism. As I’ve suggested elsewhere (in response to another enthusiastic partisan of imperialistic to-do lists), it’s time for the U.S. to ratchet back its imperial involvement abroad, and at a minimum, to get the hell out of South-Central Asia–as our good president promised us when we elected him back in 2008.
Though he’s not nearly as well known as Rashid, my friend Khalil Ahmad of the libertarian Alternative Solutions Institute in Lahore has a similar take in this piece, “Hopeless in Pakistan,” sans Rashid’s problematic neo-imperialist prescriptions for the United States.
Meanwhile, it’s time for Afghans and Pakistanis to take ownership of their own war against the Taliban (possibly with the help of Indians), and time for us Americans to patch together our own country–a country whose health care system is a disaster, whose criminal justice system now regularly leads to riots, whose higher education system is a bit of a shambles, which hasn’t managed to come to terms with illegal immigration, and which faces a cybersecurity threat not from the Taliban but from North Korea. In other words, it’s time to put the specter of 9/11 behind us and move on to resolving the actual problems we face. There’s no contradiction involved in saying that, and in wanting the government of Pakistan to prevail in battle over the Taliban.
To bring things back to the present, read these two pieces in this morning’s New York Times, “Pakistan’s Old Curse,” and “Pakistani Forces Kill Dozens of Militants.” As memories of the massacre inevitably fade, these two articles indicate where the action will be in the future.
Postscript, January 8, 2015: Here’s a nice tribute to the victims, via Faiz Ahmad Faiz and Zehra Nigah, by my cousin Fawad Zakariya. It’s from his blog, “Moments of Tranquility” (the blog is in English, but this post is largely for the Urdu-competent). I was stunned to discover from the exchange in Fawad’s combox that You Tube is banned in Pakistan.
I’ve updated my post calling for a boycott of the Ayn Rand Society to add some comments on an essay recently published in The Atlantic by John Paul Rollert of the University of Chicago.
Update within the update, December 19, 2014: James Otteson and Peter Boettke (who are speaking alongside Yaron Brook at the ARS session in a few days) have both contacted me privately re the boycott. Otteson expresses a reluctance to break his prior engagement with ARS. Fair enough; I only wish I’d urged him to back out sooner, when it might have been more feasible. Boettke disagrees with me about the need for a boycott. I’d prefer to air my disagreement with Boettke in the open, but I’ve respected his wish to keep our disagreement private. Thanks to both of them for responding.
Here are my three favorite commentaries on the Pakistani Taliban’s recent attack on a school in Peshawar:
KABUL: The Afghan Taliban have condemned a raid on a school in Peshawar that left 141 dead in the country’s bloodiest ever terror attack, saying killing innocent children was against Islam.
Survivors said militants gunned down children as young as 12 during the eight-hour onslaught in Peshawar, which the Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) said was revenge for the ongoing North Waziristan operation.
“The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan has always condemned the killing of children and innocent people at every juncture,” the Afghan Taliban, which often target civilians, said in a statement released late Tuesday.
“The intentional killing of innocent people, women and children goes against the principles of Islam and every Islamic government and movement must adhere to this fundamental essence.”
“The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (the official name of the Taliban) expresses its condolences over the incident and mourns with the families of killed children.”
The Afghan Taliban are a jihadist group loosely affiliated to the Pakistan Taliban, with both pledging allegiance to Mullah Omar.
Here’s another great one, for those who know a bit about Pakistani politics. It’s from Imran Khan, leader of Pakistan’s Tehrik-e-Insaf political party.
“I have never seen an atrocity like this in my entire life…I cannot even comprehend how someone could kill children like this,” he said.
“If someone killed my children like this, I would seek to avenge it as well,” Imran said.
Yes, terrorist attacks are really unprecedented for the Pakistani Taliban. I mean, who ever heard of the Pakistani Taliban killing innocent people? In Pakistan, no less? Has Imran sahib informed the Royal Society?
Obama terrorizes and murders innocent Pakistani citizens.
That’s supposed to be a commentary on drone warfare against the Pakistani Taliban. I’ve italicized the word of interest. Here is what I find interesting about it.
Suppose that the U.S. packed up its drones tomorrow and left South Asia for good. What does the author think should happen next? Broadly speaking, there are only two options. Either the Pakistani military fights the Taliban or not.
(1) Suppose they fight the Taliban. Suppose they choose to do so by means of the least destructive method available to them– drones. (Actually, drones are not quite ‘available’ to Pakistan right now, but imagine that they were.) Suppose that these drones kill “innocent Pakistani civilians” as a side-effect of the attempt to fight the Taliban. Would Nawaz Sharif then be as guilty of “murder” as Obama has been alleged to be? Or do you have to be an American drone operator to satisfy that description?
(2) Suppose that the Pakistani military chooses not to fight the Taliban, on the grounds that doing so would lead to the deaths of “innocent Pakistani civilians” (as it surely would). Suppose that the Taliban then murder Pakistanis civilians with impunity for the next seven or eight years, as they’ve done for the last eight. In fact, imagine that the Taliban ratchet up their killings on the grounds that it’s easier to kill people when the army that’s supposed to be protecting them refuses to do so. Would the author be willing to accept those consequences as an implication of his fastidious strictures on drone warfare?
While I’m on this subject, let me ask one last set of questions. The Taliban are non-state actors–a kind of terrorist NGO. They are, in other words, de facto anarchists. According to anarchist theory, “the state” lacks legitimacy. So imagine we decide to get rid of it.
Now imagine, further, that “we” are Pakistanis. (Yes, I realize that my thought-experiment is starting to strain credulity at this point.) Let’s imagine, then, that “we” Pakistanis abolish the Pakistani state tomorrow. I assume that the Taliban would not be deterred from further depredations by this act.
So here is my question, intended for anarcho-capitalists: In what sense would Pakistanis be better off without a state than with one in facing the Taliban? And how should they do it? Whatever the method, it must meet two specifications: (1) it must not involve the assistance of a state, and (2) it must not lead to the deaths of any innocent third-parties. In this season of miracles, that surely can’t be too much to ask.
Some mourners expressed frustration at the apparent impotence of their own security forces. “What is this army for?” shouted one man at the city’s main Lady Reading hospital, where he had come to collect the body of his grandson.
“Where are their atom bombs and airplanes now?” he said. “They were of no use if they cannot protect us from death in our daily lives.”
Better questions could scarcely be asked, and truer words could scarcely be uttered. But we’re talking about armed forces that have begun every war they’ve fought, and lost every war they’ve begun: they’re guilty of genocide (East Pakistan, 1971) and willing to start nuclear war with India over uninhabitable chunks of ice (Siachen Glacier), but incapable of grasping the fact that their deals with the devil have surrendered the entire northwest of the country to totalitarian psychopaths bent on mass murder in the name of God. Pakistanis should never forget that the partition of the subcontinent was intended to give the Muslims of the subcontinent a safe haven from religious persecution by Hindus. Somehow, it never occurred to them that “they” might persecute “themselves.” Call it another grim chapter in the annals of that supposedly impossible phenomenon–“reverse discrimination.”
Meanwhile, from the same article:
Back at the deserted Army Public School, snipers perched on the rooftops, watching for a potential follow-up attack. In the nearby tribal belt, the Pakistani Army mounted fresh airstrikes.
Were they merely “fresh airstrikes” or were they mass murder? Would they have been mass murder if carried out by drones more precise than the airstrikes? I renew the question.
I find it interesting that in the English language press, at any rate, a lot of Pakistani commentary has taken the form of anguished questions. This column by Sameer Khosa in Lahore’s Nation consists of almost nothing but questions until this passage at the end:
Let us finally put an end to the criminally dishonest nature of our conversation on the Taliban, and on the national security challenge as a whole. Because now, we have seen its cost and it is unbearable.
Carry these children in your heart always. Let their innocence be the antidote to the lies that are peddled to us. Let their curiosity about the world remind us to ask anyone who has a one-sentence-long solution to this problem how they propose it will end. Let us fight in their name. Let their gravestones say: tell us now that this is not our war. Tell us now that this is not personal.
The problem is, this is what Pakistanis always say after a Taliban atrocity, only to forget it until next year’s atrocity. I’m not criticizing Khosa; I’m criticizing his audience. What he’s saying is undeniably true. So is what these people are saying. And these two. The problem is that it’s been true for years. Remember what happened in Peshawar last year? It was Malala before that, and the massacre of the Shias of Derra Adam Khel before that, and the Geo TV station before that, and the Bajaur market before that, and the attack on the shrine of Data Ganj Baksh before that, and the one on the Ahmadi mosques in Lahore before that, and the assassination of Benazir before that. How many “before thats” does a rational person need before he figures out “we have a problem, and we have to solve it”? (Here’s a list of TTP attacks.) Unfortunately, what Khurram Hussain is saying is true, too.
Anyway, I can’t help continuing the semi-sardonic theme of the original post. So, a few quotations in that vein:
Khursheed Shah says terrorism is national issue
Speaking to media representatives after attending the MPC, Opposition Leader in the National Assembly Syed Khursheed Shah said there is a complete consensus among political parties of the country on the terrorism issue.
He expressed his resolve to stand shoulder to shoulder with the armed forces in their ongoing fight against terror. Shah also urged the media to play a proactive role in eradicating terrorists from the country.
The PPP leader said that even Israeli state does not carry out such atrocities on Palestinians like the terrorist did to young kids yesterday at the school in Peshawar.
That’s from Dawn, “No distinction now between good and bad Taliban: Nawaz.” I mean, if they’re worse than Israelis, then we really have to fight them. Incidentally, the U.S. just normalized relations with Cuba. Any chance of Pakistan doing the same with Israel sometime soon?
I certainly wouldn’t go quite as far as Sherry Rahman does here, but I see her point, and it’s a nice counter-narrative to those handwaving claims one hears about the virginal innocence of the Taliban’s clean-handed apologists and sympathizers:
PESHAWAR: Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) leader Sherry Rehman said Wednesday that if anyone engaged in the apologist narrative when it comes to terrorism and terrorist attacks, they would be considered as terrorists and allies of the terrorists.
Time has come for a decision and anyone who presents justification for acts of terrorism will be regarded as a traitor.
“Whoever is a friend of the terrorists is a traitor,” Rehman said addressing media representatives in Peshawar.
Rehman urged that the people of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa will not remain the victims and instead become those who will lead the war against terrorists.
Of course, taken literally, Rahman’s policy would require locking up large chunks of Pakistan’s judiciary. But I don’t think Rahman quite means what she’s saying–at least not as stated. It’s still the heat of the moment.
I leave you, finally, with a Word Press Editor’s Pick for 2014, written in October by Mehreen Kasana, a Pakistani graduate student at a school in Brooklyn.
On my way to class, I take the Q train to Manhattan and sit down next to an old white man who recoils a noticeable bit. I assume it’s because I smell odd to him, which doesn’t make sense because I took a shower in the morning. Maybe I’m sitting too liberally the way men do on public transit with their legs a mile apart, I think to myself. That also doesn’t apply since I have my legs crossed. After a few seconds of inspecting any potential offence caused, I realize that it has nothing to do with an imaginary odor or physical space but with the keffiyeh around my neck that my friend gifted me (the Palestinian scarf – an apparently controversial piece of cloth). It is an increasingly cold October in NYC. Sam Harris may not have told you but we Muslims need our homeostasis at a healthy level. While our bodies regulate our internal fanatic temperatures to remain stable, sometimes it gets a little too chilly so we pull out those diabolical scarves and wrap them around our diabolical necks and diabolically say, “Holy shit. It is cold today, Abdullah.” To which Abdullah replies, “Wallah. My ass is freezing.”
Reading her, you’d think that the act of wearing a keffiyeh in Brooklyn or Manhattan was a wildly rare and transgressive occurrence. It isn’t. But let me add one more “maybe” to the list: maybe this is the kind of thing that happens occasionally, that the author could very well be imagining, that doesn’t matter much even if it happened, and that is best ignored rather than inflated into the occasion of a self-pitying drama of grievance stretching back to Hiroshima, the Raj, and the Atlantic slave trade.
See if you have the discipline to make it through the whole thing. Kasana doesn’t want to apologize for Muslim atrocities. That’s fine. I don’t think she should, and have said as much in the past. But try as hard as you can to make coherent sense of her claim that there is no distinction to be made between good and bad Muslims. And feel free to enlist the help of the Mahmood Mamdani article she links to in her post to do so. Yes, I realize that she’s rejecting the “binary opposition” of Good and Bad Muslim within a specific narrative. But at the end of the day, what does she think is left of the ordinary distinction between good and bad Muslims? Should we throw it out? I don’t know a single Muslim who thinks so. Try to make sense of what just happened in Peshawar while ignoring the distinction, and reflect on the results. Hard to do. So why should any non-Muslim apologize for making use of it? No apology, so to speak.
The ninth annual Felician Conference on Ethics and Political Philosophy will be held at the Rutherford Campus of Felician College
223 Montross Ave
Rutherford, NJ 07070
on Saturday, April 25, 2015, 9 am – 6 pm
Submissions on any topic in moral and political philosophy are welcome, not exceeding 25 minutes’ presentation time (approximately 3,000 words). Please send submissions via email in format suitable for blind review by March 1, 2015 to: felicianethicsconference at gmail.com
Submissions are invited for a special session on topics at the intersection of ethics, counseling psychology, and psychiatry.
This may turn out to be the least-publicized call for a boycott ever, but I’m going to call for one anyway: Philosophers attending the APA Eastern Division Meetings this year should boycott the meeting of the Ayn Rand Society. Frankly, in my view, they should boycott the Society itself.
For twenty-five years now, the Ayn Rand Institute (ARI) has vilified libertarians as “nihilists,” and declared them too evil to “sanction,” i.e., too evil to endorse or deal with.
IS LIBERTARIANISM AN EVIL DOCTRINE? Yes, if evil is the irrational and the destructive. Libertarianism belligerently rejects the very need for any justification for its belief in something called “liberty.” It repudiates the need for any intellectual foundation to explain why “liberty” is desirable and what “liberty” means. Anyone from a gay-rights activist to a criminal counterfeiter to an overt anarchist can declare that he is merely asserting his “liberty” — and no Libertarian (even those who happen to disagree) can objectively refute his definition. Subjectivism, amoralism and anarchism are not merely present in certain “wings” of the Libertarian movement; they are integral to it. In the absence of any intellectual framework, the zealous advocacy of “liberty” can represent only the mindless quest to eliminate all restraints on human behavior — political, moral, metaphysical. And since reality is the fundamental “restraint” upon men’s actions, it is nihilism — the desire to obliterate reality — that is the very essence of Libertarianism. If the Libertarian movement were ever to come to power, widespread death would be the consequence. (For elaboration, see my essay “Libertarianism: The Perversion of Liberty.”)
Justice demands moral judgment. It demands that one objectively evaluate Libertarianism, and act in accordance with that evaluation. It demands that one identify Libertarianism as the antithesis of — and therefore as a clear threat to — not merely genuine liberty, but all rational values. And it demands that Libertarianism, like all such threats, be boycotted and condemned.
“Boycotted and condemned.” I like that.
Despite some tricky-looking verbal gymnastics, ARI has not disavowed that view (and explicitly says that it has not). So vilification of libertarianism and libertarians remains the official view of the Ayn Rand Institute despite its paradoxical (that is, hypocritical) decision to make common cause with a few libertarian organizations.
The Ayn Rand Society (ARS) is a nominally distinct entity, but every single member of its Steering Committee is in some way affiliated with ARI. In any case, this year, they’ve decided to invite Yaron Brook as the main speaker at their APA Eastern Meeting (see the very first link in this post). Yaron Brook is the Executive Director of the Ayn Rand Institute. He is therefore the man responsible for ARI’s continuing policy of defamation. ARS has invited him to address their meeting despite that fact, and absurdly enough, has invited two libertarians to respond to him. The Steering Committee’s knowledge of Brook’s institutional role–and of ARI’s ideological position–are, in my view, sufficient to justify a boycott of the meeting. (Read this exchange if you’d like a sense of Yaron Brook’s moral stature and his method of cognitive functioning. It’s best read in conjunction with this piece from the Chronicle of Higher Education.)
It makes things worse that intellectually, Brook is a shallow propagandist entirely lacking in bona fide qualifications as a political philosopher. (Nonetheless, like all Objectivist pseudo-intellectuals of his type, he insists on describing himself as an “expert.”) It’s therefore a mystery why ARS’s leadership would have invited him to speak at the APA. In 2012, I asked both the late Allan Gotthelf (ARS’s founder*) and James Lennox (the current co-chair of ARS’s Steering Committee) why Brook had been invited. Neither of them had an answer. If you’d like an answer, feel free to ask Lennox or his co-chair Gregory Salmieri for one, and share what you hear from them. But my own inference is that they have no defensible answer to give. I also find it a mystery why James Otteson and Peter Boettke would have accepted an invitation to discuss libertarian politics with someone responsible for a mass-movement campaign of anti-libertarian defamation, but I suppose one mystery begets another.
I’m happy to say that I’ve convinced at least one major philosopher to back out of an invitation to speak at an ARS event, and have convinced a few prominent libertarians to let their membership in ARS lapse (or in the case of those who had already let it lapse, not to renew their membership). I’d like to add indefinitely to that list.
Whatever you do, don’t seek refuge in the excuse that philosophers are obliged to have conversations with those with whom they disagree on moral issues. (Scroll down in the link to my exchange with Matt Zwolinski.) The response to that is: “no kidding.” The question is whether philosophers ought to help burnish the reputation of organizations that suborn and facilitate decades-long campaigns of character-assassination. If you want to be a part of that of effort, feel free. But then take responsibility for being a part of it. And don’t complain when you’re treated accordingly. You’ll have no one to blame but yourself.
*Correction (added after posting): To be precise, Gotthelf was ARS’s co-founder, along with David Kelley and George Walsh. ARS was co-founded by the three of them in 1990. But Walsh died in 2001, and Kelley has not been active at the leadership level in ARS for decades. Gotthelf was the central figure at the heart of ARS, and was responsible for the decision to invite Brook.
Postscript, December 18, 2014: I just happened to read an interesting article, “Meeting Ayn Rand on the Las Vegas Strip,” by John Paul Rollert (of the University of Chicago’s business school), that sheds interesting light on my call for a boycott of the Ayn Rand Society. The article is a report on this past summer’s ARI conference in Las Vegas, featuring Yaron Brook, among others. This passage, on a session on inequality, is particularly revealing of Brook’s approach to intellectual discourse:
“The Left dominates our intellectual world,” Brook declared. And yet, despite its success, the stated aims of the Left are merely a pretext for an agenda far more sinister than anything contained in the Democratic Party’s platform or, for that matter, a Michael Moore movie. Take the professed concern for the growing disparity between the very rich and the rest of America: The liberal impulse to address this gap may seem rooted in a sense of fairness or even a desire to promote social cohesion, but viewing it as such is extremely naïve. Indeed, it takes at face value the rhetoric of the Left, which keeps one from seeing it for what it really is: the language of a decades-long con game. “What they’re really after is not the well-being of anybody,” Brook explained. “They want power. They want to rule us.”
It gets worse. For if “the intellectuals” use fear-mongering around the so-called problem of inequality to seize power, they wield it in favor of a nihilistic vision of the human condition. They aim to systematically undermine and annul the great achievements of heroic men and women, an effort that will not only corrupt the “American sense of life” but one that stabs at the very heart of Ayn Rand’s vision. “We need to tell the truth about these bastards,” Brook said. “We need to reveal them for what they really are. We need to expose them to the American people for what their agenda really is. They’re haters. Their focus is on hatred. Their focus is on tearing down. Their focus is on destroying.”
ARI’s pretense at intellectual respectability is a laboriously-constructed affair. Those affiliated with it realize that if ARI’s intellectuals are to be taken seriously, they must convince their non-Objectivist interlocutors that they take those interlocutors seriously, and want to engage constructively with them. Taking them seriously means treating them with respect, and treating them with respect means not poisoning the well in disagreements about their views. The preceding passage shows those interlocutors what the rest of us have long known: it’s an act.
Anyone who attends Brook’s presentation at the APA will be treated to Brook-in-genteel-mode, Brook-as-he-presents-himself-in-a-prestigious-academic-setting, where his reasonability and ARI’s are under scrutiny and on the line. If you decide to attend his session (against my advice) ask him what he means by “We need to tell the truth about these bastards,” and “Their focus is on destroying.” What truth? What bastards? Who is focused on destroying what? Why not be explicit for a change? Does he mean the ones in the room next door? The ones who run the APA? The ones running the job interviews for the jobs his Objectivist Academic Center-groomed job candidates so desperately want? If so, tell him to say so. If not, ask him to explain.
It hasn’t occurred to Brook that someone might regard inequality as a proxy variable for structural injustices in an economy, including injustices caused by rights-violations. It hasn’t occurred to the apologists for the supposedly new and improved ARI that Brook’s well-poisoning is a direct implication of his avowed allegiance to Peikoff’s “Fact and Value.” Nor has it occurred to academic philosophers that their coy and “sophisticated” defenses of dishonesty and phoniness find perfect expression in the likes of Brook–someone they’d likely regard as a mortal enemy, but whose practices they’ve unwittingly come to rationalize. If there were any justice in the world, Thomas Nageland David Nyberg would be forced to attend the ARS session and have an awkward conversation with Yaron Brook: Brook would have to call them “bastards” intent on destroying the world, and Nagel and Nyberg would have to face in Brook the perfect exemplification of both Nagelian concealment and Nybergian dishonesty. Frankly, if that meeting happened, I’d go to the session.
Incidentally, Rollert gets a lot of things right in his essay, but gets some things wrong. For one thing, he buys into the myth that “when it comes to ‘real’ philosophers–a designation that, for better or worse, indicates a perch in a Philosophy Department–Objectivism mostly goes unmentioned.” Not quite. Again, not quite.
He also seems to equate radicalism with “escapism.” But Socrates, Aristotle, and Locke were all in their own way radicals. Arguably, so was J.S. Mill. None was an escapist. Contrary to Rollert, there’s no intrinsic connection between escapism and radicalism.
Finally, this seems to me wrongheaded:
By and large, when it comes to questions about the structural shortcomings of capitalism, the most persuasive answers will be of a dry and technical nature. They won’t savor of the sulfurous clash between the forces of good and evil….
There’s no reason to think that questions about the structural shortcomings of any political system should be reducible to issues “of a dry and technical nature.” The structure of a political system is something set by people. People have free will, and can be held responsible, not just for what they choose to do, but what (and how) they believe. If people culpably embed injustice into the very structure of a system, claims about structural shortcomings will not merely be “dry and technical.” They’ll be about justice and injustice, and that will “savor” of the clash between good and evil. No one thinks that structural racism is a merely “dry and technical” issue. There’s no good reason to think that other structural matters are “dry and technical,” either.
That is something that Rand got right, and it’s something that non-Randians might (ironically enough) learn from her. “Nothing made by man had to be; it was made by choice” (Ayn Rand, “The Metaphysical Versus the Man-Made,” in Philosophy: Who Needs It, p. 37). What was made by choice can be judged in moral terms, and that goes for the structural shortcomings of political systems as well.
As I was saying, not all choices are dry and technical. Just look at ARS’s choice to invite Yaron Brook to speak at the APA.
First, I’m happy to report that all four presenters have agreed to write their presentations up for a symposium to appear in Reason Papers. The written version of the symposium will probably be published in the journal sometime in early 2016.
Second, an anecdote.
I’ve mentioned Robert Whitaker’s work here several times before. He’s the author of Mad in America and Anatomy of an Epidemic; he’s also a contributor to the website Mad in America. I happened to notice Marcia Angell’sreview of Anatomy back in 2011 when it (the review) came out, but had no direct interest in the topic at the time, and more or less filed it away for future reference. I eventually managed to develop a direct and personal interest in the topic, and in the interests of disclosure—and the amusement of telling the story—I may as well explain how it came about.
The long and short of it is that in 2013, I became a psychotropic drug addict myself. The addiction came about through the good intentions but serious errors of my medical practitioners, and, as far as I’m concerned, it counts as a significant (though ultimately not medically serious) case of iatrogenic injury. The experience soured me for a while on the medical profession (including pharmacists), and especially on psychiatry and Big Pharma. I have a less bitter and less intense attitude now, but still have to confess to a residual resentment at all involved for what I went through. The benign residue of that resentment, however, is curiosity. I wonder what happened to me, and why. Hence the interest in the topic itself.
Anyway, here’s my story. After several straight months of insomnia and depression following a divorce, I asked my primary care physician for something to help me sleep. The something turned out to be Ambien. My doctor put me on a dose of 90 x 12.5 mg controlled release pills, which—in compliance with the directions on the bottle—I took “daily as needed” until I ran out (and then got some more).
Around day 25, the medication started to lose its original effect of knocking me out within about ten minutes of taking it.
Around day 40, I had regularly begun to lose my sense of how many pills I was taking on a given night, and started to double and even triple up on the 12.5 mg/day dosage. Having done that a few times, and having realized how insane it was, I then abruptly decided to stop taking the pills altogether, thereby inducing a relatively severe and totally unexpected withdrawal reaction (which I misinterpreted as the effects of extreme sleep deprivation). In the process, I almost crashed my car a few times, suffered two physical collapses on campus, and scared the hell out of a lot of people, including friends, family, students, colleagues, several nuns, a security guard, and an administrator or two. Colleagues had to call 911 for both of my collapses after finding me semi-conscious and on the ground. I found it scary, and judging from the looks on the faces of the first responders, and the way the cops encircled me and kept their hands on their weapons, they seemed pretty frightened, as well. (There’s no telling what harm a semi-conscious philosophy professor might do to a group of armed law enforcement officers. “I don’t really know where my hands are, but don’t shoot!”)
On the one occasion when I was taken to the ER (I refused treatment “against medical advice” on the other occasion–correctly, I still believe), no one seemed interested in hearing about my Ambien issues. They duly noted it in their chart, then promptly ignored the issue and moved on. The ER doctor diagnosed me as having “vertigo,” prescribed an anti-vertigo medication, gave me an IV with saline solution, and left it at that. In retaliation for his refusal to listen to what I had to say about Ambien, I lied to him and told him after a few hours in the ER that I was fit to drive home. I guess he believed me, and then cheerfully discharged me; I less cheerfully drove home (or at least in the direction of my home) and then nearly crashed my car into a diner. (Having missed the diner, I decided to stop and have a meal there: I mean, if you don’t wreck the diner while driving past it, you might as well stop and have the hot open-faced turkey sandwich to celebrate your good fortune. Insanity never tasted so good.)
I eventually got home, but still had to fill out the anti-vertigo prescription. I didn’t trust myself to drive to the pharmacy, but didn’t trust myself to walk there, either: vertigo is no respecter of modes of locomotion. I ended up staggering there somehow, only to discover that I had lost the anti-vertigo prescription somewhere between my apartment and the pharmacy. Out of options, I staggered back home, reframing the loss of the anti-vert prescription as a defiant refusal to comply with medical orders, and settling on the ground to have my vertigo in a safe place. That’ll show that ER doc.
I lay there awhile, let the vertigo wash over me a bit, then popped another 12.5 mg CR Ambien, settling soon enough into another four refreshing hours of non-REM sleep. By 2 am, I was wide awake, reading Jorge Luis Borges (on insomnia), and waiting for the sun to come back up so that I could start yet another vertiginous and sleep deprived day teaching ethics, critical thinking, and aesthetics to students who seemed not to notice that anything was amiss. (Conveniently, I had managed to collapse after class had ended. None of my students saw the collapse happen; I lay on the ground an hour before I was discovered by the instructor who needed to use the classroom after me.) At that hour, being “wide awake” for the forty-fifth night in a row didn’t feel anything like being in a Katy Perry video. It felt like being in a madhouse of my own making.
Somewhere around day 85, it began to dawn on me that I was addicted to Ambien and had to find a way to get off. (What, you ask, did I do between day 45 and day 85? I followed the directions on the bottle, that’s what. I popped those pills “as necessary,” supplying my own personal criterion of “necessity.”)
No one—not my physician, not my pharmacist—had ever informed me that any of this was likely or possible. In fact, my pharmacist insisted that Ambien was harmless, that no one ever got addicted from it, that one could safely be on it for years, and that when the time came to get off years hence, I could safely make that decision at will.
Not really. Getting off the medication was a bit of a drag. I started the taper around my hundredth day on the medication. The taper protocol, which involved a 12.5 mg reduction of the medication per week–one abrupt drop per week from 12.5 mg a night to 0–gave me intense nightmares, paranoia, and hallucinations, among them a particularly wild psychotic episode in which I believed that my brain was being devoured by pink, L-shaped worms.* I also had unbelievably vivid, detailed, apparently true-to-life dreams of home invasions, of unknown intruders coming into my house and maliciously leaving all the lights on (while, in the dream, I was alone in my apartment tapering from Ambien), and (my favorite) of being asked by an ex-girlfriend to lead an eager and willing army of small children to overthrow the U.S. government. (I woke up before we did any harm.)**
A physician I eventually consulted to help supervise the taper described my taper protocol as “an act of self-punishment,” and put me on a more gradual one. Unfortunately, before it was all over, I had yet another episode that put me in the ER. This time, I had to call 911 myself, only to discover that the paramedics sent to rescue me had gotten lost on the way to my apartment. (In other words, my local EMS had failed to pull off what Papa John’s routinely accomplishes. Is it the tips?) As I saw them circling my apartment complex without ever quite finding their way to my building, I was forced to leave my apartment in the middle of what was supposed to be a medical emergency to guide them to their intended destination. When I did, one of them blamed their inability to find me on the complexity of my apartment complex. The other one blamed it on her addiction to Xanax. Et tu, Paramedic? Anyway, there’s nothing like honesty.
When I told her that I myself was suffering side-effects from Ambien withdrawal, Xanax Girl blurted out, “Ambien? Shit, I was going to switch to that tomorrow. They gave me the prescription for it, and I’m pretty sick of this Xanax–but you know, maybe I won’t now. You’re fucked up, honey. I don’t want end up like that.” I told her she had a point. She thanked me for the advice, then got me into the ambulance, and nearly managed to crash it into a barbershop before we got to the ER. (No, we didn’t stop for a haircut.) I’ll never forget the crazed, anxiety-ridden look on her face. I felt protective of her. She seemed worse off than me.
This time the ER doctor listened to my anti-Ambien rant, then nodded sagely and said, “Yeah, but Ambien is nothing. You should see Klonopin withdrawal. Now that’s some shit! I’ve seen people vomiting for hours from that. I mean, not to make light of what you’re going through right now.” Not at all.
Another saline drip. A few questions about my fitness to leave the ER. Some informative sheets of paper on the perils of Ambien dependency. Then, discharge. My friend Mike picked me up, and we decided to get pizza (pizza cures everything). Unfortunately, despite the pizza, the symptoms came back that night, but I couldn’t bear to call 911 again. I got through it somehow, mostly by forcing myself to stay awake.
All in all, the withdrawal lasted 71 miserable days. Once I got off Ambien, however, my sleep patterns returned to normal. The irony was that the Ambien had done almost nothing to help me sleep, which is what it had been prescribed to do. I suffered eight consecutive months of insomnia, six of them on Ambien–less than four hours of sleep a night for about 250 nights. Bad as the insomnia was, however, the experience as a whole convinced me that Ambien was a lot worse than the condition it had been prescribed to correct. It also gave renewed meaning to a line from Ozzy Osbourne’s “Flyin’ High Again”: I really should have kept my feet on the ground, and waited for the sun to appear. Better insomnia than addiction. And the experience primed me for Robert Whitaker’s anti-medication message.
Though it’s obviously not Whitaker’s fault, it was probably a mistake on my part to have read his book during withdrawal from a psychiatric medication: I learned a lot from the book, but the experience of reading it at the time almost certainly ramped up my sense of paranoia, and probably fed my nightmares and hallucinations. (On the other hand, I have to admit that the nightmares and hallucinations gave me new and distinctive insight into Descartes’ Meditations, so I guess I made epistemological lemonade of the psychotropic lemons I’d been served. Call it a contribution to positive psychology.) Even under the best of circumstances, it’s difficult to read and contemplate Whitaker’s thesis without suffering mental disturbance of some sort.
A year or so after my Ambien ordeal, I’d like to think that I’ve achieved some measure of objectivity.
*Postscript, December 14, 2014: I forgot to mention the episode where I hallucinated that demons had entered my brain via my eyes, roosting in my eyelids. I blame the lapse of memory on my Ambien use, but hey, according to the experts, Ambien improves memory, so don’t listen to me.
**Postscript, February 9, 2015: I just happened to discover a music video that’s a picture-perfect depiction of an Ambien withdrawal nightmare–“Big Bad Wolf” by In This Moment. Just fall asleep after hours (or days or weeks) of insomnia, draw out the wolf-piggie dialogue depicted here for a few hours, and repeat every night for a few months–and you’ll get the idea.
Policy of Truth 