Anti-Etam

This is old news. It first showed up way back in October. But I've spotted it in a couple of end-of-year review stories, and it's got me tickled all over again. In a way it's another auto-antonym, but this auto-antonym comes from a musical mnemonic for a first aid procedure, so there are all kinds of quirky, fussy little symbol-referent wrinkles in play.

So there was a study done in Peoria, Illinois by researchers at the University of Illinois College of Medicine. They took ten doctors and five medical students, and trained them to give CPR chest compressions to music, and then followed up five weeks later to see if they could still remember the rate at which they were supposed to do the compressions. They did, so the researchers concluded it was a good training technique.

The study made news because of the cuteness of the song they chose: the BeeGees' "Stayin' Alive." But there was a twist that several of the news stories left out: another song that worked equally well was "Another One Bites The Dust," by Queen. One doctor commented, "Right rhythm, wrong message."

And this is trite, but I can't resist: it's also a good ending thought for 2008. I'm not sorry to see it bite the dust, but I've got reason to be thankful I'm still stayin' alive. And more importantly, you can tell by the way I use my walk, I'm a woman's man; no time to talk.

Anti-Equality

The problem with what I'm about to write is that it gives me the creeps. But I suppose things are the way they are, and my dislike and discomfort are part of what I have to come to grips with.

Last week, I re-read "Don't Shoot The Dog," by Karen Pryor. Something I want to do someday is own a home with a yard, and then adopt and train a dog. I won't try to keep a dog in an apartment, even though I know a lot of people who do, because I don't think it's fair to the dog. But someday, when my roots are truly down and I'm a homeowner, I plan to take on that challenge. In thinking toward that, I've thought a good deal about dog training, and I've read up on the subject. And that reading and thinking took me in this direction.

This is what gives me the creeps: there are unmissable parallels between the Bible and dog-training.

Your dog has no idea what the word "sit" means. It doesn't understand that what you want it to do on that spot of carpet is in the same category with what you do in a chair, in a car, cross-legged on the grass, perched on a fence, straddling a tree-branch, or whatever. It does come to learn, by trial and error, that when that sound comes from your mouth, you want it to flex its hips and put its rump down. Stimulus, response. It can furthermore tell from your tone whether you're feeling patient, cheerful, tired, angry; but it completely misses the overwhelming majority of the content of what you said.

Now go read Isaiah 55:8-9. Go ahead; I'll wait.

In communication, we talk a lot about the content dimension and the relational dimension of a message. Dogs get about the tiniest crumb of content from anything you say, but they get a whole lot of relational message every time you pay any attention at all to them. They don't know what you mean, but they know very well who you are. They recognize you as different from anyone else on earth. They know you by smell. They know you by posture, and can respond to your different postures. They can read mood swings that your human associates might miss altogether. More and more people diagnosed with seizure-causing medical conditions are given aide dogs, because the dogs can spot incredibly subtle signs that a seizure is on the way.

Now go read Jeremiah 31:33-34.

Not for nothing are dogs recognized for their loyalty. Your dog is your dog, and you are his (her) person. The dog might not know what you mean, for your thoughts are not a dog's thoughts, and your thoughts are higher than the dog's thoughts. But the dog knows you.

And that's got me thinking today that God doesn't teach us; God trains us.

You could reasonably object that Christ called His disciples His friends, and that the author of Hebrews said we were Christ's siblings. (For that matter, so did Paul.) That doesn't faze me; plenty of people think of their dogs as family members. These days, more and more couples choose to adopt dogs instead of having children, and tell everyone that the dogs are their children, as far as family bonds and an outlet for love are concerned.

I warned you it was creepy.

Probably the essence of the creepiness is that it's demeaning. But anyone who's bothered to study the Bible knows that it teaches the wisdom of humility and the dangers of pride, so if I'm a little squeamish about being, by analogy, God's dog, then that might be a healthy squeamishness. I know that for plenty of folks who aren't believers, this explanation might be more than enough to drive them away. It certainly sums up my understanding of why some of my more passionately atheistic friends embrace that deliberate rejection of Christ: they rebel, they gag, at the thought of being anyone's dog. But something I've argued on endless occasions in my adult life is that the world as it is doesn't care about our discomfort. If we're jealous of birds, and make up our minds that gravity is so disappointing that we have the right to defy it, and we step off skyscrapers proclaiming at the top of our lungs that we reject gravity, gravity will put on a demonstration of its authority. Our dislike for it has zero effect on its mastery of us. Same is true of God and His dominion.

We don't, and can't, grasp His thoughts. When He speaks to us, we gather only the thinnest outer edge of His meaning. The most we can hope for is to know Him, to build in ourselves a loyalty to Him, to accept His gracious offer to be part of His family: not as equals, for He has no equal, but as beloved features of His household, brought under His shelter by our willingness to trust. In fact, the fit between that and a person-dog relationship is pretty complete.

Now, all of this does leave unresolved the question of whether we will always be His pets. Paul, in Corinthians, gives reason to think someday we will go from knowing in part to knowing perfectly. And, of course, He created us in His image: it wasn't until the fall that we were separated from Him. When that separation is ended, then perhaps we'll know Him from a perspective that is nearer child-father than pet-person. But none of that changes our present state, does it?

And if it gives me the creeps, then that just proves I still cling to some devotion to myself, some level of being impressed with myself, that needs to give way.

Anti-Quated

תּוֹרָה ≠ 方
משיח = 方

Anti-Podes

I've had some early Christmas presents this year, mostly in the form of words or phrases that wouldn't sit still and mean something plainly and straightforwardly. It must be my own particular flavor of dorkiness, but those just get me excited. I suppose it's a hazard of my trade.

One example of what I'm talking about is the auto-antonym, which refers to words that have meanings that are opposites. The first one that pops into my head is "cleave," which can mean "cut in two," but also can mean "seal together two halves." A couple of other examples are "custom" and "sanction." They remind me of kanji, which are wonderful because they have so many different readings. Our language is phonographic: the symbols tell us how to pronounce the word, which is why beginning readers learn how to sound out what they read. Other languages, such as Chinese, are ideographic, meaning that each unit of writing has an entire meaning. But the great thing about Japanese is that it uses both a phonological script (actually, two of them -- hiragana and katakana) and an ideographic script, kanji. And the ideographs each have a bunch of different readings: you have to fit them into context before you have any clue what they mean.

The idea isn't original with me, but I like how nicely that arrangement of writing tools fits with the split between verbal and nonverbal communication. There's been research in recent years that showed that speakers of ideographic languages processed the text in a different part of the brain from speakers of phonographic language. It's also the case that ideographic language coincides with cultures that are more indirect, more low-context, more inclined to let the receiver of the message fill in the details. And nonverbal messages have a lot in common with that: a facial expression surely means something, but the something is less clinical and precise than a carefully written and revised sentence; it needs the context before you can interpret it accurately.

All these thoughts were slurrying around in my head yesterday evening as I was rationalizing my failings. I'm a reasonably good teacher, and I was in an especially good mood, since my course evaluations for the fall had arrived, full of some incredibly kind and gracious words from students. But the place where I clearly fall short is in research; put bluntly, my publication record is pathetic. I've presented some conference papers, and I have one article and a book review, but that's just a piddly showing for twelve years' employment at three different universities. But the striking thing is, it's exactly because my publication record is so poor that I got absolutely zero stirring of interest from the majority of jobs I applied for, up until the day I applied for this job. And this job is so perfectly suited to my wants and my temperament that I can't imagine teaching anywhere else. And as I was reflecting on all of that, and turning my failing into a success, I thought, God knows what He's doing. And then I was very tickled to realize that my colleagues, former professors, etc. were probably thinking the exact same words about me, only with a slightly different emphasis: "God knows what he's doing!" And the meaning of the exact same words, arranged syntactically in the exact same formation, went sliding off in a completely different direction. To my delight.

Anti-Septic

I use a lot less soap than most people. I also think I'm pretty free from superstition. There's this whole psychological twist that goes into washing and cleanliness that equates power with quantity or volume, and crowds out consideration of precision.

Soap is not some magic dirt-erasing potion. I've seen people dip their hands, or their dishes, in soapy water and immediately rinse them off. A few even say they killed germs by doing so. Hogwash. Soap does one thing and one thing only: it lets the water wash off any oily dirt that's on the hand or the dish. Ordinarily, rinsing with water does nothing to greasy, oily dirt, because water and oil repel one another. But soap molecules have a hydrophilic "end" that attaches to water, and a hydrophobic "end" that attaches to oil, so soap is effectively a trailer hitch that lets the water haul the oil away. Mechanical scrubbing action is still necessary.

Imagine you wanted to paint a room: would you dip the brush in paint, just touch it to the wall, and expect the entire wall to magically turn that color, and be perfectly even and flawless? Not unless you're wobbly in the head. You'd have to go to the effort to apply the paint, smooth it over, give it a second coat, etc. The mechanical action matters. Really, when it comes to removing dirt, the mechanical action matters more than the soap does. You can take most dirt off with scrubbing, because the abrasion is violent enough to dislodge even greasy dirt. You may take your top layer of skin off with it, but you're always doing that anyway, little by little. A good, vigorous scrubbing just speeds it up a bit.

So all I've really argued to this point is that soap doesn't accomplish much all by itself. That doesn't explain why I use less of it. There have been a number of product tests done over the years to find out how clean laundry gets with a lot of detergent, a little detergent, and no detergent at all. The results show that it doesn't make that much of a difference: agitate clothes through water, especially warm or hot water, and that's the biggest part of getting them clean. Having read those reports several times, I cut way down on my detergent use a few years back. For whites or unmentionables, I wash in hot water and use a fair amount of detergent, but for clothes that don't get that dirty (pants, outer shirts) I use cold water and about a tablespoon or two of liquid detergent. And every once in a while, if I run out of laundry soap and haven't remembered to pick it up, I go ahead and run loads for a couple of weeks without adding anything to them.

None of this is the slightest bit interesting, even to me. But the widespread practice of piling on the soap, or imagining that it has "cleaning magic," is a symptom of a deeper rational kink. We do the same thing with over-the-counter medication, with nutritional supplements, and sometimes with particular relational practices: "Let's sit down and have a serious talk about this." It feels good to pour on the power, instead of carefully surveying the situation from all sides and choosing a response that's finely calibrated to it. It reminds me of people who pass me on the street at blazing speed, weaving in and out of traffic, and then when I reach a red light, they're right beside me. They sure had fun flooring that gas pedal, but it didn't get them any real advantage.

And sometimes I think we misunderstand God in that way. True, He's got all the power anyone can imagine, and scripture lays out a couple of circumstances where He put on a display that would reduce any human being to slack-jawed awe. But it's meaningless to talk about His power as a maximum, as a bludgeon, for two reasons: first, there's no maximum to it, and second, a corollary of the first, it goes way beyond the limits of our understanding. What I do more and more is think of God's power as precision; not as soap dumped on dirt, in hopes that the soap will operate like some cartoonish Clean Paint, but as meticulous and loving attention, wiping, scrubbing, polishing, applied to every nook and crevice of what needs cleaning. Not too much pressure, but not too little; no streaks, no scratches, no spills, no missed spots. I think of God's justice not as the kind of punishment that makes an atom bomb look like a love-pat, but rather as the most perfectly scaled, perfectly balanced, perfectly just consequence for the offense: breathtaking in its match, not in its immensity. God can go fingerprint-specific, atom-specific, quark-specific, and beyond, unlike we humans, who can only roughly match what we do to what we perceive.

That's a quality I'm quite convinced God has, and I find it far more awe-inspiring than thinking expansively about His power. I also think it's a useful starting point for thinking about problems. We have expressions like "swatting a mosquito with a bazooka" that allude to the error of excessively blunt response, but they're hardly everyday wisdom. I suspect it might be an artifact of our culture: we have so much power, from our military to our wealth (shaky at the moment) to our institutions to our ideas, that an impatient application of overwhelming force, a little Powell doctrine, seems appealing to us. People in other parts of the world learn more of a respect for subtlety and nuance. But anyway, I find myself more and more absorbed with wiggling the slightly warped key in the lock until I can get it to turn, rather than kicking the stubborn door out of its frame. And I save a good deal of money on soap.

Anti-Coherence

So this morning my ankles are sore, and I've got new thoughts about mindfulness.

Michael Stipe once said there were certain notes in some of his songs that he couldn't hit unless he was dancing, and I've decided there's a whole range of thinking that I can't tap into unless I'm walking. I walk to work every morning, which takes me half an hour, and this week, the walking conditions have changed with every new day. On Monday morning, I had to walk to work in several inches of snow, which, in many ways, resembles walking on the beach: soft footfalls, but drag between steps. On Tuesday and Wednesday, I had to pick my way over icy patches, lifting my feet and carefully planting them, testing each step for stability before putting down my weight. This morning, it was warm enough to rain, which meant I walked over some parts wet (but iceless) pavement, and some parts slush. People who do a lot of driving don't get as much chance to notice the different conditions as I do; by the end of my half-hour trek, the frame of mind I'm in has a lot to do with the terrain I've crossed.

And, as I wrote last February, the rules changed every day. On Monday, none of it was especially slippery. New snow is a change from dry pavement, but it's more or less problem-free. Tuesday and Wednesday, snow was safe, because it gives pretty good traction, but I had to take a careful look at any snowless patch and assess it for slipperiness. This morning, the last bits of snow were actually the dangerous part: the slush was very slippery, and I almost took a spill several times.

What this meant was, no autopilot, no routine. I had to invest more conscious effort in the walk than I do on most other days. But what caught my fancy was the signs of adjustment. Today my ankles were sore, because the walking I've done the past couple of days has exercised muscles that normally get left alone. Day after day, I step out my front door and swing into my stride, and it's a simple repetitive motion over and over; similarly, day after day I put my brain elsewhere and woolgather for half an hour until I find myself unlocking my office door.

But for the past couple of days, I've had to be very present through the entire trip. And that gets me to thinking about unexpected situations in teaching: students who are defiant, or who have particular needs, or scheduling circumstances that are new and different. Instead of swinging into my stride, I have to pick my way through those classes, and I do feel frustrated ("sore") at times, but it's just the building up of "muscles" that I've neglected.

Sometimes I get all ambitious about taking on more and more tasks, more and more commitments, more and more projects, but to free up capacity to attend to them, I have to compress the ones I've already got. I have to be more efficient and cut down the time and attention they require. I have to take my teaching and "swing into my stride," make it something automatic and unexamined, and I think sometimes what looks to me like maturity and growing professionalism is really a form of bureaucratized, mechanical, repetitive teaching that neglects some of the "muscles" I could be using.

Luckily, I can count on the school and the students to keep changing the rules. And they can count on me to keep getting sore about it. But it's a healthy thing.

Anti-Dote

As you read this, the odds are quite high that you're going to think I'm writing about something I'm in no position to understand. But the more years I live, the more I think that being in the position to experience it firsthand isn't nearly as helpful to a clear understanding as some might like to believe. Read on, and see what you think.

I think the biggest obstacle to healthy marriage is the mis-calibration of expectations. It’s a flashing danger sign if you fall into one or more of the following traps:

• Thinking, day after day, that because the stakes are so high, anything short of perfection is failure.

• Thinking that any sign of conflict is a crisis that demands the most heavy-handed overreaction possible.

• Thinking it’s worse to have attention called to a problem than to let the problem fester.

• Thinking that an issue is so minor and petty that it doesn’t need to be addressed.

• Thinking that your lives have to be so completely intertwined that nothing is separate from you or unknown to you.

• Thinking that anything you aren't interested in, don't understand, don't enjoy, don't appreciate, is good fodder for mockery.
  

• Thinking that in an emergency, if you really had to, you could just lay down an ultimatum and overcome any resistance to get your own way.

• Thinking that your children are entirely dependent on you to set a good example in this area, and overlooking the possibility that if you bother to listen, they may actually have some lessons to teach you.

The kind of thinking that’s a good sign consists of understanding that it’s a delicate balance, a tricky negotiation that needs non-stop attention and work. The biggest part of that work is being willing to listen, to frame your perceptions and feelings in words, to work, gently and patiently, through difficulties. Easy to say, but baffling and exhausting to put into practice.

You might have gotten this far thinking, “Actually, you’re just stating the obvious. Everyone already knows this by now.” And where marriage is concerned, I think that’s probably true. But here’s the twist: I wasn’t really writing about marriage. Go back up to where I bolded it, and replace it with race relations. Then re-read it and see what you think.

Anti-Pathy

"Then, when the rhetorician is more persuasive than the physician, the ignorant is more persuasive with the ignorant than he who has knowledge? - is not that the inference?"
-- Socrates, Gorgias

Placebos are disturbing things. Last night I was reading about them over pizza and beer. They work incredibly well. A huge stack of surveys documents the fact that physicians regularly prescribe placebos for their patients, and that they work just fine. Pharmacists get sucked into the game too, since a prescription that plainly calls for something inert traps them in the middle: they probably can't substitute their pharmaceutical expertise for the doctor's broader medical expertise -- they can't diagnose, in other words -- but they're the ones on the cutting edge of the deceit: they hand the customer a bottle of things that are represented as medicine but in fact have no bioactive ingredient.

The crazy thing is, study after study shows that placebos work. If patients expect that what's in the bottle will ease their pain or other symptoms, then very often those symptoms vanish. And the converse is also true: chemicals that should interact with bodily processes in a defined way are completely ineffective if accompanied by a suggestion or distraction that convinces the patient that the drug won't work properly.

The rub is, even if it works, it's entirely deceitful. Even if the results are better than than what the actual drug would produce, does that justify lying to the patient? Even if you can demonstrate that an actual drug is only effective so long as you enlist the mind, the imagination, the expectations of the patient, you can't escape from the fact that the doctor is fully aware of the fraudulent nature of the transaction. It may work, but effectiveness is not honesty. Isn't that, at the very least, troubling?

I got to thinking about that this morning, because I'm teaching rhetoric in the spring, and throughout the history of human civilization, we've had a love-hate relationship with rhetoric. Socrates couldn't stand the study of it; said it was an inferior art, concerned only with appearances and flattery, and that instead we should concern ourselves with truth, as discovered through dialectic. And he reminds me of a patient saying "Never mind the placebos. I want a real, entirely bioactive drug." It's certainly to be expected that Socrates prefers truth to rhetoric, but it's also far from clear that this insistence gets him where he wants to go.

My take on absolute truth: yes, it exists, but it exists as the sole and exclusive property of God. Its essence is congruence with His thoughts, His pronouncements, His judgments. The quality "true" can be defined as "what God thinks." And I think He speaks to us in true statements. But those concessions land a long way from stipulating that we can understand those truths, act on them, or transmit them to anyone else without distorting them. (Look here and here and here.) Furthermore, plenty of folks have had the truth revealed to them, and have fled from it. As with medicine, sometimes the ways people reshape themselves, the damage they inflict on themselves, puts them beyond the help of the medicine, but a placebo can be the lever to the fulcrum of their expectations, and can dislodge what ails them.

From research, we know that placebos work because people are swayed by the trappings of a medical setting: lab coats, medical equipment, gleaming institutional hallways, etc. They're also emotionally invested: they're in pain, frightened for their lives. And finally, it's well-documented in medical literature that experimental treatments can produce a placebo effect because patients feel a bond with their doctor and want to please her or him. And I'm sure you see this coming: Aristotle categorized rhetorical appeals as logos (the objective, institutional proof that anyone should accept as authoritative), pathos (proof based on emotion), and ethos (proof based on the character or identity of the person doing the persuading). I don't think that's a coincidence.

And then there are the dynamics of resistance and addiction. Antibiotics become less effective as people keep taking them, because the pathogens they target evolve countermeasures that enable them to survive the chemical attack. Pain killers become less effective because the body's chemistry changes, and people develop a physical addiction, a tolerance, to the drug's effects. In the same way, critical, life-changing truths can hit us incredibly hard on the first hearing, but lose their potency and become mundane upon repeated hearings. And far too often, truth is outflanked and contained by clever counter-maneuvering; sometimes by an outside party who is both clever and dishonest, but just as often through our own rationalizing.

In short, I think we romanticize medicine, and I think we romanticize truth. In both cases, I think we mistake our cloud of perceptions for objective features of reality, and we think the milieu in which we move is far more clear-cut and stable than it really is. Healing is in God's hands, just like truth, and I think we concoct ersatz stand-ins for His power because we cannot stand to wait for His time, to face fully our dependence on Him. We swallow medicine so we can pretend that we've taken control of our illness. We pronounce statements true or false so we can feel the Godly authority of policing the quality of knowledge, of sorting fact and error into their categories, even though those pursuits fly in the face of everything we know about our human limitations.

So it's not a question of whether placebos are better or worse than medicine. I think there's not a difference. God heals, and every healing happens by His permission. The same is true of rhetoric and the truth. Rhetoricians have worked through the years to establish the claim that all communication, all human pronouncements are rhetorical, and I've always shook my head impatiently because I thought that diluted the concept out of existence. But now I think they're probably right. It is all rhetorical, simply because truth is a quality that does not, and cannot, come from us. It's all just placebos.

Anti-Atrophy

My Christmas break reading list:

• Honest Signals: How They Shape Our World, by Alex Pentland
  
• Rock, Paper, Scissors: Game Theory in Everyday Life, by Len Fisher
• 13 Things That Don't Make Sense, by Michael Brooks
• Outliers: The Story Of Success, by Malcolm Gladwell
• Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson

That's all the fun reading I'll have time for. I also need to re-read, cover-to-cover, the textbooks for all four classes I'm teaching in the Spring. But since we're expecting a pretty big winter storm tomorrow, with a second salvo about Wednesday, I may get a lot of good days to stay inside and just read the day away.

It's times like this I wish I'd spent the extra dollars to live somewhere that had a fireplace.

Anti-Occident

There are few things we do a shabbier job of than understanding terrorism.

To begin with, there are too many people who pull back altogether from the challenge of understanding it. "Understanding" is a synonym for "condoning," and both are weakness. Terrorism is like fire: you don't analyze the fire, you extinguish the fire. The only thing to be done with terrorists is extinguish them, liquidate them, eradicate them, find them and kill them by any means necessary.

Rarrr, we're tough. Hope nobody notices how terrified we are.

In fact, terrorism is the result of a whole array of breakdowns and failures, and we could do a far better job of reducing its incidence by pouring some serious resources into any one of them. In most parts of the world that yield terrorism, public opinion of the west in general, and the United States in particular, is both very negative and very dysfunctional. The misunderstandings are epic. The potential for smart, relentless work to reach out to other parts of the world, to put our own messages into their media and other cultural channels, is enormous, and largely unrealized. Trying to teach our way out of the root causes of terrorism doesn't feel enough like muscle-flexing. But that muscle-flexing has the same failing as corporal punishment: it may work, temporarily, in limited measure, on very young children, but it's far less likely to work as the children grow older, stronger, more sophisticated, and more willful. Instead, all it accomplishes is to slather on another layer of resentment and determination.

Next semester I'm teaching intercultural communication, and I'm tempted to make terrorism one of my running examples. It really seems to me that if students understood that there are bodies of reasoning, chains of argument, whose output is a considered decision to turn to terrorism, and that those chains draw from cultural premises that aren't familiar to us, but are also not beyond our ability to decipher, then that understanding might dislodge the stubborn determination to view terrorism as the same thing as a stuck jar lid, something that will only respond to muscle.