Carnival of Liberty is now up at Target Centermass

I’m finger-tied at the moment or I’d write a spiel about how liberty is the most important thing today and that the general populace’s lack of understanding of the true meaning of freedom is one of the biggest danger’s facing America, but I won’t. Instead I’ll say read some excellent posts on the subject up there…and when you’re done reading those, read mine.

Go pick up a copy of the DSM-IV-TR. Now, after you go to the ER to get your dislocated shoulder re-located, come back and finish reading this post. That’s the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of psychiatric disorders. It’s due to be expanded shortly. Now, flip through, read the sheer number of ‘disorders’ present. Now, read some of the symptoms. Remark upon their vagueness. Head to psychcentral.com for a quick demonstration.

Take a few of those tests online. Just for reference, those tests said that I have Anxiety disorder, ADHD, Bipolar, Borderline Personality Disorder, was having a depressive episode, was having a manic episode, and possibly had Seasonal Affective Disorder. For many of those it said I should seek immediate attention. I answered truthfully. The sad thing is, its not much different for most of the people I direct there. The funny thing is, I’m generally regarded as unflappable, and have proven this in situations ranging from dealing with a chronic neurologic and musculoskeletal disorder to an encounter with a brown bear.

I really don’t have much more to say here, except between the 47% lifetime prevalence they insist we have, and the sheer mass of ‘psychiatric illnesses’ most without a definable biological etiology, yet most with a biochemical treatment, something’s rotten, somewhere.

I will leave you with the definition of a psychological disorder…draw whatever conclusions you wish:

In Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy…a caregiver…feigns or induces an illness in another person, usually her or his child, to gain attention and sympathy as the “worried” parent.

“Inasmuch as we have words to describe medicine as a healing art,
but have none to describe it as a method of social control or political rule,
we must first give it a name. I propose that we call it pharmacracy, from the
Greek roots pharmakon, for ‘medicine’ or ‘drug,’ and kratein, for ‘to rule’ or
‘to control.’ … As theocracy is rule by God or priests, and democracy is rule
by the people or the majority, so pharmacracy is rule by medicine or physicians.”–Thomas Szasz

Now, I’m not a Szaszian in the strictest sense. Where schizophrenia served as his perfect example, schizophrenia is, to me, one of the truly justifiably biologically-based mental illnesses. But, the words ‘chemical imbalance’ cause a psychotic break in me. Furniture within a 5 meter radius usually does not survive. “‘X’ is ‘genetic’”, on the other hand, tends to cause not rampant property damage but an hour long discourse on what it means to be genetic, how genes are established, and how allelic differences translate into phenotypic differences.

Szasz challenged psychiatry to find a biological root to things like depression and anxiety, to which they threw up the ‘defenses’ of the chemical imbalance and familial patterns. Both of these are rather weak, as psychiatrists would realize if they had, you know, training as scientists, or more than only a single class in neurobiology. At any rate, these swiss cheese like arguments worked well enough for a general populace saddled with an unfortunate culturally inborn desire to trust health professionals.

Let’s start from square one though. What do we know about psychiatric illness, specifically mood and anxiety disorders?

So let’s summarize. Flip a coin, heads you’ll have a psychiatric disorder in your lifetime, tails, you won’t. Wow, those odds are even worse than heart disease (hmmmm). This will probably happen to you after a change, either internal or external, that you didn’t react to well (imagine that). Your serotonin levels will probably be different from when you weren’t suffering. Whether you pop pills or just talk it out, you have about the same chance of recovering.

I see a couple sticking points here. First, that’s a ridiculous prevalence of disease. If there’s a biological cause, we are sicker and more inbred than a purebred dalmation. Second, if an event that doesn’t directly impact biology causes it, chances are the disease isn’t directly biological. Third, serotonin levels are correlated with the ‘disease state’, but that doesn’t prove causation. Something someone with an education in science could tell you (*cough*). Fourth, kinda ties back to second. If it’s a chemical imbalance or a gene that causes it, only a chemical should be able to cure it. No amount of diet control in the world is going to save a Type 1 (juvenile onset) Diabetic from death without insulin injections.

More tommorrow.

I really should tell you something of my background. If the mental health professions didn’t piss me off so badly, I’d be in Brazil or Argentina right now, studying Pygmy Marmosets (Cebuella pygmaea), trying to figure out where next month’s funding would come from, and how to fill in the wholes in the Platyrrhine fossil record. This is because I have a masters in Human Evolution and Behavior (bioanthropology) and happen to love that field more than any other in the world. Before I picked up that piece of wallpaper, I got a degree in Neurobiology and Behavior, my second favorite field of study. What does this mean to you?, just a couple things:

If I sound disparaging of them, it’s because I am. Every academician or professional has their place. It just so happens that not only did they trespass all over my territory, they pissed on the potted plants and left empty beer cans everywhere. And then, as if to add insult to injury they gallivanted over into the eye of the public and proceeded to tell so many half-truths and non-truths as to potentially rip it apart at the seams (I may be getting a touch melodramatic here, but not much mind you), all the while ignoring what my discipline has to say about the brain and behavior.

Basically, I found a fight I couldn’t simply walk away from. But that’s enough self-indulgence, on to the point, which is the shaky foundation of psych.

I LOVE women, believe me. I owe everything I’ve accomplished to the strong women in my life. I’ve got a lot of happy memories courtesy of high school crushes and college girlfriends. Sure there was a stalker or two, and one ex who kept trying to impart blunt force trauma to my head and chest with a ball peen hammer, but overall, the world is better with them. Hell, as a primatologist studying Paternal Behavior, I’m often mocked as a ‘Uterus Envy Researcher’.

But, the very existence of Womens Studies deparbtments in colleges across the nation is utter bullshit. It isn’t that women’s issues are discussed and researched, but that male-specific issues are summarily dismissed as being the dominant perspective of the rest of the social sciences. While this may be true to an extent, a large part of the male world goes completely overlooked in academic circles.

Unfortunately, all the ranting in the world won’t change that fact, and in my old age, I’ve grown mature enough to understand that some windmills just aren’t worth tilting at (only some mind you). So instead of playing Shakespeare’s Idiot, full of sound and fury, etc, etc, I’ve decided to let other people do the ranting…and pay them for it.
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You can enter in one of two contests: ‘College’ and ‘Other’. Pretty self explanatory. Like the undergraduate major in Women’s Studies, these are open to BOTH SEXES. Unlike the aforementioned academic department, you’ll find that not only do I not hate the opposite sex, I admire and respect them. Every week, I’ll post selected quotes and essays from what I get. Should the majority of posters turn out to have blogs of their own, we’ll just turn this into a little Carnival of Testosterone to call our very own.

As far as guidelines go, i’ll take anything from 500 to 5000 words from people of any age. Please tell me in your email whether you’d like your contact info to appear along with your essay should I choose to host it. If you’ve already got it up at your own blog, I’ll just link you.

And now for the moolah, 100 dollars will be awarded each July 1st (starting 2006) for the best entry in each division. Should it prove popular enough, and my wallet deep enough, I may make this a biannual occurrence. As to what you can spend it on? I don’t really give a damn, you’ll be getting a check with no strings attached. I would however prefer you spend it on something like a power tool, or ammo, or something like that.
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Content: What I’m not looking for are diatribes on why women are the devil, but for specific issues that may be overlooked by society at large, including most men. Examples may include:

Anyway, yall got the idea. Oh, and before I forget, here’s the email for the project, remember to include your email and/or bloglink as well as whether you’d like to remain anonymous or not (you’ll still receive the prize if you win). Let’s make this a success and start bringing males back into the discourse of social sciences.

mensstudies - at - gmail.com

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal.”

Dr. King spoke these words in 1963. Not ten years before, public schools were forcibly desegregated in the landmark ruling of Brown v. Board of Education. A year later, a 14 year old black boy named Emmitt Till was lynched for whistling at a white woman. In 1957, Eisenhower had to dispatch the National Guard to protect black children going to school in Little Rock, Arkansas.

In those days, men were not treated as equals. There is no doubt about it. But today, things are considerably better. Some would argue that racism continues, others insist that it is almost gone, the last vestiges dying along with the last generation.

But concern about equality is not limited merely to race but to gender as well. It’s those two this post will be concerned with. Not long after the black rights movement, bra burning started in earnest as feminism took root in approximately 50% of the population almost instantaneously.

To this day feminists and black activists insist that the rich white male is oppressing them, that racism and sexism remain dominant forces in every aspect of our lives, that they are still second class citizens. As the son of a female, and a dark man from a foreign country myself, I don’t doubt that both still exist, but I question their impact.

It appears that the first question we have to ask is: How do we determine first whether they exist, and secondly their impact. The standard method appears to be simple demography. How large is the black population? What is the distribution of wealth among them compared to the population on average? Of college-educated blacks? Of those in prison? Even of those on the silver screen? Now repeat for women.

Blacks are more impoverished, women make less than men, there are more blacks in prison, there are fewer women going into the sciences and engineering, and there are fewer blacks in general going to college. You can’t really deny that. But does that actually mean there’s a systemic prejudice against them?

Well, there are less whites in football, fewer men pursuing careers in elementary school education, more men in dirty, dangerous manual labor jobs, and fewer whites in hip hop. Does that mean that they are systematically persecuted?

No, probably not.
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The above method measures Equality of Outcome and from there attempts to extrapolate whether or not there is Equality of Opportunity.

The problem with such argument by analogy is that the argument is only as valid as the analogy itself. Is outcome really a good predictor of opportunity? I’d like all 3 of my readers to think back to opportunities they had and whether they took every one of them. Could they be making more money, in a better career, or happier if they’d made slightly better choices? I ain’t doing too shabby myself, but there’s definitely a few times I could’ve made better choices.

Another problem is that, especially with studies about sexism, we assume that people will have the same desires whether male or female. We know fewer women go into the sciences. Have we asked them if they actually want to go into the sciences? If 40% of college men want to go into science and engineering, but only 20% of college women do, then shoudl we really expect that women be proportionally represented?

Third, there are much more direct measurements of sexism/racism. In almost any path, in almost any discipline, there are objective criteria by which one can be measured. If we want to show any kind of statistical rigor, we must control for this. Girls with similar SAT scores/GRE scores/math&science grades must be compared to guys applying for the same science and engineering jobs. If females of a given caliber are more likely to be rejected than males, then we have sexism on our hands. It remains much the same for minorities.
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The truth is that we can’t even declare whether prejudice is alive and kicking in the 21st century or not. People of different races and genders won’t necessarily make the same choices given the same opportunities. And even if they do make the same choices, it hasn’t been demonstrated that their race or gender is the primary factor contributing to their relative ‘under’ or ‘over’ representation in a given demographic.

Positive and Negative Liberty
Thomas Jefferson in his first inaugural address, on the role of government in the preservation of liberty:

“A wise and frugal government which shall restrain men from injuring one another, which shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement…

or Julian Baggini explaining the socialist concept of ‘positive freedom’

“But the left has always recognised another from of liberty…the practical ability to actually make choices and live your life in the way you want…

When Isaiah Berlin coined the terms, he did so to make a distinction between the two ways a government can function. Succinctly put–from Wiki–”Positive liberty is often described as freedom to achieve certain ends, while negative liberty is described as freedom from external coercion.” Jefferson espoused a government that acted in the negative, preventing the removal/erosion of liberty. The left, on the other hand, pushes for a government that acts in the positive, actively conferring ‘liberty’ upon you.

Where he’s incorrect is not in the positive/negative distinction, but in the use of the word ‘liberty’ itself. These two forms of government are stewards of two entirely different things, as I’ll attempt to show in the rest of this post.

The History of the Idea of Liberty
Here’s a few quotes from some really old, really dead people on liberty:

“Liberty is to be free from restraint and violence from others”

John Locke (1632-1704)

But rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others.

Thomas Jefferson

“That principle is, that the sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection.

John Stuart Mill (1806-1879)

Although I didn’t quote him, Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) was probably the first proponent of the above conception of liberty in works such as Leviathan. Liberty had been oft mentioned in reference to philosophy and government in times past, but Hobbes was perhaps the first to articulate concretely what liberty is and how government should protect it.

Liberty, then, has enjoyed a long tradition of being thought of in a rigorously defined ‘negative’ sense. Don’t mess with me and I won’t mess with you. Government will make sure of that. Yay. We’re free. End of Story.

A New Kind of Liberty? Or Something Else Entirely?
‘Positive liberty’ had a couple of false starts in philosophy. Jean Jacques Rousseau briefly discusses it then discards it as not liberty at all. John Stuart Mill does much the same thing 100 years later. And then, Isaiah Berlin picked it up and ran with it in the late 19th/early 20th century:

FDR further redefined the concept [of freedom] to include social protection from the ills of want and fear. JFK invoked service to country in freedom’s cause…What united all these new visions of liberty was the idea that freedom is not necessarily diminished by government but can often be advanced only through the vigorous actions of government.

William A. Galston

That’s why the left sees the state as having an enabling role. Freedom only becomes real if people are empowered to make choices for themselves, and they may need the help of others to do so.

Baggini again.

A much younger conception of ‘liberty’. One that seems to be pulled out of thin air and isn’t readily connected to the earlier conception. The important phrase here is ‘freedom from the ills of wants and fear.’ This changes liberty from a default state to one that must be actively maintained. On one hand, government just sits around in case liberty is impinged upon. On the other, government has to work its butt off to give you ‘positive liberty’…and in order to do so must restrict and manage the lives of all…kind of contradictory.

Though Long Dead, the PrescientOld Men Manage a Rebuttal
If you still think that ‘positive liberty’ is any form of liberty at all, one must merely turn back to the old dead guys…

“A man is free with respect to those activities which by his strength and wit he is able to do”

From Hobbes himself. So long as your intrinsic qualities aren’t stifled, you’re free, no matter how poor you are. As JL Hill says in discussion of the above quote, “One is not “unfree” by virtue of lack of capacity to perform an act.”

That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not sufficient warrant.

John Stuart Mill again, saying that using power in order to ensure your own prosperity isn’t rightful. FDR must have missed that, since ‘protection from want or fear’ is exactly that.

Compatible Ideas Nonetheless?
So they’re clearly different entities. But could they be complementary? FDR certainly claimed so in defense of the clearly unconstitutional New Deal provisions. All liberals, and sadly many conservatives certainly think so as well. All I need here is a couple of pictures, masterfully rendered on a 1999 IBM thinkpad running MSPaint.

The first demonstrates liberty as properly defined:

The dashed lines represent the proper role of government. Notice that the lines are dashed, not solid. This is because a good government isn’t noticed unless you try to harm another, in this case that dashed line acts as a barrier. As Oliver Wendell Holmes once famously said, “My right to swing my fist ends where the other’s nose begins.” You can wave that fist as close to the other as you please, that dashed line doesn’t impede you. Yet should you attempt to assault your neighbor, that line becomes a rock wall, stopping you in your tracks and preserving everyone’s right not to be harmed by others.

Then a depiction of ‘positive liberty’, “freedom from wants”:

As Galston and Baggini said, vigorous action of the government and the help of others is necessary. When the size of the circles are fairly equal, this is no big deal, by happenstance everyone comes out approximately the same as before. When they’re unequal, as on the right side of the picture, the impact of government becomes quite dramatic, yellow and brown are practically hemorrhaging like Marburg ebola victims as seafoam green and peach genuflect at the feet of big government, worshipping the giver of such largesse.

And ‘freedom from fear’ added to the picture:

The esteemed Mr. Holmes is no longer allowed to wave his fist all that close to his neighbor’s nose. Because, after all, a man waving his hands around can be quite scary, and everyone should be free from such a thing. Instead, Mr. Holmes and Mr. Baggini stand on opposite sides of their backyard fence, screaming at each other like neighbors quarreling over who borrowed who’s rake. Mr. Holmes has lost the freedom to benignly swing his fist. His neighbor, on the other hand, is no longer scared. And yet more liberty lost.
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While we’re on this train of thought, we should ask ourselves if there isn’t another much more basic difference between ‘positive’ liberty and the real thing. This can be done by asking how to judge whether a man is free or not.

Traditional-if neither government nor other citizens restrict him from behavior that harms no one else, a man is free.

‘Positive’-a man is only free when he neither needs nor fears. He must have adequate food, clothing, and shelter, and must find himself in good spirits.

The big difference here is extrinsic qualities versus intrinsic, objective versus subjective. In the traditional sense of the word, a man’s freedom can be judged without asking him a single question, simply by observing his social and political surroundings. To determine whether or not he’s free in the ‘positive’ sense we must ask him his opinion.

Conclusion
‘Positive liberty’ can only be achieved through restriction and burdens upon actual liberty. It is not complementary with true liberty. Those who advocate the former stand against the liberty espoused by Lao Tzu, the ancient Greeks, Buddha, a host of western philosophers, and our founding fathers.

Furthermore, ‘positive liberty’ does not even deal with the same thing as liberty proper. Liberty is about a man’s place in society. ‘Positive liberty’ is about a man’s state of mind. There is a word for issues surrounding the state of one’s mind: psychological. Funnily enough we find that one of the most important and useful psychological theories deals handily with this subject. This would be Abraham Maslow’s Heirarchy for Human Needs.

The use of ‘positive liberty’ as a basis for government in any form, from England’s Nanny State attitude toward self-defense, to Cornell’s Racial Program House system, is tyranny of the worst sort. It is a tyranny that plays to our most basic fears, making us feel so helpless that we turn to the ultimate arbiter in mediocrity to protect us.

Remember Mill’s words, that “the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not sufficient warrant [for the wielding of government power].” To allow it the power to be anything else is to build your own cage.