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Simone Weil by Susan Sontag (1963; and available in Against Interpretation and Other Essays):

The culture-heroes of our liberal bourgeois civilization are anti-liberal and anti-bourgeois; they are writers who are repetitive, obsessive, and impolite, who impress by force—not simply by their tone of personal authority and by their intellectual ardor, but by the sense of acute personal and intellectual extremity. The bigots, the hysterics, the destroyers of the self—these are the writers who bear witness to the fearful polite time in which we live. It is mostly a matter of tone: it is hardly possible to give credence to ideas uttered in the impersonal tones of sanity. There are certain eras which are too complex, too deafened by contradictory historical and intellectual experiences, to hear the voice of sanity. Sanity becomes compromise, evasion, a lie. Ours is an age which consciously pursues health, and yet only believes in the reality of sickness. The truths we respect are those born of affliction. We measure truth in terms of the cost to the writer in suffering—rather than by the standard of an objective truth to which a writer's words correspond. Each of our truths must have a martyr.

What revolted the mature Goethe in the young Kleist, who submitted his work to the elder statesman of German letters "on the knees of his heart"�the morbid, the hysterical, the sense of the unhealthy, the enormous indulgence in suffering out of which Kliest's plays and tales were mined—is just what we value today. Today Kleist gives pleasure, Goethe is to some a duty. In the same way, such writers as Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky, Kafka, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Genet—and Simone Weil—have their authority with us because of their air of unhealthiness. Their unhealthiness is their soundness, and is what carries conviction. Little Bookroom / Savoir Fare London

Perhaps there are certain ages which do not need truth as much as they need a deepening of the sense of reality, a widening of the imagination. I, for one, do not doubt that the sane view of the world is the true one. But is that what is always wanted, truth? The need for truth is not constant; no more than is the need for repose. An idea which is a distortion may have a greater intellectual thrust than the truth; it may better serve the needs of the spirit, which vary. The truth is balance, but the opposite of truth, which is unbalance, may not be a lie.

Thus I do not mean to decry a fashion, but to underscore the motive behind the contemporary taste for the extreme in art and thought. All that is necessary is that we not be hypocritical, that we recognize why we read and admire writers like Simone Weil. I cannot believe that more than a handful of the tens of thousands of readers she has won since the posthumous publication of her books and essays really share her ideas. Nor is it necessary—necessary to share Simone Weil's anguished and unconsummated love affair with the Catholic Church, or accept her gnostic theology of divine absence, or espouse her ideals of body denial, or concur in her violently unfair hatred of Roman civilization and the Jews. Similarly, with Kierkegaard and Nietzsche; most of their modern admirers could not, and do not embrace their ideas. We read writers of such scathing originality for their personal authority, for the example of their seriousness, for their manifest willingness to sacrifice themselves for their truths, and—only piecemeal—for their "views." As the corrupt Alcibiades followed Socrates, unable and unwilling to change his own life, but moved, enriched, and full of love; so the sensitive modern reader pays his respect to a level of spiritual reality which is not, could not, be his own.

Some lives are exemplary, others not; and of exemplary lives, there are those which invite us to imitate them, and those which we regard from a distance with a mixture of revulsion, pity, and reverence. It is, roughly, the difference between the hero and the saint (if one may use the latter term in an aesthetic, rather than a religious sense). Such a life, absurd in its exaggerations and degree of self-mutilation—like Kleist's, like Kierkegaard's—was Simone Weil's. I am thinking of the fanatical asceticism of Simone Weil's life, her contempt for pleasure and for happiness, her noble and ridiculous political gestures, her elaborate self-denials, her tireless courting of affliction; and I do not exclude her homeliness, her physical clumsiness, her migraines, her tuberculosis. No one who loves life would wish to imitate her dedication to martyrdom nor would wish it for his children nor for anyone else whom he loves. Yet so far as we love seriousness, as well as life, we are moved by it, nourished by it. In the respect we pay to such lives, we acknowledge the presence of mystery in the world—and mystery is just what the secure possession of the truth, an objective truth, denies. In this sense, all truth is superficial; and some (but not all) distortions of the truth, some (but not all) insanity, some (but not all) unhealthiness, some (but not all) denials of life are truth-giving, sanity-producing, health-creating, and life-enhancing.

Last week Jennifer Burns, author of Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right, appeared on The Daily Show.  Below you can watch her interview with Jon Stewart.  Then scroll down and read the top three questions everyone has been asking her since her appearance.

1. Is Jon Stewart as short as they say? I met Jon a few minutes before the show started in the “Green Room,” which is where guests wait before going on air. Basically, so many people told me he was so short that I was expecting a midget to walk in the door. Compared to that preconception, Stewart is not that short! I certainly think I’m taller than him, but his stature didn’t really make an impression. What struck me instead was how quick and smart he is, with an immediate rapid fire patter and stream of jokes. I was also surprised at how he looked different in real life than on TV. There are subtle distortions to the face on camera and in person he was leaner with more defined features. He has mesmerizing blue eyes which I focused on during the interview so I could keep up with what he was saying!

2. What does Jon Stewart say to you after the interview is over and the cameras are still rolling? I wish I could remember! I have no recollection of our last exchange, it was probably some basic thank you’s or pleasantry, and I think he probably helped me step off the stage. By the time I exited the set, I had completely forgotten what we talked about – it must have been a psychological reaction to the high pressure of the situation. Our conversation came back to me in great detail when I watched the show later that evening.

3. Are you mad he plumped the books of two Daily Show staffers at the end of the show? Not at all! It was a huge honor to be chosen for the show and has exposed my book to a wide and enthusiastic audience who might not have heard of it otherwise. There’s nothing like TV for legitimating intellectual production! Seriously, I appreciate that Jon Stewart is both a consummate entertainer and a really smart guy who values books and ideas, and I think his ability to blend humor and serious discussion is a great gift to contemporary America.

Frederick Grinnell is Professor of Cell Biology and founder of the Program in Ethics in Science and Medicine at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas. His newest book, Everyday Practice of Science: Where Intuition and Passion Meet Objectivity and Logic offers an insider’s view of real-life scientific practice. Grinnell demystifies the textbook model of a linear “scientific method,” suggesting instead a contextual understanding of science. Scientists do not work in objective isolation, he argues, but are motivated by interest and passions.  In the article below he looks at a recent article in Nature about defining death.  Read previous posts by Grinnell here and visit his website here.

An editorial in Nature (1 October, 2009) entitled “Delimiting death” supports the proposal to reconsider the legal definition of death. “Ideally,” writes the Nature editor, “the law should be changed to describe more accurately and honestly the way that death is determined in clinical practice.” The current definition uses the criteria: (1) irreversible cessation of circulatory and respiratory functions, or (2) irreversible cessation of all functions of the entire brain, including the brain stem. However, assessing ‘irreversible’, ‘all functions’ and ‘entire brain’ becomes to some degree a matter of physician judgment. In cases involving organ procurement for transplantation, the physician is under pressure to obtain donor organs that are as fresh as possible. The situation becomes conflicted. “Physicians know that when they declare that someone on life support is dead, they are usually obeying the spirit, but not the letter, of this law. And many are feeling increasingly uncomfortable about it.”

The Nature piece might be dismissed as adding nothing new to the discussion except for the provocative, two part, conceptual definition of death that the editor proposes: (1) “the person is no longer there” and (2) “can never be made to return.” The first part of this definition helps makes clear the symmetry between the most contentious issues of modern bioethics – endings and beginnings of life. The person is no longer there; we can harvest the body for organs. The person is not yet there; we can harvest the body (embryo) for stem cells.

Franz Rosenzweig’s metaphorical description of death — “His I would be only an It if it were to die.” –no longer is just a metaphor. The meaning of human death emerges according to the organization of human life. For a newly formed embryo, death means loss of viability of a single cell. After several cell divisions, loss of viability of a single cell no longer equals death. Rather, death becomes equivalent to development arrest. After 3-4 months of gestation, once the cardiovascular system develops, it becomes reasonable to speak of cardiovascular death. After 6-7 months, once the central nervous system develops, it becomes reasonable to speak of brain death. After development of modern life support systems, once machines can replace heart and brain functions, it becomes reasonable to speak of the person and the body as separated entities. Modern medical technology has succeeded in separating the I from the “living” It. Modern social thinking remains conflicted about accepting this separation.

Using Nature’s conceptual definition of death as a point of departure is unlikely to produce a more easily implemented legal definition of death for two reasons. First, nobody knows the answer to the question “Where is the person?” Indeed, trying to answer this question has become the central focus of cognitive neuroscience research with no consensus in sight except that – which would return us to the current definition of death — the person will be gone after cessation of brain function. Those who support using human embryos for research up to 14 days of embryo life select 14 days not because they know when the person has arrived but rather because they agree that before day 14 the person could not yet have arrived. Second, both from technical and practical points of view, the statement “can never be made to return” will add the word ‘never’ to the ambiguous list of other terms, i.e., irreversible, all functions and entire brain, about which the Nature editor complains. Therefore, given the inherent ambiguity, trying to decide the moment of an organ donor’s death with certainty will continue to have the potential to create a conflicted (or so it might feel) situation of choosing to sacrifice one life to save another. Clinical judgment still will be required as always is the case in the practice of clinical medicine.

If changing the legal definition of death cannot solve the practical problem, is there an alternative? One approach might be to change the informed consent process so as to involve organ donors more explicitly in the choosing process. Some donors will want to gift their organs only after certainty of death. Their wishes oblige physicians to act cautiously in declaring death, even if it means potentially reducing the value of the organs. However, other donors might view themselves as more involved participants whose advanced directives encourage their physicians to act to maintain the value of their organs, even if doing so means instructing the physician to obey the spirit and not necessarily the letter of the law. Instead of deriving a new definition of life’s end as proposed by the Nature editorial, we should aim for better public understanding of how modern medical technology has made defining life’s end so difficult.

Stephen T. Asma is Professor of Philosophy at Columbia College Chicago, where he holds the title of Distinguished Scholar.  His newest book, On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears, is a wide-ranging cultural and conceptual history of monsters-how they have evolved over time, what functions they serve, and what shapes they are likely to take in the future.  It is with this monstrous perspective (sorry I know it is an awful pun) that Asma looks at Where the Wild Things Are in honor of its release this weekend.

With hindsight it seems fitting that Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are (1963) first appeared in cultural space somewhere between Elvis Presley and the Beatles. Where the Wild Things Are is a rock’n’roll story, about being misunderstood, rebelling against authority, letting your hair down, and generally indulging in the Dionysian rumpus. It’s not surprising, then, that the new film version (Warner Brothers) is brought to us by skateboarding music-video director Spike Jonze and literary mega-hipster Dave Eggers.

As the movie’s trailer reminds us, “Inside all of us is a wild thing.” And in our therapeutic era, we generally accept that it is good and healthy to visit our wild things –to let them off their chains, let them howl at the moon. You can also taste some of this Romanticism in the recent relish of the Woodstock anniversary, with its celebration of noble primitivism. But the hippy view of “the wild” is quite sunny, whereas Sendak (who lost family during the Holocaust) wanted to acknowledge some of the darker aspects of uncivilized life (even, or especially, through the eyes of a child). Despite these darker notes, however, Where the Wild Things Are still affirms the idea that danger, at least in small doses, is good for you. And this latest fascination with beasties, together with the approach of Halloween, reminds us that we have a love/hate relationship with monsters generally. We are simultaneously attracted and repulsed by them.

Sendak’s monsters are just repulsive enough to be alien, foreign, and mysterious, but they’re also vaguely cute and familiar enough for us to identify with them and recognize our emotional selves in them. Sendak claimed in later interviews that the monsters were based loosely on his boyhood perceptions of his frightening aunts and uncles. Like a distant relation, our uncanny monsters are alien aspects of our own identity –they are parts of who we are, unfamiliar aspects of our psyches. This common way to read monsters –as primitive, uncivilized versions of ourselves –is obvious in Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde or the forthcoming Universal Pictures remake The Wolfman, starring Anthony Hopkins and Benicio del Toro. Monster stories have a cathartic function, in the sense that they give our tamed, repressed impulses a brief holiday of Bacchanalian revelry. And after these virtual trips to our own hearts of darkness, we can better return to our everyday social world of compromise, accommodation, and compliance. On this account, the monster story is the favorite genre of our reptilian brains (the real home where the wild things are).

However, every era has its own uses and abuses of monsters. The lesson of Shelley’s Frankenstein, for example, is often taken as a liberal lesson in tolerance: we as a society must not create outcasts, or persecute those who are different. Or consider that the medieval mind was obsessed with giants and mythical creatures as God’s punishments for the sin of pride. And the medieval period also began the Church’s long fascination with demon possession. For the Greeks and Romans, monsters were prodigies –warnings of impending disaster.

Besides the cuddly monsters of Where the Wild Things Are, our present day fascination seems dominated by zombies, vampires, and serial killers. Why are we so entranced by these specific creatures –why do we love to hate them?

Not only are there more zombies around these days, but they seem to be getting faster and more aggressive. Gone are the slow lumbering goons of the George Romero-era zombies, and in their stead we have lightning fast undead predators. Zombies, just like vampires, serial killers and most other monsters are terrifying because you cannot really reason with them. Unlike your other enemies, you cannot appeal to monsters to recognize that you’re a good hearted person, or you’ve got kids, or you really understand their pain, or you only want to understand them in the name of science. They’ll pummel you and eat you anyway. There’s not much common ground, in terms of rationality or emotional solidarity. One suspects there is a link between a decade of American fear of terrorists, and a rise in zombie monsters that do not respond to negotiation.

But zombies also have unique qualities that trigger the dynamic of love/hate, attraction/repulsion. Everybody wants to live forever. That’s a given. If you can’t remember wanting to live forever, then you’re probably a successful and functional adult. But the inner narcissist –the one that thinks he’s God and wants to live forever –is still in you somewhere, buried deep. The zombie, like the vampire, is a kind of immortal: chop his leg off, he’s still coming; blow a hole in his chest, he’s still coming. His life span is indefinite and he’s indestructible. So the little narcissist inside us really likes the immortal aspect of the zombie and the vampire. We unconsciously crave that kind of staying power and durability, but our narcissistic desire to cheat death is impossible to sustain in the face of mature experience. Reality regularly reminds us, as we are growing up, that we will not cheat death. No one actually cheats death. To carry on in the fantasy world of the narcissistic inner-child is impossible given the brute facts of our animal mortality. So the universal urge to live forever must be repressed, as we grow up. This repression means that the desire must be transformed from positive to negative –from something we like, to something disgusting (just like in potty training).

We love to hate zombies because they simultaneously manifest our craving for immortality, and our more mature realization that the flesh always decays. As “living dead,” all zombies elicit those conflicting impulses in our psyche. The more disgusting they are, the more we are reminded of our inevitable decomposition, but the more they keep getting up and chasing, the more we are delighted by the promise of immortality. The psyche seems to carry out an unconscious vacillation: the zombies live on forever, those lucky sods, but wait…they’re disgusting and repellent and…and…run!

Vampires are a much more glamorized and sexualized version of the attraction/repulsion dynamic. From Polidori’s original Vampyre, to Stoker’s Dracula, to today’s teen vampires of Twilight, the blood drinkers are, generally speaking, totally hot. The play of sexual taboos in vampire stories is well appreciated. But in addition to the always titillating presence of neck-kissing and the exchange of bodily fluids, we have to recognize that vampires are romantic monsters. They are incarnations of the irresistible but damaging femme fatal for boys, and the “bad boy” or cad for girls. A vampire is frequently an archetype of the charismatic, handsome, man, who seduces women by his very indifference toward them. Women find him alluring and seek chase, only to discover too late that they are broken upon his heartless unmovable nature. The vampire holds out the promise of love, but alas lacks even humanity.

Vampires and zombies share another well-spring of horror: you could easily become one. You or your loved one is just a little bite away from contracting the disease. In the age of AIDS, swine flu, SARS, and myriad pandemic anxieties, it’s easy to see why monsters who transmit their monstrosity through bites (both sexual and gustatory) are especially frightening. In the medieval mind, monsters and demons were metaphysically different from you and I, and in the unlikely event that you were transformed into one you could be sure it was the result of serious sin. Nowadays, however, casual, accidental contact can make you “one of them.”

One suspects that losing one’s humanity, or becoming one of them, is also at play in our dread fascination with serial killers –real and imagined monsters. We have extensive media coverage, and corresponding public appetite, for real serial killers like Jeffrey Dahmer, Charles Manson, John Wayne Gacy, Ed Gein, as well as the popular fictional characters Norman Bates, Sweeney Todd, Hannibal Lecter, Freddy Krueger, Leatherface, Michael Myers, and so on. Why are so many of us repelled, disgusted, and morally outraged, but also willing to lay out cash to see psychotic murderers hang people on meat hooks, sever limbs, and of course eat their innocent victims?

Before the 1950s, very few people would have suggested that a serial killer was anything like you, or I, or churchgoing folks. And yet, now it is commonplace for people to think of psychopaths as just slight (albeit horrifying) deviations on the otherwise normal brain or psyche. A murdering psychopath is not a demon-possessed creature or an offspring of Cain, but a guy who failed to develop normal levels of human compassion. Most of us believe that the exact causes of monstrous serial killing will be found eventually in brain science or developmental psychology or some combination, but we don’t think that Gacy, Dahmer, Hannibal Lecter, or Leatherface, are metaphysically different from us. We have secularized the evil of such psychopaths only recently, and maybe this is one reason why we love to hate them.

Just as Sendak’s monsters give us a kind of Rousseauian view of going “back to the wild” (wherein the authentic self is discovered, uncorrupted by society), so too Leatherface and similar monsters of “torture porn” give us a kind of Freudian view of going native. We’re attracted to serial killers because they lack conscience, hurt their enemies with impunity, and feel very little. They do the stuff we might do, if we had not been socialized properly. We’re attracted to their animalistic primitive powers. But we’re simultaneously repulsed by them because they lack the precise qualities that make us human.

If Rousseau and the hippies are right, then our inner primitive monsters will be more like Sendak’s beasties; weird, a little dangerous, but ultimately helpful. If, however, Freud is right about the kinds of monsters inside us, then we shouldn’t go too often or too long to where the wild things are.

Like rock’n’roll, the wild primitivism of monsters is tempered by bourgeois (and simply human) needs for security, safety and stability. Howlin’ Wolf is sanitized into Elvis, the “long haired” Beatles have to wear suits, the mud-soaked Woodstock kids are ready to go home after the weekend, and Sendak’s little “Max” misses his mom and leaves his monsters to return to “his very own room where he found his supper waiting for him, and it was still hot.”

I have little idea where last week went. Apologies. I'm still trying to get used to the slightly mad rhythm of my new London life...

Back in May, I wrote a blog post called Like What You Like. In one of the comments, I said:

Liking whatever you like is a relativistic point about liking -- plenty of stuff out there, enjoy what you will. But my second point is a separate point, not an extension of my first, and it is an almost essentialist point noting that literature itself asks what literature is, and only literature can answer.

I wanted to come back to this again because it seems to me that (at least) two types of reading are being carried out by most readers most of the time. And only one of them is likely to allow readers to find what new literature might be out there now. I'm tempted to suggest that the two categories of reading could be called "reading for pleasure" and "reading seriously", but even to suggest as much strikes me as utterly absurd. I don't read for anything other than pleasure (although a deeper pleasure as opposed to a sugar-high might have to be conceded!) I wondered if "reading philosophically" versus "reading non-philosophically" might perhaps be the distinction, but that crumbles as soon as it is invoked. The suggestion that any reading is non-philosophical is risible. We've surely all got whiff of enough cultural studies to know that it is now widely recognised -- and bleedin' obvious -- that when folk are slumped in front of the telly watching some soap opera or other they are engaging with it on many different levels, and use it later to negotiate conversations about ethics, morals, narrative; same when they are reading an airport thriller. Both these attempts at describing these two types of reading also come perilously close to the idea that one type of reading is better than the other. Again, that strikes me as plainly daft.

In their excellent introduction to Maurice Blanchot, Ullrich Haase and William Large suggest that, particularly on the back of the thinking of Hegel (via Alexandre Kojève), Heidegger, and Nietzsche, and in (often silent) dialogue throughout his life with Bataille, Nancy, Derrida and Levinas, Blanchot has inherited a question...

... namely that of the finitude of our existence, expressing itself in a new, disturbing and seemingly meaningless experience of death. Here it is no longer the powerful subject that gives meaning to its world, but a passive human voice that listens to the anonymous voice of the other.

This means that the question of literature, in which at least for Blanchot this anonymity has its greatest force, is no longer a parochial question about values and tastes, but a directly philosophical question about the status of the human being, and that this question has a broader ethical and political significance.

This is the greatest impact of Blanchot's writings: to think about literature, to struggle with the question of literature, is to face the fundamental questions of our age.

The demand of literature, then. There is, thus, only one type of reading: reading! Something else is happening when we consume books, even if we think about them very seriously (our newspaper 'critics', our synopsis-writing friends in the blogosphere, myself often) or think about them hardly at all (our stereotype of a commuter reading his 'Dan Brown'). The continuum between active-passive, engaged-unengaged, is not where the demand is responded to. But it is that response, a response that should not need to be called anything other than reading, but is so much more than what we have begun to think reading merely need be, that is demanded of us if we want to begin to want "to think about literature, to struggle with the question of literature [and] to face the fundamental questions of our age."

Doubtless, there is sometimes a fearsome intelligence to the dinner-party guest who can hold forth about the latest Booker shortlist and their associated merits and demerits. And then there is someone, somewhere else, quietly reading in a corner, really reading, wowed and unnerved and silenced by the poetry of Celan. I've been impressed by that dinner-guest on many occasions (I think I may well have sometimes been a boorish version of that dinner-guest myself) and I have no doubt that s/he reads carefully, deeply, in an engaged and serious way. Equally, I have no doubt that, very often, they entirely miss the point not only of what they are reading at any particular time, but of what reading means and what a reader could or should be in response to Blanchot's demand -- or, rather, Blanchot's recognition of the demand of literature -- and away from the need either to see consuming texts as a legitimate leisure activity or a way to impress life's Greek chorus about your putative intelligence.

The irresistible power of the artist.
Digital print. Click to enlarge.

Lately, I've been experiencing episodes of G-Doubt.
Ink, pencil and collage. A4 size. Click to enlarge.

Robert Veatch is Professor of Medical Ethics at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics, Georgetown University. He received the career distinguished achievement award from Georgetown University in 2005 and has received honorary doctorates from Creighton and Union College. His new book, Patient, Heal Thyself: How the “New Medicine” Puts the Patient in Charge, he sheds light on a fundamental change sweeping through the American health care system, a change that puts the patient in charge of treatment to an unprecedented extent. In the original article below, Veatch looks at how the empowerment effected Michael Jackson’s medical decisions and the responsibility of his doctor.

Dr. Conrad Murray is the doctor who apparently administered a fatal dose of the anesthetic, propofol, to Michael Jackson in a desperate attempt to respond to his cries for help in getting some sleep. He has received rough treatment from the media. Jackson’s death has been ruled a homicide and the media are reporting that he will be charged with manslaughter. I think that judgment is too quick and want to come to the doctor’s defense.

The case is, of course, being tried in the press before we have all the details, but the likely scenario is emerging. Making some plausible assumptions, I think a case can be made for the doctor’s decisions. Let me assume, for purposes of discussion, that the doctor did not intend to kill Michael (He was reportedly being paid $150,000 a month to be Michael’s full time physician. Even if he had completely abandoned his duty to serve the patient, he would be a fool to intend the death.) Let me assume that the lethal effects were foreseeable, but not inevitable side effects of a very potent drug. Let me also assume that Michael had been informed by Dr. Murray how dangerous the drug was and how unusual it was to use it for this purpose. Possibly, he had even told Michael that the drug’s labeling did not include the use of propofol outside of a hospital and that almost all physicians would refuse to use it this way.

With these assumptions, a prosecutor will have a difficult time accusing the doctor of a crime. It is not even clear to me that “homicide” is the right term for the death. First, it is important to realize that “off-label” uses of drugs by doctors is not illegal. It is done all the time when a physician becomes convinced that it in the patient’s interest. Second, it is critical to understand that medical choices about what is in a patient’s interest are directly dependent on the patient’s goals and values. They cannot simply be read out of a textbook as if medical science can prove what is in a particular patient’s interest. (Think about whether aggressive chemotherapy is in a terminal cancer patient’s interest or whether an abortion is in the interest of a pregnant woman.) The patient’s interest is necessarily a subjective matter about which only the patient can have direct knowledge.

It seems clear that Michael was in the advanced stages of insomnia and was in excruciating agony from persistent lack of sleep. That is an awful situation about which patients often have to make desperate choices. None of us can know what was in Michael’s head that caused the insomnia or led him to plea for pharmacological intervention. We do know that other drugs had been used even that fateful night (benzodiazepines that are often used to reduce anxiety and induce sleep). These other drugs had failed to solve the problem and made the use of the propofol even more dangerous, something Dr. Murray surely knew and presumably had told Michael.

Now the question for Dr. Murray and for Michael Jackson is, given his desperate situation, is the only drug that will give him some sleep worth the very great risk of side effects, even death? Surely, for most of us the answer would be negative, but that doesn’t mean it was Michael’s answer. Given that he had apparently received the drug many previous times without side effects, I don’t see how we can claim that Michael would be wrong to decide that the risk would be worth it in his case. Deciding whether the drug is “worth it” is a value judgment, not a scientific fact that the doctor can look up in a book. Even if almost everyone else would have decided not to try the desperate off-label use, I don’t know how we can say Michael’s gamble was wrong for him.

But, you might say, even if Michael’s judgment was understandable, surely Dr. Murray was wrong to go along with his patient’s demand. Surely, other physicians would not have agreed. A physician is supposed to be a responsible professional who has the right not to go along with a patient’s very unusual and risky demand. Most physicians would have refused to provide the propofol (at least outside of a hospital) and that is understandable, but this does not prove that Michael’s value judgment about the risk was wrong or that Dr. Murray was wrong to comply. Some medical issues are appropriately judged by what is called a “standard of care.” The correctness of the physician’s behavior is judged by what his colleagues similarly situated would have done. This, however, is not a decision that should be judged by that standard. If it is possible that Michael had made a rationally defensible decision that the risk was worth it for him, then a physician is within his rights to decide to cooperate in a legal behavior if he so chooses. He surely would have had the right not to provide the dangerous drug for off-label use, but he also has the right to decide it is a tolerable risk. If he does so after the patient is adequately informed, I don’t see how we can fault him assuming that the lethal effect was not intended.

This turns out to be crucial for the rest of us if we are to get high-quality, rational medical care. We have for many years recognized that most powerful, valuable drugs have anticipated side effects. If we choose to take the risk and the side effect occurs, we don’t say that the choice was a mistake. If the side effect is death, we don’t say it was a homicide. Provided the intended beneficial effects are good enough, we say that the side effect is tolerable even if it is foreseen. That, in fact, is precisely the justification for doctors’ use of narcotics to control severe pain in cancer patients even though they know that the side effect can be respiratory depression and even death. Most ethical systems have long acknowledged that such “unintended, but foreseen” deaths are tolerable. Normally, such a death is not deemed a “homicide.” Just may be, if we put ourselves in Michael’s shoes and plug in the value judgments he made, we can understand why Dr. Murray, apparently with great reluctance, was willing to go along. I can’t fault him if that was what he did.

Click to enlarge.

The story of the bloke who didn't listen to the mahout from "The Man Who Wanted to Meet God: Myths and Stories that Explain the Inexplicable" a book of Indian parables by S.Saraswati
Linocut 32cm x 34cm. Click to enlarge.

Mouthwash. Bleach.

Detergent.

What is the hidden link that allows us to associate the three above products together?

Not only do we use these in our everyday strive for hygiene, but they all supposedly kill 99.9% of germs.

Let’s look at that again:

“xxx peppermint mouthwash: Kills germs 99.9%! Buy two now for ….$$$ Yadda Yadda.”

And again:

“Kills Germs 99.9%…”

However, they don’t actually make it clear whether it is the bacteria in our mouth or not.
So therefore, this can be taken several ways:

1. If I drip this onto a single germ, it will die 99.9% of the time.
2. 99.9% of germs will die once they come into contact with the mouthwash - what the “marketeering” people want you to think. ; OR
3. The mouthwash only affects 99.9% of all the known germs in the world.

I might be that one in a thousand :3

What do you think? (: Who knows? It’s a possibility.

Make mine a double.

Cassie, Publicity

Anthony Scioli is Professor of Clinical Psychology at Keene State College. Henry Biller is Professor of Clinical Psychology at the University of Rhode Island. Their new book, Hope in the Age of Anxiety, is a look at how we can be happy and healthy in a world filled with economic collapse, natural disasters, poverty, and the constant threat of terrorism. In this excerpt, they look at how finding meaning can positively affect your health.

What is meaning in life? Many lengthy philosophical essays have been written on this topic, but one of the most compelling descriptions can be found in a pithy five-page article written by philosopher Robert Baird. In Meaning in Life: Created or Discovered, Baird reduced the meaning-making process to three essential life tasks: cultivating depth and quality in your relationships, committing yourself to projects and goals, and fashioning stories that place your life in an ultimate context. Note that, once again, the big things in life come down to attachment, mastery, and survival, or in other words, hope. Perhaps this is why theologian Emil Brunner proclaimed: “What oxygen is to the lungs, such is hope to the meaning of life.”

Meaning in life is both a destination and a vehicle. As a destination, a meaningful life can be viewed as a desired end state or goal: every human being has a need to lead a life that makes sense to him or her on a personal level. As a vehicle, meaning making can pave the way to better health: being fully engaged in the flow of life and having a deep sense of purpose can make you more resistant to illness and extend your life. In both senses, the personal meaning in one’s life, like a potentially effective exercise program, usually requires some adjustment if it is to be sustained over time, and for many, that adjustment includes the incorporation of established traditions such as religious faith. But regardless, the meaning that one finds in life supports health because it solidifies hope.

Meaning as a health destination. Meaning is hardly a luxury item for a social animal endowed with prominent frontal lobes and a keen sense of future survival. Meaning is basic to human life. No amount of money or power can take its place. If these earthly gains sufficed, we would never see many of those who have them in spades destroy themselves with drugs, eating disorders, or other self-destructive behaviors. Horace Greeley put it well, “Fame is a vapor, popularity an accident . . . riches take wings.”

Meaning as a vehicle to better health. Individuals infused with meaning are well anchored. They have strong relationships, a potent sense of mastery, and an unwavering sense of purpose. In short, they are brimming with hope. What are the health benefits of such deep centeredness? Psychiatrist Viktor Frankl observed that those of his fellow prisoners at Auschwitz who were able to sustain some sense of purpose were less likely to succumb to illness. More than even food or medical care, a meaning-oriented outlook preserved the immune systems of these survivors.

Psychologist Carol Ryff has been among those who believe that meaning and purpose in life reduces allostatic load, the wear and tear of biological reactivity to stress. To the extent that spiritual beliefs impart meaning, this may be why high religious involvement tends to be associated with fewer cardiovascular crises and greater longevity. In a sense, the meaning-centered individual is less likely to be tossed adrift by what Shakespeare dubbed the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.”

Ryff and her colleagues tested the meaning hypothesis by studying 134 women, ages 61 to 91. They assessed both hedonic (joy and happiness) and eudaimonic well-being (meaning and purpose). Greater meaning and purpose, rather than more joy and happiness, emerged as the better health predictor. Specifically, those who reported greater eudaimonic well-being had lower levels of stress hormones and inflammatory cytokines as well as higher levels of HDL (”good” cholesterol). They also had a healthier body mass index.

The ability to derive meaning is also important for those already diagnosed with a serious illness. Denise Bowes of Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia and her colleagues conducted detailed interviews of nine women diagnosed with ovarian cancer. “Hope” and “finding meaning” were the two most important factors that determined perceived well-being. As one woman put it, “If you don’t have hope, then you don’t have anything really.”

The role of meaning as an illness buffer seems to be especially important for older individuals. One of us (A. S.), in collaboration with psychologist David McClelland, explored the impact of derived meaning, chronic illness, and age on reported morale in 80 younger (25 to 40) and 80 older (65 to 80) adults. The findings were fascinating. Older individuals were better able to derive meaning from experiences with illness than their younger counterparts. In addition, despite reporting twice as many chronic illnesses as the younger group, the older adults had significantly higher levels of morale. What accounted for this surprising finding? It appeared to be derived meaning. Among older adults, meaning was the strongest predictor of morale, exceeding by a factor of ten to one both the importance of age and the number or severity of chronic illnesses.