Order in the Court/World

     This idea of "order" began by my reading of an article on judicial law in the UK (from the London Review of Books), a piece which spoke of the laws against assisted suicide: ...the law continues to inhibit the entitlement of a sane individual to draw a line under a life that may well have been fulfilling and worthwhile but has now become unbearable, by threatening to prosecute and jail anyone who –regardless of motive– gives them the help they need to end it.  Not only this; if the helper –a spouse, say– would have inherited the deceased person’s estate, the law may step in to disinherit them.  Whether it actually does so depends on the applicability of forfeiture legislation, which itself defers to what it recognises as a principle of public policy –that is to say, a principle developed and applied by the courts– that denies a wrongdoer the fruits of his or her own crime ‘in certain circumstances’, as the statute reticently puts it.  What these circumstances are is nowhere spelled out: do they for instance include manslaughter by reason of diminished responsibility?  A dependant who helps a patient die may escape prosecution but end up penniless.  If this sounds a bit prescient to the recent Texas anti-abortion law (SB8 denies even rape and incest victims recourse, and allows anyone --even someone not related to the victim-- to sue), one has to remember that the UK law went on the books in 1961, while the Texas law arrived 60 years later.  The author of the UK piece appears to imply that such laws are due primarily because of early religious backgrounds among their justices and how such beliefs may have dribbled over to the political partisanship in the US.  Hmm, but it was then that my thoughts began veering off into the realm of Picard and crystal meth (what??)...

     Jump to a piece by William Deresiewiez who wrote a review in The Atlantic: Many years ago, when I was a junior professor at Yale, I cold-called a colleague in the anthropology department for assistance with a project I was working on.  I didn’t know anything about the guy; I just selected him because he was young, and therefore, I figured, more likely to agree to talk.  Five minutes into our lunch, I realized that I was in the presence of a genius.  Not an extremely intelligent person—a genius.  There’s a qualitative difference.  The individual across the table seemed to belong to a different order of being from me, like a visitor from a higher dimension.  I had never experienced anything like it before.  I quickly went from trying to keep up with him, to hanging on for dear life, to simply sitting there in wonder.  Basically, the person he is talking about (David Graeber) went on to co-author a new version of the history of civilization; in other words what we've "learned" so far, he suggested --about empires and native Americans and early humans and the rise of agriculture/industrialization/governments-- might be quite inaccurate...sort of like the series Picard* which postulated that organic "life" (which is pretty much us) was actually a byproduct of a more intelligent but synthetic life.

     If that sounds like quite the leap, consider these recent observations about a form of life that has been on Earth 2500 times longer than we have: cephlapods.  Wrote a piece in National Geographic (on squid research): Last year, this research took a major step forward when a group of scientists at the laboratory successfully used the gene editing tool CRISPR-Cas9 to disable, or “knock out,” a gene in the Doryteuthis squid—a first for any member of the talented group of mollusks known as cephalopods.  The work paves the way for scientists to investigate the genetics behind cephalopods’ near extraterrestrial abilities, from squid’s color-changing skin cells to cuttlefish’s duplicitous mating behavior to octopus’s capacity for memory and learning.  “How have they figured out different ways to make these complex behaviors?” wonders molecular biologist Josh Rosenthal.   Then there was this from Hakai (on octopuses): Human perception of the octopus is, much like the creature itself, manifold and mercurial.  Depending on the circumstances, we have portrayed them as monsters and marvels, aliens and appetizers.  The fact that octopuses are now widely agreed to be sentient creatures of exceptional intelligence and adaptability urges us to seriously consider the possibility of reciprocal human-octopus companionship.  Yet their exquisitely unfamiliar biology makes them particularly easy to misinterpret...If we accept that octopuses are as conscious and clever as they appear to be --that they are capable of contemplation and choice-- then we must accept the possibility of reciprocal human-octopus friendships.  At the same time, we must acknowledge that, in all likelihood, octopuses’ umwelt --the particular way they experience the world-- is extremely different from our own, and that our ability to communicate with them is severely restricted.   In his book Super Fly, Jonathan Balcombe wrote: Isn't it interesting how readily we acknowledge self-awareness in a mammal but grasp for alternative explanations in an insect because it defies our expectations...Evolution is a master problem solver.  With the luxury of eons of time, and a huge diversity of natural resources to experiment with, evolution has wrought organisms with stunning adaptations.  Some of these suggest intelligence that seems improbable.

     In an interview with B.R. Cohen, author Meghan O'Gieblyn said: Why are there so many similarities between those theological questions and current debates about technology and human identity?  Why are we still talking about the same problems that Augustine was writing about, and Aquinas?  There are a lot of different ways that these questions found their way into science and technology...Those problems got baked into mechanistic philosophy and then into our machines themselves.  And those questions are now reemerging in artificial intelligence, which again brings up the problem of consciousness and the mind/body problem.  Can machines think?  Are we just machines?  She also wrote about order and perhaps the importance of routine in Harpers: Is it possible in our age of advanced technology to recall the spiritual dimension of repetition?  Or has it been conclusively subsumed into the deadening drumbeat of modern life?...If machines once ordered life around the uncompromising efficiency of the clock, digital technologies have dissolved the structure of the workweek and further collapsed the distinctions between public and private life.  The internet is not a place of order but a boundless abyss that erases the contours of individual hours, swallows entire days, and inundates our lives with a vague sense of possibility never quite realized, leaving us, in the end, with that low-grade spiritual exhaustion for which “decision fatigue” seems too weak a term.

     Our sometimes feeble minds can often imagine complex things while also discovering that some concepts are simply beyond our reach; how can something be without beginning and without an end?  How can we connect our conscious mind with our unconscious one (and are there more than just those two)?  The new crystal meth now so prevalent on today's streets gave a quick glimpse of this, wrote a sobering piece** in The Atlantic; gone are the days of using Sudafed and ephedrine to make meth, it wrote.  Enter ever more sophisticated (and relatively easy to manufacture) chemicals, replacing the earlier chemicals of lead and mercury, cyanide and hydrochloric acid; unfortunately the newer, more easily-acquired chemicals used in the P2P process are even more damaging.  Said the excerpt: Methamphetamine is a neurotoxin—it damages the brain no matter how it is derived.  But P2P meth seems to create a higher order of cerebral catastrophe.  “I don’t know that I would even call it meth anymore,” Ken Vick, the director of a drug-treatment center in Kansas City, Missouri, told me.  Schizophrenia and bipolar disorder are afflictions that begin in the young.  Now people in their 30s and 40s with no prior history of mental illness seemed to be going mad...“The degree of mental-health disturbance; the wave of psychosis; the profound, profound disorganization [is something] I’ve never seen before,” Rachel Solotaroff, the CEO of Central City Concern, the social-service nonprofit that ran the station, told me.  Solotaroff was among the first people I spoke with.  She sounded overwhelmed.  “If they’re not raging and agitated, they can be completely noncommunicative.  Treating addiction [relies] on your ability to have a connection with someone.  But I’ve never experienced something like this—where there’s no way in to that person.”

     But what of the other viewpoint, that of the users?  Megan Schabbing, a psychiatrist and the medical director of emergency psychiatric services at OhioHealth, in Columbus, Ohio...spends much of her time on the job digging into the underlying causes of drug use among those who end up in the ER.  Often there was trauma: beatings, molestation, rape, war deployment, childhood chaos, neglect.  For many of these patients, she discovered, the delusions fueled by meth became the point—the drug’s attraction.  “Many would tell me, ‘I can stay out of reality on the street’ ” by using meth, she said.  “When they come to us, it takes them days to figure out who and where they are.  But some patients have told me that’s not a bad thing if you’re on the street.”...Said one homeless meth user: “we’re making the choice to separate ourselves from everyone else—instead of someone pushing us out.  I think it’s our way to hide from the world that doesn’t accept us."    

    So picture this, your orderly world is unexpectedly turned upside down.  You get sick and are now in the hospital; your home is burglarized; your memory seems to be diminishing; your dog passes away.  Or this, from the London Review of Books about what's happening in Lebanon; wrote Stefan Tarnowski: If you do get petrol, how much you pay for it depends on where your money is.  Twenty litres will set you back 125,000 Lebanese lira. At the official, pegged exchange rate that’s $83.  But if you’re fortunate enough to own real dollar bills – which we’ve taken to calling ‘fresh dollars’ – and exchange them on the black market then the petrol will cost you less than $7.  Or, if you’re a member of the middle classes who deposited dollars in a bank account before October 2019 --dollars which can now only be withdrawn as ‘lollars’-- then you’ll end up paying $32.  On some days supermarkets close because the exchange rate is fluctuating so rapidly they don’t know how to price their goods.  Most shops no longer use price tags: you find out how much you’re going to pay when you reach the till.

     Like it or not, there is a calmness when order is restored, when you arrive back home after a long and enjoyable vacation, when you open the door and someone --even your dog is cat-- is there, when the heater begins warming up the apartment.  Such small but important parts of "our" world are reminders to be grateful since so many others in the world don't or can't experience such things.  For many, life is a return to a tent, a zone of safety and life, but a twilight zone of sorts.  Where or when is the exit?  The series Maid and the movie Lorelei brought these issues to the forefront, the urge to keep hoping that life --surviving life really-- would change, even as the days seemed to not do so.  Our choices now would matter; the bigger issues would follow.  We must not abandon hope.  Wrote Jane Goodall in her recent co-authored book on hope: People really want to believe that they can make a difference, but sometimes they need to hear it from someone who has seen firsthand what people are doing,  Seeing how people respond helps, but there's something else.  When I was spending hours alone in the forest at Gombe, I felt a part of the natural world, closely connected with a Great Spiritual Power.  And that power is with me at all times, a force I can turn to for courage and strength.  And sharing that power with others helps me to give people hope.  

    Whether you believe we are human or machine, organic or synthetic, conscious or just a random conflagration of atoms, we are us, packed with thoughts and routines, outlooks and hope.  It is a time to be grateful, even if we may be fearful, a time to help others even all we can offer is a smile or a hand.  A time to come together and to be alone.  "..time spent away from the influence of others allows us to explore and define who we are, " wrote Stephanie Rosenbloom in her book Alone Time.  The mind can cackle with intense focus or go beachcombing plucking up an idea like a shell, examining and pocketing it, or letting it go to pick up another...Alone we can power down.  We're "off stage," as the sociologist Erving Goffman put it, where we can doff the mask we wear in public and be ourselves.  We can be reflective.  We have the opportunity for self-evaluation, a chance to consider out actions and take what Westin called a "moral inventory."  We can, in a sense, run a self-diagnostic.  With a new year underway and our routines disrupted by pesky viruses and changing economies, it may be a good time to cocoon ourselves and yet use the time, to let our auto-pilot take over for a tiny bit and just begin to dream.  What we dream and the direction it will take us remains unknown. We can only hope...

 

*This is not meant as an endorsement because on a personal level, we found the series too filled with fluff as if stretched from what we felt should have been 3 episodes into a sleep-inducing 10 (and spoiler alert, the series returns for another season).

**Pleading ignorance, I didn't realize that meth users are totally different than opioid users, the addictive chemicals targeting different receptors in the brain.  One problem, noted the excerpt, was this: Opioid addicts began to shift, en masse, to meth.  Meth overdoses have risen rapidly in recent years, but they are much less common than opioid ODs—you don’t typically overdose and die on meth; you decay.