Dissolving the Dilemmas over Stem Cells

The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein cautioned that we must be on guard against “the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.” What the most important philosopher of the 20th century was concerned about here are the problems and confusions dualistic terms (i.e., mind & body) can generate when language goes on holiday. More concretely, the use of conceptually separate terms like mind and body force us to think that there must be real ontological entities to which those terms refer. If I say “It is raining,” for instance, I certainly do not mean to suggest there is an entity called “It” that is raining.

Virtually every neuroscientist recognizes that the terms mind and brain are two ways of talking about the same thing. Of course, brains are “things” only in a loose way of speaking. After all, brains give rise to subjectivity, which is a rather awe inspiring phenomenon. As Wittgenstein noted, “It is the “I,” it is the I that is deeply mysterious.” However, Wittgenstein – like most scientists today – was a monist, which is the say he believed the brain/mind was a single substance (or process).

This is a good thing, since dualism, the notion than the mind is a separate entity from the physical brain, has for all practical purposes been discredited as incoherent and unempirical. Unfortunately, dualism lives on for the scientifically and philosophically illiterate. In fact, dualistic thinking permeates pro-life arguments against abortion. Put simply, if dualism is false – and the scientific and philosophical case against dualism is overwhelming – then the central arguments pro-lifers make against abortion and stem cell research rest on unsound assumptions.

Pro-life groups maintain every embryo is an individual from the moment of conception. From this it follows that every embryo is: 1) sacred, 2) part of the human community, and 3) entitled to the rights and protections we afford every member of the human family. Using words like “scared,” “community,” and “family” in association with the embryo, of course, primes audiences to see things a certain way. Science uses similar rhetorical techniques, but the way scientists use language tends to make objects seem more impersonal. Language, in a sense, can create reality, or at least frame our perception of reality.

The way pro-life advocates use language in relationship to embryos is instrumental in creating moral dilemmas that evaporate if one approaches the matter more objectively. To begin with, the notion that the “moment of conception” marks some miraculous, transcendental, or non-physical event is not an idea that holds up to rational scrutiny. First of all, the so-called moment of conception is not a moment at all, it is an entirely biochemical process that lasts several hours at a minimum. Second, individuality is not something present (or created) at the moment of conception. After all, many zygotes split in two several weeks after conception, a phenomenon which leads to twins.

But the most damning argument against assuming there is anything sacred or miraculous about the typical embryo comes from Mother Nature. Simply put, most embryos never develop into human beings because embryos frequently fail to implant or because they spontaneously and naturally abort.

Pro-lifers frequently resort to false choices. Writing in the Washington Post, for instance, Michael Gerson offers the following either/or choice: 1) embryos are sacred or 2) embryos are protoplasmic rubbish.

Thinking in terms of moral absolutes is what gets us in to trouble here. Put simply, context matters. For instance, imagine the following thought experiment: a fertility clinic housing 1,000,000 surplus embryos is on fire. There is a fifty-fifty chance the embryos can be saved, but only at great risk to the firefighters. Should we ask the firefighters to risk their lives to save the embryos? I would argue, the loss of 1,000,000 insentient embryos is not worth the life of even one human being embedded within a family and a community.

Conversely, it is possible to imagine another thought experiment: a plague has broken out which has rendered every woman of childbearing age on the planet infertile. Only a handful of viable embryos remain anywhere on earth. Under such circumstances, shouldn’t the safety and well-being of such embryos be preserved at all costs until some way is found to perpetuate the human race?

The moral value of an embryo is not nil, nor is it absolute. To a large extent, the moral dilemma of using embryos to create stem cell lines exists because of the way pro-life advocate use – and very often misuse – language. Wittgenstein recognized that the mind/body problem was a function of our language games. There is a lesson here for pro-life advocates.

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How the Bush Administration Bankrupted America; How the Obama Administration can Restore America's Prosperity

Conservatives are like the comedian Rodney Dangerfield these days, they can't get no respect. In the public mind, figures like Rush Limbaugh, Bobby Jindal, Joe the Plumber, and Sarah Palin are a source of bemusement, a slightly annoying but nonetheless chuckle-producing diversion from the calamities the conservative movement helped engineer.

The same cannot be said, alas, for conservative commentators like Charles Krauthhammer, Michael Gerson, and Sean Hannity (a trio of humorless blowhards oozing animus from every pore). I suspect their vinegary dispositions stem from the fact that their most cherished beliefs are constantly at variance with reality. As William James recognized, there is nothing more painful than false belief.

The financial pain America is currently facing can be traced to a set of false beliefs that constitute the core of conservatism's economic doctrine. These discredited principles include: the notion that tax cuts pay for themselves, the idea markets are self-correcting, and the belief that deregulation serves the common good.

Tax cuts are to conservatives what crack cocaine is to lab rats. The basic idea behind supply-side economics is that taxes must be lowered on America's most productive (i.e., wealthiest) citizens because they alone possess the wherewithal to put capital to work. Conversely, transferring resources to the poor, so the thinking goes, will only insure that wealth is squandered on unproductive forms of consumption.

The wealthy received their tax breaks under the Bush administration, but the promised investment glut never materialized. Conservatives have peddled the notion that taxes are a form of punishment, or a disincentive to productivity. But a truer view of taxes comes from Oliver Wendell Holmes, who held that taxes are the price of civilization. If Holmes is right, then it follows that those who benefit the most from society (i.e., the wealthiest) owe the greatest share in return.

The origins of the current financial crisis are complex. Americans had been living beyond their means on borrowed credit for too long. The United States staked its future on financial services and products, as opposed to manufactured goods. To make up for the trade deficit the United States borrowed heavily from countries like China to keep the good times rolling. Debt-ridden consumers, however, found they could no longer afford to products once housing prices were undermined by deadbeat sub-prime borrowers. By this stage, as British historian Niall Ferguson observes, the United States has become a sub-prime superpower.

To reverse America's economic fortunes, the Obama administration must increase the earnings power of the vast majority of ordinary Americans. Doing this will require substantial and sustained investment to upgrade public education, our healthcare system, and our infrastructure. Investments along these lines are necessary to insure that Americans are the brightest, healthiest, and productive workforce on the planet. When we are once again making the products and services the world wants to buy, then incomes will rise. This will revitalize consumer spending, leading to corporate profits, which will translate into rising stock prices.

Tax cuts disproportionally aimed at the wealthy did not lead to broad-based income gains or the kind of investments America needs to ensure sustainable prosperity. Free market fundamentalism has also proved to be a false creed. Put simply, if the last eight years have shown anything it is that free markers do not inexorably allocate resources efficiently or rationally. In fact, free market fundamentalism has proven to be nothing but a cover for crony capitalism, whereby the powerful and well-connected rewarded themselves by feeding at the public trough. The fact that the financial wizards that created the current crisis walked away with billions, while America's healthcare, education, and infrastructure needs were starved, illustrates the total intellectual and moral bankruptcy of free market fundamentalism.

Looting the financial system and cannibalizing companies could not have happened to the extent it did without wholesale deregulation. The invasion of Iraq was another conservative enterprise predicated on false premises that helped bankrupt the United States, and not just economically but morally too. Of course, conservatives are loath to admit they are wrong, which explains why Krauthhammer and others are trying to portray the Iraq War as a victory. A pyrrhic victory, perhaps, but mostly the Iraq War has been a strategic debacle that siphoned America's blood and treasure in a failed bid to leverage our military might to transform the Middle East. As the historian Arnold Toynbee recognized, societies that attempt to remake far off outposts on the periphery of empire are invariably less successful than societies that remake themselves.

Revitalizing America is a herculean task facing Obama. Conservative commentators have generally heaped scorn upon the Obama administration's approach, which will make government a more central partner in shaping the economic landscape of the future. As Michael Gerson ludicrously puts it, "governments don't invest, they spend." Obviously, Gerson is thinking of the Bush administration, not the far-sighted administrations that initiated the GI bill, the interstate highway system, and the Internet.

Krauthammer is even more obtuse than Gerson. The dyspeptic Krauthammer completely fails to see how healthcare has anything to do with the current financial crisis or its cure. Let me enlighten this vapid windbag. The current healthcare system is an inefficient monstrosity with private insurance companies gobbling up resources to feed a vast bureaucratic apparatus collecting premiums from those who don't need healthcare while denying treatment to those who need it.

Ok, that's a bit of a caricature, but it captures an essential truth: private insurers represent a vast layer absorbing our healthcare dollars, but this layer does not deliver healthcare. This system has become an albatross for businesses and individuals. For instance, the cost of health insurance has to be factored into every product, which makes U.S. goods less competitive. Additionally, it stifles individual initiative – i.e., under the current system, employees will be less inclined to leave dead end jobs to pursue more rewarding opportunities if they fear they'll lose their health coverage in the process.

Conservatives like Krauthhammer, Gerson, and Hannity appear congenitally incapable of connecting the dots. These guys are like Rodney Dangerfield – the joke always seems to be on them and they don't get no respect.

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Is the Surge Really Working?

The surge in Iraq may be succeeding (at least on a superficial tactical level) but America is sinking thanks to the strategic ineptitude of the Bush administration. John McCain, according to the Washington Post’s Michael Gerson, is close to clinching the Republican nomination because he courageously embraced Bush’s troop surge, and now that unpopular decision, Gerson argues, is in the process of being vindicated.

To be sure, any reduction in violence is a welcome sign, but the notion that the United States is achieving momentum towards “victory” reflects a tragic misunderstanding on part of Republicans. The United States could eventually achieve stability in Iraq, but at this stage any victory is likely to prove phyrric. That is, any “benefits” will amount to averting and mitigating consequences and potential worst-case scenarios set in motion by the ill-considered invasion and disastrously managed occupation itself. Stabilizing Iraq may have at best a neutral impact on global terrorism, though in all-likelihood America’s presence in region will be a rallying cry for jihadists for decades to come. Put simply, Iraq became the spawning ground for a new generation of anti-Western foot soldiers who can take battlefield experience and techniques gleaned in Iraq to Afghanistan, Pakistan, Europe, and elsewhere.

Bush’s theory that a democratic Iraq would transform the Middle East has been turned on its head. Spreading liberty as a way of reducing terrorism was a tempting panacea at best, but it is proving simplistic and false. The United States can continue to pour blood and treasure into Iraq, but in the interim it is neglecting its own crumbling infrastructure and the investments it needs to secure a more prosperous economic future. Ironically, at the very moment it’s own resilience is being sorely tested the country is facing a series of virtually unprecedented environmental calamities. Responsible scientists will not attribute any one event to global warming, but taken as a whole the wildfires, tornadoes, and other natural disasters we’ve seen of late are beginning to represent a scale of devastation forecast by Al Gore and experts on global climate change. On this issue, tragically, George Bush and his conservative minions resemble nothing so much as a flock of ostriches with their collective heads in the sand.

The cultural anthropologist Jared Diamond, in his book Collapse, observes how the decline of great powers are often associated with military defeats on the periphery of empire, which in truth mask ecological collapse at home. There is no doubt – none whatsoever – that the seven years of the Bush administration have led to an unprecedented decline in America’s strategic, moral, and economic strength. In simple terms, the United States is in a vicious cycle: Borrowing money to purchase oil from Middle East, which empowers anti-American forces, while simultaneously contributing to the high level of carbon emissions that fuel global warming. Bush, for his part, seems oblivious to the fact that American taxpayers are funding both sides in the terror war. To add insult to injury, many victims of Katrina and the tornadoes in the South have family members serving in Iraq. We are stuck in a war we never should have launched while the Bush administration completely ignored the gathering threat posed by environmental calamities fueled by global warming, which our own imprudent and unsustainable energy habits helped bring about.

Great leaders have a sense for the arc of history. That is, they see where history is going and they prepare their people to face the challenges of the future. Al Gore, for instance, has been trying to educate the public on global warming for three decades. He was also prescient – in a way Bush is incapable of – in recognizing the potential the U.S. led invasion and occupation of Iraq would have to ignite sectarian conflict that could destabilize the entire Middle East.

Gore (and most Democrats) understand that confronting the challenge of Islamic extremism will take a lot more that marshalling America’s military power; it will take diplomatic suasion and bi-partisan cooperation to rally the world behind a comprehensive strategy to increase the ideological appeal of America and its Western values (especially women’s rights and the separation of church and state) while reducing the appeal of Islamic extremism. It will also entail taking the United States beyond the carbon era.

Gore’s rational approach to problem solving contrasts sharply with Bush’s disastrous faith-based approach to governing. Conservative ideologues like Bush see terrorism as a manifestation of ontological Evil, a superstitious outlook that engenders a historical form of madness akin to the Salem witch trials or the Inquisition. It is no accident, for instance, that Bush’s response to the challenge of terrorism includes waterboarding and other forms of torture generally associated with the Middle Ages. Indeed, his style of leadership hearkens back to the Divine Right of Kings, the long discredited notion that a political leader functions as God’s regent here on earth.

The historian Arnold Toynbee observed that the rise of religious fundamentalism is invariably a sign of civil decline. He also observed that civilizations that attempt meet existential challenges by remaking the rest of the world (especially far-flung outposts on the periphery of empire) are invariably less successful that than civilizations that remake and renew themselves from within. This insight goes along way in explaining the Bush tragedy; the Bush administration has effectively outsourced America’s national security to Iraq’s security forces.

The surge has produced some tactical advantages, but there are compelling reasons to doubt they can be sustained. For one thing, widespread corruption governing the dispersion of oil revenues does not bode well for a political reconciliation. Further, Iraq’s various militias recognize the surge is by its nature of limited duration. Thus, they have every incentive to lay low and/or play-up their al-Qaeda fighting bona fides in the hopes of procuring as much American aid and equipment before Iraq enters the next phase when American troops begin to draw down in the Spring/Summer of 2008.

America’s predicament in Iraq resembles a Zugswang, which is a situation in chess where every possible move you make will leave you worse off. The United States may prevail in Iraq, yet maintaining the present commitment is likely to further hasten America’s decline. Those among Bush’s dwindling number of apologist who still believe that some decades from now the United States will be able to declare “Mission Accomplished” should remember the words of King Pyrrhus: “one more victory such as this and we are ruined.”

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Bush’s State of Disunion

Bush’s State of the Union was a surreal exercise in self-delusion. Virtually everyone – Republicans and Democrats – recognize the Bush administration has been a catastrophic failure, but lawmakers on both sides of the aisles treated our hapless and incompetent president to rapturous applause. It may be a measure of how morally obtuse our political class is that a hoard of legislators sought the autograph of the man who presided over Katrina, Guantanamo, and the tragically mishandled invasion of Iraq.

All the available evidence suggests that George W. Bush is poised to eclipse Andrew Johnson, Warren Harding, and Richard Nixon as the single worst chief executive in presidential history. Still, a dwindling number of Bush sycophants and apologists believe forty-three will be vindicated by history, just as Harry Truman has been. However, it is becoming increasingly difficult to square their Pollyannaish views with the grim reality that over the last seven years the United States has suffered an unprecedented and precipitous decline in its national power and moral prestige. Put simply, Bush’s policies have left the United States isolated, drained, and divided while greatly exacerbating the strategic and economic challenges the country faces.

Former Bush scriptwriter, Michael Gerson, tries to put the best spin on Bush’s State of the Union in his column in the Washington Post. Bush, Gerson argues, has remained true to the principles of compassionate conservatism. His faith-based initiatives, AIDS relief efforts, and educational reforms associated with the No Child Left Behind legislation represent the "persistent advocacy" of a compassionate leader. Bush bashing has become an industry fueled on hatred, Gerson implies, of a decent man who aimed to do well.

I’ve never subscribed to the simple-minded view that Gergon attributes to Bush critics, namely, that Bush is "heartless and callous." No doubt, Bush’s legacy will include some admirable and worthy accomplishments. Ironically, however, I believe it is Bush messianic idealism coupled with his personal mediocrity that accounts for the unfolding multiple tragedies his administration is responsible for.

At one time or another, Bush has exhibited an axis-of-mental ills – dyslexia, attention deficit disorder, alcoholism – that probably go a long way to explaining the perverse mixture of hubris and ineptness he has displayed in office. It’s not that Bush is unintelligent, by any means, but his thought processes and reasoning are demonstrably defective. His persistent resort to cliches, mixed metaphors, and non-sequitars, for instance, is a sign of artful demagoguery at best, or serious cognitive deficits at worst.

It’s easy to laugh at the mixed metaphor that has become virtually synonymous with the Bush administration’s spectacular intelligence failure regarding Saddam’s phantom WMD -- "we can’t wait for the smoking gun to become a mushroom cloud" – but as the pundit Karl Kraus recognized long ago, a person’s character is invariably revealed by the way they use language. It’s probably no accident that Bush failed to connect the dots prior to 9/11, and then subsequently connected dots where there was no logical connection (Iraq and al-Qaeda). Likewise, his decision to lump three disparate states into the infamous "axis-of-evil" is another example of Bush connecting the dots where no formal alliance or real-world connection existed.

Bush’s ADD almost certainly has everything to do with the lack of due diligence he displayed in the run up to the Iraq War. Whether it is the infamous sixteen words that everyone agrees should never have appeared in 2003 State of the Union, or the failure to prepare for the occupation of Iraq, Bush’s decision-making processes can best be characterized as rash, impetuous, reckless, and ill considered. He never planned for worst-case scenarios because he mistook prudence for pessimism. And he never allowed evidence or the facts to get in the way of his instincts. Bush’s ADD has made him a deeply irrational decision-maker.

Bush’s "leadership" has been a moral, strategic, and economic calamity for the United States. As recession looms, the deficit swells, and the dollar slumps to new lows it is becoming apparent to most Americans just how much the country has been steered in the wrong direction by the Bush administration. The architect of America’s great unraveling, however, remains largely oblivious to all this. How is this possible? I remember a Town Meeting where President Bush was asked about his decision to go to war with Iraq. Bush defended his war of choice, but surreally blamed Saddam for kicking the UN weapons inspectors out of the country. Much of the audience – and I’m sure Bush too – probably believed the U.S. had done everything it could to avoid war.

The only problem, of course, is that it wasn’t Saddam who kicked the inspectors out of Iraq, it was president Bush that ordered them out because he insisted the inspections weren’t working. Another couple of weeks, Hans Blix contented later, and we’d have known for sure that Saddam never had the alleged WMD stockpiles. Even after the fact, Bush couldn’t admit the truth. It’s a telling revelation of a president who will probably go down in history as the political equivalent of Inspector Clouseau.

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