Rational Philosophy

“Today, I am not the person I was ten years ago.” Karl Svensson, a convicted murderer, told his Swedish classmates at medical school when his past caught up with him. The prestigious Karolinska Institute eventually side-stepped the unprecedented question of whether to expel Mr. Svensson simply because of his past criminal acts — once a neo-Nazi, apparently, Svensson’s crime had been deemed a hate crime. Instead, the institute expelled him on a technicality — he had falsified his high school records by substituting his assumed name for his birth name of Hellekant.  The story raises two very interesting questions: 1. Can we change? and 2. Should a person who has committed this kind of crime be allowed to practice medicine (or another similar profession)?

The New York Times editorial board has endorsed Hillary Clinton as the Democratic candidate. Its opinions supporting the endorsement of Clinton for the Democratic and McCain for the Republican vote make fascinatingly candid reading. The Times’ opinion of Clinton again raises the question of whether someone, fundamentally, can change. It left me wondering whether Clinton has changed, and, if so, whether she has changed enough to overcome the disadvantages in her character that have revealed themselves so often in the past — her divisiveness and “I know best” intellectual hardness. The Times uses the example of her “famously disastrous foray” into trying to solve the healthcare issue to support its premise that she has changed and now displays a new understanding of what’s to be done.

I’ve written before about our capacity to change as it relates to the concept of free will and personal development. Being conscious allows us to choose between options, and to select options that may be difficult, unattractive or counter to our immediate instinct. Through this reasoning we can see that it is possible to develop new levels of awareness and new patterns of behavior, to make choices different from those we would have made in the past.

But if we examine the concept of behavioral change we find a composite concept. And we tend to conflate and confuse its constituent parts: When I ask, “can we change?” I could really be asking two separate questions. The first: “Can someone become altered such that the same impulses will lead to different immediate responses?” And the second: “Can someone become altered such that the same impulses will lead to different eventual responses?”

Ten years go, in an angry confrontation, Svensson reacted violently. His immediate response was to be urged to violence. And he acted on this immediate response by lashing out.

To say that Svensson’s immediate response may have changed, we would have to believe that he would not feel urged to violence if faced with a similar confrontation ten years on. I would say that we have very little reason to believe that Svensson or anyone could change in this way simply through reflection and remorse. Our immediate, instinctual response is pre-conscious, and therefore isn’t subject to conscious influence.

On the other hand, to say that Svenssion’s eventual response may have changed seems a much more reasonable and rational conclusion. Svensson, still feeling a violent urge, could now have a modified conscious response and resist the desire to lash out.

Svensson’s classmates were split over whether he should be allowed to stay on. Those that supported him said that he’d paid his debt and, by inference, should be trusted to have changed his conscious response to confrontation. But we can infer that those of his classmates who still distrusted him understood and feared that his immediate response to confrontation (or other stress) could and indeed would still be violent.

Should a violent killer, rehabilitated in his conscious actions, be trusted in the medical profession? To answer that question we would need to understand the degree and range of provocation that Svensson may react violently to, and the strength of his newfound ability to keep his emotions in check. In the absence of reliable ways and means to measure these variables, it would seem reasonable for society not to want Svensson providing medical care. Svensson has rights of freedom, but it also seems reasonable for society to say that he has forgone some of those rights (such as an unfettered choice of career) by his past actions.

So to Hillary Clinton: Although the circumstances are very different, we are confronted with the same logical argument. As I understand it, the instinctual fervor of Clinton’s liberal ideological passion inspired and limited her original approach to tackling the healthcare issue. Her newfound understanding means that she’s better able to consciously override her immediate divisive response. But the concern remains that she would encounter similar instinctual responses in a broad range of political situations.

As we’ve seen with Bush and as tends to happen to those in high office, the stresses and demands of the job certainly don’t make it easier to overcome one’s immediate responses. As the Times’ opinion points out, Clinton has been succumbing to these impulses during her campaigning, underscoring the perspective that we have reason to doubt that she has truly learned to keep her immediate responses in check.

Obama, on the other hand, reveals a more promising character for non-devisive leadership. This then narrows the gap between the candidates that the Times claims to exist, and perhaps even makes Obama the more logical choice. It becomes a matter of character versus experience. I for one would choose character every time.

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I didn’t post yesterday as I have pneumonia. I’ll try a quick post today because I’m feeling a little better, and because Mitt Romney’s speech on faith has me alarmed.

I highly recommend The NY Times editorial, Crisis of Faith, bravo. Of several pieces I’ve read it is the only one I’ve found that focuses on the distressing fact that Romney chose to make the speech in the first place. The rest seem to take it for granted that this kind of focus on religion is par for the course in a political race in America in 2007.

David Brooks, for instance, laments that Romney succeeded only in blurring the distinctions between faiths until one’s choice of religion may as well be a matter of picking “the one with the prettiest buildings?” I may be wrong, but Brooks seems almost offended that Romney didn’t rank religions by their degree of goodness.

As reported by CNN, Bill Bennett and Roland Martin debated the effectiveness of Romney’s speech; did it succeed in its political objectives. I can see how such inquiry can be of a certain amount of interest or even fascination, but if this is the primary level on which we judge such an event, surely there is a bigger problem.

As the Times editorial points out, Article VI of the Constitution states that “no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.” And yet this is exactly what is happening in politics today. Romney succumbed to pressure to take such a test. Other candidates are doing the same thing. The general media implicitly or explictly supports or condones such tests in all manner of ways ranging from allowing an explicitly religious test to be posed as a question in a debate, to focusing political commentary on the content or success of a candidate’s religious posturing rather than questioning why the candidate is posturing.

If you have the stomach for it, you can listen to Romney’s speech or read a transcript via NPR.

Everything that’s wrong about Romney’s speech is contained within it. He equates freedom with religion, for instance, and states that freedom is given by God, the Creator. He refers sarcastically to ‘enlightenment’ in Europe as if it is intrinsically a bad thing. He tries to concretize a definition of America as a religious nation.

The phenomenon of religious sway in America and the stranglehold it has on so many matters of national importance can be tied, I think, to a culture of isolationism and fear. America has yet to accomplish freedom from religion because too many of those with influence, in society and in government, fear the ramifications of such freedom and believe that America is right in clinging to the notion that God somehow looks down with favor on it.

Then is this freedom? Hasn’t religion now become a constraint?

Religion is humankind’s way of trying to conceive of where we came from. Religious faith is humankind’s way of holding on to an idea of where we came from in the face of obstacles to that idea.

Religion began as a natural and imaginative way for people to explain certain things that seemed inexplicable. The earliest religions focused on things such as the heavenly bodies (one could say that worshipping the sun comes closer to revering the source of life than any other religion!) or the spirits of the earth. As our scientific understanding of the world improved the basis for religious understanding receded ever further from the realm of everyday life, into something quite nebulous and remote.

This is the philosophical aspect to the piece: Religion cannot be supported logically or rationally. There are those who would rebutt that neither can atheism or agnosticism. I would beg that there is a difference. If we take as a ground for our awareness of our existence the input of our senses, we can build up a picture of the world as we perceive it from entirely logical and rational principles without ever calling upon the need for a god or creator. I cannot prove that there is no god, but I can demonstrate, logically and rationally, to my own satisfaction that my place in the world and the way the world works (even the way religions function) can be understood without calling upon some divine creator.

I’m alarmed by Romney’s speech because this culture of religion and its clamor will hold America back, and will continue to cause harm in the world in the name of good. As long as America defines itself as a religious nation, it will continue to spawn and support crusades, both here at home and abroad. It will further isolate America from the rest of the world. And it will perpetuate the religious moralizing that prevents politicians from making perfectly sound decisions because they’re afraid to stand up to the zealots in the community.