by James Carroll, Boston Globe

Reposted from:
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2007/03/19/the_many_forms_of_fundamentalism/

NEARLY A decade and a half ago, this condemnation of fundamentalism was issued: “The fundamentalist approach is dangerous, for it is attractive to people who look to the Bible for ready answers to the problems of life . . . instead of telling them that the Bible does not necessarily contain an immediate answer to each and every problem. . . . Fundamentalism actually invites people to a kind of intellectual suicide. It injects into life a false certitude, for it unwittingly confuses the divine substance of the biblical message with what are in fact its human limitations.” This robust denunciation came from the Vatican, in a 1993 document entitled “The Interpretation of the Bible in the Church.”

The phenomenon of “fundamentalism” has made an extraordinary impact on the world. But what is it? The scholar Gabriel A. Almond defines fundamentalism as “religious militance by which self-styled ‘true-believers’ attempt to arrest the erosion of religious identity, fortify the borders of the religious community, and create viable alternatives to secular institutions and behaviors.” Some fundamentalists pursue openly political agendas (Northern Ireland, Israel, Iran). Some are apolitical (Latin American Pentecostalism). In war zones (Sudan, Afghanistan, Palestine, Sri Lanka), fundamentalism is energizing conflict. Most notably, the warring groups in Iraq have jelled around fundamentalist religion.

These varied manifestations resist being defined with one word, which is why it is better, as Almond suggests, to speak of “fundamentalisms.” But they all have something in common, and as the Vatican critique of biblical fundamentalism suggests, it is dangerous. The impulse may begin with good intentions, the wish to affirm basic values and sources of meaning that seemed threatened. The term was born when conservative Protestants in early-20th-century America committed themselves to defend the five “fundamentals” of their faith — the inerrancy of the Bible, virgin birth and deity of Jesus, doctrine of atonement, bodily resurrection of Jesus, and his imminent return. That movement was a rejection, especially, of the historical-critical mode of biblical interpretation, and of Darwinian science. These characteristics still animate Protestant fundamentalism.

But all fundamentalisms, rejecting a secular claim to have replaced the sacred as chief source of meaning, are skeptical of Enlightenment values, even as the Enlightenment project has begun to criticize itself. But now “old time religion” of whatever stripe faces a plethora of threats: new technologies, globalization, the market economy, rampant individualism, diversity, pluralism, mobility — all that makes for 21st-century life. Fundamentalisms will especially thrive wherever there is violent conflict, and wherever there is stark poverty, simply because these religiously absolute movements promise meaning where there is no meaning. For all these reasons, fundamentalisms are everywhere.

Even in contemporary Roman Catholicism, with whose condemnation of fundamentalism we began. Catholic fundamentalists are more likely to be called “traditionalists,” and today the Vatican is their sponsor. Instead of reading the Bible uncritically, in search of “ready answers to the problems of life,” they read papal statements that way, finding in encyclicals the “false certitude” that the Vatican warns biblical literalists against. The most recent case in point is Pope Benedict’s “Apostolic Exhortation,” issued last week. What begins as a contemplative appreciation of the Eucharist ends up as a manifesto designed to keep many Catholics from receiving Communion at Mass. The ticket to Communion is an uncritical acceptance of what the pope calls, in a striking echo, “fundamental values,” which include defense of human life “from conception to natural death.” The key declaration is that “these values are not negotiable.”

But culture consists precisely in negotiation of values, and change in how values are understood is part of life. Moral reasoning is not mere obedience, but lively interaction among principles, situations, and the “human limitations” referred to in the 1993 Vatican statement. Take “conception.” The great Thomas Aquinas depended on 13th-century notions of biology, and did not believe that human life began at conception. Negotiation followed. Take “natural death.” Disagreements over its meaning (including among Catholic bishops) were made vivid not long ago in the case of Terri Schiavo. Negotiation followed. The pope affirms universal and unchanging “values grounded in human nature,” as if human nature is fixed, instead of evolving. One detects here, too, a suspicion of Darwin, an invitation to “intellectual suicide.”

The various fundamentalisms are all concerned with “fortifying borders,” and that is a purpose of today’s Vatican. The pope’s exhortation concludes by referring to the Catholic people as the “flock” entrusted to bishops. Sheep stay inside the fence. But what happens when Catholics stop thinking of themselves as sheep?

James Carroll’s column appears regularly in the Globe.

Not so simple, as it appears in recently published study results.

People purchase foods based on:

§ their income level,
§ their belief in a food’s health benefit and cost,
§ ethnicity and gender

Food choice is also influenced by environmental factors, such as

§ reliance on fast food,
§ food advertising and
§ food pricing,

and on individual factors, such as

§ taste,
§ palatability,
§ convenience and
§ health benefits.

The study, published in the March 7, 2007, advance online publication of the European Journal of Clinical Nutrition, reports about 4,356 U.S. adults aged 20-65 years from two nationally-representative cross-sectional surveys conducted by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA)—the Continuing Survey of Food Intakes by Individuals and the Diet and Health Knowledge Survey. The Johns Hopkins Center for Human Nutrition researchers examined diet quality indicators, such as the amount of energy, energy density, total fat and saturated fat in foods consumed by study participants. They also considered the quantity of fruits and vegetables, fiber, calcium and dairy products consumed and the overall quality of people’s diet, which was assessed using two indices, including one recommended by the USDA. The key findings are as follows:

There are considerable ethnic and gender differences in the association between socio-economic status, perceived barrier of food price, perceived benefit of diet quality and dietary intake.
Income constraints on individuals and families can lead to a poorer quality diet. When buying food, African-Americans with lower incomes saw food price as more important than Whites with the same income level did.
Caucasians of lower socio-economic status ate more fat and saturated fat. African-Americans showed no association between income level and fat intake.
Among all study participants, and independent of income, the perceived barrier of food price appears to increase sodium intake while reducing fiber intake.
Perceived benefit of diet quality was directly related to better nutritional behavior, including consuming foods less in saturated fat and eating more fiber, fruits and vegetables. Compared to men, women were more concerned about meeting food guidelines in order to improve their health.
Women had lower energy, energy density, total fat, saturated fat, cholesterol and sodium intake than men. Yet, men had higher intake of fruits and vegetables, fiber, calcium and dairy products, particularly because they consumed mor

Mind, these results are not describing eating habits but provide a correlational analysis of customer behaviour patterns. But despite differences between shopping and eating habits, the decision about them is, as known since “5 a day” and other nutritional research, not as autonomously based on convenience, taste or beliefes about health benefits, as most of us would be inclined to believe. Nonetheless, May A. Beydoun is sure intitled to infer: “People’s diets are affected by many factors. We examined some of those factors. Therefore, a large proportion of the association between income level and dietary intake could not be explained by the perceived barrier of food price or the perceived benefit of diet quality.”

Eur J Clin Nutr. 2007 Mar 7; [Epub ahead of print] Links
How do socio-economic status, perceived economic barriers and nutritional benefits affect quality of dietary intake among US adults?Beydoun MA, Wang Y.
1Center for Human Nutrition, Department of International Health, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Baltimore, MD, USA.>

Background:Socio-economic factors may affect diet quality, perhaps differentially across gender and ethnicity. The mechanism of this association is still largely unknown.Objectives:We examined the independent effects of socio-economic status (SES), perceived barrier of food price (PBFP) and perceived benefit of diet quality (PBDQ) on diet quality indicators and indices (DQI(j,k)), across gender and ethnicity. Additionally, we estimated the mediation proportion of the effect of SES on DQI(j,k) through PBFP and PBDQ.Methods:Data from two cross-sectional surveys, the Continuing Survey of Food Intakes by Individuals (CSFII) and Diet and Health Knowledge Survey (DHKS) 1994-96 were used. Our sample consisted of 4356 US adults aged 20-65 years. With principal components analysis, SES (an index) was measured using household income per capita and education, and PBDQ was measured using an 11-item scale. PBFP was defined as the ratio of importance of food price score relative to nutrition. DQI(j,k) were assessed by a set of indicators and two indices including the Healthy Eating Index.Results:The associations between SES, PBFP, PBDQ and DQI(j,k) varied significantly across gender and ethnic groups. PBFP acted as a mediator in the association between SES and selected DQI(j) indicators, namely energy, fat intake, sodium and simple sugar consumption (mediation proportion >10%), but not PBDQ.Conclusions:SES, PBFP and PBDQ all affect dietary intake, and vary by ethnicity and gender. Positive effect of SES on DQI(j,k) may be mediated by PBFP but not PBDQ which is an independent protective factor. Nutrition education is important to promote healthy eating.European Journal of Clinical Nutrition advance online publication, 7 March 2007; doi:10.1038/sj.ejcn.1602700.>

PMID: 17342164 [PubMed - as supplied by publisher]

Sounds like Leviticus 19:18, but not really? Well, it isn’t, but that is what narcissists do demand from the whole wide world. A new study (see below) presents a twist on the conventional narcissist

Conventionally narcissists are viewed as compensating negative self views by their grandiose self-concept. However, new research in Psychological Science shows that narcissists actually view themselves the same on the outside as on the inside. Whether it is their constant need for attention or their unfounded sense of entitlement, none of those are attributable to their unconscious self-loathing, as it appears. Previous studies have shown that narcissists’ conscious self-views are not uniformly positive. Narcissists see themselves as being above average in areas such as status, dominance and intelligence (what are referred to as agentic domains), but not in areas such as kindness, morality, and emotional intimacy (what are referred to as communal domains).

Following that line of thought, the researchers in the quoted study tested the link between narcissism and unconscious self-views in these agentic and communal domains. Conventional perspective suggests that narcissists should unconsciously dislike themselves equally from their intelligence to their level of intimacy in relationships. Narcissists, however, had positive unconscious self-views on the agentic (but not communal) domains.

Campbell, Bosson and colleagues used an Implicit Association Test to assess the participant’s underlying views on their self-esteem. Essentially, the test works by recording reaction times to computer-based word associations and relies on the notion that the participants are not aware that their self-esteem is being assessed while they are taking the test. This test was tailored to measure narcissism as it relates to agency, communion, and self-esteem.

The results, which did appear in the March issue of Psychological Science, show that narcissists do not uniformly dislike themselves “deep down inside.” Rather, narcissists reported positive unconscious self-views in agentic domains and not in communal areas. This study provides new evidence that narcissists exhibit a somewhat imbalanced self at both conscious and unconscious levels.

Miller JD, Campbell WK, Pilkonis PA.

Christopher Lasch, in his bestseller The Culture of Narcissism, American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectation, explains cultural narcissism as a response to anxiety, and a social strategy for people who lack a secure sense of their selves. This analysis allows Lasch to identify several interconnected social systems that cause social anxiety, that fail to educate and support people in being aware of their identities as human beings with rights and responsibilities, and that promote extravagant and grandiose behaviour. While he discusses various systems separately, Lasch also describes the evolution of the modern, technological, materialist, consumption-oriented, personally liberated, nominally egalitarian American society. People are insecure because they are in fact vulnerable. More and more people are adopting narcissistic strategies to protect themselves. One strategy is making a grandiose show of ourselves. (Another is turning to religious and psychological practices to reach psychological states where we experience peace, harmony and transcendence.)

It remains a question open to further research, if the parallelism between the imbalanced narcissistic self-concept, emphasized by the mentioned study, and the social tendencies diagnosed by Lasch is due to causal relationship - as if social narcissism starts tainting the individual narcissistic self-concept, or if both findings do turn over the traditional view of narcissism altogether, as a masked overall self-hatred.

University of Georgia, Athens, GA 30602, USA. jdmiller@uga.edu

This study examined the construct validity of narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) by examining the relations between NPD and measures of psychologic distress and functional impairment both concurrently and prospectively across 2 samples. In particular, the goal was to address whether NPD typically “meets” criterion C of the DSM-IV definition of Personality Disorder, which requires that the symptoms lead to clinically significant distress or impairment in functioning. Sample 1 (n = 152) was composed of individuals receiving psychiatric treatment, whereas sample 2 (n = 151) was composed of both psychiatric patients (46%) and individuals from the community. Narcissistic personality disorder was linked to ratings of depression, anxiety, and several measures of impairment both concurrently and at 6-month follow-up. However, the relations between NPD and psychologic distress were (a) small, especially in concurrent measurements, and (b) largely mediated by impaired functioning. Narcissistic personality disorder was most strongly related to causing pain and suffering to others, and this relationship was significant even when other Cluster B personality disorders were controlled. These findings suggest that NPD is a maladaptive personality style which primarily causes dysfunction and distress in interpersonal domains. The behavior of narcissistic individuals ultimately leads to problems and distress for the narcissistic individuals and for those with whom they interact.

PMID: 17292708 [PubMed - in process]

Sure, the aXbo alarm clock sounds quite promising with its ability to monitor your sleep phases and wake you at just the right time, but does it promise too much? No it doesn’t. The aXbo seems to be one of the best systems on the market for waking up right.

An USB cable allows you even to check out your sleep patterns with your computer. Did not try that one, but I did have an easy time setting up and using the actual aXbo. Turns out the wristband sensors are plenty comfortable, and you can set separate alarms for both you and your partner. For the ultimate in sleep bliss, aXbo seems to fit the bill exactly if you’re prepared to fork over the $250.

BIRMINGHAM, England, March 24

A father-of-two hanged himself live over the internet in Britain’s first ‘cyber suicide’.

Kevin Whitrick, 42, took his life after being goaded by dozens of chatroom users from across the world who initially believed he was play acting.

But as they watched in horror, Mr Whitrick climbed onto a chair, smashed through a ceiling and then hanged himself with a piece of rope.

“He tied a rope around an uncovered ceiling joist and stood on the chair as he tied the rope around his neck,” one anonymous user said of the Internet incident. “Some of us chat room users, talking to Kevin over text chat, microphones and video tried to convince him to step down, but others egged him on telling him to get on with it.”

Friends of the 42-year-old said he had been emotionally strained from the death of his father, a recent car crash and his marriage ending.

The case appears to echo that of Brandon Vedas, a 21 year-old from Phoenix, Arizona, who committed suicide online using a mix of alcohol and prescription medication. In that case people in the chat room egged the young man on, while others tried desperately to find his address.

In “Crowds and Power”, a book published in the early 60s, Elias Canetti, has a lot to say about the times we are living in now, the divisions, the pack mentalities, the fired-up nationalisms, the fierce groupings …

Obviously, one of Canetti’s points is that this crowd-behavior stuff is as old as mankind itself. Perhaps now, though, the questions of WHY have taken on greater urgency. Why? Canetti wrote this book as the Cold War heated up, and as the civilized world tried to deal with the repercussions of the Holocaust - what an industrialized group can do to another. You can feel the anxiety in Canetti’s prose at times.

Canetti studies crowds of all kinds, and dissects how they behave. The crowds who gather in churches, how those crowds are different from the audience at a play, how the audience at a play differs from the audience at a cello concerto - and then he goes further, into a geo-political mode - describing revolutions, crowd mentalities …

Attributes of the Crowd for Canetti are:

* the crowd always wants to grow

* within the crowd, there is equality

* the crowd loves density

* the crowd needs a direction or a common goal

There are a few more issues to be noticed.

DISCHARGE - the catalyst that creates the crowd

ERUPTION - the sudden transition from a closed crowd into an open crowd

PANIC - the disintegration of the crowd within the crowd

OPEN crowd - open to continuous, uninterrupted growth

CLOSED crowd - limited growth in exchange for permanence

STAGNATING crowd - lives for its discharge by deferring it

RHYTHMIC crowd - density & equality coincide, dependent on movement

SLOW crowd - long term goal, as religion

QUICK crowd - short term goal, as in war

INVISIBLE crowd - the dead, future generations, posterity

DOUBLE crowd - exists due to other crowds, as rivals, opponents

By Prevailing Emotion, crowds are classified as:

BAITING crowd - goal & density, as a killing mob or hunting pack

FLIGHT crowd - common threat, as an evacuations

PROHIBITION crowd - refuses what is expected, as a strike

REVERSAL crowd - many meek attack the few fierce, as a revolution

FEAST crowd - abundance in a small space

Crowd psychology does not change with the physical environment of the group in question. Crowds as such react fickle, often irrational and potentially violent. Organisation and rituals may artificially promote solidarity and rhythm. A category that is missing in Canetti’s analysis, naturally, manifests itself tragically for the first time in both mentioned cases of suicide: the CYBER CROWD. It can be observed in both chat communities, and, else, follows the very same rules as physical crowds described by Canetti. As he says: “during the discharge distinctions are thrown off and all feel equal.” Both times those users ushering the victim formed a baiting crowd hungering, not for the “…the naked, smooth, defenseless flesh of the victim” but for it’s digital image.

In 1962 Canetti wrote: “Today everyone takes part in public executions through the newspapers.” In 2007, for the first time, people assisted through interactive means of the WWW to a suicide, which has been unduly called by the Daily Mail a “cyber suicide”. There was nothing “cyber” about the desperate man killing himself. “Cyber” was the baiting crowd in the chat, greeding for his death. And it is hence not less true about the “Cyber Crowd” what Canetti wrote about the baiting crowd of newspaper readers: “…it is the most despicable and, at the same time, most stable form of such a crowd.”

Greedy Chinese hospitals have been made to look rather foolish this week by not being able to spot the difference between tea and wee.

A group of Chinese reporters came up with the idea of passing off tea as urine samples; submitting the drink for tests to see how greedy local hospitals were.

Six out of the ten hospitals in Hangzhou, the capital of the rich coastal province of Zhejiang, concluded that the patients had infected urinal tracts. Five of the hospitals subsequently prescribed drugs costing up to 400 yuan ($50, €40, £27, 3,587 Kenyan shillings); roughly 4% of the average annual salary for an urban dweller in Zhejiang.

The news first appeared on the online edition of the semi-official China News Service (www.chinanews.com) on Wednesday. They claimed that, of the hospitals, four were state-owned. The report has subsequently been removed from the site.

“It makes one shiver all over even though it’s not cold,” the China News Service said after its reporters and colleagues from Zhejiang Television tested the hospitals.

Health Minister Gao Qiang has recently accused hospitals of charging excessive fees and prescribing unnecessary and expensive medication.

Market reforms in the past two decades have cut state subsidies to many hospitals and left the health care system in need of life support. State media have reported patients committing suicide because they cannot afford exorbitant medical costs.

However, when all is said and done, maybe the hospitals are perfectly reasonable to start prescribing medication if you’ve just wandered in off the street claiming to have pissed out a cup of finest green tea. Lapsang Souchong anyone?

“True joy is a serious thing. “

(Seneca the younger, Epistulae morales, 23, 4).

This famous sentence is often misinterpreted, as the grammatical subject occupies the secondary position.

It does not say:

“Only a serious thing is real joy.”

Seneca is instructing the younger Lucilius about real joy and how to find it;

he says:

“[3] Hoc ante omnia fac, mi Lucili: disce gaudere. Existimas nunc me detrahere tibi multas voluptates, qui fortuita submoveo, qui spes, dulcissima oblectamenta, devitandas existimo? immo contra nolo tibi umquam deesse laetitiam. Volo illam tibi domi nasci: nascitur, si modo intra te ipsum fit. Ceterae hilaritates non implent pectus; frontem remittunt, leves sunt, nisi forte tu iudicas eum gaudere qui ridet: animus esse debet alacer et fidens et supra omnia erectus.

[4] Mihi crede, verum gaudium res severa est. An tu existimas quemquam soluto vultu et, ut isti delicati loquuntur, hilariculo mortem contemnere, paupertati domum aperire, voluptates tenere sub freno, meditari dolorum patientiam? Haec qui apud se versat, in magno gaudio est, sed parum blando. In huius gaudii possessione esse te volo: numquam deficiet, cum semel, unde petatur, in veneris.”

[L. Annaei Senecae
ad Lucilium Epistulae XXIII]

“Most of all, dear Lucilius, learn how to rejoice! Do you believe now, i would withdraw fom you all joy, once I forbid the whims of chance and want to see hope, the eversweet seduceress, avoided? On the contrary: was it after me, you never should miss joy! It is my whish that joy should blossom for you at your own home! She does so, once she dwells inside you. Serene emotions of other kind do not go to your heart. They just sooth the crests of sorrow on your forehead and are flighty companions, except you would call it joy when one is laughing: no, for this the spirit must be merry, trustfull and above all things.

Believe me: True joy is a serious thing! Or do you believe a man could with compose - or, as our men of the world prefer saying: serene - countenance despise death, open his house to poverty, rein in his desires and think of enduring pain? He who is able to accomplish all these, is living in deep joy - although it might not seem alluring. In possession of such a joy I want to see you: and it shall never leave you, once you did discover the well, where it does come from.”

(enjoying real joy must be learned with earnest effort - translating Seneca’s epistles as well).

Brain Scans Reveal Cause Of Smokers’ Cravings

We all knew it: within the mind of every smoker trying to quit rages a battle between reason wanting to break the habit and the screaming for another cigarette. More often than not, that cigarette gets lit.

Researchers at Duke University Medical Center studied brain scans of smokers discovering three specific regions deep within the brain that appear to control dependence on nicotine and craving for cigarettes. Shown in blue in this illustration is the thalamus, an region of the brain critical to one’s ability to calm down when stressed. In red is the striatum, a region implicated in the pleasure system of the brain. In green is the anterior cingulate cortex, a region vital to self-control and concentration. (Credit: Image courtesy of Duke University Medical Center)

These regions play important roles in some of the key motivations for smoking: to calm down when stressed, to achieve pleasure and to help concentration.

“If you can’t calm down, can’t derive pleasure and can’t control yourself or concentrate, then it will be extremely difficult for you to break the habit,” said lead study investigator Jed E. Rose, Ph.D., director of the Duke Center for Nicotine and Smoking Cessation Research. “These brain regions may explain why most people try to quit several times before they are successful.”

In this study, the researchers manipulated the levels of nicotine dependence and cigarette craving among 15 smokers and then scanned their brains using positron emission tomography, or PET scans, to see which areas of the brain were most active.

Three specific regions of the brain demonstrated changes in activity when the smokers craved cigarettes versus when they did not.

One region that lights up, called the thalamus, is considered to be the key relay point for sensory information flowing into the brain. Some of the symptoms of withdrawal among people trying to quit stem from the inability to focus thoughts and the feeling of being overwhelmed, and could thus be explained by changes in this region, according to the researchers. The researchers found that changes in this region were most dramatic among those who said they smoked to calm down when under stress.

Another region that lights up is a part of the pleasure system of the brain. Changes in this region, called the striatum, were most notable in people who smoked to satisfy craving and for pleasurable relaxation, the researchers said.

A third region that lights up, called the anterior cingulate cortex, is vital to cognitive functions such as conflict, self regulation, decision making and emotion. People whose brain scans showed the most differences in this region also reported that they smoked to manage their weight.

here is the original Entry in Pubmed :

Neuropsychopharmacology. 2007 Mar 14; [Epub ahead of print]

Regional Brain Activity Correlates of Nicotine Dependence.Rose JE, Behm FM, Salley AN, Bates JE, Coleman RE, Hawk TC, Turkington TG.
1Department of Psychiatry, Duke University Medical Center, Durham, NC, USA.

Fifteen smokers participated in a study investigating brain correlates of nicotine dependence. Dependence was reduced by having subjects switch to denicotinized cigarettes for 2 weeks while wearing nicotine skin patches. Positron emission tomography (PET) scans assessed regional cerebral metabolic rate for glucose (rCMRglc) after overnight nicotine abstinence on three occasions: (1) at baseline; (2) after 2 weeks of exposure to denicotinized cigarettes+nicotine patches; and (3) 2 weeks after returning to smoking the usual brands of cigarettes. Craving for cigarettes and scores on the Fagerstrom Test of Nicotine Dependence (FTND) questionnaire decreased at the second session relative to the first and last sessions. Regional brain metabolic activity (normalized to whole brain values) at session 2 also showed a significant decrease in the right hemisphere anterior cingulate cortex. Exploratory post hoc analyses showed that the change in craving across sessions was negatively correlated with the change in rCMRglc in several structures within the brain reward system, including the ventral striatum, orbitofrontal cortex and pons. The between-session difference in thalamus activity (right hemisphere) was positively correlated with the difference in FTND scores. Correlational analyses also revealed that reported smoking for calming effects was associated with a decrease (at session 2) in thalamus activity (bilaterally) and with an increase in amygdala activity (left hemisphere). Reported smoking to enhance pleasurable relaxation was associated with an increase in metabolic activity of the dorsal striatum (caudate, putamen) at session 2. These findings suggest that reversible changes in regional brain metabolic activity occur in conjunction with alterations in nicotine dependence. The results also highlight the likely role of thalamic gating processes as well as striatal reward and corticolimbic regulatory pathways in the maintenance of cigarette addiction.Neuropsychopharmacology advance online publication, 14 March 2007; doi:10.1038/sj.npp.1301379.

PMID: 17356570 [PubMed - as supplied by publisher]

…while reality sits there trying to put on its socks.

Rian E. Mc Mullin

Charles François Prosper Guérin (1875 - 1939)

Expectation

On March 22, 2007 a 13-year-old Utah girl took home the top prize at a nationwide stinky sneakers competition in Montpelier, Vt. - a golden tennis shoe, $2,500 and a year’s worth of Odor Eaters from the National Odor Eaters Stinky Rotten Sneaker Competition.

She also won a trip to New York and tickets to see “The Lion King” on Broadway.

“I’m supportive and I’m so proud, even though she stinks,” her mother told The Salt Lake Tribune. She said her daughter is “normally really clean” but was able to overcome her neat impulses to keep her feet wallowing in filth.

The girl qualified for the competition by taking home the first prize for foul shoe odors at the 2006 Utah State Fair. Her brother took second place in the competition, the newspaper said.

The winner takes it all and The Salt Lake Tribune keeps reporting.… It was Umberto Eco who called the media vehicles for magic culture. As such the media constitute a stumbling-block to the spreading of a culture based on critical thinking.

Over the last few years both a conceptual evolution (the commercialisation of the news and the ever-growing adherence to the principles of marketing) and a technical evolution (the assault of computer science and the increase in the amount of information processed in the same period of time) have significantly lowered the threshold of critical evaluation. In the end, this results in an almost automatic short cut from the cause to the effect (the event/news). Umberto Eco is absolutely right in saying that, for structural reasons, the media give us a magical view of the world.

In this magic representation of the world, in this unbearable lightness of the media, facts evaporate, and factual information tends to become pseudo-information while real life is void of meaning, as long as it is not present in the media. Hence, no means is odd enough to enter the magic mirror of media presence.

If this is how things really stand, then we are tempted to tell scientists (and professional journalists) to keep clear not only of talk-shows, as Eco recommends, but of all mass media. Otherwise not only might they end up communicating science next to some stinky sneaker competition, but they could even be seen as (modern) stink themselves.

Easier said than done. The presence of meaningful content in the media is no longer optional. It’s presence in the media, actually, has become an inescapable need. And the attention devoted to meaningful content by the media should become an inescapable social need, given the ever-increasing complexity in all aspects of our daily life. Whether we like it or not, facts, meaning and even science “have to” be present in the media. So this is the problem we humbly have to face (anyone who has a ready-made solution is asked to come forward): how to communicate reason (also) through the media at a time when the media are structurally inclined to communicate magic rather than facts.