NETFUTURE

                    Technology and Human Responsibility

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Issue #119     A Publication of The Nature Institute        March 27, 2001
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            Editor:  Stephen L. Talbott (stevet@netfuture.org)

                  On the Web: http://www.netfuture.org/
     You may redistribute this newsletter for noncommercial purposes.

NetFuture is a reader-supported publication.


CONTENTS
---------

Editor's Note

Quotes and Provocations
   The Reality of Appearances
   Brief Notes from All Over
   Diagnosing Lady Hamilton's Portrait

DEPARTMENTS

Correspondence
   Nurses Surfing the Web

About this newsletter


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                              EDITOR'S NOTE

If you've wondered about The Nature Institute, publisher of NetFuture, you
can now find out about us by going to www.natureinstitute.org.  There are
many articles and papers there that have never appeared in NetFuture.
Among the pieces of my own that may interest you, I'd like to mention
these:

** "Are Animals Robots?"  I argue that it is far easier to represent
   aspects of the human being in a computer program than it is to
   represent a beetle -- this despite all the talk about programs
   achieving the level of sophistication of insects or other animals.
   (http://natureinstitute.org/pub/ic/ic1/robots.htm)

** "Toward a Final Theory of the Sloth".  This is a response to a reader's
   objection to Craig Holdrege's article about the sloth in NetFuture #97.
   What does it mean to understand an organism scientifically?
   (http://natureinstitute.org/pub/ic/ic3/sloth.htm)

** "The Straitening of Science".  Do physical objects, by nature, really
   move in straight lines unless subjected to outside forces?
   (http://natureinstitute.org/pub/ic/ic3/straitening.htm)

By the way, if you were interested in that original article on the sloth,
you may want to look at other studies in "whole-organism biology" by
Craig.  Go to http://natureinstitute.org/subj/nature/index.htm.

SLT

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                         QUOTES AND PROVOCATIONS


The Reality of Appearances
--------------------------

Two vicious crimes by teenagers have recently made the news.  Elkech Leon,
who has acknowledged beating and raping a sixteen-year-old girl in Queens,
New York, in 1999, has now pleaded guilty.  He had told law enforcement
officials after the assault:  "It was all so real.  I wanted to feel how
it felt to be a rapist".

Lionel Tate, a fourteen-year-old Floridian, has been sentenced to life in
prison without possibility of parole for beating six-year-old Tiffany
Eunick to death.  He committed the murderous act when he was twelve.
According to the New York Times, "Lionel testified that he was emulating
the wrestlers he regarded as heroes when he kicked and body-slammed
Tiffany".  You can imagine Lionel's perplexity at the outcome; don't the
wrestlers always get up and walk away?

If you are looking for a thesis topic in sociology or psychology, I
suggest something like this:  "How has our sense of reality been changing
during the era of electronic media?"  Anyone who takes up this challenge
will, in the first place, have to get beyond the commonplace observation
that young people obviously know the difference between a video screen and
the real world.  Of course they can tell you the difference between
what is a video image and what is not, and of course they will deny
any confusion in the matter.  But this correct logical judgment hardly
gets us very far.

Here's an analogy.  A toddler quickly learns to distinguish himself from
others.  He can use the word "I" correctly.  But if you look deeply into
what the concept means to him at this highly imitative age, you will
notice that everything "out there" has, at the same time, a powerful and
almost magical existence "in here".  The line between self and other is
not as sharply drawn as it will be in later years.  This, of course, is
quite as it should be.  Even in many adults, what psychologists refer to
as "ego boundaries" can at times be exceptionally porous -- despite these
same adults' ability to tell you quite definitely that they are themselves
and not someone else.

So any attempt to sort out the contemporary "sense for reality" will have
to dig beneath surface judgments of the intellect.  I'm convinced that one
of the first conclusions any such digging will lead us to is that the
usual distinction between appearance and reality is misleading, if not
altogether useless.  Our experience of a video image is as real as our
experience of anything else.  The question is only, "What sort of
experience is it?" -- a question that is immediately downplayed when we
derogate the experience as mere appearance.

Once we do take all experiences seriously, we will probably be less
concerned about children thinking video images are "real" than we are
about their beginning to experience the rest of their world with some of
the qualities of a video image.  After all, there is no possibility of
arguing that images are innocent in this regard.  The truth here has long
been recognized with respect to art.  Oscar Wilde once asked, "Have you
noticed that nature has recently begun to look like Corot's landscapes?"
According to the art historian, Sir Ernst Gombrich, the earlier,
eighteenth-century search for beauty "that sent poets and painters to the
Lakeland was a search for motifs that reminded the art lovers of
paintings, preferably those of Claude and Poussin".

Gombrich also cites the seventeenth-century artist, Roger de Piles, who
observed that the bad habits of painters "even affect their organs, so
that their eyes see the objects of nature colored as they are used to
painting them".  We should, moreover, remember that the development of
linear perspective in fifteenth-century art had a great deal to do with
our ability to detach ourselves from the world, take up an individual
point of view, and begin scientific observation.  In general, the images
and meanings we have at our disposal, the ways of looking and seeing, not
only shape our interaction with the world, but determine what sort of
world is available to interact with.

Anyone who persists in the belief that television, video games, computer
images, and the cinema do not profoundly influence children is just
willfully blind.  The qualities of the images we bathe in are at the same
time qualities of our inner life -- that's what it means for us to
experience them.  The only question is how we work with and assimilate
these qualities.  And our answer to this question helps to determine the
qualities of the objective world we share with each other.

Moreover, if there's one general truth about young children, it's that
their natural tendency is to assimilate what comes to them with great
simplicity and trust.  The world we give them in images becomes their
world, overly facile distinctions between appearance and reality
notwithstanding.  These distinctions are much less useful for
comprehending their world than is the fact, for example, that the peculiar
reality of video images does little to ground the child in a coherent
order of things where actions have understandable consequences -- the kind
that can land you in prison for life without parole.

In general, we deprive our children of any stable orientation to the
world.  It is our daily work, above all else, that gives meaning and
substance to our lives, and yet (unlike in earlier times) the world of
adult work is almost completely hidden from the child today.  It is hidden
behind the brick walls of the factory; it goes on within steel and glass
office towers many miles from where the child lives; or it disappears into
a digital interface that re-presents the whole world of human effort as a
few incomprehensible abstractions upon a square foot or two of glass.

Likewise with social action and politics, which might have helped to
orient the child to life in community.  As political activity, even at the
local level, was sucked into the television in the living room, it became
remote, cosmetic, charisma-centered, advertising-driven.  Voter apathy
increased.  Of the entire political process, little is "there" in any
practical sense for the child except a chaotic collage of images bearing
subliminal messages and reflecting all the demonic sophistication of
Madison Avenue.

How can the child, growing up in our society, find anything to orient
himself by, anything to encourage him in the conviction that there is a
stable and coherent order of things to which he can make a meaningful
contribution?  The world we present to him is all too accurately
symbolized for him by the anti-reality of the music video.

The tortured relations between "appearance" and "reality" have vexed our
culture for several hundred years, and continue to be a source of great
confusion.  (Have you ever wondered why many of the same people who assure
us that children do not experience gruesomely violent video images as
"real" also assure us that video images are an excellent way to teach
children about the natural world?)  The only solution is for us to cease
dismissing some things as empty appearance and instead begin to enter into
the particular qualities of each different kind of experience, seeing it
for what it is.  The images vomited from the studios of Hollywood and
Madison Avenue may be fantasies, but they are at the same time among the
most powerful realities of our culture.

A class of school children was recently reported to have laughed when
informed of the shootings in Santee, California.  I don't know the
particulars of that incident, but I would be loathe to say up front that
those children's laughter had nothing in common with the frequent laughter
at violent scenes in movie theaters.  If you really knew a single child
and went through such experiences with him, you'd find yourself staring
the answer in the face quickly enough.

But, of course, knowing children in this direct way is not exactly the
wave of the electronically enlightened, distance-educated future.  So, in
the absence of direct understanding, we can look forward to more reams of
survey data -- which can themselves be a way of dismissing the world as
mere appearance compared to the bedrock reality of "hard numbers".

It may be that the decisive challenge facing children today is to find
some kind of stable, grounding coherence within the various sorts of
reality assaulting them.  The current prognosis for these kids is not
encouraging, and can be summed up in a simple question:  if we are
stumbling around in a confused dialectic between appearance and reality,
should we wonder that our children are doing the same?

Related articles:

** "Virtuality and the Atomization of Experience" in NF #87.

** "Mona Lisa's Smile", a chapter in The Future Does Not Compute.

** "Seeing in Perspective", another chapter in The Future Does Not Compute.



Brief Notes from All Over
-------------------------

** Regarding the article, "Golden Genes and World Hunger: Let Them Eat
Transgenic Rice?" by Craig Holdrege and me (NF #108),
you will recall that the
golden rice work was partially funded by the Rockefeller Foundation.  Now
Gordon Conway, president of the foundation, has written a letter to
Greenpeace acknowledging that "the public-relations uses of golden rice
have gone too far", and also that, while he believes golden rice can make
an important nutritional contribution, "We do not consider golden rice the
solution to the vitamin-A deficiency problem".

** Indian scientist-activist, Vandana Shiva, delivered last year's BBC
Reith lecture.  One of her observations:  "In spite of all empirical
evidence showing that genetic engineering does not produce more food and
in fact often leads to a yield decline, it is constantly promoted as the
only alternative available for feeding the hungry".  She goes on:

   Recently, the McKinsey corporation said:  "American food giants
   recognize that Indian agro-business has lots of room to grow,
   especially in food processing.  India processes a minuscule one percent
   of the food it grows compared to seventy percent for the U.S."

   It is not that we Indians eat our food raw.  Global consultants fail to
   see the ninety-nine percent food processing done by women at household
   level or by the small cottage industry because it is not controlled by
   global agribusiness.  Ninety-nine percent of India's agroprocessing has
   been intentionally kept at the small level.  Now, under the pressure of
   globalization, things are changing.  Pseudo-hygiene laws are being used
   to shut down local economies and small-scale processing.

   In August, 1998, small-scale local processing of edible oil was banned
   in India through a "packaging order" which made sale of open oil
   illegal and required all oil to be packaged in plastic or aluminum.
   This shut down tiny "ghanis" or cold-pressed mills.  It destroyed the
   market for our diverse oilseeds -- mustard, linseed, sesame, groundnut,
   coconut.

   And the take-over of the edible oil industry has affected ten million
   livelihoods.  The take-over of flour or "atta" by packaged, branded
   flour will cost one hundred million livelihoods.  And these millions
   are being pushed into new poverty....

   The globalization of the food system is destroying the diversity of
   local food cultures and local food economies.  A global monoculture is
   being forced on people by defining everything that is fresh, local and
   handmade as a health hazard.  Human hands are being defined as the
   worst contaminants, and work for human hands is being outlawed, to be
   replaced by machines and chemicals bought from global corporations.
   These are not recipes for feeding the world, but stealing livelihoods
   from the poor to create markets for the powerful.

Much of Shiva's lecture was a fleshing out of this point:  "The most
efficient means of [destroying] nature, local economies, and small
autonomous producers is by rendering their production invisible".  As she
makes vividly clear, this is largely a matter of rendering women invisible
-- the women who contribute so massively to much of the world's economy.

** In her lecture, Shiva also offered this stinging commentary on the
patenting of life forms:

   Patents and intellectual property rights are supposed to be granted for
   novel inventions.  But patents are being claimed for rice varieties
   such as the basmati for which my valley, where I was born, is famous,
   or pesticides derived from the Neem [tree] which our mothers and
   grandmothers have been using.

   Rice Tec, a U.S.-based company, has been granted Patent no. 5,663,484
   for basmati rice lines and grains.

   Basmati, neem, pepper, bitter gourd, turmeric ... every aspect of the
   innovation embodied in our indigenous food and medicinal systems is now
   being pirated and patented.  The knowledge of the poor is being
   converted into the property of global corporations, creating a
   situation where the poor will have to pay for the seeds and medicines
   they have evolved and have used to meet their own needs for nutrition
   and health care.

   Such false claims to creation are now the global norm, with the Trade-
   Related Intellectual Property Rights Agreement of the World Trade
   Organization forcing countries to introduce regimes that allow
   patenting of life forms and indigenous knowledge.

   Instead of recognizing that commercial interests build on nature and on
   the contribution of other cultures, global law has enshrined the
   patriarchal myth of creation to create new property rights to life
   forms just as colonialism used the myth of discovery as the basis of
   the take-over of the land of others as colonies.

** In the Winter, 2001 issue of Orion, Wendell Berry writes about
"The Idea of a Local Economy".  One of the things he does is to criticize
the notion that a corporation should be regarded, legally, as a person.
Much that is destructive about the peculiar form the corporation has taken
today arises precisely because the corporation is not a person:

   A corporation, essentially, is a pile of money to which a number of
   persons have sold their moral allegiance.  As such, unlike a person, a
   corporation does not age.  It does not arrive, as most persons finally
   do, at a realization of the shortness and smallness of human lives; it
   does not come to see the future as the lifetimes of the children and
   grandchildren of anybody in particular.  It can experience no personal
   hope or remorse, no change of heart.  It cannot humble itself.  It goes
   about its business as if it were immortal, with the single purpose of
   becoming a bigger pile of money.

** Back in September ecologists David S. Wilcove (Environmental Defense)
and Thomas Eisner (Cornell University) wrote about "the Impending
Extinction of Natural History".  They pointed out that "a knowledge of, or
even an avowed interest in, natural history is no longer a prerequisite
for admission to a graduate program in ecology or any other branch of
biology .... Even the field trip ... has become increasingly uncommon".
The authors view the demise of natural history as "one of the biggest
scientific mistakes of our time".

The lopsided shift toward molecular biology and genetic engineering
reflects a preference for theoretical explanation and mechanical
manipulation of a sort that can proceed without much reference to the
organisms we began by trying to understand.  Who needs the complicating
presence of organisms and natural habitats when you can pursue molecular-
level mechanisms that are such well-behaved artifacts of your theory?

The result of the shift is a lot of lost opportunity in the classroom.  As
Wilcove and Eisner remark, "For the price of a stereo microscope, now less
than $250, a science teacher can turn a pinch of soil into a bustling
world of springtails, oribatid mites, and nematodes, creatures as bizarre
and engaging as anything to appear in a Star Wars movie".  They conclude
their essay (which appeared in the Sept. 15, 2000 issue of The
Chronicle of Higher Education) with this:

   The current push to connect every classroom in America to the Internet
   demonstrates how quickly elected leaders and the public can be
   galvanized to address what is rightly perceived to be a critical
   educational need.  Meanwhile, the demise of natural history goes
   unnoticed, increasing the likelihood that future generations of
   schoolchildren will spend even more time indoors, clicking away on
   their plastic mice, happily viewing images of the very plants and
   animals they could be finding in the woods, streams, and meadows they
   no longer visit.

** As a follow-up to Lowell Monke's article on factory-farmed hogs in NF
#114:  John F. Kennedy, Jr., and a group of lawyers are filing hundreds of
lawsuits against hog operations nationwide, beginning in North Carolina.
That state's nineteen million tons per year of swinish waste notoriously
finds its way to places where it doesn't belong.  In June, 1995, twenty-
two million gallons of hog manure spilled into tributaries of the New
River, and 1999's Hurricane Floyd washed hog waste into the Tar, Neuse,
and Cape Fear tributaries.  One of the lawsuits charges the giant
Smithfield Foods (responsible for hogs on 1500 factory farms) with
violating federal racketeering statutes, due to the serial nature of the
company's polluting activities.  According to one news story
(unfortunately, I have misplaced the source),

   In 1997 a U.S. District Court judge fined Smithfield $12.6 million for
   thousands of Clean Water Act violations; in another case, a manager
   pleaded guilty to illegally dumping toxic wastewater into the Pagan
   river; the state of Virginia also has a suit pending against the
   company alleging more than 22,000 discharge and pollution violations
   from the mid-'80s to the mid-'90s.

If the astonishing charges in these government lawsuits are even
fractionally true, then we see here a perfect illustration of a point made
in NF #114:  anyone who can treat a community of animals with arrogant
disdain will very likely find it also possible to treat a community of
people with arrogant disdain.

** Andrew Kimbrell, director of the International Center for Technology
Assessment in Washington, D.C., delivered one of the annual E.F.
Schumacher Lectures last October.  He included this remark:

   Instead of changing technology so it fits life, the breathtaking
   attempt of genetic engineering is to change life so it fits technology.
   [For example,] to genetically engineer plants and animals so they will
   fit with global warming, so they can survive those temperatures.  To
   genetically engineer our farm animals so they can survive in the
   factory farm system.  And, yes, even to genetically engineer us, so
   that we can survive in the technological world to come.

** This came from the San Jose Mercury News (March 1) via NewsScan
Daily:

   One of the findings of the just-published Social Capital Community
   Benchmark Survey, http://www.cfsv.org, is that Silicon Valley is a
   community that is relatively backward socially compared to national
   statistics:  people in the Valley are twenty-seven percent less likely
   than people elsewhere to visit with relatives, and are not very
   inclined to serve as community leaders, join clubs, or even attend
   public meetings.

   But even nationally, says survey director Robert Putnam, "there has
   been a serious erosion in American connectedness".  James Koch of the
   Center for Science, Technology and Society at Santa Clara University
   says of Silicon Valley:  "This is a region that is enigmatic.  We have
   tremendous prowess when it comes to innovation and commercialization of
   technologies.  That's often attributed to the robust networks that
   exist in this region.  But we are remarkably weak in social ties.  We
   are like a very, very well-trained athlete who can do one thing
   especially well.  But we haven't cultivated this larger capacity for
   civic engagement".

Meanwhile, I just saw mention of a new study (co-sponsored by America
Online) claiming to show that the Net has strengthened social ties.  The
warring surveys, you can be sure, will go on, and on, and on....


Diagnosing Lady Hamilton's Portrait
-----------------------------------

A wonderful pilot program at Weill Cornell Medical College has future
doctors spending time at the nearby Frick Collection studying famous
portraits.  It's part of an effort to train the students in the art of
observation.  The idea, novel as it is in today's medical environment, is
for them to learn to see the person in front of them as an essential part
of the diagnostic effort.  For example, the enlarged pupils in the
portrait of Lady Hamilton (mistress of Admiral Nelson) suggest the use of
belladonna, a potentially fatal herb often taken in Lady Hamilton's time
to lend the eyes an erotic quality.

Students quickly become interested in the challenge of assessing the
patient through direct observation.  One of the creators of the Cornell-
Frick program said, "Already I've had students tell me that when they walk
into a hospital room they don't go right for the chart".

The Cornell program was modeled after one at Yale, where art curator Linda
Friedlaender

   recalled visiting her friend in the hospital the day before her
   operation.  It was obvious the woman was extremely nervous and needed
   some reassurance.  Yet when a resident stopped by to check on the
   patient, Ms. Friedlaender said, he barely lifted his eyes from the
   chart, remained standing in the doorway, and took her lack of questions
   as permission to quickly leave.

Now Yale requires every first-year medical student to take a course
entitled "A Rash in a Frame: Enhancing Observational Skills".  Other
schools around the country have indicated an interest in starting such a
program.

All this is extremely encouraging.  I very much hope these schools can
raise their courses to a minimal level of philosophical sophistication,
since a fundamental question about the nature of scientific knowledge
underlies the doctor's decision whether to "go straight for the chart" or
instead to look at the patient.  This decision can be understood as a
choice between seeing a particular illness as the essential thing (the
illness just happens to be "doing this particular patient") or else seeing
the patient as the essential thing (the patient just happens to be "doing
this particular illness").

But this still doesn't state the matter forcefully enough, since what
"this particular illness" is cannot even be defined apart from the
individuality of the patient.  We've been taught to think in terms of
perfectly discrete, nameable illnesses, as if each one had a kind of
fixed, atomic identity independent of the person who is "doing it".  But
this is hardly the case.  No two pneumonias are the same disease, and the
profusion of vaguely defined syndromes in our day (such as chronic fatigue
syndrome, "environmental illness", and lyme disease) underscores the need
to see the illness as a function of the person rather than the person as a
function of the illness.

Of course, there is not really a strict line between these two approaches.
The problem today is that the willingness to see the person has largely
vanished from medicine, replaced by a focus on symptom clusters regarded
as essences in their own right.  Putting it a little differently:  we are
much more inclined to think we understand patient A when we have
established what he has in common with cases B, C, D ... , all of whom
form a neat diagnostic class, than to believe we understand A only when we
grasp his uniqueness -- what he does not have in common with B, C,
and D, and what he is distinctively "doing" with his illness.  This
distinctive doing, and not the nameable illness, may be the more important
thing when it comes to diagnosis and treatment.

Such a focus upon the qualitative uniqueness of what we observe is foreign
to mainstream science, with its ultimate, explanatory urge to see only
featureless, indistinguishable particles.  A medicine grounded in such
science is hardly predisposed to recognize the patient as an individual,
and we can only hope that courses such as the ones at Cornell and Yale
will, over time, nudge young researchers toward the quest for a new kind
of science.

Related articles:

** "Notes on Health and Medicine" in NF #88.

SLT

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                              CORRESPONDENCE


Nurses Surfing the Web
----------------------

From:  Name withheld by request

Steve:

My four year old daughter was born with a cleft lip and palate and has
required a series of (standard) reconstructive surgical procedures.  Her
fourth such procedure was last week.

Needless to say, everything in the hospital where she receives her care is
computerized.  There are obvious problems that come up in this.  For
instance, our in-processing was delayed while one of the receptionists was
on the phone with tech support describing the blue screen of death facing
her on her desktop machine.  However, there were some experiences we had
that were much more subtle and much more troubling.

The computerization of the hospital really does extend everywhere.  When
we met our daughter in post-op recovery, I noticed immediately that the
room was filled with computerized equipment of all kinds.  Our daughter
was completely connected to one piece of monitoring equipment and her
vital signs (heart, respiration, blood pressure, blood oxygen) were
displayed on a screen above her bed.  Right next to that screen was a
screen connected to a PC.  It was displaying a login screen for some kind
of program that I was not familiar with.

The post-op room was fairly large with a number of patient bays
distributed around its perimeter.  As I looked around the room I noticed
that the pair of monitors (vital signs plus PC) was standard in all the
bays.  I also noticed that the PC monitors were variously displaying the
same login screen that we were faced with or, alternatively, the Microsoft
Windows (TM) logo.  None of the PCs actually seemed to be used for
anything, at least not where the patients were.

I did see one PC in use as we walked with our daughter as she was being
transferred to her ward for her overnight observation stay.  We passed by
a bay (empty of any patient) where one of the medical personnel was
carefully working with the PC in that bay.  She was dressed in surgical
scrubs (as were all the on-duty personnel in post-op).  She was in the
mode of computer interaction we all see everywhere: type a little, read a
little, move the mouse, click, read some more.  I knew right away what she
was doing without even looking at the screen but a glance over my shoulder
as we passed by confirmed it.

The screen was displaying a page from the JC Penney web site.

She was shopping on line.

I don't know what is more troubling, the fact that the post-op computers
were being used for on-line shopping or that on-line shopping was the only
thing they were being used for.

This scene was replayed multiple times (if not so dramatically) in the
ward where our daughter spent the next 24 hours for observation.  There
was a PC in the hallway outside her door with a big sign on it that said
"Web RN" -- I assume it had some official nursing purpose.  However,
everyone I saw using it -- nursing staff, doctors, visitors -- used it to
surf the web in various ways.  I suppose I have committed some breach of
etiquette by noticing what people were doing with this computer, but the
screen was directly facing our room, and the fact that on-duty medical
personnel were surfing when they were supposed to be caring for my
daughter (and, of course, others on the ward) was so troubling that I did
glance over some shoulders.

I am still trying to digest all of this and understand what it means as
well as what it might portend.  In the meantime I thought I would share
this with you and see what you might make of it.

Best,
Name withheld upon request

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                          ABOUT THIS NEWSLETTER

Copyright 2001 by The Nature Institute.  You may redistribute this
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Steve Talbott :: NetFuture #119 :: March 27, 2001

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