What’s normal now (6)…we are the worlds of our hosted bugs

Torrey Orton

May 25, 2014

 

Levels of life in fact …

 

Recently SBS TV hosted a series on the bugs upon and within us. We provide them with a living and they provide us with life. The uncounted hordes cleaning up our exterior are exceeded in number and diversity by those inside which give tangible meaning to a ‘gut feel’. Even knowing they are there vigorously gathering away does not give access to any perception of their presence in their reality – invisible and intangible things to us which yet succeed in comforting us, or not. We just have to believe they are so until we get a look though a scanning microscope at the myriad creeping and crawling things polishing our armour (skin) and processing our roughage (digestion).

We and they are all alive for a while, but only aware of each other in moments of failure to provide our respective services to each other, such as the result of an unintended injury like an antibiotic attack on a germ which defaults indiscriminately to all bugs and disables digestion in one way or another. However, our communication is indirect, by gesture as it were – ‘I’m sick to my stomach with…’ or, ‘It was a gut wrenching experience…’ from the inner residents to the host and ‘Here’s something soothing for that diarrhoea...’ from the host to the residents. Both are well within reach of the others’ sensibilities, but almost without regard for each other except in an emotional storm driven by objective threats to viability – menaces of death of various kinds.

… and perception

When the bugs’ world is distorted by ours, we, for those moments, are focussed by their collective distress away from our concerns, taking up theirs as if they are ours – which they are, so to speak, but we cannot conduct a life at the microscopic level. When we do so by force of disease we are heading for the doorways of perception’s close. That’s how a serious gastro-enteric stomach bug feels, as it literally lays waste with us.

So, too, do we dally with the brain’s presence to us: we kiss lips, not neuronal networks. If the networks are distorted by injuries physical (blunt force trauma; natural declines of genetic weakness or ageing) or emotional (disregard, deprivation, and the ensuing despairs of our oppression over time), our self in its physical guise is compromised. But it is unhelpful to our management of that compromise to point out its brainy compositions. What do we expect anyone to do with that observation themselves? Well, they can affect their sense of self by a variety of means – meditation, walking, eating right, sleeping OK …– those are the levels of action which are known to affect daily well-being directly already.

What’s neuron’s got to do with us – the lip kissing us - except in that facilitative sense which the bugs also are for us? They are different levels of perception and action, like that between Newtonian and quantum physics. We are in the Newtonian world and it is in the quantum.

Views of life-death

Views of life-death
Torrey Orton
Feb 18, 2012

Note: this piece is the first in the life-death series, the second of which was published here on April 17, 2012. This one was composed out of three separate posts two-three years ago. It sets the problem subsequent life/death posts will address. It was published on the Kings Tribune website on the date above and in the magazine's march 2012 issue.

"You're driving down a road in the desert, and the engine suddenly stops. .. no Pep Boys, no Auto Club to help. Whether the road continues is of no consequence. It has ended for you."

This is Edward Schniedman, dead at 90 in LA, predicting his own death's nature. While death is death, what it means seems to be a matter of opinion. Even what it is seems so, too. So, I offer some views of death as my contribution to the debates and discourses about death.


I have a stake. I'm old enough (68) to know that I'm nearer the end of my term than its beginning. I've outlived my father and his father by 4 years. I'm pretty clear I want to die when I want to, if I can, and have taken steps to encourage that possibility.


I share this view and intent with my wife. We've signed the necessary papers to ensure that the 'life support' technologies are turned off, or left off, if we're incapable of being consulted. Some things stand in the way of complete confidence they will be turned off, mostly others with other meanings to death, who may want not to accept what I have legally decided. Their meanings of life give different tones to death from mine. Some of those differences are catastrophically confronting for people like me. This is the terrain of naturally fundamentalist thinking in fact, not merely in faith or theory. The resurrected are only seen in faith tracts and films. How can I understand this better, and maybe them, too?


The purchase of assuredly effective means to end my life cleanly, with minimum clean-up required of any others is, however, not legally available. I do not want to count on under the counter substances with uncertified contents, etc. I would be happy to engage with a variety of safety requirements, especially ones aimed at ensuring the drug(s) cannot be accessed by anyone other than me. This would require a regime somewhat like the Swiss one portrayed in the Pratchett video. For a local perspective, see the Victorian branch of Dying with Dignity FAQs here.


Some initial takes on life-death

These views on life-death are undertaken with wonder at the difficulty of the task of making sense of death, and life. The counter point is my emotional wrenching by the uncertainty of fulfilling my preference for choosing my own death time, as much as that is possible. These are matters where perspective is nearly all in the struggle to give judgment a sustainable foundation. Here are some first takes. They do not pretend to be complete.


There is my notion of a 'good death'. Dying on one's own kitchen floor or over-night in bed, as one of my parents did, qualifies for this label. In some pre-modern societies there was an understanding that one's time had a limit and making way for others was both necessary and honourable. Another 'good death' may be that at home with more or less extended periods of relatively painless decline and social intimates present continuously on the way. The fact of dying attracts moral attentions of every imaginable sort.


The climate for dying

Second, we have the increasing squeamishness of late modernity about any perceived damage to the self, driven by an implicit assumption that we can be protected from all imaginable dangers (see some of the submissions to the Victorian Royal Commission based on assumptions that the actual 2009 bushfire conditions could have been foreseen and planned for comprehensively).


A handmaiden of this aversion to the material tribulations of everyday life is the philosophy of 'nice'. Be nice; don't trouble others; adjust your thinking and feeling to not confront anyone, even unintentionally.


'Nice' has been enhanced by the actions of the damages lawyers and the health marketing fraternities. The latter sell hopes of endless life and instant recoveries (you deserve a lineless face or pot-less gut as much as you deserve a Gucci or a Ferrari) from the costs of living (obesity, wrinkles, varicosities and lost hair among them).


The lawyers sell (actively marketed these days) reprieve from perceived slights to soul and self which have been legally or administratively excluded from polite discourse. Defence against bullying grows into defence against anything "uncomfortable" like a different perception of our workplace worth from our self-perception – the foundation of performance management, or learning! Warnings of the dangers of overhanging limbs and maybe fallen rocks compete with trees for attention on our highways.


So, we are not to see death or damage in public. My ex-countrymen – Americans - take this even further by banning the showing of those dead from defending the country. The Pratchett video mentioned above received 800 objections to the fact it showed, without flinching or inflating, the last breaths of the patient's life! In case we might be overwhelmed by reality, our TV stations all prepare us for possibly disturbing images.


Nor should we even speak disturbing images. Our public servants are trained (I assume; why else this tortured rhetoric and toneless, robotic delivery by cops and docs and pols?) to say anything but 'dead', 'body' or similarly explicit language. Rather we are given 'the deceased' who 'passed on' (just to somewhere else?) or more grimly 'passed away' (finality is acknowledged), or, more evasively, just 'passed' (like a train in the night?). Yet all are considered "tragedies" that befell "victims" (with the exception of publically recognised crims and malefactors) in print, on screen and in the mundane discourse of our neighbourhoods.


Demographics and politics of life-death

The demographics of life-death are this: a few (about 20 %) of the electorate in Australia are prepared to fight (to the death?) to preserve the right of every conception to come to term and every adult to be constrained from dying on their own terms, assisted or not. This 20% achieve a larger electoral influence than their numbers warrant because the total field of voters is finely poised between the major parties. Small factors shift small margins in finely poised electorates. Electorally true and ethically incorrect.


The facts of death – who, how many, when, but not often how or why – are available daily, along with births. With one exception: suicides, successful and attempted, are seldom reported unless unavoidable and even then only implicitly (notably death by train). So the fact that we begin and end are matters of public record, presumably because enough of us are interested to warrant the use of space that might otherwise be sold for ciggy and alcopop ads. We cannot meaningfully speak of death or birth separately without being in denial of the absent partner – we are living-dying beings; we live for a while. However long we do, it never amounts to how long we have not existed. Hence I talk of life-death.


In addition, the boundaries are a bit suss on both ends. For example, where does IVF fit with naturally occurring conception; similarly where does life support machinery fit with naturally occurring death. Notice that neither of these options is available to the poor anywhere. Some of the poor some places do have the chance to sell a part of their biological resources to the rich (comparatively) elsewhere, giving them a surrogate participation in others' longevity. As the Everest example below highlights, human rights are easily over-ruled by specific disabling circumstances, plus variations in courage (or, as I'd have you think, variations in need for martyrdom, which is just a label for a split-second decision). This is also the land of everyday hospital triage under disaster conditions.


A program of explorations

I hope, after building various views of life-death, to arrive at a place where fully rounded treatments of life-death issues can more often be achieved. To do so would mean, for example, considering all specific issues in the context of the materially and socially enabling factors through which any resolution is constructed. In other words, to use consistently the biopsychosocial construct on which some evidence-based medicine attempts to stand for all life-death matters.


So here are some views of life-death to come in this series. The first I have elaborated a bit to give a sense of the material argument. The other six are skeletal images. The order is not assured, nor are the topics guaranteed as stated. I'll be learning as I go and that may change my overall perspective and the features in its view. Reader suggestions welcomed!


Extreme sports and....the permeability of rights in pursuit of meaning – some examples:

Cathy O'Dowd's Rewind 1999 piece in Sunday Life (24 May '09, pg. 30; Melbourne) included a report of her passing by a dying woman on the north face of Everest. "The general public don't get this: they think, 'As long as she's alive, you can't leave'. But they live in a world where you can call the police or an ambulance. You can't do that on Everest."

 

High risk sports - like sky diving, paragliding, bungee jumping , base jumping - have been around since lion-baiting was the entry price for manhood in sub-Saharan hunter-gatherers.

 

In Australia we have our own sport: binge drinking - specialty of the young and younger olds, with death dealing potentials and fulfilments every weekend. These are called "tragedies" when they are merely excesses of youthful riskiness.

Beginning of life and ...rights to life. The IVF opportunity and challenge


'Normal' end of life and... is death for embracing or defeating?


Martyrs, those who serve and the costs of justifiable violence


Suicide attempts, successes and failures...irretrievable meaning statements


Choice – what can we really choose, how much should we choose?

 

Near deaths - insights from those who passed over and back again.



 

The fights we have to have!

The fights we have to have!

Torrey Orton

November 25, 2009

Three posts ago, I was worrying about facts we cannot easily have – independent, neutrally sourced and, therefore, compellingly convincing ones. In our times, the drives for such differentiating substance in our preferred arguments become more profound with each passing day. In tandem, the counter-pressures multiply – spin, playing the man, falsifying, lying. This is summed neatly in the present dilemma of climate change – a 'proven' event whose proof is constantly under duress, especially about its provability.

While the simple answer to doubters / deniers / sceptics is that the accepted risk of inaction is better than 50% and so action is unarguably demanded, this even does not suffice to quiet their multiplying fears of taking action. We are, I expect, on the edge of a plunge into increasingly violent disputation of the competing claims in this area among others.

The evidence for this is increasing rates and types of fragmentation of public organisations and institutions. In Australia this appears daily in two political activities: those of the governments and those of their oppositions. In the states, the oppositions are almost non-existent, and in many cases are riven with internal disputes. These are played out on the national stage most dramatically in the Coalition's floundering about climate change. Characteristic of the decline of the normal institutions of policy debate and delivery is the rise of fringe - right or left side – players, both personal and organisational.

The "death panels" debacle in the US healthcare struggle is examined in detail as a case of the fake news getting irretrievably out of the hands of the real news dealers – the media. It and struggles about the causes and responses to the GFC are two other highly disputed domains of public discourse. Throw in the war on terror and we have a plethora of too slippery to touch dilemmas. All that's left is the clatter of competing beliefs, and troops lining up to get into a fight (e.g. the Tea Party players in the same healthcare debate).
A similar tone exists across waters in the UK - "The debate over climate change is becoming more vitriolic by the week." Financial Times Editorial 24/11/09.

How can we learn when we think wrongly ?

"....when two experts are offering diametrically opposed views about the same subject, at least one of them has to be wrong." Michael Coulter in The AGE Nov. 1,'09. This is a model of digital, black & white thinking. For the major issues of our times multi-dimensional, continuous variable thinking is a minimum starting place. However, the above pressures and drives promote the opposite. They encourage us to make one of them be wrong to sustain our beleaguered simplicities.

An additional problem is that most of those charged with assuring our future(s) are only capable of thinking about our world through from paradigms and perspectives they learned (if at all) more than twenty years ago. These paradigms were themselves the products of the mid-thirties to mid-sixties, and can only be wielded as one edged swords in combats for which flails would be more appropriate weapons. In turn, the stress of life and the idea marketplace force those ideas to be simplified to variations of either/or when to varying degrees both/and is more suitable.

These two factors – need for simplification and shortage of conceptual complexity – yield the economic 'debates' in Australia (and US, UK, and …) which centre around a couple of concepts from Adam Smith (choice and market) and some monetarist adjustments of the last 50 years.

Here, by contrast, Robert Skidelsky tries to make sense of the struggle for dominance in explanations of the GFC.

.... "In my view, Keynes' major contribution to economic theory was to emphasize the "extreme precariousness of the basis of knowledge on which our estimates of prospective yield have to be made". The fact of their ignorance forces investors to fall back on conventions, the most important being that the present will continue into the future, that existing share prices sum up future prospects, and that if most people believe something, they must be right.

This makes for stability in markets as long as the conventions hold, but they can be overturned in the face of bad news, because "there is no firm basis of conviction to hold them steady".

Tipping or chaos?

In essence, this is what happened last year, and is where we are in our various struggles now. What we can predict from that is hard to know. We are in the region of tipping points (Gladwell, 2000) or chaos points (Ervin Laszlo, 2006) which I want to characterize as long term trends punctuated by short-term excitements of their environments. These, in retrospect, look like the expected tipping / chaos points of the theories.

This is also the region to which our accrued knowledge of life threats – the deep schemas and behaviour patterns (read habits) for defending ourselves from potentially terminal events – is oriented. The most important of these for humans are not the ones poppsychs endlessly berate as the old brain, and evolutionary outmodes which block better relating, communicating, decision-making…on and on.

What we are blocked by are real fears based on long term of threats to our viability. These, appropriately, push us towards powerful actions and fights we have to have. I fear we are daily closer as the world we know is irretrievably splintered by uncrossable gulfs of mutual ignorance.

What to do? I can only hope that seeing is a step towards doing. I believe that this can often be the case, but big numbers make it likely to be a bumpy passage. This gulf can be as big as realising that a published writer on challenges for our times includes only one item I have on my list of challenges! And he's at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington DC. If we do not agree on the problems we'll surely have trouble with the facts.