Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 112

As If Ebola Wasn’t Bad Enough Right Now

Dan Hurley reports on a confusing new childhood illness:

More than 100 cases of a polio-like syndrome causing full or partial paralysis of the arms or legs have been seen in children across the United States in recent months, according to doctors attending the annual meeting of the Child Neurology Society. Symptoms have ranged from mild weakness in a single arm to complete paralysis of arms, legs, and even the muscles controlling the lungs, leading in some cases to a need for surgery to insert a breathing tube, doctors said.

The outbreak, which appears to be larger and more widespread than what has largely been previously reported by medical and news organizations, has neurologists and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention scrambling to find out what is causing these cases and how best to treat it. “We don’t know how to treat it, and we don’t know how to prevent it,” said Keith Van Haren, a child neurologist at Stanford University School of Medicine. “It actually looks just like polio, but that term really freaks out the public-health people.”

Book Club: Unlocking The Mind With Meditation

A reader introduces another main theme from Sam’s book:

I wrote in earlier to share my excitement over atheists breaking into the discussion of spirituality. To that end, I think Waking Up is a valuable read. I walked away appreciating a bonafide atheist’s taking on the subject. Having sat on the fence for my whole life on the subject of God, I’ve found writing that approaches atheism as a negative definition (what we are not) but a positive one (what we are) essential in becoming more comfortable joining a small minority of non-believers.

I’ve been meditating for over a year now. It is perhaps the most substantial and rewarding thing I’ve done for myself and I plan on continuing the practice for the rest of my life. I can’t quite explain the growth that sitting in silence every morning has given me. It’s almost like I’m playing a bit with the dials of life, turning up my attention to the essential and the hidden while turning down some of the noise that can make listening to it all difficult, like my tendency to argue or having my thoughts spiral out of control.

As one might imagine, I was very receptive to the chapters on meditation. The discussion of the lack of self is certainly worth a re-read. I know that I, for one, want to circle back on the neuroscience to make sure I caught everything.

Ultimately, I felt like Waking Up was an invitation to discuss as opposed to a deep dive. I understand why. The typical person reading the book might need a little convincing. However, in making the basic case for mindfulness, I think Harris understandably did not chase any specific points to anywhere too arresting. I hope that Harris continues to write on the subject. It’s clear that he has more to offer and I think he would have receptive audience having argued the basic case.

I’d be interested in reading more about spirituality interfaces with morality, the day to day, and broader constructs of society. Andrew and Sam had a great discussion re: religion a while back. I think it would be great to dive to the same depth and explore some of those questions with the new book in mind.

Another reader:

I just finished Waking Up. The book has some fascinating things to say about the brain, the nature of consciousness, and the “self,” but I see it primarily as an invitation to the reader to begin a meditation practice. As Sam writes, “I am suggesting an experiment that you must conduct for yourself, in the laboratory of your own mind.” So I have a question for you, Andrew: Have you taken him up on this invitation?

Have you begun a meditation practice? I don’t mean, “Do you engage in activities such as yoga or jogging or dog-walking that you might describe as meditative.” I mean an actual, daily practice of mindfulness meditation, such as Sam is describes on p39 of his book.

If you have, I’d be curious to hear how your experience accords with Sam’s. As a practicing meditator myself, I can confirm that in my experience, meditation has effected a profound and apparently lasting transformation in the way I experience and engage with the world, entirely for the better, and more or less exactly as Sam describes in his book.

I am more content, more positive, happier, and both physically and mentally healthier. Moreover, I feel confident that these transformations will last, because they are built on real insight – on seeing for myself The Way It Is (the title of an excellent book by the Theravada Buddhist monk Ajahn Sumedho), rather than on anything taken on faith.

Every week, I read your Sunday postings – that fascinating, diverse, often heart-wrenching compilation of spiritual yearnings, conjectures, arguments and analyses, and I am reminded of Eckhart Tolle’s poignant question: “Why are so few seekers, finders?” Or the complementary observation of Henry Benoit on man’s search for meaning, particularly in the West: “With regard of the wealth of diagnosis, one is struck by the poverty of therapeutic effect.”

Meditation offers that therapeutic effect. It transforms seekers into finders. And as Sam points out, it does this reliably enough to be considered a “best practice,” or as the Buddhists call it, “skillful means,” for effecting this transformation.

As much as I have enjoyed the discussion surrounding Sam’s book, I would caution that to read it and walk away with nothing more than opinions or criticisms would be to miss the point entirely. This is a book that leads to a door. Meditation is the way to open that door. If you haven’t taken Sam up on his invitation to do so, I would strongly encourage it. The results can be … enlightening.

I took a course in Transcendental Meditation a few years’ back. And I do indeed meditate – but not regularly enough or with sufficient dedication and discipline. For a while, I combined it with a more traditional Christian prayer: I’d spend twenty minutes meditating, and then ten minutes saying the Lord’s prayer, slowly, methodically, contemplating and thinking through each phrase and then examining my conscience. I found the calm and composure after meditating helped dispel all the anxieties and distractions and thoughts that impeded prayer. And, yes, it really did help restore some balance to my life – an equilibrium and calm that is nonetheless hard to sustain when you do what I do every day and are constantly absorbing news, news, news, and opining in a raucous and rhetorically polarized public arena. I even asked Sam to recommend a teacher – but any serious attempt to get to grips with it would require at least a month’s retreat – and that was close to impossible given the blog.

And then the nervous energy of my job, and my own natural restlessness would take over. There are many times in the day when merely the idea of meditating seems so out of place, and so out of tune with the frenzy of Internet life. There are more emails to read, more links to cover, more decisions to make about the Dish, more chores and tasks to accomplish. It feels at times as if modern life both makes meditation more essential and yet also extremely counter-intuitive. I suspect it’s the beginning of an answer to much of what ails us – and yet I cannot seem to muster the discipline to do it as I should.

The reader follows up:

I’ll share an old line I found somewhere which you might find apropos, given your schedule: “Everyone should practice meditation for ten minutes a day. And if you don’t have time to do that, then you should practice for 20 minutes a day.”

Follow the whole Book Club discussion here. And join in by emailing your thoughts to bookclub@andrewsullivan.com.

Why Rand Matters

The foreign policy speech Rand Paul gave late last week is well worth a read. I was having a conversation with an international relations scholar the other day, and when asked her what her position now was, she said “realism, which these days usually means non-interventionism.” That’s exactly where I am and it seems to be where Paul now is:

After the tragedies of Iraq and Libya, Americans are right to expect more from their country when we go to war. America shouldn’t fight wars where the best outcome is stalemate. America shouldn’t fight wars when there is no plan for victory. America shouldn’t fight wars that aren’t authorized by the American people, by Congress. America should and will fight wars when the consequences …intended and unintended … are worth the sacrifice.

Amen. I’m particularly glad he mentioned Libya: an almost textbook example of a well-intended, impulsive liberal internationalist intervention – we must prevent a massacre right now! – that led to far more deaths over the following months and years than it allegedly prevented. The critique also applies to the current, quixotic, and counterproductive attempt to control the civil wars in Syria and Iraq. But he also rightly maintains that “the Use of Force is and always has been an indispensable part of defending our country”:

The war in Afghanistan is an example of a just, necessary war. I supported the decision to go into Afghanistan after 9/11. I still do today. America was attacked by Al Qaeda, and there was a clear initial objective: dismantle the Taliban, and deny Al Qaeda safe haven. The invasion showcased the best of modern American military strength and ingenuity: we went in with Special Forces and heavy air power, and formed critical alliances. The Taliban were ousted from power, and Al Qaeda fled. We kept a limited force in Afghanistan to wage counterterrorism and we understood, at first, the limits of nation building in a country decimated by over 30 years of constant war.

​Only after our initial success did the lack of a clear objective give rise to mission creep. Today Afghanistan is more violent than when President Obama came into office.

If I had to pick a president on foreign policy, this vision is far closer to my own beliefs about where we need to go than Clinton’s very twentieth-century interventionism and embrace of ra-ra American exceptionalism (i.e. we get to break all the rules we enforce on others).

Dougherty favorably contrasts Rand’s foreign policy vision with Ron Paul’s:

Ultimately, the senior Paul did not have a foreign policy. Instead, he had a series of protests against the federal government. They were often richly deserved, but rarely did they constitute a genuine alternative to the status quo.

Rand could have gone in this direction. And he has shown that he’s willing to take a protest to great lengths. Recall his popular filibuster against the use of drones in the United States, into which he folded criticisms of the Patriot Act and the presidential “kill list” that includes American citizens. But the younger Paul has decided that if he wants to be president, he better have a substantive foreign policy.

Antle III continues to dream big about Rand Paul’s potential to change the GOP on foreign policy. The needle Rand needs to thread:

[T]his foreign policy must command enough assent from governing elites that qualified professionals would exist to implement it in the event sympathetic politicians were elected. And it must be a foreign policy that could actually work, not one that waves away genuine national-security threats or pretends that United States could become Switzerland.

That means politically this foreign policy must be able to galvanize the biggest constituency for peace within the Republican Party—the libertarians, constitutional conservatives, and other noninterventionists who backed Senator Paul’s father in the last two presidential campaigns. At the same time, it must be accessible to a larger swathe of the Republican rank-and-file.

Part of that means joining the still-young Ron Paul movement with older Republican foreign-policy traditions that remained well within the party’s mainstream as recently as George H.W. Bush’s presidency.

Beauchamp rightly calls Paul’s speech “one of the most important speeches on foreign policy since George W. Bush declared war on Iraq”

Paul’s agenda has a lot more in common with Barack Obama’s view of the world than it does with, say, John McCain’s. But his speech very cleverly played up the criticisms of Obama, and minimized the points of agreement. That’s because the basic goal of the speech was to teach conservatives that they can oppose foreign wars and Democrats at the same time.

The real target of Paul’s speech were the neoconservatives: the wing of the GOP that believes that American foreign policy should be about the aggressive use of American force and influence, be it against terrorist groups or Russia. Paul’s unsubtle argument is that this view, dominant in the GOP, is a departure from what a conservative foreign policy ought to be.

His tactic for selling this argument is innovative. He’s reframed arguments with neoconservatives as arguments with Obama, banking on the idea that he can get everyday Republicans to abandon hawkishness altogether if they see Obama as a hawk.

Smart smart smart smart smart.

(Photo: Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) speaks on October 24, 2014. By Jessica McGowan/Getty Images)

Hathos Alert

“Yeardley Smith, the voice of Lisa on Fox’s ‘The Simpsons,’ was an honored guest at the dinner and told the Washington Blade the advancement of LGBT rights was due to [HRC executive director Chad] Griffin’s work. ‘It’s extraordinary,’ Smith said. ‘I think the dominoes are falling so fast. And nobody ever thought it could happen that quickly, but Chad could get it done. It’s very impressive,'” – The Washington Blade, at the Human Rights Campaign’s annual dinner.

The dinner’s keynote speaker was the president who doubled the rate of discharges of gay people in the military, signed the Defense of Marriage Act and campaigned on it, entrenched the travel ban on HIV-positive immigrants and tourists – and has never apologized for any of it. He was given repeated standing ovations.

(Photo: Yeardley Smith and Chad Griffin arrive at the Human Rights Campaign Los Angeles gala dinner held at JW Marriott Los Angeles at L.A. LIVE on March 22, 2014 in Los Angeles, California. By Michael Tran/FilmMagic.)

Tweet Of The Day

To clarify re arrest in #Leeds as man came close to PM’s group: Nothing sinister, just a man in the wrong place at the wrong time….

— WestYorkshire Police (@WestYorksPolice) October 27, 2014

Can you imagine any police department in the US saying that after a man ran – sprinted, actually – right through the president’s security entourage and came into direct contact with him? But that’s what happened in England today. The dude was merely jogging to the gym – and is now de-arrested. For video see below:

Quarantanamo, New Jersey

Kaci Hickox, quarantined nurse can go home. This is the tent she was being held in: pic.twitter.com/airGpo3lgq

— ian bremmer (@ianbremmer) October 27, 2014

Late Friday, governors Cuomo and Christie announced a mandatory 21-day quarantines for anyone arriving in the US through the Newark and JFK airports if they had direct contact with Ebola patients in Guinea, Liberia, or Sierra Leone. Cuomo blinked yesterday and relaxed the new rule for his state after strong objections from public health groups and the White House:

Originally, Cuomo and … Christie announced a joint initiative to require a governmental quarantine for 21 days for all health care workers flying into their states. Illinois soon followed suit. But under the new guidelines, Cuomo said returning health care workers can instead quarantine themselves in their homes for 21 days, and will receive at least two unannounced house calls from local health officials. The state will provide services like food and medicine if the health-care worker needs it. Health care workers will also monitor their symptoms, as has been the standard for the vast majority of people returning from work in the region. “If their organization does not pay for the three weeks, we will,” Cuomo said during a press conference Sunday night.

Christie has also walked back his order somewhat. Nurse Kaci Hickox, the first person subjected to the New Jersey quarantine order, is set to be released today and allowed to finish her quarantine at her home in Maine after threatening to take legal action against the state over her treatment:

The nurse’s treatment has drawn withering criticism from both public health officials and the nurse herself. At University Hospital in Newark, Ms. Hickox has been kept in an isolation tent with a portable toilet, but no shower or television. … Ms. Hickox called her treatment inhumane and castigated Governor Christie for saying she was “obviously ill” when she displayed no symptoms of Ebola.

Kent Sepkowitz calls these quarantine orders an overreaction that won’t do anything for public health:

Indeed, there is a consequence to Christie and Cuomo’s decision that endangers the safety of the rank and file of New Jersey and New York far more than it protects it. Searching for a bump in some internal poll or perhaps because it feels good to make a damn decision once in a while, the governors know but choose to ignore the obvious big fact: There is a larger crisis occurring in redoubts well beyond Trenton and Albany. Their move, though perhaps it plays well now, will have a desiccating impact on volunteerism; this in turn will make the African epidemic worse, which will make it more likely cases will appear in the United States, which will increase the risk of Ebola for John Q. Public as he wanders through Trenton and Albany, Brooklyn and Newark.

Cohn piles on:

It’s also an open question whether the quarantine reduces anxiety or intensifies it. That’s particularly true in this case, because Cuomo’s statements on Friday, at least as relayed by the press, left the impression that a non-symptomatic Ebola patient could spread the disease on the subway—the very notion that public health officials had spent the previous 24 hours explaining wasn’t true. That’s one reason that officials from the Obama Administration, the CDC and the New York City Department of Public Health seemed not at all happy about Friday’s announcement. The other is that, based on what I’m reading in outlets like the Times and hearing from insiders, they weren’t so much consulted about the decision as informed of it at the last minute, as a fait accompli.

So does Josh Voorhees:

If Cuomo, a Democrat, and Christie, a Republican, do believe they’re acting in the public’s best interest, then they haven’t done their research. Public health experts have made it clear that quarantining asymptomatic individuals will do little if any good. More troubling is the risk of a cascade of unintended consequences that could make it more difficult to contain the virus in West Africa, where it has already claimed more than 5,000 lives and will likely claim thousands more.

At best, the bipartisan pair is giving in to the fears of a misinformed public. At worst, Christie and Cuomo—whose respective presidential ambitions are no secret—are capitalizing on those fears to score cheap political points by appearing to be guardians of their constituents’ safety. The chance to bolster their respective profiles appears too good for them to pass up, even if such gains are paid for by risking West African lives.

The orders might even be unconstitutional:

Lawrence Gostin, a law professor at Georgetown University who has been in touch with Hickox about her legal options, said he thought the quarantine order was illegal and unconstitutional. He noted that since you can’t catch Ebola from someone unless they are both infected and showing symptoms, Hickox poses no danger to the public. “The courts are very suspicious when you deny a whole class of people their liberty,” he said. “She’s being detained because she’s a member of a large class of people who happened to have been in the region.”

But Jazz Shaw is disappointed in Cuomo for backing off:

Having them stay at home is doable, but only if we have confidence that they actually will stay at home, rather than going out bowling, playing basketball and riding the subway. That will require monitoring, but the monitors need to look like bellhops more than prison bulls. It’s a tricky situation to be sure, but it could be handled. Sadly, it seems that Cuomo has left Christie hanging in the wind and will – as predicted – bend in the direction of Washington.

A Declaration Of War On Francis

So this is why it took Ross Douthat so long to utter an opinion about the recent Synod on Family Life in Rome. He was weighing whether to call for schism! For the record: for all my questioning and concern about the direction Benedict XVI was taking the church, I never wrote a column that actually called for open revolt against him. The theo-conservative reaction to Francis reminds me a little of the wing of the GOP that simply cannot tolerate the give and take of democratic life, and as soon as a president of the other party is handily elected, and actually dares to enact a clear campaign pledge, declares the end of the republic!

But, of course, the Catholic church is not a democracy, so the analogy won’t work. But neither is it a dictatorship – least of all under this Pope who, from the very beginning, insisted that he was merely a bishop among bishops. And in Ross’s column, there is a clear assumption that his side of the debate owns the church, that any contrary views to his are an outrageous, treasonous and unprecedented attack on the institution itself, that any accommodation of mercy for those caught in the cross-hairs of the teachings on sex and marriage and family is somehow a “betrayal” of the core faith. Not a misguided idea – but a betrayal.

This is nonsense and panic, but it is a useful insight into the theo-conservative psyche. Notice the language used to describe a civil, rare and open debate of issues that the church is grappling with. This process – in which the theocons won on their core issues – is “a kind of chaos,” it’s “medieval” and “dangerous,” it sows “confusion.” It is as if these questions cannot even be debated (which was, of course, the view of John Paul II and Benedict XVI), as if faith itself is so fragile and so rooted in unquestioning blind obedience to a body of teaching that makes no distinction between central and more marginal issues, that any Pope that actually seeks to have a conversation about these questions is a threat to the church itself.

And what are these questions that are so dangerous to consider? That some divorced Catholics who sincerely want to be part of the life of the church should be allowed some participation in the sacraments; that a gay relationship should not be defined and condemned solely for its sexual nature – but can be appreciated for other virtues, such as mutual love and sacrifice; that doctrine should never be imposed without an option for mercy. These are not violations of the core teachings – that marriage is for life and must be always open to life; that non-procreative sex inside or outside marriage is always sinful – but attempts to acknowledge that human beings are involved here, and that exclusion and cruelty and contempt are not the only options for those following the teachings of Jesus.

But for Ross, it appears that mercy is an attack on inviolable truth, rather than its essential Christian complement. And it also appears that allowing the Vatican to reflect the actual debate going on among actual Catholics in our real lives is some kind of threat to the faith itself. Please. If your faith cannot admit of doubt, of debate, of conversation … then it is a white-knuckled faith in the religion of total certainty, rather than the calm faith of those who know we do not have all the answers to every pastoral question.

Ross seems to think, for example, that Francis is proposing an end to the idea that marriage should be monogamous and life-long. That’s just bizarre. What Francis is encouraging us to debate is not whether those whose marriages failed should be re-married in the church, but merely, depending on the circumstances, whether they can be allowed to participate in the full sacramental life of the church. What Francis is suggesting in another respect is that gay people’s real human lives and loves cannot be reduced to a psychological and moral “disorder.” You can see these suggestions as an attack on Jesus’ austere view that marriage is inherently life-long or it is nothing, if you really want. Or you can see this as a reflection of Jesus’ constant, persistent empathy with the sinner, love for the individual and mercy toward the flawed. I suspect most Catholics would instinctively see this as a function of the latter.

And Ross agrees that his is a minority view. Which explains a little of his rage.

For the first time in more than thirty years, the rigid traditionalists, who were always a minority of Catholics, had a Pope very much on their side. Their champion was Joseph Ratzinger who viewed even the Second Vatican Council as dangerously open to the currents of modernity and who, as John Paul’s doctrinal enforcer, ruined countless careers, and policed any error, and shut down any dissent to his understanding of orthodoxy. Many of us who disagreed did not throw a hissy fit, threaten schism, or call for open revolt. And we refused to do this even as our very identities were deemed inherently directed toward evil, as we were blamed for the violence sometimes directed against us, as we were blamed for the child abuse of pedophiles, as we had to endure the staggering hypocrisy and venality of a hierarchy that tolerated their peers’ rape of children but reserved their strongest condemnation for gay couples in committed relationships.

But we, it seems, are not the real Catholics. We are not the people who keep the church alive. We are somehow parasitical on the true believers. The real Catholics are

the people who have done the most to keep the church vital in an age of institutional decline: who have given their energy and time and money in an era when the church is stained by scandal, who have struggled to raise families and live up to demanding teachings, who have joined the priesthood and religious life in an age when those vocations are not honored as they once were. They have kept the faith amid moral betrayals by their leaders; they do not deserve a theological betrayal.

It’s an almost textbook case in which those who regard themselves as morally superior claim ownership of a church created … for sinners. There is a clear rebuke to that mindset:

So the last will be first and the first last, for the called are many and the chosen ones are few.

Let us leave such distinctions to God, shall we? And try to struggle together in a church which no faction owns and in which truth is always tempered with mercy and in which faith is always leavened with doubt.

(Photo: Pope Francis hugs a disabled man during a meeting with the UNITALSI, the Italian Union responsible for the transportation of sick people to Lourdes and the International Shrines in PaulVI hall, at the Vatican, on November 9, 2013. By Filippo Monteforte/AFP/Getty Images.)

Down On The Democrats

The latest polling indicates that Americans want a GOP Senate:

According to a new NBC News/Wall Street Journal/Annenberg poll, a majority of likely voters – 52 percent – say they would like to see Capitol Hill controlled by Republicans, compared to 41 percent who favor the president’s party. (For registered voters, it’s 46 percent GOP and 42 percent Democrat-controlled.) While neither party can boast stellar approval ratings, those surveyed gave Republicans better marks when asked whether what they’ve heard, seen or read in the past few weeks has made them feel more or less favorable towards either party.

Aaron Blake highlights another poll, which shows that “congressional Democrats are facing their highest disapproval rating in at least the last 20 years, at 67 percent.” He later puts this finding in context:

To be clear, the Washington Post-ABC poll still shows a slight difference between the parties, with congressional Republicans viewed dimly by 72 percent of Americans, which is slightly worse than the record 67 percent who view Democrats dimly. And it is beyond question that the GOP’s continually poor image is holding it back from making what could be even bigger gains than it’s primed to make in the Nov. 4 elections.

But the gap between the two parties is shrinking, and there’s plenty of reason to believe the GOP’s image isn’t hurting it much more than Democrats’ is these days.

The View From Your Window

Telluride, Colorado, 11.08 am

Why Are The Midterms So Meh? Ctd

Beinart ponders our collective apathy:

The dullness comes from this election’s lack of a compelling macro-theme. Yes, there are national refrains: Democrats in state after state call their Republican opponents heartless misogynists; Republicans call their Democratic opponents Obama clones. But there’s no big national issue on which voters feel that they can change the country’s course. It’s not that candidates today are more cynical or homogenized than in midterms past. It’s that the subjects they’re discussing cynically and homogenously don’t matter as much. …

Republicans still denounce Obamacare, but few still believe they can repeal it. Big partisan differences about the size of government remain, but with the deficit going down and Republicans no longer willing to go to the brink over the debt limit, the crisis atmosphere of 2010 has faded. Overseas, Americans worry about Ebola and ISIS, but those threats don’t divide them along partisan lines like Iraq. There’s little reason to believe that electing a Republican Senate would substantially change American policy toward either.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying next month’s elections don’t matter. They do. As Annie Lowrey has predicted, a Republican Senate—if elected—will work mightily to prevent President Obama from using his executive authority to implement a broad range of government regulation. But these potential fights are mostly too narrow and too technical to grab public attention. Americans just don’t believe that as much hinges on their vote as did in 1998, 2002, 2006, or 2010. For many pundits, that makes this election boring. For many ordinary Americans, I suspect, it’s something of a relief.

Along the same lines, Lee Drutman and Mark Schmitt blame our politicians’ lack of big ideas on polarization:

Historically, parties and candidates have sought political advantages by trying to raise the salience of particular issues that might cut across party lines. The assumption was that voters might support Democrats on some issues, while they might agree with Republicans on other issues. So, for example, a pro-choice Republican might be able to win over enough Democratic voters to emerge victorious in a Democratic district, or the reverse. …

As party politics has become at once more homogenous and polarized, it’s not only harder to reach a compromise at the end – such as on immigration reform or the federal budget. There’s also less room for ideas and fresh approaches to issues at the beginning. The “political issue space,” once wide open and full of opportunities to form new coalitions, is now narrow and closed.