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The Best Of The Dish Today

Believe it or not, but the most popular post of the day was the Beard of the Week. I’m a bad person.

Five others: a deeper conservatism; a tidal wave for equality; decriminalized weed in DC; the Pope on civil unions; and the rogue CIA.

See you in the morning.

(Photo: A Ukrainian man looks out at the countryside from a train on the outskirts of the Crimean city of Simferopol on March 4, 2014 in Simferopol, Ukraine. By Spencer Platt/Getty.)

Update from a reader:

Wow.  I logged on to the Dish tonight, to see if you had any new Ukraine coverage … and there’s my favorite high school teacher front and center with a bunch of his current students.  The high school in that picture is Bishop Kelley High School in Tulsa, OK.  I’m an alum, class of ’02.  It’s a great school, and Father O’Brien was a fantastic teacher in my day, and is, i’m quite sure, doing an equally wonderful job as the school’s president. Despite the excellent scholastic education I got at BK, the religious nature of the education didn’t stick with me. But if it had, Father O’Brien, and couple of the lay Christian Brothers, would have been the reason why.

The Problem Of America’s Prisons, Ctd

In an otherwise grim report about solitary confinement, Shruti Ravindran points outs that prison officials across the country are rethinking the practice:

A recent case involving death row inmates in Unit 32, a supermax facility in Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman, sparked off a change of heart among prison officials, and something of a national trend. When [forensic psychiatrist Terry] Kupers evaluated the residents in Unit 32 in 2002, which reeked of malfunctioning toilets, he found that about 100 of them had severe undiagnosed or misdiagnosed mental illnesses. They hallucinated, threw feces at the guards, and howled through the night; in response, they received punishment, not treatment. After listening to the accounts of inmates who described the facility as a hellhole and insane asylum, the prison authorities gradually reduced the segregated population from 1,000 to 150, upon which violence plummeted by 70 percent.

The Mississippi experience led to a re-examination of the rationale behind solitary confinement in Colorado, Illinois, Maine, Ohio and Washington. Maine cut its segregated population by almost 60 per cent, and made it onerous to keep a prisoner in confinement for more than 72 hours. The Colorado prison authorities reviewed their segregation practices and, in 2012, announced the closure of a 316-bed administrative segregation unit that will save the state $13.6 million this year. This January, prison authorities in Illinois closed down its notoriously repressive supermax, Tamms Correctional Center, which cost the state $26 million annually, or about $64,800 per inmate per year to run.

In a history of Philadelphia’s Eastern State Penitentiary, David Kidd conveys some fascinating details about the origins of solitary in the US:

As foreboding as it was, Eastern State was designed from the beginning to implement new, more humane theories about crime and punishment. Presaging many of today’s arguments on corrections reform, the emphasis was much less on punishment and more on rehabilitation. Philadelphians, drawing on their Quaker roots, had long argued for better treatment of prisoners. They believed that if prisoners were left alone in complete silence, with nothing to occupy their minds but thoughts of their misdeeds, they would become genuinely penitent. (Hence, the building was known as a “penitentiary.”)

The place was utterly silent. Guards walked the halls with socks over their shoes. The wheels on the wagons that brought food down the long corridors were covered in leather. For 23 hours of every day, inmates were confined to a 7.5- by-12-foot cell with a church-like vaulted ceiling and small skylight. For the remaining hour they were allowed outside within their own small exercise area. Inmates in adjoining cells were never allowed outside at the same time, and any communication between prisoners was strictly forbidden.

In order to implement these new ideas in prison reform, Eastern State boasted a number of design innovations. Because each prisoner would never leave his cell, water for washing had to be brought to him and a flush toilet provided. (By comparison, running water didn’t make it into the White House until 1833.) A rudimentary system provided heat to each cell – something many Philadelphia residents couldn’t afford themselves.

Recent Dish on solitary confinement here. More posts from the archive here, here, here, and here.

Face Of The Day

Leo, aged 9 months, takes part in an experiment at the “Birkbeck Babylab” Centre for Brain and Cognitive Development in London, England. The experiment uses an electroencephalogram (EEG) to study brain activity whilst the baby examines different objects of varying complexity. Researchers at the Babylab, which is part of Birkbeck, University of London, study brain and cognitive development in infants from birth through childhood. The scientists use various experiments, often based on simple games, and test the babies’ physical or cognitive responses with sensors including: eye-tracking, brain activation and motion capture. By Oli Scarff/Getty Images.

Surrender Douthat! Ctd

A reader writes:

I find I have little sympathy for the protestations of Douthat, Dreher, etc., and here’s why: what they’re protesting is their fading ability to dictate to others how to live their lives. They have not actually lost any rights, but rather lost a position of privilege and authority from which they have called the tunes to which others have been forced to dance. What they’re upset about isn’t the loss of power over their own lives; it’s about the loss of power over others’ lives. To which I say, “Boo-freaking-hoo.”

Another is on the same page:

You quoted Rod Dreher:

American Christians are about to learn what it means to live in a country where being a faithful Christian is going to exact significant costs. It may not be persecution, but it’s still going to hurt, and in ways most Christians scarcely understand.

No. American Christians are about to learn what it means to live in a country whose culture and values and attitudes don’t fully replicate their own. That is all.

I’m sure it’s painful to discover that your world view is actually just one among many, rather than Reality Itself, and I can sympathize with the pain since I was once a child and had to endure many such painful realizations as I grew up and learned that I was not actually the central character in the universal drama.  Indeed, I’m still confronting such humbling realizations, well into my forties, on a routine basis.

As a Dish completist, I’ve been following this and related discussions carefully, and I’ve tried to exercise as much compassion as possible for those who perceive themselves to be on the losing side of a “culture war”.  That very perception is worthy of compassion – namely, that what most of us experience as progress towards a fairer, more tolerant, more enlightened society should be perceived by some as a defeat in a war.

But I’m finding my resources of compassion seriously over-taxed by Douthat’s et al. reaction to the coming of the age of marriage- equality because it is rooted in the moral and intellectual complacency of privilege.  Douthat, especially, is expending all his intellectual energy on rationalizing his prejudices rather than attempting to examine them. Even so, nobody is forcing him, or anybody, to change his attitudes or behavior – conservative Christians remain free to profess and practice their beliefs.  Indeed, this really isn’t about them at all.  And there’s the rub.

Suddenly they and their views are not the American Unum, but merely part of the Pluribus.  Their outrage (or, in Dreher’s case, apprehension and sadness) is really a reaction to a loss of prestige, a loss of a sense of centrality, a loss of the sense that this is their country and they are the normal ones, and it’s only natural and correct that the culture and the law should reflect their values and their attitudes.

Suddenly, the culture and the law are not on their side – that must be very painful.  Except that this is not about “sides”.  It’s about justice.  There aren’t actually any losers here in practical terms.  Unless by losers you mean people who have lost the privilege of denying rights to some of their fellow citizens because those citizens fail to conform to their particular standards and values.

Another quotes me:

Rod wonders if being the counter-culture “will be good for us.” In my view, it really could be. Since Constantine, Christianity’s great temptation has been to doubt the power of its truths and to seek to impose them by force. And its greatest promise has been when it truly has been the counter-culture – in the time of Jesus and the decades after, or, say, in the subversive appeal of Saint Francis’ radical vision. Why see this era as one of Benedictine retreat rather than of Franciscan evangelism? Why so dour when you can still be the counter-cultural salt of the earth?

This is a good point, yet I don’t think it gets at why conservative Christians face such a distressing conjuncture now.

For decades, they have assured us that homosexuality must be stigmatized, both in popular culture and law, because the Bible and our own natural reasoning (viz. “natural law”) are clear that it is inextricably evil and a civilization that openly tolerates it is destined for destruction. Well, they’re here, they’re queer and … life goes on, and most people have come, sometimes grudgingly, to accept that Craig and Bruce next door are not the horsemen of the Apocalypse. In fact, they’re distressingly upstanding members of the community and make a killer raspberry crumble for the library bake sale. What they were claiming to be one of the great truths of human history handed down by Yaweh himself appears to have been, shall we say, overstated.

It’s like the doomsday cultists who predict the end of the world with absolute certainty and then find themselves utterly flummoxed when the predicted day comes and goes and nothing happens. The handwaving and excuse-making are pretty lame: Oh, you don’t see the effect now, but in 20 years, we’ll find out how much gay parents damage their kids, or in 20 years, we’ll see how polygamy and incestuous marriages are the norm, etc. The apocalypse is always just over the horizon. We’re not wrong; our timeline was just off.

The larger issue at stake is the truth claims of Christianity, at least in the view of its most stringent interpreters. If the Bible can’t be trusted to be right about whether or not gay people are horrible monsters on par with murderers, swindlers, and slave dealers, what can we trust it for? Now, conservative Christianity endured (mostly) coming to terms with desegregation and interracial marriage and now evanglicals run around acting like they practically championed those things back in the day, so perhaps Dreher and Douthat and others are overstating things. But I’ve often wondered whether, as gays and gay marriage become more mainstream and, well, banal, many Christians won’t find themselves wondering why the apocalypse hasn’t come after all and what that says about Scriptural authority in a lot of other areas. That’s what’s not sitting well with a lot of Christian culture warriors right now.

More thoughts from readers on our Facebook page.

Psychedelics As Medicine

MDMA researcher Michael Mithoefer discusses the drug’s promise in treating PTSD:

Meanwhile, the first study in decades on the psychotherapeutic benefits of LSD found that it could help patients cope with life-threatening illnesses:

The controlled, double-blind study, which was conducted in Switzerland under the direction of Swiss psychiatrist Peter Gasser, measured the impact of LSD-assisted psychotherapy on 12 people with life-threatening diseases (mainly terminal cancer). “The study was a success in the sense that we did not have any noteworthy adverse effects,” Gasser says. “All participants reported a personal benefit from the treatment, and the effects were stable over time.”

Initially eight subjects received a full 200-microgram dose of LSD while the other four got one-tenth as much. After two LSD-assisted therapy sessions two to three weeks apart, the subjects in the full-dose group experienced reductions in anxiety that averaged 20 percent, as measured by the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory, while the other subjects became more anxious. When the low-dose subjects were switched to the full dose, their anxiety levels went down too. The positive effects persisted a year later. “These results indicate that when administered safely in a methodologically rigorous medically supervised psychotherapeutic setting, LSD can reduce anxiety,” Gasser and his colleagues conclude, “suggesting that larger controlled studies are warranted.”

The Predicament Of Ukrainian Jews

#Crimea MT @BalmforthTom One of Simferopol's 3 synagogues last night graffitied with 'death to Jews', swastikas pic.twitter.com/ZB3A3qQkYO

— Jenny Mathers (@jgmaber) February 28, 2014

Eli Lake addresses it:

Ukraine has never been a very good country for the Jews. The 19th and early 20th centuries were marred by pogroms against Jewish communities. Under Soviet occupation, many Jews that stayed in Ukraine faced the state sponsored anti-Semitism of the Communist system. More recently, a few neo-Nazi groups have openly participated in the popular uprising that ousted President Viktor Yanukovych baring at times swastikas.

Nonetheless, leaders of Ukraine’s small Jewish community (experts estimate there are between 80,000 and 350,000 Jews in Ukraine) say they are more worried about anti-Semitic attacks from Russian operatives and Yanukovych loyalists than the nationalists who gathered in Kiev and other cities to oust him.

Marc Tracy’s take:

Both sides are using Ukraine’s Jewish community as a symbolic pawn, in which the credibility of the other side can be diminished by accusations of anti-Semitism. And that is remarkable. In a sense, it’s even laudatory. Babi Yar—in which, outside Kiev, over just two days Nazi Einsatzgruppen shot more than 33,000 Jews—was barely 70 years ago. 900,000 Ukrainian Jews, more than half the country’s pre-war Jewish population, were murdered in the Holocaust. This was in no small part because occupying Germans were able to secure the cooperation of homegrown anti-Semites, who had been carrying out pogroms in parts of their country that at the time were a designated region for Jews to settle in for decades preceding World War Two.

He bets that “it would be better for Ukraine’s Jews for Ukraine to retain its sovereignty and territorial integrity”:

If Ukraine is divided along ethnic lines, then ethnic minorities—most of all the Muslim-majority Tatars but also, potentially, Jews—could find themselves the odd peoples out.

Meanwhile, Jeffrey Veidlinger points to the history showing that “before Crimea was an ethnic Russian stronghold, it was a potential Jewish homeland.”

Meme Of The Day

#ashtag:

Post Ash Wednesday Mass. Love these kids. #ashtag pic.twitter.com/WmwbAGHg3g

— Father Brian O’Brien (@frobrien) March 5, 2014

What Does AIPAC Really Want?

At the lobbying group’s annual policy conference, Judis takes their temperature on the peace process:

AIPAC doesn’t poll its attendees, so there was no way to measure directly support for Kerry’s efforts. But I heard some grumbling in the workshops that the West Bank, if allowed to become a state, would turn into Gaza. When Kerry, who spoke at the conference, and two Israeli business leaders attempted to justify the negotiations, they got at best tepid applause. The discussion of the peace process by Netanyahu and by AIPAC leaders was also extremely one-sided. They did not utter a word about settlers, outposts and the occupation, or about Naftali Bennett’s Jewish Home Party, which is opposed to a Palestinian state.

Instead, Netanyahu and the AIPAC leaders dwelled entirely on the concessions that the Palestinians would have to make. “The Palestinians must prepare their population to make the necessary compromises with Israel,” Robert A. Cohen, AIPAC’s new president, declared. Netanyahu hinted at some of those compromises. Israeli troops would have to be able to patrol the Jordan Valley for decades. And Jerusalem would remain “the eternal undivided capital of Israel and the Jewish people.” If Netanyahu and AIPAC stick to those demands, they would probably doom the negotiations.

MJ Rosenberg examines Netanyahu’s decision to spend a quarter of his speech excoriating the BDS movement:

Netanyahu is using BDS as just one more excuse to avoid making tough decisions about the occupation. And he is giving a hostile movement infinitely more credibility than it deserves. The prime minister of Israel should not be giving speeches about a fringe movement that, so far, has accomplished almost nothing — including on U.S. campuses. It’s as if Lyndon Johnson gave a speech denouncing the Trotskyists for its opposition to the Vietnam war.

All Netanyahu did was use BDS as another excuse to avoid the issue of the ugly, immoral, illegal occupation itself. So typical. Anything to avoid talking about peace.

Paul Pillar notes Bibi’s enduring obsession with vilifying Iran:

Outside of the anti-Americanism that is heard so widely and often, it is hard to think of any other leader or government so dedicated to heaping calumnies unceasingly on another nation, at least one not currently waging war on the heaper’s country. Maybe some American Cold Warriors fixated on the Evil Empire came close. Attacks on Iran occupied most of the first half of Netanyahu’s speech Tuesday to AIPAC. Haaretz accompanied a transcript of the speech with one of those graphics depicting the frequency with which particular words have been used. For the entire speech Iran was mentioned far more than any word other than Israel.

Another, Deeper Conservatism

Reviewing Yuval Levin’s The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Left and Right, Elizabeth Corey comes to a striking conclusion – “Paine has won” – and longs for a more counter-cultural conservatism:

[M]uch of modern conservatism provides a vision of a good life that differs little from that advocated by the most energetic progressives. The ends might be different, but the means are the same.

A substantive alternative would require a much more radical reorientation of the modern soul. Even as everything in contemporary culture pushes us to look forward, to “aim high” and relentlessly pursue change, we might remember that there are truly countercultural ways of living that ask for patience, gratitude, and satisfaction instead of impatience, discontent, and constant desire for what does not yet appear. Such an attitude does not entail our becoming inactive, boring, or staid, but it requires a willingness to preserve rather than tear down and build anew. Reform would be, as Burke suggested, more cautious than radical, with careful attention to the familiar and the tried. We might begin by learning to appreciate and even to love, as Michael Oakeshott has put it, the “gentle, endearing imperfection of all living things,” including ourselves.

And so a truly counter-cultural conservatism would regard play as the highest of human activities and homo ludens a great cultural achievement – and play is indeed a deep, underlying virtue in Oakeshott’s thought. But so too is a reinvigorated modernist Christianity, the religion of unachievement, the faith that has no time with the American “cult of wellbeing“. This is a conservatism in love with nature, with friendship, with humor – and all those things that can never be reduced to the level of the “useful”. And of course it includes the voice of art, of imagination, of poetry, as Mark Signorelli explains:

The key, I think, lies in relishing the extraordinary power of [Burke's] language, a political and moral rhetoric that effectively models the kind of conservatism Corey calls for, with its “radical reorientation of the modern soul.” Other writers describe the sort of principles that would constitute a viable conservative vision—the grateful piety towards God and land and family—but only Burke realizes that vision in his words, conveying to us some sense of what it must be like to live according to such principles. His superb eloquence, which is often noted as something incidental to his thought, is really at its heart. It is the means by which he manifests the full experience of constructing a political order out of the particular affections of time and place.

Burke is, in effect, the poet of conservatism. And, like any good poet, he is capable of arousing the elemental affections from which civilized life grows.

Richard Reeves appreciates that Levin doesn’t ignore the parts of Burke’s thinking that today’s conservatives might not want to emulate:

Not that Burke is sanitised here for modern consumption. While many contemporary conservatives cite his famous line about the need “to love the little platoon we belong to” as an argument for local, civic associations, Levin reminds us that the platoons in question were in fact “very clearly a reference to social class”. Burke thinks that, in a flourishing society, people know their place in the hierarchy – and learn to love it.

By offering us Burke warts and all, Levin in fact makes a stronger claim for his continued importance. In his hands, Burke forces us to think again about the wisdom that can inhere in the institutions and customs of a nation, sometimes even after rational scrutiny has done its work.

Previous Dish on Levin’s book here and here.

Chart Of The Day

Quoctrung Bui explains why you should always order the largest pizza:

The math of why bigger pizzas are such a good deal is simple: A pizza is a circle, and the area of a circle increases with the square of the radius. So, for example, a 16-inch pizza is actually four times as big as an 8-inch pizza. And when you look at thousands of pizza prices from around the U.S., you see that you almost always get a much, much better deal when you buy a bigger pizza.