Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 60

Same-Gender Schooling, Ctd

by Dish Staff

Back in 2007, Andrew had this to say on the subject:

It’s always been a good idea, especially for boys. … The only way to ensure gender equality is to base it on a firm grasp of gender difference. In today’s educational world, a blank slate theory about human nature leads to boys’ being short-changed.

But Katie J.M. Baker cites new data running against that view:

A recent comprehensive study of 1.6 million students in grades K–12 from 21 nations found no advantage to single-sex schooling. It also found that single-sex schooling reinforces negative stereotypes, as did an oft-cited 2011 report published in Science, “The Pseudoscience of Single Sex Schooling.” Any benefit from single-sex education, the authors say, are from variables like discipline policies or parent engagement. Single-sex schooling “looks like a quick fix for low-income kids, but it’s all junk,” said Diane Halpern, Dean of Social Sciences at Minerva Schools at Keck Graduate Institute and former president of the American Psychological Association, as well as the lead author of the 2011 study. “Data simply doesn’t support that this is a superior way to teach.”

Mental Health Break

by Dish Staff

The year in 233 viral vids:

The Best Of The Dish This Weekend

I’ve been really heartened by many Christians’ responses to the Torture Report’s cataloguing of evil done in our name and behind our backs. The Catholic Bishops need to do much more, but this was a start:

The Catholic Church firmly believes that torture is an ‘intrinsic evil’ that cannot be justified under any circumstance. The acts of torture described in the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report violated the God-given human dignity inherent in all people and were unequivocally wrong … We have placed ourselves through our history as a beacon of hope, a beacon of reason, of freedom: and so, this recent chapter in our history has tarnished that.” He went on to say, “It is not something that can be easily regained, but I think that the publishing of this report begins the cleaning up of that tarnishing of our reputation as a nation that is on sound moral footing.

Today, we also noted one Christian now refusing to say the Pledge Of Allegiance, with sentiments, to my mind, completely appropriate to this moment:

From reading the report, it should now be crystal clear to anyone who has read the teachings of Jesus as found in scripture that one cannot swear their allegiance to America while simultaneously giving our allegiance to the alternate way of Jesus. Absolutely, positively, impossible. The contents of the report reveal what the US has done, and what has been done is anti-Christ – pure, absolute evil.

The crucifixion of those with already broken limbs should surely have a resonance, even among white evangelicals.

I also sense a slight opening for a way forward. There is no question in my mind that these grotesque human rights violations will require justice – if only compensation for torture victims. I agree with Harold Koh that not prosecuting open war crimes is equally intolerable in a democratic society – and sends a terrible message to all dictators and thugs across the planet that they can now torture at will. But there’s also an obvious next step: give Michael Hayden what he wants.

The Intelligence Committee should insist on interviewing all the torture suspects who are busy complaining they didn’t get to give their take (even though interviews with them from the CIA’s internal review is in the report, as are the CIA’s full, considered response). For good measure, the Obama administration should provide to the committee all the documents it has on the torture program. In other words: let’s update the report with as much data as we can possibly find. I sincerely doubt that it will turn up anything less incriminating than the CIA’s own records, but this is so grave and foundational a matter, we should make every effort to have the equivalent of a Truth Commission. The SSCI report is a great start.

Some relief from the weekend: Niebuhr on the temptations of mixing religion and politics; Wieseltier on the social peace among argumentative Jews; the grand tradition of drunk professors; the last wondrous video stores; and lesbian graffiti in ancient Pompeii.

The most popular post of the weekend was Watching Cheney: He’s Got Nothing. Runner-up: this Mental Health Break celebrating New York City.

21 more readers became subscribers this weekend. You can join them here – and get access to all the readons and Deep Dish – for a little as $1.99 month. Gift subscriptions are available here (you purchase one today and have it auto-delivered on Christmas Day). Dish t-shirts are for sale here and coffee mugs here. A final email for the week:

I want to thank you for the writing you’ve done about the way we treat animals in the factory farm system. Before reading your blog, I was vaguely aware that there was controversy, but I will admit that I was not as thoughtful about where my food came from as I ought to have been. It was your blog that introduced me to these horrifying maternity pens, which sent me looking for more information, and pretty soon after that I decided that I couldn’t be part of a system that included such cruelty. I don’t think there’s anything morally wrong with raising animals for meat; I just think that before they are humanely slaughtered, there ought to be some recognition that these are living creatures who can feel pain, both physical and emotional.

Anyway, I stopped buying pork from the grocery store, found two local farms that raise and slaughter their animals in humane conditions, and then stopped buying meat from the grocery store all together (because what the farming system does to chickens and cows might not be as bad as what it does to those poor sows, but it’s not much better). It’s undeniably more expensive, so we eat quite a bit less meat, which in the long run is probably a big win for my family’s overall health and small win for the environment. So, even if there’s nothing you and your staff can do to convince Christie to buck political forces and do what’s right for these animals, you’ve inspired at least one of your readers to do what little she can by taking her dollars elsewhere. Thanks, and keep up the great work!

I’m taking next week off blogging to deal with other pressing Dish business. Michelle Dean and Will Wilkinson will be guest-blogging, alongside our regular Dish team. I may post on torture and a few other topics, so I won’t be off-grid. Just trying to keep the Dish alive and well.

The rest of us will see you in the morning.

(Photo: The shadow of a protester in a hoodie is seen in the glow of police lights on the wall of a church during a ‘Millions March’ demonstration protesting the killing of unarmed black men by police on December 13, 2014 in Oakland, California. The march was one of many held nationwide. By Elijah Nouvelage/Getty Images.)

The Depravity Of Dick Cheney

Perhaps the only saving grace of this sociopath formerly in high office is that he understands that his legacy could well be as a war criminal unlike any in American history before him. That’s my only explanation for why he has to be out there day after day, year after year, attacking his successor, lambasting America’s return to civilization, and insisting that hanging people from shackles, freezing them to near-death, near-drowning them so that their abdomens are distended with water, anally raping them, breaking their limbs, and keeping them awake so long they hallucinated … is not somehow torture. Ask yourself: have you ever met someone who believes that? Outside the professional criminal classes, that is.

And in his response today to the voluminous and undisputed evidence supplied by the CIA’s own internal documents, he has nothing specific or factual to say that can undermine any of it. He just insists, like a dad lost on a car trip, that he alone knows he’s not lost, whatever the map or GPS says. His best talking point is that those who authorized and committed the torture were not interviewed by the committee – implying this was because of bias. But this is transparently false. Six months into the investigation, the attorney general announced his own study into CIA torture techniques. Here is Senator Feinstein’s account of what happened next:

The committee’s Vice Chairman Kit Bond withdrew the minority’s participation in the study, citing the attorney general’s expanded investigation as the reason. The Department of Justice refused to coordinate its investigation with the Intelligence Committee’s review. As a result, possible interviewees could be subject to additional liability if they were interviewed. The CIA, citing the attorney general’s investigation, would not instruct its employees to participate in our interviews. (Source: classified CIA internal memo, February 26, 2010).

So the CIA was not ordering its employees to be interviewed, for defensible legal reasons. In any case, there were plenty of previous interviews with CIA torturers, including from the CIA’s own internal investigation, there was a formal CIA response to all the charges (highly unpersuasive because they have to argue against their own records), and, so far as I know, interviewing them all over again is still possible. Come to think of it, why doesn’t the committee take that up again under GOP leadership, if their perspective will allegedly alter the conclusions?

But in the Cheney interview, there is nothing faintly that rational. He is behaving like a cornered man. On what possible grounds does he dismiss 6.3 million pages of documentation from the CIA’s own records as “full of crap”? The CIA had a chance to rebut every one of the conclusions with other documents and failed to. This is preposterous as well as slanderous to the extraordinary work behind this remarkable report. But the most revealing parts of the interview were the following, it seems to me. Todd asked Cheney at one point what he believed the meaning of torture is, after citing the rectal hydration issue (which seems to have upset more people than any other technique). And this is what Cheney said:

I’ll tell you what my definition of torture is: what nineteen guys armed with airline tickets and boxcutters did to 3,000 Americans on 9/11.

Later, when confronted with an example of a human being suspended by his wrists from shackles so he could barely touch the floor for 22 hours a day for two weeks, Cheney refused to say that that wasn’t torture. Instead he repeated:

Torture is what the al Qaeda terrorists did to 3,000 Americans on 9/11

What I take from these statements is that the torture program was, for Cheney, partly an amateur thug’s idea of how you get intelligence, and partly simply a means of revenge. Yes: revenge. This was a torture program set up in order to vent rage and inflict revenge. It was a program that has no place in a civilized society.

He was then asked about the 26 people whom the CIA admits were tortured by mistake. One of them was even frozen to death. A sane and rational and decent human being, who presided over the program that did this, might say: “The decision to torture was an extremely agonizing one, but I still believe defensible. But of course the torture of innocent people is horrifying. I deeply regret the chaos and amateurism of the program in its early phases.”

So what did Cheney actually say? When confronted with the instance of Rahman Gul, the individual tortured to death, Todd asked what the US owed these torture victims. Cheney actually said this:

The problem I have is with all the folks we did release who ended up on the battlefield … I have no problem [with torturing innocent people] as long as we achieved our objective.

It doesn’t get any clearer than that. The man is a sociopath. He is a disgrace to his country. And he needs to be brought to justice.

The View From Your Window

Lincoln City, Oregon, 4.23 pm

A Long Distance Relationship … With Your Therapist

Joseph Burgo shares his experiences using telemedicine in his therapy practice:

No doubt it would be better if my clients and I were able to meet in my office week after week, me inviting them in from my waiting room at the beginning of each session and ushering them out through the exit door at the end. But for people who live in remote locations where qualified professional help is scarce or entirely unavailable, connecting with a therapist by Skype is often the best option. Over the last few years, I’ve worked with an American expat living in Japan, a Ukrainian émigré in Israel, and the scion of a wealthy family in Egypt. I’ve held Skype sessions with people located in remote corners of the United States, England, Australia, and other countries. They had few options for getting the help they needed. …

The legality of Skype therapy is a gray area because most state laws require the professional to hold a license in the state where the client resides. Because I was trained as a psychoanalyst, and psychoanalysis is not a regulated profession in most states, I skirt such licensing laws by offering my services in that capacity. Some therapists call themselves “life coaches” when they work across state lines; others simply ignore the law. The arrival of distance therapy and telemedicine is rapidly rendering state-by-state licensure impractical. As usual, the law lags far behind technical innovation.

Todd Essig points out drawbacks to Skype therapy:

Are being bodies together and technologically-mediated simulations of being bodies together functionally equivalent, at least for the purposes of the psychoanalytic psychotherapy practiced by both Burgo and me?

According to a soon to be published book by Gillian Isaacs Russell titled Screen Relations: The Limits of Computer-Mediated Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy the answer is a resounding no (disclosure: I wrote the Foreword for this fine volume). In fact, after this book hits the shelves patients and therapists alike will need to be attentive both to the obvious gains from screen relations based treatment and the inevitable losses. Russell effectively demolishes the myth of functional equivalence using her ethnographic study of therapists and patients who have experienced Skype therapy along with lab findings from cognitive and neuro-science, communication studies, infant observation, and human–computer interaction, as well as a deep dive into clinical theory,

According to Russell, in an exchange we had about the Burgo article, when you eliminate the experience of being bodies together you constrain and limit what is therapeutically possible to “‘states of mind’ rather than ‘states of being.’” As a result, reflective introspection gets narrowed. How reflective can one really be when talking to a dashboard iPhone on a long drive?

Previous Dish on telemedicine here. In other therapy news, Tina Rosenberg flags research on providing mental health care to those in developing nations:

Two years ago, I wrote about a research study in 2002 that provided group interpersonal therapy, led by college students and high school graduates with two weeks’ training, to depressed women in Ugandan villages. The treatment was so effective that six months after starting this therapy, only 6 percent of those treated still had major depression.

More recently, similar work has gone on in South Asia. In rural Rawalpindi, Pakistan, the Thinking Healthy Program taught basic cognitive behavioral therapy for only two days to female community health workers with a high school education. The trainees, called Lady Health Workers, then integrated the therapy into their regular visits with pregnant women and new mothers. … Six months later, only 3 percent of those treated were still depressed. The largest study was in Goa, India, where local people with no health background were given an eight-week course in interpersonal psychotherapy and worked with physicians to treat patients with mental health disorders. This, too, was very successful.

These studies were proof that depression could be treated in poor countries by lay people. Now these researchers are trying to figure out how to streamline these interventions to the minimum outlay of resources needed to maintain excellent results.

Lastly, some somewhat lighter fare – Amanda Bloom covers a popular podcast from comedian Paul Gilmartin:

Gilmartin, 51, is the creator and host of The Mental-Illness Happy Hour, a weekly two-hour trudge to the darkest—and most joyful—corners of the human condition. He records the podcast in his hometown of Los Angeles, and the show is built around interviews with celebrities, artists, therapists, and podcast listeners; anonymous surveys; and Gilmartin’s narration of his own struggles with depression, addiction, and overcoming sexual abuse. Thirty-five thousand people download the podcast each week, and some episodes—interviews he’s held with Marc Maron, Maria Bamford, and Adam Carolla, for example—have been downloaded more than 80,000 times. The Mental-Illness Happy Hour website is home to an active listener forum, and the show’s 200th episode aired on November 21.

The podcast serves as a place of community and affirmation for those who struggle with mental illness, including Gilmartin, who has been undergoing treatment for clinical depression since 1999 and has gained clarity on his own issues through talking with his guests and corresponding with his listeners. It was while interviewing comedian Danielle Koenig during episode 16 of the podcast that Gilmartin realized on-air that he had been molested by a neighbor as a young boy, and the revelation that he was a survivor of incest began its slow simmer while talking with radio personality Phil Hendrie on episode 59. …

Levity and humor also keep the podcast from being overwhelmingly heavy, and listeners can expect a dick joke every now and again, in between tales of binge eating, drug dealing and coping mechanisms.

Mental Health Break

Exploring the imagined heavens:

The Merits Of Materialism

Julie Beck parses them:

There are two kinds of materialism, according to Dr. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a distinguished professor of psychology at Claremont Graduate University. Terminal materialism is the kind typically derided as shallow and empty – wanting things for their own sake, or to impress others. What inspires someone to save something from a burning house is more likely instrumental materialism, when “the object is simply a bridge to another person or to another feeling,” Csikszentmihalyi says.

While things are, on the one hand, just things, they are also repositories for the meaning people project on them. Religious objects are obvious examples of things that transcend their thing-ness: A cross is just two pieces of wood but for what it represents to Christians; a menorah is just a candelabra, except that it’s not. Similarly do people build meaning around their possessions – a gift from someone’s mother might represent her love; souvenirs could be reminders of places close to heart but far from hand. “Things embody goals, make skills manifest, and shape the identities of their users,” write Csikszentmihalyi and Eugene Rochberg-Halton in their 1981 book The Meaning of Things. “Man is not only homo sapiens … he is also homo faber, the maker and user of objects, his self to a large extent a reflection of things with which he interacts.”

Should Christians Say The Pledge Of Allegiance?

Benjamin Corey already was skeptical of the practice – but with what we now know about the United States engaging in torture, he answers the question with a forceful “no”:

When you’ve had nationalism and tradition drilled into your head for years on end it can be hard to step back and realize that maybe we’ve been wrong– that’s how indoctrination works and why it’s so hard to break free from it. We grow up being taught that America is the greatest nation that has ever existed, that we are exceptional compared to others, that we are a “Christian” nation, and that whatever we do is good, right, and justified. And so, pledging to give our allegiance to such an entity is an easy sell, as the narrative we are given doesn’t seem on the surface to conflict with some basic understandings of following Jesus.

However, the release of the now infamous CIA Torture Report should be the final blow that closes the case on Christians reciting the pledge of allegiance.

From reading the report, it should now be crystal clear to anyone who has read the teachings of Jesus as found in scripture that one cannot swear their allegiance to America while simultaneously giving our allegiance to the alternate way of Jesus. Absolutely, positively, impossible.

The contents of the report reveal what the US has done, and what has been done is anti-Christ– pure, absolute evil.

Kyle Cupp nods, claiming that “some evils are so intolerable, so embedded in an institution, that you cannot in good conscience pledge allegiance to that institution”:

The United States of America receives no special graces or blessings that keep it mostly on the side of Christ. It’s not and never has been a “Christian nation.” It is not the world’s savior. American Christians do not owe their nation permanent loyalty. For Corey, the US absolutely crossed the line, although he already had serious concerns about the pledge.

I sympathize. The US flag doesn’t symbolize liberty and justice for all–or a nation-state that should always remain indivisible and in existence. What allegiance I have to my country is conditional. Unless we see fundamental and structural reforms, I do not wish for the US to persist until the end of history. I believe the people of my country have done great good and have the capacity for great good in the future, but the reformers aren’t running the show, and I’m not overflowing with hope.

(Photo by Alan Levine)

Quote For The Day II

“There is one question which we seldom ask each other directly: it is too brutal. And yet it is the only question worth asking our fellow travelers. What makes you go on living? Why don’t you kill yourself? Why is all this bearable? What makes you bear it?

Could I answer that question about myself? No. Yes. Perhaps … I supposed, vaguely, that it was a kind of balance, a complex of tensions. You did whatever was next on the list. A meal to be eaten. Chapter eleven to be written. The telephone rings. You go off somewhere in a taxi. There is one’s job. There are amusements. There are people. There are books. There are things to be bought in shops. There is always something new. There has to be. Otherwise, the balance would be upset, the tension would break.

It seemed to me that I had always done whatever people recommended. You were born; it was like entering a restaurant. The waiter came forward with a lot of suggestions. You said, ‘What do you advise?’ And you ate it, and supposed you liked it, because it was expensive, or out of season, or had been a favorite of King Edward the Seventh. The waiter had recommended teddy bears, football, cigarettes, motor bikes, whiskey, Bach, poker, the culture of Classical Greece. Above all, he had recommended Love: a very strange dish,” – Christopher Isherwood, Prater Violet: A Novel.