Author Archives: Peter Levine

notes on the mideast after Arafat

I have a colleague who’s an excellent guide to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, almost uniquely qualified to explain it. I can’t reconstruct his crystal-clear summary of recent events, but I think I can accurately recollect a few key points:

1. Before Arafat died, there was some potential for a unilateral Israeli withdrawal from all of Gaza and selected parts of the West Bank. Sharon had decided to go that route, and he, perhaps alone of all Israeli politicians, had the stature to confront the settler movement and achieve some degree of withdrawal. After all, he was the architect of the settlements, so he could argue that some of them must be removed. Further, there was a consensus in Israel that Arafat was not a possible negotiating partner. Paradoxically, this made the left despair about fundamental negotiations and support modest Israeli withdrawals. In general, the Israeli people want negotiations, but not with Arafat. That desire created political momentum for an alternative strategy of unilateral separation. (Whether a withdrawal could possibly have led to a fair and sustainable outcome is another question.)

2) With Arafat dead, the Israeli right is now calling for negotiations with his successor, and playing on popular hopes that somehow the two sides will be able to reach an overall agreement. This stance will help them block Sharon’s strategy of unilateral withdrawal.

3) But Arafat was never as much of an obstacle as most Israelis have believed. His successor will inherit the same basic situation. Moreover, the Israeli right is calling for the Palestinian authority to wage a civil war to defeat Hamas, as a precondition for sitting down with Israeli negotiators who are not pre-committed to any particular position. This is an utterly unrealistic expectation.

4) So there is little ground for hope, and the death of Arafat has probably made things worse (although hardly anyone mourns him as a human being). The best path is probably still for Israel to withdraw from Gaza, in which case it is conceivable that the Palestinian authority and Hamas will work out a modus vivendi to govern the area, will converge ideologically, and will be able to negotiate together with Israel. The likelihood of that outcome strikes me as very low. But every other scenario I can imagine seems worse.

how deep is cultural diversity?

“Historicism” is the view that our values are phenomena of our cultural backgrounds and contexts; and contexts differ from time to time and place to place. Although even the ancient Greeks recognized some degree of moral diversity, true historicism was a discovery of the nineteenth century.

However, modern natural and social science have suggested that some important aspects of psychology are common to all members of homo sapiens, the results of our evolved physical natures. For example, it appears that all people place a higher value on a certain gain than on a probable gain of much greater worth; but they have the opposite view of losses. For related reasons, people will go to great lengths to save $5 on a $10 purchase (?fifty percent off!?), but will not inconvenience themselves to save exactly the same $5 on a $125 purchase. A loss of money reduces happiness more than an equivalent gain increases it.

I mention these findings because we are told that they emerge consistently in studies from around the world; they may reflect mental heuristics that evolved when people were hunter-gatherers. Robert Wright tells us that ?people?s minds were designed to maximize fitness in the world in which those minds evolved,? our ancestral state, which apparently resembles modern life among the !Kung San people of the Kalahari Desert or the Inuit of the Arctic.

However, even if such claims are true, they do not negate the existence of deep diversity in other aspects of psychology and moral judgment. If our physical natures directly determined our answers to all moral questions, then we would not debate ethics or literally wage wars over differences of principle. Besides, many of the features of human psychology that are universal are not moral. Perhaps we evolved to be aggressive toward competitors and altruistic toward relatives. Yet we also have the capacity to limit our aggression and to generalize our altruism beyond family and tribe. People disagree about when aggression is appropriate and in what circumstances one must be altruistic. These differences are especially evident when one compares individuals from long ago or far away. Thus the natural basis of aggression and altruism does not in any way reduce the importance of moral diversity and disagreement.

Finally, the very science that generates findings about human nature is embedded in a particular time and society. This does not mean that truth is inaccessible to science or that its findings are arbitrary. It does mean that we should ask whether the questions and methods of recent science are at least somewhat limited by our local interests and capacities. In sum, Isaiah Berlin was right: ?human beings differ, their values differ, their understanding of the world differs; and some kind of historical or anthropological explanation of why such differences arise is possible, though that explanation may itself to some degree reflect the particular concepts and categories of the particular culture to which these students of this subject belong.?

trust and reliability online

I recently published an article in which I described the following “troubling example”:

In June 2004, if you went online to learn about ?cholesterol,? you might have typed that word into Google, the world?s most heavily used search engine. Google would have quickly returned a list of more than five million websites containing the word ?cholesterol.?

The first ten websites would appear immediately before you; the remaining five million would take progressively more time and patience to find. The eighth result would be a page within MedlinePlus. This is an elaborate website created by the National Library of Medicine, a department of the United States government that has an annual budget of US $250 million, a mandate from Congress to inform the public about medical issues, more than a century of experience, and a highly professional staff of scientists and librarians. …

Somewhat higher up on the Google listing, at number five, was a site written by Uffe Ravnskov , MD and PhD, who described himself as the ?spokesman of THINCS, The International Network of Cholesterol Skeptics.? His site announced: ?The idea that too much animal fat and high cholesterol are dangerous to your heart and vessels is nothing but a myth. ? If you think this is written by another internet crackpot, take a look at Dr. Ravnskov?s credentials and the reviews of his book??which was for sale on the site.

I am not competent to judge whether Dr. Ravnskov?s claims about cholesterol or his own credentials are accurate. However, it is remarkable that an individual with a low-budget website?registered to the ?.nu? domain, which belongs to the New Zealand protectorate of Niue in the South Pacific?should be able to beat the National Library of Medicine of the United States in the competition for prominence on Google.

Dr Ravsnkov has, understandably, sent me an email complaining of his treatment in my article. I went back to his personal page and the Thincs website. To me, they raise interesting, complex, and ambiguous issues. Indeed, I meant to explore those issues in my article, although I confess that my tone was disparaging toward Dr. Ravnskov. These are the points that “trouble” me:

1) None of us can tell directly whether “animal fat and high cholesterol are dangerous to your heart and vessels.” We all rely on trusted authorities. People like me are completely dependent on others’ expertise. But even a scientific specialist in this field would have to trust the instruments he or she used and the reliability of past research. So the issue is not whether Dr. Ravnskov’s argument is right (I’m not qualified to judge that), but rather whether we should trust him or the medical orthodoxy that he is challenging.

2) In general, there are some good reasons to trust medical orthodoxy. Scientific method makes sense. Randomized, double-blind, clinical trials really are the “gold standard” of research. Not only that, but academic and government-paid researchers are supposed to work for institutions with integrity that reward truth and not profit. It worries me that anyone can create a website and say anything at odds with the medical establishment, and potentially convince lots of people to ignore the standard advice.

3) On the other hand, it is perfectly plausible that all those white-coated folks at NIH could be wrong about a particular topic. “Group-think” could have set in. Worse, they could have been more or less corrupted by the pharmaceutical companies that are making huge amounts of money from anti-cholesterol drugs. Newspapers and medical journals are full of distressing stories about distorted medical research.

4) Dr. Ravnskov’s websites look a little amateurish, and they advertise a book that he is selling. They list articles and other books in support of his position; but many are not peer-reviewed. Facts like these are sometimes taken as signs that a website is untrustworthy. However, some of the articles he cites are peer-reviewed. More importantly, the conventional signs could be misleading. Maybe Dr. Ravnskov’s sites look amateurish because they are low-budget; and they are low-budget because he has integrity. Maybe MedlinePlus isn’t more reliable, just more slick.

4) I feel that if I were worried about cholesterol (which I’m not, especially), then I could look into the issue and decide which sources are really credible. I could take the time to read the links on Medline and on Dr. Ravnskov’s page, and I believe I could make decent judgments. However, I (arrogantly) assume that I have better-than-average skills in the interpretation of research. How should we tell a 9th-grader to sort out reliable and unreliable claims?

All of this underlines the deep importance of ethics in medical research. I would quickly dismiss a critic of medical orthodoxy if it weren’t for all those stories about financial conflicts-of-interest.

“The Storm”

Here is a great, if difficult, war poem. It’s from the first page of La Bufera e altro (The Storm and Other Things), a book that Eugenio Montale began in fascist and Nazi-occupied Italy during the Second World War and published in 1956. My amateurish English translation follows. Click for some commentary and the magnificent Italian text.

The Tempest

Princes have no eyes to see these great marvels

Their hands now serve only to persecute us

–Agrippa D’Aubigne, à Dieu

The storm that drums on the hard

leaves of the magnolia its long March

thunder and hail,

(the sounds of crystal in your nocturnal

nest surprise you, of the gold

squandered on the mahogany, on the gilt edge

of the bound books, a sugar grain

still burns in the shell

of your eyelids)

the flash that candies

trees and walls and surprises them in this

eternity of an instant–marble manna

and destruction–that you carry

carved in you by decree and that binds you

more than love to me, strange sister,–

and then the rough crash, the sistri, the shudder

of the tambourines above the ditch of thieves,

the tramp of the fandango, and above

some gesture that gropes. —

just like when

you turned around and with your hand, cleared

your brow of its cloud of hair,

waved at me–and went into the darkness

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a story about universities and communities

I thought the following was the most interesting story told at the Penn State conference last weekend. (I’ll relate it in an anonymous paraphrase, since I don’t have the speaker’s permission to name her or her institution.) The story takes place at a major research university that’s near a deeply impoverished city. Don’t try to guess which one–there are lots. An administrator gathered a group of socially engaged, committed professors to meet with representatives of the community. The community members listed a set of pressing concerns, one of which was the huge trucks that rumble through their city. It came time for the professors to respond, and one by one, they all said that they knew nothing about trucks. The community members replied (in effect), “Well, it looks like we’ll have to deal with this on our own. But what good does it do us to have a world-class research university here?”

Like all good stories, this one prompts many thoughts, not all mutually consistent. My colleagues at the meeting made some interesting points, and then I came up with other ideas on my way home. In particular …

  • It wasn’t necessarily wrong for the professors to disclaim expertise about trucks. There’s nothing worse than false pretentions to knowledge, and these people really didn’t know about urban planning, traffic control, or related issues.
  • Possibly, the university should hire different people if it can’t field experts on the topics that concern the neighboring community. But possibly not. It all depends on mission. The university in question sees itself in service to the whole world, so it’s understandable that they don’t hire truck experts.
  • It might have been a good thing for the community to realize that they had to solve the problem on their own. There is nevertheless a question about the purpose of universities, especially ones that are supposed to serve their neighbors.
  • There could be a role for the university as a knowledge-broker. A staff member could be charged with putting community members in touch with experts–either at the campus or elsewhere. (Although no one at Penn State said so, this is a traditional role for librarians.)
  • Perhaps the professors who said they knew nothing about trucks were missing the point. Trucks are easy to understand; and urban planning (while complex) may not be the issue here. The real problem may not be trucks or roads but power: who wields it, how to confront it, how to get it. Professors, specifically political scientists, are supposed to understand power. But you can’t just transfer information or expertise about power to community members. Something much closer to real education would be required. By the way, the education could be mutual, since the best political scientists learn from observing or participating in political struggles.