Reincarnation: Where Do Beliefs Come From?

Why do people believe in Heaven? Why do they believe in Hell? Why do some people believe God created every living thing and others believe in evolution?

Sometimes, people believe things because it's to their advantage to believe them: As Upton Sinclair said, "It is hard to bring a man to understanding if his income depends on his not understanding." (Or words to that effect.)
So the Reynolds tobacco executive who testifies before a Congressional committee he believes cigarettes are harmless is easy to figure out. 
But consider afterlife: Apart from some the preacher whose livelihood depends on convincing people he knows the mind of God and the rules God has laid down, for most people there is no advantage to simply believing in an afterlife, other than the comfort factor:  I will see my mother again in Heaven. She is not permanently lost to me.
The Phantom reflects on his own belief about what happens to us after we die, and he cannot quite figure out where it comes from, but maybe that's why is seems so persuasive. 
When the Phantom was about eight years old, he overheard a discussion between is older brother and his father. His brother said that everything in the universe was cycles.  The earth revolves around the sun; the seasons cycle; every organism has a life cycle. His father looked at his older son with an expression neither of his sons had often seen--one of genuine interest in something one of his sons had said. The father said, "That is a real insight you have there." 

Sometime after this, the Phantom was awakened from a deep sleep--sat bolt upright in bed, from a nightmare. In the dream, the Phantom had gone to bed and died. But the dream did not end there. The Phantom died, but almost instantly was reborn in his brother's room, as a new child. He was a baby, screaming his lungs out, frustrated that he'd have to start all over again, to learn to speak, to walk, back to square one.

And ever since, the Phantom, in his heart of hearts has believed that's what happens to us. We do not go to heaven. Our souls are simply recycled.  Everything else on this planet seems to be recycled, one way or the other--the preservation of energy and mass. What was profoundly sad for the Phantom was in his new incarnation, he had no memory of his old family, of the world he had left. He was simply returned to earth, to start anew, with no memory, no past, no connection to those he had loved before. It was just ruthless. 

There is no way to test this theory, as far as the Phantom knows. It just is. Just a thought. A belief. 

Another experience, a mind game, from a dream, this one a recurrent dream. The Phantom had recurrent dreams he could fly. He would simply flap his arms and rise up into the air and hover above the trees and look down on people below, who never noticed him, never looked up, but the Phantom was very worried someone would and he would have a lot of explaining to do, so he swooped back down to earth. But it was excruciating, to have to land, although the landing was always soft. It was excruciating because it was such a thrill flying. 

Now, the aging Phantom walks along the shore at North Beach, Hampton, and he sees men doing what he had done in his dreams:  They go out on surf boards with sails attached to a harness and the wind catches the sails, and they lift off above the waves and are gone. They rise into the air and become little more than a speck in minutes, sailing aloft,  out to sea and then they turn and return to shore. 

The Phantom, of course, knows some day he must try to  learn this. 
But the Phantom is not keen to die quite yet.

Amy Chua: Defining Success

Get dressed, get blessed
Try to be a success
Please her, please him, buy gifts
Don't steal, don't lift
Twenty years of schoolin'
And they put you on the day shift.
--Bob Dylan, "Subterranean Homesick Blues"

Amy Chua writing with Jed Rubenfeld in a new book, The Triple Package, explores some the same questions The Phantom raised in last week's blog: What is success, how do we measure it and how do we get it?

She looks at what happens to groups, and concludes success does not occur because one group has genetically superior gifts or higher intelligence--if success emanated from superior genes, then those genetically blessed groups would, generation after generation be at the top, like some master race--but  what sociologists and economists have documented is not that pattern: groups tend to rise to success in one generation but then fall back toward the mean in the next.  Some groups which have succeeded over several generations  are not as genetically connected as Jews (or at least as Jews were before they moved to America and started marrying non Jews.) , The Mormons, have achieved success relentlessly, as defined by the number of CEO's who are Mormons and they are more of an interbred group.

But what are the measures of success?  Income is one. Indian Americas have a median income of $90,000 (whereas all Americans have a median of $50,000.)
Jews are said to be successful because 3 of the 9 members of the Supreme Court are Jews and 1/3 of American Nobel Laureates are Jews. 

Chua looks at some of the usual assumptions which conventional wisdom suggest explains the success of certain groups: e.g., certain groups arrive in this country well educated and poised to succeed. Indians often come on work visas, having been trained in computers in India, so their success is predictable.  But Chua shows groups who arrive with minimal education (Chinese, Vietnamese, Korean) who, within a generation have risen,  as measured by income and by admissions to Ivy League schools.

When an elite New York City school (Stuyvesant) changed its  admissions policy  to simply admit those students with the highest test scores, 620 Asians, 177 whites 24 Hispanics and 9 blacks comprised its entering class. The same happened at Berkeley, when California went to a formula for admissions:  grades plus test scores were all that counted. The campus went 90% Asian.

There has always been that underground, non politically correct belief that Asians are good at math, genetically, and blacks simply "don't have the head for it."  This is the racial bias. The Phantom saw evidence to the contrary among his Nigerian, Kenyan and Ethiopian patients in Washington, D.C.

Does this mean Stuyvesant and Berkeley got the brightest, most talented kids? Or did they get the kids who had figured out how to play the game best, the kids whose parents could pay for the Kaplan test prep course? Were these kids really bright, or just shrewd?

The Phantom's son learned how to grub grades from a girlfriend, who instructed him: Don't get all interested in this subject. Just do what you need to do to get the "A" and move on.  He had become interested in Benjamin Franklin, for a report, and he was checking out more books from the library to learn more.  No, wasted time. You are getting distracted.  Don't get seduced by getting interested and wanting to learn more than you need to learn. The idea is not to learn about Franklin. The idea is get an "A" in the course. 

 Chua points to the interesting phenomenon of Nigerian students. Although Nigerians make up less than 1% of American blacks, they comprise 25% of the Black students at Harvard Business school.  This certainly comports with observations the Phantom made in Washington, DC, where he met many Nigerians who were erudite, driven and successful. So were many Ethiopians. Nigerians also sent wonderful surgeons to the United States during the 1970's but then something happened in Nigeria and those doctors stopped coming.

Ms. Chua observes that across groups, success comes to those who: 1. Believe they are endowed with superior brainpower  2. Are insecure about their own personal worthiness 3. Have admirable impulse control.

In other words, certain groups foster a child rearing environment in which the children feel they have something to prove, but are only likely to succeed if they focus on what they need to succeed and forsake all other temptations.

Ms. Chua, who wrote Tiger Mom, returns to the whole notion of rearing and how Chinese Americans are often less concerned about their children suffering, or struggling with self esteem, but more with instilling a sense of urgency and a will to succeed. 

She points to the changing economy, which rewards  higher education as the environment in which these driven children are likely to succeed where the indulged American kid who watches TV and plays video games will wind up driving a cab.

Of course, she has to concede a substantial number of college grads wind up driving cabs, because their college education, while stimulating or edifying or simply a four year debauchery, did not lead to a career.

Which brings the Phantom back to the issue of whether or not going to college is actually a ticket to economic success. Do students at the Ivy League actually learn things which make them more successful than students at state schools, or are those students at the Ivy League because they are driven toward success and pursue it? Would those ambitious students have failed , had admissions to the Ivies been by lottery and rejections been their fate? Or would they have succeeded because they were ambitious to begin with?

The Phantom can certainly think of classmates he knew growing up who fit the profile Ms. Chua describes: In particular, his high school prom date, a friend he knew since 4th grade. She was clearly wonderfully bright, verbal, analytical and insightful and the Phantom spent hours talking to her and knew her far better than any of her teachers. The daughter of an ophthalmologist, she applied to Ivy League schools and Seven Sisters schools but was rejected by every one, and wound up at Carnegie Tech. After a year, she transferred to Barnard, went on to Columbia Law and became a lawyer for a big Hollywood studio, and ultimately  she became general counsel and partner in a  brand name financial institution which most people know,  and she now lives on Russian Hill, San Francisco with a monster beach house up the coast. 

The Phantom knows about the beach house because she emailed him a picture, saying come out and visit sometime; we've got room. Whenever she returned to Bethesda, she takes out  a dozen of her old high school chums to dinner and covers the bill. She probably makes more than all 12 put together. And eight of those 12 went to Ivy League schools, straight out of high school.  Her generosity is genuine, but she has, clearly, never gotten over what happened at the end of high school. That emailed photo of her home reveals the pain. You may have gone directly to the Ivy League, but I'm no failure. Look at me know. She had something to prove. And she did. 

In the Phantom's case, he wound up spending 16 years in Ivy League institutions, after high school, through medical school and the end of medical training, but when he returned home to Bethesda, to open his practice, none of those names mattered. He would have been better off had he gone to medical school at Georgetown or George Washington, where he'd have made connections which would have helped when he started practice. People would have referred him patients right away. As it was, it took years to create a network of local doctors and until then, his practice languished, as he sat in his office under some very expensive diplomas which didn't mean much to either his patients or the doctors who would have to refer them.

And what of the value of that education?  The first four years, studying calculus, physics, even organic and inorganic chemistry were largely wasted. These, we are and were told were necessary as "fundamental' to what you learn later in medical school. Hogwash. Even in medical school, much of the first two years of "basic science," a waste of time, effort and emotion. Only after 6 years, during the 3rd year of medical school,  was any of what the professors taught useful, meaningful or even interesting.  

Yes, you can get into Harvard, but apart from getting you into the wedding announcements in the New York Times, will that translate into dollars, down the road?

Intriguingly, when Andrew Hacker, a professor who taught at Cornell for years, whose own PhD is from Princeton, tried to discover what actually happened to the graduates of Princeton, Cornell, Harvard, he got stonewalled. The universities would not share such private information, even if no names were involved.  They track their graduates, for purposes of knowing who to ask for big donations, but they would not share any numbers with anyone. 

Hacker suggested the reason these elite institutions don't want to share that information is they would have to reveal how many of their illustrious graduates are driving cabs twenty years out. He did remark the Princeton class of 1962, one he  taught, struck him as a collection of mediocrities. 

There is always faith required by students. You have to believe what the teacher is teaching has some intrinsic value.  Many times, especially in the sciences, where you have to begin with the basics and build up, the time spent seems wasted, and it is only as you accumulate knowledge, you discover its value. But, too often, in science courses, there is no value at the end of the rainbow, and the faith has been unjustified.

What we really need to do, in this country, is to go back to the details: What is on those exams?  Were the kids who got into Stuyvesant, the kids who aced that exam, the best and the brightest, or simply the shrewdest?

Making Bets on Careers

You takes your chances in some careers

The Phantom's father spent his career thinking about labor, jobs, careers. It started when he was in his 20's, during the Great Depression. He had a job in an employment office and he saw what happened to people as they pursued jobs, lost them, looked again.
He was first generation in America, and he was trying to figure out how this country worked, and in the 1930's the sources of information came down to talking with your friends, who were often as confused as you, and reading.
He read a lot.
He concluded being a doctor was a good bet. Doctors did better than most during the Depression, as far as he could see. Lawyers sometimes, sometimes not.  Government work was good:  Local government was excellent: School teachers, policemen seemed secure, and security was more important during the 1930's than the prospect of hitting it big, striking it rich.
He was still advising his sons to go to medical schoolin the 1960's because medicine had been good for thirty years and as far as he could see, would be good for another 30.
And you only work 30 or 40 years, for the most part.
But he could not have anticipated the computer age, with its jobs which were not even imagined in the 1970's.  People who bet on computer jobs did better, for the most part.
Now, the golden rewards of medicine are fading--most doctors are employees, often well paid, but not always, not even the majority; that star is burning out now.
Lawyers aren't even employed in law, for the most part, and jobs for lawyers diminishing.
Teachers can still get some secure jobs, but even tenured professors don't know whether their jobs are safe. They won't be fired, individually, but entire departments are closed down in restructuring.
Tradesmen are still trying to make the right bet: Sheet metal workers have been displaced by computer driven machines and have shifted to other lines of skilled labor.
How does an individual make a bet now, about investing in training which may prove obsolete or poorly paid in just a few years? Every day, every year of training is a bet, a leap of faith. Student loans are more and more often a bad bet.
If individuals have trouble making these bets, how do governments set policies based on bets about which industries will provide jobs and which will dry up? Every day there is a story about some young person who took out big student loans to study cosmetology or fashion design or radio and broadcasting and you think: Well, that was a stupid bet. Some school took that poor sucker for a ride.

Each generation thinks its problems are unique, but those problems are usually just different versions of the same old problems.  People in the 1930's were confused about which training to pursue, which career paths to take because industrialization was changing the workplace--but for 20 or 30 years huge numbers of industrial workers made the right bet. They made cars in Detroit, got good wages and good pensions. Now that same bet is no longer a safe one. Would you encourage your son or daughter to go work for Boeing, making airplanes?

Now, people are flowing toward computers and information related fields rather than production of stuff you can hold.

Who can see whether or not that bet is a good one?

There were times when the government made projections about where the jobs would be, in general--in service sectors, industrial sectors, health or manufacturing.  Are there any reliable projections now?

The Undesirables: The Roma and Conscience

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore,
Send these to me
--Emma Lazarus
poem at the base of the Statue of Liberty

Our role is not to welcome the world's misery.
--Manuel Valls, Interior Minister, France

The Phantom is not an accidental tourist. He is a reluctant tourist. He is happy with the home upon which he has lavished his attention and love and not eager to leave it, except when he has to, and that unfortunate circumstance is periodically forced upon him by his wife, for whom travel is life, adventure and renewal. She was an Army brat, moved every 3 years through her childhood,  born in Heidelberg, raised on Army forts from Kentucky, Florida, to the Presidio in San Francisco to Tripler in Hawaii, to Weisbahden and VonKruetsnacht in Germany. She speaks German and English which does not help her in most of the world  but she is undaunted by foreign tongues:  when speaking with French speaking people she simply speaks English with a French accent and expects them to understand her.

The Phantom has been dragged, kicking and screaming, to various parts of the world where English is not much spoken, and where people keep demanding and occasionally confiscating his passport.
Strangely, he has often, in retrospect at least, found the experience edifying, broadening even. He has been able to look at his own American assumptions with fresh eyes.

In Florence, some years ago, the Phantom found his way blocked by a shocking looking woman, a hunchback in a black head scarf, long black dress. She did not look at the Phantom, but stood in his way, a foot from him and held up her hand. Her face was sallow, gaunt and  she may have been blind, maybe not. The Phantom's rule when accosted by pan handlers on the street is to give them something--it saves a lot of agonizing. Just give them something and move on. But this woman was, for some reason, disturbing, and something about her made the Phantom hesitate about reaching into his pocket.  There was something insistent about her outstretched hand; this was not supplication but demand. The Phantom's American back got up: Millions for defense--not one cent for tribute! She was clearly a Roma. The locals  seemed to be watching the Phantom to see what he would do.How would this American tourist deal with this Roma?

So, the Phantom understands, on a gut level, why the French and other European citizens find the Roma, or Gypsies as they are called in the States, such a vexing problem. It's not so much the Roma as our own response to them. It has something to do with their appearance, most importantly, although their behavior is not irrelevant.

Of course, that can be a swift slide to Hell--the emotional response to appearances. The Nazis pointed to the dark people, Gypsies and Jews and used that appearance to justify murder.

Look at how vermin like these people are, Goebbels said. They are outside, trying to get inside. 

They are the others.

Not like us.

And where does that get you?
There is a wonderful scene in Band of Brothers where Liebgott, a Jewish soldier in E company, is asked to translate for Richard Winters, the commanding officer, when the Americans stumble on a small concentration camp.  Winters asks a prisoner why the prisoners had been incarcerated. Are they criminals? The prisoner looks offended and surprised. but then he tries to explain. He uses a German word Liebgott cannot translate. "I don't know the word," Liebgott says. "No, not criminals. More like 'unwanted.' They are 'undesirables,'" Liebgott says. And then the prisoner adds,  "Jews, Gypsies." Liebgott, of course, is Jewish, but nothing is said about this. The viewer knows what he is thinking. 

On the other hand, the Phantom remembers when Gypsy patients were admitted the New York Hospital in Manhattan and the whole family moved in, occupied the solarium at the end of the hall, cooked meals there. The nurses ran around locking everything up and the Phantom thought them not much removed from racists. But, the fact was, things did just disappear: scissors, dressings, blood pressure cuffs, anything which was not tied down or locked up. And when the Gypsies left, the thefts stopped and things returned to normal.

A French official described the problem he faced when the law required him to find a place for the Gypsies in his town to live and he arranged for a hotel.  Later, he heard from the hotel owners: "They had stripped the rooms of all the furniture and the hinges and knobs and fled."

This behavior is said to be understandable: Because the Gypsies have nothing, they must steal.
What do we do with a group which appears, at least from casual observation or by rumor, to be uninterested in assimilating our values. What to do with a culture which values survival by breaking the rules?

And what do we do with people we find repugnant?  We know we should be more charitable, but we find it difficult to work for and with people who seem intent on remaining repellent? 
And when we are charitable and they bite us, how should we respond?

Spring Training

North Hampton from Plaice Cove--Obadiah Youngblood

Rejoice Coastal New Hampshire dwellers!  No, pitchers and catchers have not yet reported for Spring training in Florida or Arizona, but the next best thing has happened: The Coastal New England baseball league has just sent out an email for the first indoor practice of the year. We may be shoveling snow now,  but we have packed our gloves and balls and helmets into the back of the car and we will soon be throwing and swinging in batting cages.

What is it about baseball that can open old eyes, worn by icy winds and summon up dreams and memories behind those weathered lids?

Baseball Arms--Obadiah Youngblood

Judge Harold Green: The Golden Age of Television

Judge Harold Green

Honeysuckle Weeks (That's really her name)

We are living now in the golden age of television.  Watching Breaking Bad and now, Foyle's War, and having gone through The Killing, The Fall, House of Cards, The Sopranos, Downton Abbey, Game of Thrones, Treme and, of course, most of all, The Wire, the Phantom can only give thanks to the profusion of art now available on television. 

The Phantom recalls his distress when, during the War in Vietnam, the only news on television was from the big three networks and he thought the war would never end until something changed the stranglehold those networks had on the carotid blood flow to the American mind.

In fact, he was wrong:  Walter Cronkite, at CBS, simply played night after night of images from Vietnam, without comment, and it became obvious what a debacle it was. The notion of America as the Lone Ranger fell apart every night on the Evening News.

But eventually, the unthinkable did happen:  A monopoly in America was defeated, broken up and real competition occurred.  The monopoly was AT&T, Ma Bell, which had total control over telephones.  Ma Bell not only controlled local calls, but long distance calls and all the hardware in each citizen's home.  Ma Bell was so powerful, nobody could imagine this giant would ever fall. There was much trepidation about what would happen if it did fall--you might not be able to call Aunt Minnie in Providence if the company was smashed into little bits.

But then a judge named Harold Green got the case, and it became clear he was going to break that giant down.  Harold Green lived up the street from the Phantom, in a modest house, built in 1956 as one of  a tract of homes. There were four models to choose from and they cost about $21,000. The builders, the Becker brothers, lived in the development, as did government workers, a doctor, an airline pilot and an under secretary of Interior and the head of the SEC. 

Harold Green had a pretty blonde German wife, which was something of a curiosity in a neighborhood in which about a quarter of the families were Jewish. But it was said Harold Green was okay, and in fact may have been Jewish, so his choice of a German was forgiven. In fact, Harold Green was born Heinz Grunhaus, in Frankfort, Germany in 1923, and Jewish or not, he got out of Germany as Hitler came to power and moved to America, where he joined the U.S. Army and served as an interpreter during WWII. After that, he went to college and law school in Washington, DC and the rest is history.

He fought in the big war and then he fought another big war against AT&T and he brought down a giant.

So what does that have to do with the golden age of television? You may argue, the demise of AT&T and the emergence of cable TV are unrelated, but the Phantom sees connections where others see only empty space. They may be right, but the Phantom believes once Ma Bell was brought down, the flood gates were opened.  Cries of the end of Western Civilization arose when the final settlement occurred in 1982--every time you had trouble making a call, the AT&T customer service man would tell you it was all from the break up. Things could not work well without the great paternalistic monopoly which provided service in every state to every state, which provided you your black telephone with the rotary dial and even gave you extensions for different parts of your house.

The same was said about television. All the conservatives who hated to see change, who thought we were doing just fine with three networks,  intoned ominously about the chaos which would occur if the big three networks had to descend into a morass of competition from multiple networks. 

And the rest is history. Real competition meant creative stallions were unleashed and we see the evidence every night, on television.

Watch Breaking Bad, with all its overcharged intensity, its meticulous writing and you know you are seeing superb craftsmanship. Follow that with Foyle's War, an understated, deliberately paced, elegantly crafted show, starring--of all things--a fifty something, balding police detective on a beat in Hasting, England, along the southern coast, just across the channel from France, during early part of WWII, before America entered it. 
His driver, is a 22 year old freckled blonde, no beauty, but spunky. The cast of characters, includes a detective who had his leg blown off during the fiasco which was the English invasion of Norway.  (You are not told much about the fiasco, but if you have read about it you know it was one of many examples of British military incompetence--this one included landing British soldiers who were supposed to ski behind the German lines but the skis had no bindings and the Brits were slaughtered.)  This is one detail not covered in Folye's War, but many other details are, and they are fascinating. After houses were bombed, local wardens were supposed to clear the smouldering premises of bodies and rescue people, but they sometimes pilfered the premises, stealing whatever valuables they could. Policemen stole rings from the fingers of unconscious women in these bombed out flats.  The series opens a whole new page on the history of the valiant British enduring the blitz with a stiff upper lip and sometimes light fingers. 

Thank Heaven for cable television, Netflix, HBO and the profusion of choices offered by the demise of the giants. Long live real competition, and thank Heinz Grunhaus while you're at it.

Hey! Get Your Low Dose CAT scan right here! Step Right Up!

John Singer Sargent

The Phantom was put on hold, calling the Radiology Department at the local hospital this morning. Instead of music, there were various advertisements, the most prominent being an ad for a "low dose CT scan" to detect lung cancer.

The chirpy young woman who was reading the script informed callers that "While the cost of the scan is typically not covered by insurance, this may be the best $200 you have ever spent on yourself!"

There was a smile in her voice and you could just hear the exclamation point in the script.

There are so many problems with this, it is hard to know where to begin:
1. The efficacy of detection has not been clearly established.
2. The number of false positives is always a concern with any screening test. How many people will get surgery for benign lung nodules is unknown.
3. Is a "low dose" CT really all that low dose. How many CT scans over a patient's life would he need?
4. Will patients continue smoking, knowing their CT scans are "negative" figuring, "Well, I dodged the bullet. I don't have cancer and I've smoked twenty years, so that's not going to be what gets me," and exactly what conclusions will the patients draw?
5. Why are we encouraging patients to do tests separated from the doctor who might be able to weigh in on some of these issues?

The reason for this ad is to generate income for the radiology group. At this particular hospital, the radiologists are independent contractors. They are, in many ways, like the old snake oil salesmen of Huckleberry Finn .  They have something to sell, and they want to sell it. Their concern is not your health, your longevity, but their bottom line. CT scan machines are expensive and they want to pay theirs off as soon as possible. 

Get your carotid ultrasound and your bone density at church. When you get the results, you're on your own.

Welcome to corporate, for profit, American medicine.