The Taliban: Engagement or Confrontation? Hearing before the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, July 20, 2000. Download a .pdf of the hearing transcript here.

Psychopaths Among Us: Retired University of British Columbia professor of psychology Robert Hare is a world’s expert on psychopathy and developer of a gold standard rating scale for its recognition, and he’s in anguish.

“The PCL-R has slipped the confines of academe, and is being used and misused in ways that Hare never intended. In some of the places where it could do some good — such as the prison in the TV documentary I was yelling at — the idea of psychopathy goes unacknowledged, usually because it’s politically incorrect to declare someone to be beyond rehabilitation. At the opposite extreme, there are cases in which Hare’s work has been overloaded with political baggage of another sort, such as in the United States, where a high PCL-R score is used to support death-penalty arguments, and in England, where a debate is underway about whether some individuals with personality disorders (such as psychopaths) should be detained even if they haven’t committed a crime.”

Hare believes that a large number of people — perhaps 1:100 of the population — who are not violent criminals are nevertheless ‘subclinical psychopaths’ among us. [link courtesy of David Brake]

Recall my grumblings below about the DSM system of diagnosis (with regard to another controversial diagnosis, PTSD). Here‘s an article by Hare about the confusion between the sophisticated concept of the psychopath and the closest official DSM diagnosis, antisocial personality disorder.

The problems with DSM-III and its 1987 revision (DSM-III-R) were widely discussed in the clinical and research literature (Widiger and Corbitt). Much of the debate concerned the absence of personality traits in the diagnosis of ASPD, an omission that allowed antisocial individuals with completely different personalities, attitudes and motivations to share the same diagnosis. At the same time, there was mounting evidence that the criteria for ASPD defined a disorder that was more artifactual than “real”.

And this is more information, if you’re interested, on the concepts.

People like serial killers who cannot contain their urges to kill repeatedly for no apparent reason are assumed to suffer from some mental illness. However, they may be more cruel than crazy, choosing not to control their urges, knowing right from wrong, knowing exactly what they’re doing. In such cases, they fall into one of three types that are usually considered aggravating circumstances in addition to their legal guilt — antisocial personality disorder (APD), sociopath, or psychopath — that are neither insane nor psychotic. APD is the most common type, afflicting about 4% of the general population. The American Psychiatric Association estimates that 3% of all males in our society are sociopaths. Psychopaths are rare, found in perhaps 1% of the population.

“Resisting the conclusion that everything has changed is one way to help prevent it from being true.” — Michael Kinsley: Has Everything Changed? – Maybe not. “The notion that there are days when history swings on a pivot is irresistible and, to some extent, valid. The shooting of the archduke that started World War I ? the bombing of Pearl Harbor ? the Kennedy assassination ? Before: innocence and sun-dappled lawns. Afterward: knowledge, modernity, and darkness. Will Sept. 11, 2001, really turn out to have been one of those days? A horrible day, certainly, and?yes?a day that will live in infamy. But a day when life changed dramatically and permanently for everyone, at least in America? Maybe so, but there are adequate reasons to doubt, and excellent reasons to avoid leaping to that conclusion if it can be avoided.” Slate

Jeff Faux, president of the Economic Policy Institute, writes in The American Prospect:Three Things We Learned: “The attacks of last Tuesday revealed some truths about the American political economy that have been obscured in recent years.”

Victims of Mistaken Identity, Sikhs Pay a Price for Turbans: “Frightened by a wave of violence and harassment, Sikhs across the country are struggling to explain to an uncomprehending public that despite their turbans and beards, they are not followers of the Taliban and not in any way responsible for last week’s terror attacks. Although there are fewer than a half million Sikhs in the United States, they have attracted a disproportionate share of the anger following Tuesday’s attacks.” New York Times [name: “FMHreader”, password: “FMHreader”]

This poem by W. H. Auden has been circulating in the wake of the terrorist attack. Many find it resonates uncannily with our state of mind.

September 1, 1939

I sit in one of the dives

On Fifty-second Street

Uncertain and afraid

As the clever hopes expire

Of a low dishonest decade:

Waves of anger and fear

Circulate over the bright

And darkened lands of the earth,

Obsessing our private lives;

The unmentionable odour of death

Offends the September night.

Accurate scholarship can

Unearth the whole offence

From Luther until now

That has driven a culture mad,

Find what occurred at Linz,

What huge imago made

A psychopathic god:

I and the public know

What all schoolchildren learn,

Those to whom evil is done

Do evil in return.

Exiled Thucydides knew

All that a speech can say

About Democracy,

And what dictators do,

The elderly rubbish they talk

To an apathetic grave;

Analysed all in his book,

The enlightenment driven away,

The habit-forming pain,

Mismanagement and grief:

We must suffer them all again.

Into this neutral air

Where blind skyscrapers use

Their full height to proclaim

The strength of Collective Man,

Each language pours its vain

Competitive excuse:

But who can live for long

In an euphoric dream;

Out of the mirror they stare,

Imperialism’s face

And the international wrong.

Faces along the bar

Cling to their average day:

The lights must never go out,

The music must always play,

All the conventions conspire

To make this fort assume

The furniture of home;

Lest we should see where we are,

Lost in a haunted wood,

Children afraid of the night

Who have never been happy or good.

The windiest militant trash

Important Persons shout

Is not so crude as our wish:

What mad Nijinsky wrote

About Diaghilev

Is true of the normal heart;

For the error bred in the bone

Of each woman and each man

Craves what it cannot have,

Not universal love

But to be loved alone.

From the conservative dark

Into the ethical life

The dense commuters come,

Repeating their morning vow;

“I will be true to the wife,

I’ll concentrate more on my work,”

And helpless governors wake

To resume their compulsory game:

Who can release them now,

Who can reach the deaf,

Who can speak for the dumb?

All I have is a voice

To undo the folded lie,

The romantic lie in the brain

Of the sensual man-in-the-street

And the lie of Authority

Whose buildings grope the sky:

There is no such thing as the State

And no one exists alone;

Hunger allows no choice

To the citizen or the police;

We must love one another or die.

Defenceless under the night

Our world in stupor lies;

Yet, dotted everywhere,

Ironic points of light

Flash out wherever the Just

Exchange their messages:

May I, composed like them

Of Eros and of dust,

Beleaguered by the same

Negation and despair,

Show an affirming flame.

Copyright © 1940 W. H. Auden, renewed by The Estate of W. H. Auden

Unscripted, Bush Shoots From the Lip. His puppet-masters must be sweating bullets that they can’t keep him from the public as well as they usually do. International Herald Tribune

Afghan Clerics Urge bin Laden to Leave; White House Says Unacceptable “Afghanistan’s top clerics recommended today that the accused terrorist Osama bin Laden should be persuaded to leave the country, a development that the leader of Pakistan’s largest Islamic party described as “a ray of hope.”

The ruling, which ministers said is binding on the Taliban government, could almost certainly have been reached only with the agreement of the Taliban’s spiritual leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar.

But the White House said this morning that the clerics’ edict “doesn’t meet America’s requirements” and again demanded that Mr. bin Laden be turned over to “responsible authorities” and that the Taliban close terrorist camps in Afghanistan.” New York Times [name: “FMHreader”, password: “FMHreader”]

Bush Advisers Split on Scope of Retaliation. It appears to be Cheney and Wolfowitz vs. Colin Powell, and the issue is whether to strike broadly and include toppling Saddam Hussein as an objective from the outset. Who would have thought that the commander of Desert Storm would turn into a model of diplomacy and restraint? New York Times

Novelists Reassess Their Subject Matter: “In the hours after the terrorist attacks last

week, many American novelists,

whether engaged in themes far removed

from the horrific events or not, asked

themselves if what they do had turned

irrelevant.” New York Times

Can belief in God kill you?

Religious beliefs are not always a source of comfort during ill health: they may actually increase your risk of dying.

A study of nearly 600 older hospital patients (95 per cent of whom were Christian) showed negative feelings evoked by religious beliefs sometimes predicted mortality.

…Several studies have demonstrated a reduced risk of death among those who attend church regularly, but the new research, published in today’s Archives of Internal Medicine, is the first to examine negative aspects of religiousness. ABC

And Richard Dawkins asks if science is a religion:

It is fashionable to wax apocalyptic about the threat to humanity posed by the AIDS virus, “mad cow” disease, and many others, but I think a case can be made that faith is one of the world’s great evils, comparable to the smallpox virus but harder to eradicate.

Faith, being belief that isn’t based on evidence, is the principal vice of any religion. And who, looking at Northern Ireland or the Middle East, can be confident that the brain virus of faith is not exceedingly dangerous? One of the stories told to the young Muslim suicide bombers is that martyrdom is the quickest way to heaven — and not just heaven but a special part of heaven where they will receive their special reward of 72 virgin brides. It occurs to me that our best hope may be to provide a kind of “spiritual arms control”: send in specially trained theologians to deescalate the going rate in virgins.

Given the dangers of faith — and considering the accomplishments of reason and observation in the activity called science — I find it ironic that, whenever I lecture publicly, there always seems to be someone who comes forward and says, “Of course, your science is just a religion like ours. Fundamentally, science just comes down to faith, doesn’t it?”