The Binary Circumstance

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia was interviewed and profiled on 60 Minutes last night. He calls his judicial philosophy “originalism.”

At 72, Justice Scalia is still a maverick, championing a philosophy known as “orginalism,” which means interpreting the Constitution based on what it originally meant to the people who ratified it over 200 years ago.

Scalia has no patience with so-called activist judges, who create rights not in the Constitution - like a right to abortion - by interpreting the Constitution as a “living document” that adapts to changing values.

Asked what’s wrong with the living Constitution, Scalia tells [Lesley] Stahl, “What’s wrong with it is, it’s wonderful imagery and it puts me on the defensive as defending presumably a dead Constitution.”

“It is an enduring Constitution that I want to defend,” he says.

Scalia makes a convincing argument that in a democracy like ours, the people through their representatives should make laws, not judges sitting in courts.

“I’m surprised at how many people really, really hate you. These are some things we’ve been told: ‘He’s evil.’ ‘He’s a Neanderthal.’ ‘He’s going to drag us back to 1789.’ They’re threatened by what you represent and what you believe in,” Stahl remarks.

“These are people that don’t understand what my interpretive philosophy is. I’m not saying no progress. I’m saying we should progress democratically,” Scalia says.

Back at the Oxford Union, Scalia told the students, “You think there ought to be a right to abortion? No problem. The Constitution says nothing about it. Create it the way most rights are created in a democratic society. Pass a law. And that law, unlike a Constitutional right to abortion created by a court can compromise. It can…I was going to say it can split the baby! I should not use… A Constitution is not meant to facilitate change. It is meant to impede change, to make it difficult to change.”

[…]

“The public sense of you is that [you] make your decisions based on your social beliefs,” Stahl says, with Scalia shaking his head. “That is the perception.”

“I’m a law-and-order guy. I mean, I confess I’m a social conservative, but it does not affect my views on cases,” Scalia says. “On the abortion thing for example, if indeed I were, you know, trying to impose my own views, I would not only be opposed to Roe versus Wade, I would be in favor of the opposite view, which the anti-abortion people would like adopted, which is to interpret the Constitution to mean that a state must prohibit abortion.”

Scalia says he’s against that.

Scalia says that his social conservatism doesn’t effects his views on cases. He later says that his Catholicism doesn’t effect how he rules. Yet he admits to having an “interpretive philosophy” that people don’t understand. It would be of no concern to them except that it is the driving force behind his rulings. I found him very dishonest on these points and Stahl doesn’t challenge him on this.

He also commented about his fellow justices that he would not be able to change their legal philosophy which they have held for many years.

There’s an admission that philosophy influences their decisions while he’s denying it at the same time. That’s the kind of contradiction that you get from mystical thinking.

Religion allows people to make up their own self-serving reality. It allows them to discard evidence. This same type of mystical thinking is the foundation of our government and legal system. In the end, those who believe they have a right to impose their own philosophy on others by law at the point of a gun will inevitably trample on basic human rights whether they do it through a legislative or judicial mandate. Once individuals have granted themselves that power over others they can justify just about anything, especially when they get a majority of people to agree with them. (For more, read my book.)

It also makes no difference if an individual has his rights stripped away by a federal court or a state court or whether he has his freedom taken away by national vote or state vote. That is just a matter of scale. The important thing is to protect individual liberty. Voting and laws tend to strip freedom from the individual to serve the whims of some majority. The job of the courts in a free country is to prevent that.

In applying his philosophy of originalism to the Constitution, Scalia asks himself whether a particular right exists in the document or not. He’s making binary judgments about what exists and what doesn’t exist in the Constitution.

As a thinker influenced by mystical premises, Scalia and the other justices do not apply the same process to reality as a rational thinker does. A rational thinker asks himself if something exists in reality, in nature, or not. He knows that if it doesn’t exist in reality, there’s nothing that can be known about it and therefore it cannot be discussed rationally. A rational is an “originalist” when it comes to reality.

Allowing premises rooted in the supernatural and superstitious to serve as the foundation for our legal system makes it a religion, which is prohibited by the Constitution.

From the Boston Globe:

Toward the end of “Charlie Wilson’s War,” a CIA officer played by the pitch-perfect Philip Seymour Hoffman cautions the Wilson character (played by Tom Hanks) not to be too sure they have done something glorious. To make the point, he tells the story of a Zen master who observes the people of his village celebrating a young boy’s new horse as a wonderful gift. “We’ll see,” the Zen master says. When the boy falls off the horse and breaks a leg, everyone says the horse is a curse. “We’ll see,” says the master. Then war breaks out, the boy cannot be conscripted because of his injury, and everyone now says the horse was a fortunate gift. “We’ll see,” the master says again.

I really enjoyed this movie and this review does a great job of capturing my own impressions.

The real star of the film is the script. That [Aaron] Sorkin managed to tell so serious a story in so entertaining a manner should earn him a number of awards.

The actors deliver the goods as well. Hanks’ comic timing is as brilliant as ever. Roberts is indeed, as Wilson calls her in the film, “Helen of Troy,” inspiring powerful men through her beauty and–shall we politely call it–“southern hospitality” to get with her program of freeing the Afghan people from the godless menace of the communists.

But it is Hoffman’s spot-on portrayal of the quintessential CIA operative, half crude bluster and half savvy erudition, that steals the show, and should earn him an Oscar. He storms into the film like an angry elephant, and when he’s in a scene, it’s difficult to put your attention anywhere else.

There’s a serious set of lessons to be learned behind all the hilarity, however.

The first is that, when covert actions are authorized and paid for in secret, we’re not really functioning as a Democracy. The public didn’t know what Charlie Wilson and the CIA were doing, so they had no way to vote people into or out of office to shape that policy.

And if supporting the Afghans was so clearly the right thing to do, why did it have to be done in secret? We went to war in Iraq for far less, overtly.

I recently wrote about how to make your own yogurt.

Urinalysis of populations from several different countries showed there are wide variations in metabolism based on the types of microbes that reside in the gut. What is particularly mind-boggling is the amount of bacteria we all having living in our intestines.

Each country turned out very different, metabolically.

“For instance, Chinese and Japanese people are almost identical genetically, which isn’t surprising, since they diverged culturally only a few thousand years ago - but they are very different metabolically,” said researcher Jeremy Nicholson, a biological chemist at Imperial College London.

“We know there’s a huge difference in the diseases that different nations risk - broadly speaking, the Japanese tend to die of strokes, the Chinese of heart attacks - and we see those differences reflected in their urine,” he added. “Of course they’re different in terms of lifestyle - the Japanese tend to eat more fish than the Chinese as a whole do - but their gut bacteria are also very distinct as well.”

Gut microbes help us get energy from our food.

“In your guts, you have about 1.5 kilograms (3.3 pounds) of 1,000 different species of bacteria,” Nicholson explained. “If you include all the genes from bacteria along with your own, only about 1 to 2 percent of the genes in your body are human, with the rest from the gut microbes. And what bacteria you have can be quite different from person to person.”

Next time you want to thank somebody for being alive, you might want to start with the bacteria of the world.

For the third time in the past few days I looking at snow coming down outside my window. Though we’re well into Spring, it looks like the dead of winter outside complete with darkened, gray skies, cold air and snow.

These are not just little snow flurries but a steady snowfall and it’s sticking. There doesn’t seem to be any rain or sleet mixed in with it as there was in some of the other snowfalls we’ve had this week. This is just a pure, steady snowfall.

My deck is white as well as many of the leaves on trees and bushes, my neighbors’ roofs and my driveway. It’s not yet sticking to the yard but that’s probably because my yard is mostly mud since it had it plowed up about six weeks ago and new grass seed planted. The grass has been coming in very slowly over the past couple of weeks, but it’s still mostly mud.

At the rate it’s coming down I expect that everything will be white if it keeps up for another 30 minutes or so.

A couple of days ago we had snow with thunder. That’s a new one on me. I’ve experienced plenty of thunderstorms in my life but the thunder snowstorm was a first.

I recently took up meditation. At first I was reading about self-hypnosis and then I started trying to figure out how it was different from meditation. The more I read about the two techniques, the more I became interested in them. I found so many people with scientific and medical backgrounds extolling the benefits of meditation that I committed to practicing it for a while. There are many scientific studies that have shown health benefits associated with meditation.

Both meditation and self-hypnosis are using focus as a way for inducing an altered state of consciousness. I haven’t found anybody who can draw a really clear distinction between the two but it seems that in self-hypnosis the focus is more often on something external like a hypnotist’s voice and there’s a specific goal in mind, like smoking cessation. Meditation on the other hand often turns the focus inward without any specific goal, except to keep returning to the point of focus as a way of clearing the mind.

Hypnosis seeks to change behaviors through suggestions made to the subconscious while in the altered state of consciousness.

Meditation seeks to silence all the mind-chatter to achieve a deeper awareness.

I see a lot of overlap in the two techniques, however. The important thing is the focus.

Even though I’ve only done it a short time, it’s been such a powerful experience that I don’t have any plans to quit any time soon. My mind is usually going a mile a minute with thoughts and ideas raining down like the snowfall outside my window right now. Unless I’m working on a specific problem, however, the barrage is quite chaotic and at times a little overwhelming.

My reading took me to many accounts of people describing the same kind of non-stop mind-chatter and I was captivated by their claims of learning to quite it and control it. For thousands of years people have touted the same benefit.

I have no desire to lose my active, rich mental life, nor do I aspire to spend hours each day sitting in the lotus position chanting a mantra. But I can certainly see benefits to having more control over my own mind-body. Ayn Rand said there is no dualism between the mind and the body and meditation seems a great tool for better understanding the unity or oneness of mind-body.

Practicing the continual return to focus is what I mostly seek from meditation, not any supernatural or religious experience. If you’ve been reading my blog you know that I don’t think that any altered state of consciousness is supernatural, it is merely changing the state of the mind-body, a totally natural phenomenon. Noting and acknowledging the thoughts and feelings that pull you away from the focus is also an essential part of the process. All the clutter you’ve been storing in your attic takes up a lot of space that could be better used for other mental processes. Meditation opens those boxes and allows you to choose what to keep and what to discard.

Being able to change the state of the mind-body in a way that provides more enjoyment and/or makes me more productive and healthy is just the next step toward becoming the most rational person I can be.

It sometimes snows in the middle of the Spring.