Solitary confinement

Alexey Navalny

At the moment that I write this, the Russian dissident and opposition leader Alexey Navalny is in solitary confinement. That is, he has been placed in a small punishment cell, where he has to stay for fourteen days. He is allowed to take two books with him and to use the prison kiosk, albeit on a very limited budget. It is already for the fifth time since mid-August that Navalny has to undergo this kind of punishment. Here it is not the place to write why Navalny has been placed in solitary confinement, but I think that it is a good moment to write a blog about what being kept in isolation means to you.
What actually is solitary confinement? Let’s quote the Wikipedia: “Solitary confinement is a form of imprisonment in which the inmate lives in a single cell with little or no meaningful contact with other people.” A prisoner can be isolated for different reasons, for example, as a result of a court decision; as a disciplinary sanction in the prison; in order to protect the prisoner; and so on. The essence is that the prisoner is deprived of any contact with other prisoners and has a minimal contact with the warders. The punishment can vary from having to spend the whole day in a prison cell, with the exception of doing exercises outdoors once a day, to complete sensory isolation, when the prisoner is placed in a pitch-dark cell in which no sound from the outside can be heard. The latter is the worst.
Especially complete sensory isolation has devastating consequences for the functioning of your brain. Most people will think that the brain works this way: Via the eyes, ears and other senses the brain makes a representation of the world describing how the world outside looks like. Research has shown, however, that it works not this way but about like this: There is already a kind of description of the world in the brain and via the eyes, ears and other senses the brain receives input about the present state of the world. The brain compares the input with the description present and if there is a difference the brain updates the description with the help of the input. However, the updating doesn’t simply stop, if there is no input from the senses. The brain is continuously in flux and is continuously reordering and revising the world description with the help of the information that is already there and with the help of its imagination. That’s what is happening when you are dreaming when you are asleep, but also – which is a more serious effect of sense deprivation – when you are hallucinating. Then you produce your own fantasies in your mind and in the end you can become mad. And just this happens (usually already very soon) when a prisoner is placed in an isolation cell without any light and sound: the prisoner becomes mad. What exactly happens is different from person to person. Some are going to daydream and have strange fantasies; some are also going to bang their heads against the wall. Your brain runs riot. It’s terrible (see David Eagleman The Brain. The Story of You, 53-58).
But also less extreme forms of isolation are not without consequences for your mental health, for there is also another factor that seriously affects your mental health, besides sense deprivation: deprivation of human contacts. Humans are social beings that need other humans to survive. Being provided with all you need to survive physically (food, fresh air, free space to exercise, and the like) is not enough. Also deprivation of human contacts, while otherwise living in the best physical conditions, will make you mentally ill. It can make you physically ill as well. The list of health problems you can get is very long and I’ll not mention them all, but here are some. Mentally, you can suffer from anxiety, stress, depression, paranoia, outbursts of violence, suicide, etc., etc. Physically you can suffer from chronic headaches, eyesight deterioration, dizziness, fatigue, laziness, sleep problems, muscle pain, etc., etc. Moreover, it is not unlikely that these problems will not stop once the isolation has ended. They can stay with the ex-prisoner for the rest of his or her life and maybe lead to a premature death.
Therefore, solitary confinement must be avoided as much as possible and be used only in extreme situations. That’s what, for example, the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture and Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment says: “Solitary confinement should only be imposed in exceptional circumstances, as a last resort and for the shortest possible time.” (source Wikipedia) Then one can think of isolating a prisoner or psychiatric patient for a few hours after an extreme outburst of violence at most. The United Nations considers in the so-called Mandela Rules solitary confinement lasting longer than fifteen consecutive days as torture. (source here) And I think that it is torture, indeed, certainly if it lasts more than a short time, depending on the kind of isolation (complete sense deprivation and forced staying alone in a cell with TV, radio and books available are quite a different, of course). And, that – torture – is what they do to Navalny, certainly in view of the fact that, as said, he is being isolated already for the fifth time since mid-August. But all this throws also a grim light on the forced isolations ordered by the authorities everywhere in the world in order to stop the Covid pandemic. Even though these isolations were or are in most cases by far not as extreme as the forced isolations in prisons by way of punishment, even in these cases already we see the negative health effects that human isolation can bring.

 Sources: see the links in the text, plus this article by Tiana Herring and this one in Medical News Today.

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The less one knows himself, the more he will be pleased with himself.

Anna Maria van Schurman (1607-1678)

Botulinum toxin and empathy

An important problem in philosophy is the so-called problem of other minds. In short, it involves the question how we can understand the intentions, emotions, feelings, thoughts, etc. of other persons, if we can only see their behaviour. An important step towards the solution of this problem was the discovery of “mirror neurons”. Mirror neurons are neurons that fire when a person acts, but also when he or she sees another person acting. If the latter happens, your mirror neurons mirror in your mind what the other does. Not only humans have mirror neurons, but also primates and birds have, and maybe other animals as well. In fact, they have been first discovered in macaque monkeys (by Giacomo Rizzolatti and his team).
It has become clear that mirror neurons play an important part in reading the minds of others, so in seeing and understanding what other people think, feel, intend and so on, although it is not the only factor that helps interpret other humans. Other important factors are what people say, what they actually do and their gestures, for instance. Autistic people have the problem that they cannot read the mind of others well, which may be caused by a malfunctioning of their mirror neurons.
Our mirror neurons are continuously active, when we see others. “To better understand how we read faces so rapidly and automatically”, David Eagleman and his team invited test persons to his lab, so he tells us in his book The Brain. The Story of You. The test persons got two electrodes on their faces and they were asked to look at photos of faces. “When participants looked at a photo that showed, say, a smile, or a frown, we were able to measure short periods of electrical activity that indicated their own facial muscles were moving, often very subtly. This is because of something called mirroring: they were automatically using their own facial muscles to copy the expressions they were seeing. A smile was reflected by a smile, even if the movement of their muscles was too slight to be visually obvious. Without meaning to, people ape one another.” Note that normally you are not aware of this mirroring process and that it happens automatically. (pp. 154-5)
This mirroring effect when you see others may explain why married couples tend to resemble each other after many years. It’s not only because they get the same habits, tend to wear the same kinds of clothes and the like, but also because, so research suggests, “they’ve been mirroring each other’s faces for so many years that their patterns of wrinkles start to look the same”. (ibid. 155)
All this casts a negative light on the use of Botox and other such products as a beauty treatment. Botox is the brand name for Botulinum toxin, a very poisonous product protein derived from a bacterium. Only a few drops in your brain can kill you, because it paralyses your muscles. Injected in your facial muscles, it paralyses them, too (locally), and thereby reduces wrinkling. Besides the supposed effect that it makes you more beautiful, there may be another effect of using botulinum toxin for reducing wrinkling as well. Eagleman and his team showed the photos used in their research also to Botox users. He tells us: “Their facial muscles showed less mirroring on our electromyogram. No surprise there–their muscles have been purposely weakened. The surprise was something else.” Eagleman asked both Botox users and non-Botox users to look at photos with expressive faces “and to choose which of four words best described the emotion shown.” The result? On average, Botox users were worse at identifying the emotions in the pictures correctly.” Why? “One hypothesis suggests”, so Eagleman, “that the lack of feedback from their facial muscles impaired their ability to read other people.” (ibid. 155-7)
Reading emotions in the face of someone else is mirroring them with your own face and then interpreting with your brain what your own face is doing. But if your own face cannot mirror the face of the other, there is nothing to read there for your brain and as a consequence, nothing to see in the face of the other. The emotions of the other cannot be felt. So, the malfunctioning of your facial muscles makes understanding the other and feeling with the other more difficult. Cosmetic beauty can have its price, if this explanation is right.

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My greatest business always is to keep free from business.

Gregory of Nazianzus (329-389 or 390)

Dictatorship and language

One of the main characteristics of Orwell’s type of dictatorship is that people are oppressed by manipulating the language they use. It was thesis 2 in Onfray’s summary of Orwell’s theory in my blog last week: Impoverish the language and manipulate the thoughts with the help of words. This is done by introducing new words and banning undesired words, if not by making a completely new language. Sometimes words get a double, possibly contradictory, meaning. The word “peace” is a case in point, not only in Orwell’s Big Brother Society but also in the present world. A “peace keeping” operation is a kind of military operation performed by United Nations troops. Really peace keeping should be sending mediators. But in this case we can say yet that it is an independent international organisation that tries to end a violent conflict, which is a step towards peace, indeed. But how often hasn’t it happened that one country has invaded a neighbouring country on the pretext of bringing there peace, while in fact it was nothing but forcing the neighbouring country to the will of the invader. Or, another case, just say that your neighbouring country is governed by Nazis and you have constructed a pretext to invade it.
There is a basic idea behind the view above: By manipulating the language people speak we can influence their thoughts. Even more – and we see this also in Orwell’s approach of the relation between dictatorship and language – the idea is that by manipulating their language we can determine how others think. It’s a common idea. Not only political writers like Orwell once thought so, but also linguists assumed a relationship between language and thought: the Sapir-Whorf thesis. The strong version of the thesis says that the relationship is deterministic. However, it has become clear that this strong version is not true. The relationship between language and thinking is more complicated. As a consequence, in this sense a strong version of an Orwellian kind of dictatorship cannot exist: A dictatorial language instrument that oppresses people by determining how they think does not exist. And how could it? It would suppose that the Sapir-Whorf thesis was not valid for the leader(s) of the Big Brother Society but only for the common people.
The idea that we can determine people’s thoughts by manipulating the way they speak supposes that thinking and language are two sides of the same coin, but this idea is quite problematic. For instance, don’t animals think because they don’t speak? Cannot we discriminate colours if we haven’t a word for it? In Russian, there are words for light blue and dark blue, while in Dutch there is only one word for both. Does it mean that the Dutch cannot discriminate these shades of blue? Of course not. Such examples illustrate that thought and language are different things. However, although your language doesn’t determine your thinking, it does have an influence on it. So, although the strong Sapir-Whorf thesis is not tenable, there is a weak version that says that their language does have an impact on what people think, and there is clear evidence that supports this weak version. For instance, in many languages some substantives have a female gender and other substantives have a male gender, but in each language it is different whether a substantive is female or male. So in Spanish “bridge” (puente) is male, while in German (Brücke) it is female. Lera Boroditsky discovered that, when asked to describe “bridge”, the Spanish speakers said “big”, “dangerous”, “long”, “strong”, “sturdy” and “towering”, while the German speakers said “beautiful”, “elegant”, “fragile”, “peaceful”, “pretty” and “slender”. Other tests gave equal findings. As Boroditsky concludes: “Apparently, even small flukes of grammar, like the seemingly arbitrary assignment of gender to a noun, can have an effect on people’s ideas of concrete objects in the world.” (see my blog dated 18 November 2013).
For this reason, but also based on what I see happening around me, I think that the effect of language manipulation for political reasons is somewhat different from what Orwell’s theory of dictatorship supposes. Orwell’s theory implicitly endorses the strong version of the Sapir-Whorf thesis, and this view is not tenable, as we just have seen. However, there is clear evidence that a weak version of the Sapir-Whorf thesis is true and that language does have an influence on how we think. This means that language still can be used to oppress people and to affect what they do, but the effect is not deterministic. There is no strong version of Orwell’s dictatorial language theory. Instead, there is a weak version, based on the weak version of the Sapir-Whorf thesis. By manipulating language dictators can try to influence social, and so political behaviour. If it is not allowed to talk about certain themes or if people are forced to use certain words, dictators can try to prevent that people are going to communicate about certain political issues and next that they organise themselves around a certain idea in a way the dictator doesn’t like. “No communication, no organisation”, is the slogan of a dictator. To make communication more difficult is to make it more difficult that people oppose themselves and organise themselves with like-minded people. If you call an invasion a “special military action” instead of a “war”, maybe people feel less the need to oppose it (or so the dictator hopes). Word manipulation can influence people in the same way as an ideology does. However, the effect of language manipulation is not deterministic. It does not exclude alternative ways of thinking. This is what we see in dictatorships happen and this is how dictators use language in order to oppress people: Manipulation with words. Nevertheless, opposition remains possible and also often exists. 

Random quote
The meaning of something to you is all about your web of associations, based on the whole history of your life experiences.

David Eagleman (1971-)

A theory of dictatorship

Photo taken at Fort Breendonk, Belgium

About half a year ago I have written the blog “How to become a dictator”. I propounded there the view of the French neuropsychiatrist Boris Cyrulnik about this question. Of course, Cyrulnik is not the only one who has dealt with the problem. Not only political theorists and other scholars have developed dictatorship theories, also novelists have done so. The best known novelist who did was George Orwell (1903-1950), who treated the theme in two novels: Animal Farm (1945) and 1984 (1949). I think that all my readers will have heard of these important books and maybe they have read them as well. Nevertheless, as it goes, at least often with me, maybe you keep something in your mind of the books you have read, especially if you consider them important, but gradually it fades away. So it happened to me also for Orwell’s books, even though I have read them several times. Therefore, I was happy to come across a book by the French philosopher Michel Onfray, titled Théorie de la dictature, that compiles Orwell’s work on dictatorship and discusses its main theses in a clear way. Since nowadays the power of dictators is growing again, I want to share with you the main lines of Orwell’s theory of dictatorship, as explained by Onfray.
When talking of dictatorships, most readers will think of Putin’s Russia and Xi Jinping’s China, and indeed, these are the most important dictatorships in the present world (certainly in view of the size of the countries, for the situation in a country like North Korea is even far worse). However, dictatorship is not a black-and-white phenomenon in the sense that a country is a dictatorship or it isn’t. Moreover, often a country doesn’t suddenly become a dictatorship but gradually develops to become one (see Russia since 1991). It’s a phenomenon on a sliding scale. A country can be more dictatorial or less dictatorial. It can also move into one direction or in the opposite direction. Actually, Onfray’s book is not a warning against Russia or China (although it helps understand these countries, too), but a warning against dictatorial tendencies in France and the European Union. So, if you live in a democratic country, then you can use Orwell’s view also to judge your own country and use it as a guide to stopping dictatorial tendencies. However, in democratic countries dictatorial tendencies often don’t come from the top but are the result of developments on all levels of society. It’s an interaction between social developments and governmental interventions. Keeping this in mind, here then are the main lines of Orwell’s theory of dictatorship summarized in seven theses by Onfray with a little bit interpretation by me:

1) Destroy liberty. Watch people continuously; prevent that they have a personal life and that they live on their own; let them participate in common feasts and ceremonies; manipulate and uniformise their thoughts and views.
2) Impoverish the language and manipulate the thoughts with the help of words. Introduce new words and if possible a completely new language or terminology. Ban undesired words. Give words a double, possibly contradictory, meaning. Prefer oral texts to written texts. Try to prevent that people read the classical authors or rewrite them. A present example here is the term “special military operation” instead of “war” for Russia’s attack on Ukraine.
3) Do away with the truth. Develop and teach an ideology. Use the press as your instrument. Spread false news. Only what the authorities say is true.
4) Manipulate history. Erase undesirable past facts. Rewrite history and “make” new facts. Destroy books and write literature according to the official norms.
5) Deny or ignore nature. Deny natural human desires or just use them as a way to distract people from the real problems (sex, sport). Promote an ideal type of living; an ideal model of man. Regulate procreation. Medicalize life. See, for example, how China deals with the Covid pandemic. On the one hand, it tries to stop the spread of the coronavirus with measures which may reduce the spread of the virus but cannot destroy it (nature is ignored), while on the other hand these measures are a manner to keep the people under control.
6) Propagate hate. Make an internal or external enemy. Make war. Say that those who criticize your measures are psychiatric patients or criminals; make them “confess” their sins. Examples here are the Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny (the internal enemy) and Ukraine and the NATO (the external enemy).
7) Strive for full power and control of all aspects of life. Take full control of the education of children in all its aspects. Make your own opposition. Put the elite to your hand. Make that scientific facts are only known to those who really need them (so to the scientists). Make people believe that they have something to say and that they have an influence, although, of course, the real power is in the hand of the leader(s).

This theory of power is based on Orwell’s imaginary worlds in Animal farm and 1984. Even in the most severe dictatorships, it can happen that its aspects are not fully realized and maybe never will be realized. But Orwell holds us a mirror that reflects a possible world; a world that has already partly been realized in some countries. If we may believe Onfray, France and the EU are on the way to become dictatorships. I think that this is a bit exaggerated. Nevertheless, we can see Onfray’s thesis as an early warning, and in order to see how France, the Netherlands and the EU are developing, we can use Orwell’s theory of dictatorship and Onfray’s interpretation as a checklist. If warned in time, maybe we can keep the situation under control, but for that we need more than a checklist but also people with a democratic mind. 

Random quote
However wicked men may be, they do not dare openly to appear the enemies of virtue, and when they desire to persecute her they either pretend to believe her false or attribute crimes to her.

François Duc De La Rochefoucauld (1613-1680)

10,000 VIEWS !

My philosophical blog reached a milestone, for for the first time since I started writing philosophical blogs 15 years ago, I had more than 10,000 views in one month! To be exactly, my blog had in October 10,227 views! Yes, 10,227 views of my blog in a month.
More and more people are reading my blogs. Till last February, I had about 3,000 views a months and then gradually more people discovered my blog page, with the result that last month I broke the 10,000 limit. Thank you all !