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From Wild Board Dung to Steroids, Athletes Cheat

Fiala on ethics: From wild boar dung to steroids, athletes cheat

 By Andrew Fiala

Fresno Bee, Friday, Jan. 25, 2013 | 05:30 PM

It’s been a bad month for cheaters and liars in sports.

Lance Armstrong confessed to doping. Steroid-using baseball superstars were kept out of the Hall of Fame. And we learned that Notre Dame football star Manti Te’o was caught up in an elaborate hoax.

Fraud and mendacity are as old as athletic competition. Homer’s “Iliad” recounts cheating in a chariot race. Ancient charioteers also sought assistance from performance enhancers. Wild boar dung boiled in vinegar was one preferred potion. The emperor Nero even took the stuff, looking for a competitive edge. When Nero “competed” he won every event — in a falsified Olympiad set up to please his own vanity.

I discussed the recent athletic hogwash with Andrew Marden, the weekend sports anchor for KGPE (Channel 47). From Marden’s perspective, one of the biggest problems is the presence of big money in sports. Monetary rewards will tempt vainglorious and greedy athletes to cheat. The money spreads to the team, the agents and the league itself. The more an athlete wins, the more money everyone makes, tempting the organization to look the other way.

Marden also pointed out that we love stories of athletes overcoming adversity. We admire Te’o’s tenacity after his girlfriend’s death. We celebrate Armstrong’s ability to “live strong” after cancer. The narrative crumbles when we discovered that Te’o’s girlfriend never existed and Armstrong’s athletic performance was drug-assisted.

These stories become classically tragic when the conceited cheaters get their comeuppance. We like that part of the story, too: It satisfies our desire for vindication.

There’s a kind of relief that Barry Bonds and Roger Clemons weren’t voted into the Hall of Fame. And many are hoping that Armstrong’s confession to Oprah will lead to further repercussions.

Marden pointed out that public shame and moralistic requital is a weak punishment for a millionaire. Indeed, shameful misdeeds don’t seem to diminish an athlete’s earning potential. Consider Melky Cabrera, the baseball star who was given a 50-game suspension last summer for doping. Cabrera missed the Giants’ World Series victory. But he signed a $16 million contract with the Toronto Blue Jays. Apparently it’s not true that cheaters never prosper.

A further problem is that cheaters and liars seem to actually enjoy cheating and lying. The so-called “cheater’s high” is a sense of elation that comes from successfully getting away with pulling a fast one.

Effective cheats often don’t feel guilty. Instead they get a charge from taking advantage and not getting caught. The same sort of thrill might explain lying, stealing, marital infidelity or even negotiating a business deal. We feel powerful and alive when we outfox our opponents and trick others into taking our hogwash seriously.

The victorious cheater’s exhilaration might explain why cheaters are not very good at assessing their actual abilities and performance. A 2010 study by Zoe Chance, from the Harvard Business School, indicates that students who cheat on tests tend to lie to themselves about their own skills and intelligence. Cheaters overestimate their own abilities and intelligence. Cheaters predict that they will continue to perform well in the future, not acknowledging that their past achievement was a result of cheating.

That kind of confident self-deception can be an asset in some circumstances. Successful competitors need to be self-assured and poised — they can’t second-guess themselves or beat themselves up over failure. But that kind of resolute composure can easily become arrogance.

Armstrong admitted this in his interview with Oprah. He said, “My ruthless desire to win at all costs served me well on the bike but the level it went to, for whatever reason, is a flaw. That desire, that attitude, that arrogance.”

The cheater’s cool conceit combines with our gullible desire to believe a great story. This makes it easy for cheats to succeed — for a while. But the cheater’s fatal flaw is his own arrogant belief that he can keep getting away with it.

The truth eventually comes out, especially in stories that are too good to be true.

In the meantime we have to remain vigilant. Athletes are easily tempted to drink the wild boar dung.

And we gullible fans are often inclined to swallow their hogwash.

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Can mindfulness influence our moral character?

Can mindfulness influence our moral character?

Andrew Fiala

Fresno Bee, Originally published 2013-01-12

Take a breath and slowly exhale. Unclench your jaw. Clear your mind. Be present now. Feel better?

A growing body of evidence suggests that there are mental, physical and emotional benefits to yoga and meditation. Some recent studies suggest that mindfulness can lead us to be more ethical.

A recent paper by Marc Lampe, a professor at the University of San Diego, argues thatmindfulness helps improve cognitive awareness and emotional regulation. This can contribute to ethical decision making. A study by Nicole Ruedy and Maurice Schweitzer, at the University of Pennsylvania, links mindfulness to “moral attentiveness.” They claim that mindfulnesshelps us avoid making excuses for immoral behavior.

This is not too surprising. Common sense tells us that we think more clearly when we calm our emotions by taking a few deep breaths. But perhaps there is more to mindfulness than deep breathing and attentive awareness.

The practice of mindfulness comes from non-Western religions such as Hinduism and Buddhism. When Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh teaches that mindfulness helps us touch the peace that is here now in the present moment, it is easy to forget that there is a complicated metaphysical and psychological theory underlying this idea.

Despite these exotic roots, Americans have embraced mindfulness. A congressman from Ohio, Tim Ryan, published a book last year, “A Mindful Nation,” which suggests thatmindfulness can help us work better, reduce health-care costs and improve the performance of the military. Ryan even secured a million-dollar federal earmark for mindfulness training in schools in Youngstown, Ohio, with the goal of using mindfulness to improve student performance.

I wonder, however, whether mindfulness should be employed as a tool for achieving the American Dream. There is something odd about using yoga to enhance military performance or meditating in order to improve profit margins. The core of mindful meditation seems to point in another more peaceful and less materialistic direction.

Critics of mindfulness worry that Eastern meditation practices cannot be easily grafted onto Western roots. Consider the controversy that erupted recently in Encinitas, a yoga-friendly beach town north of San Diego. When the Encinitas schools introduced yoga as part of the school day, Christian parents threatened to sue the school district. They view yoga as a pagan practice and demanded that their children be exempted from the program.

Some Christians have embraced alternative contemplative practices without seeing a contradiction with their own spiritual commitments. But other Christians remain opposed. In 2011, an Italian priest, Gabriele Amorth, denounced yoga as Satanic. The president of the Southern Baptist Seminary, Albert Mohler, described Eastern meditation as an “empty promise,” since it focuses on emptying the mind instead of connecting with God. Christian pastor Mark Driscoll argues that Eastern spirituality blurs the distinction between good and evil, “promoting cultural pluralism and the denial of truth.”

The claim that meditation results in relativism and the denial of truth is a significant accusation. Traditional Western approaches to ethics and religion focus on rule-following behavior and orthodoxy of belief. This requires clear judgment and an effort to distinguish between right and wrong. But mindfulness in Eastern traditions appears to have a different focus, as nonjudgmental awareness.

Jon Kabbat-Zinn — an influential proponent of meditation — connects mindfulness with nonjudging acceptance and letting go. The idea is to let experience occur without attempting to categorize, manage and direct it. A kind of serenity and peacefulness develops when letting things be, without judgment or control.

Proponents of mindfulness connect this with values such as nonviolence and compassion. But the serene equanimity of mindfulness can seem to its critics like relativism and indifference to God and the good.

There are obvious benefits to taking a mindful breath. We do make better judgments when we are able to step aside from emotional tumult and the reactive pressures of the world. But critics will argue that this is not enough — that the empty mind must be filled with principles, truths and moral judgments. There is a fundamental difference of opinion here about what counts in terms of ethical discipline and spiritual practice.

There may be no way to resolve this dispute. But it might help us to think better about these deep questions, if we took a few mindful breaths.

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Recent Violence Raises Questions About Men

Recent violence raises questions about men

Andrew Fiala

Fresno Bee, 2012-12-29

The Newtown gunman killed his own mother before opening fire at Sandy Hook elementary school. Another gunman, near Rochester, N.Y., killed firefighters who responded to a fire he had set. He had previously killed his grandmother and most likely began his rampage by killing his sister. In both cases the gunmen killed themselves.

These stories have an obvious gender component. Mass murderers are almost always men. According to Mother Jones magazine, of the 62 mass murders committed since 1982, only one was done by a woman. The rest of the shooters were men.

It might be that mental illness has a gender component. But why do mentally ill men shoot their mothers and random strangers, while mentally ill women do not? Mental illness manifests itself in culturally specific and gender specific ways. Killing, brutality, and suicide are associated with masculinity.

Men are, in general, about 10 times more likely to commit murder than women. Suicide also has a gender component, with a ratio of four male suicides for every female suicide. We might also note that domestic violence is gendered, with incest, partner rape, battery, and honor killing usually perpetrated by men.

Some might blame biology. The “demonic male” thesis popularized by Richard Wrangham and Dale Peterson holds that male violence is a common trait among male dominant apes such as humans and chimpanzees. According to this idea, male dominance is a useful tool for social organization, even though it results in occasional atrocity.

But biology and evolution only explain so much. Culture also matters. Brutality, toughness, and fearlessness are deeply woven into cultural images of masculinity. We celebrate mean and ruthless men — on the sports field, in films, and in our military mythology.

The NRA’s Wayne LaPierre appeared to blame cultural images of violence in his remarks earlier this month. He deflected criticism of guns and called for armed guards in schools. He also blamed violent video games. Most interesting was his description of violent video games as pornography. He said, “Isn’t fantasizing about killing people to get your kicks really the filthiest form of pornography?”

The porn connection points toward the gender issue. American men grow up in a culture in which sex and violence have become vicarious events. It is easy to watch people have sex and to watch people kill. What kind of affect does this have on our relationships and our ideas about morality?

The larger problem is one of dehumanization. Pornography turns women into two-dimensional images to be observed and consumed. And violent games and movies turn killing into a thrilling spectator sport. The consumer is able to view other people as objects to be used, without consideration for the experience of the other person.

This problem of dehumanization may explain the connection between mass murder and suicide. The philosopher Immanuel Kant noted two hundred years ago that lack of respect for others is connected with lack of respect for self. Suicide and murder are two sides of the same inhuman coin. Like suicide terrorists (who are also almost always male), mass murderers have embraced death. The shooter wants to die. But he wants to take innocent people with him as he kills himself. This points toward a kind of rage against life, a hatred of everything.

Games and films are not to blame for deep moral nihilism. Most game players do not end up murdering strangers. And most porn-consumers do not become rapists. The causal story is complex. Nonetheless, the constant dehumanizing imagery of popular culture can have an insidious affect on the disaffected and mentally ill. Imagining murder in a game makes it that much easier to commit it, when life falls apart around you.

Rage and despair combine with images of masculinity and easy access to deadly weapons to create a deadly mix. Maybe that’s the price we pay for liberty: for the freedom to own guns, consume porn and enjoy violent entertainment. Gun control would make suicide and mass killing more difficult. Maybe censorship would help. But the problem is larger than the guns and the games. The deep question is why some men hate life enough to kill mothers, grandmothers, children, and themselves; and why women rarely do.

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Find Christmas Joy in Magic of Cultural Imagination

Find Christmas joy in magic of cultural imagination

Andrew Fiala

Fresno Bee, 2012-12-15

Some atheists sponsored a billboard in Times Square that encourages people to “Keep the Merry, Dump the Myth.” The word “Merry,” accompanies a picture of Santa, while “Myth” is associated with Jesus.  Bumper-stickers on the other side of the culture wars insist that we have to “Keep Christ in Christmas.”

Must we choose sides between Santa and Jesus? Why can’t we have our fruitcake and eat it, too? Christmas is a cultural mashup, combining stories and legends from multiple traditions. Kids who want to put Santa and the Grinch in a stable beside Mary and Joseph are a bit confused. But so what?

The cultural references jostle together during the holidays: Dr. Seuss and Charlie Brown rub elbows with Santa Claus and Jesus. Themes like love and hope, gratitude and generosity connect the dots of this jolly jumble.

Even the pope admits that cultural accretions matter. Pope Benedict’s new book acknowledges that there were no animals in the nativity scene of the Gospels.  But he argues that the ox and the ass at the manger with Mary remain an important element of Christian iconography — an interpretive addition with allegorical significance.

Some people want to refine our stories and images in order to get back to something original and pure. Neo-pagans want to return to ancient Yule and Solstice celebrations. Santa is a Nordic creation, after all. He has a lot in common with the Norse god Thor, whose chariot was pulled across the sky by magical goats.

Christians want to return to the original event in Bethlehem. But there is nothing in our culture that is original and pure — it’s all a mashup.

A few Christians reject Santa completely, seeing him as a sinister pagan idol. He is a laughing deceiver, ominously dressed in red. He gives children toys and candy, distracting them from God.

A few websites fret that if you rearrange the letters of “Santa” you get “Satan.”  Such word play does not enlighten. However, our fascination with word magic does tell us something about human culture.

We like to play with words and rearrange images. We conjure meaning even in meaningless things. This is what allows us to enjoy art and literature. We transform dots, lines and pixels into spirited beings, alive in the mind’s eye.

The joy of Christmas is the magic of the cultural imagination. Think of the effort expended by parents on Christmas Eve.

Some worry that it is immoral to foist the Christmas ruse upon children. But the desire to enchant our children is a work of love. We want them to play and enjoy. They’ll outgrow magic soon enough.

Magical thinking can be dangerous, especially when it lingers beyond childhood. It can distract us from reality — and it can be manipulated. Advertisers use magical thinking to sell us stuff we don’t need.

That’s why Scrooge called Christmas a humbug. He thought it was a fraud and a scam. But even Scrooge was swept away by his memories and dreams. And he overcame his cynicism.

Scrooge’s ghosts do visit us this time of year. Memories of Christmas past creep into consciousness with the smell of baking cookies. We hum along with once forgotten carols. The icons and images evoke a mood, even though we grown-ups know better.

The trick is to harness the images and moods for moral purposes. The goal is to conjure up generosity and grace instead of greed and ingratitude.

This is explained by Dane Scott, director of the Ethics Center at the University of Montana, in a recent essay about Christmas. Scott argues that Christmas provides an opportunity for children to practice generosity and gratitude. Scott also explains the magic of what he calls, “emotional fire,” the magic of ethical or spiritual transformation.

Good stories assist this process. Stories and images move us. Purists may think that only some stories count. But maybe what counts is the power of the stories to kindle a fire and soften our hearts.

Winter darkness breeds Scrooges and Grinches. If you discover hope in this dark season, it doesn’t matter much where it comes from. If you’ve found it, be grateful. Then mash it up and pass it on.

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Democracy and Voting

Real work of democracy begins after voting

   Andrew Fiala

Fresno Bee 2012-11-03

Voting is a central part of self-government. Blood and tears have been shed in the struggle for voting rights. But voting is an imperfect indication of the will of “we, the people.” And voting is only a small part of political life.

Our system of voting creates problems. The biggest problem is the disparate weight of individual votes from state to state. As a result of the way that Electoral College votes are allocated, the votes of citizens in small states are worth more than the votes of citizens in big states. An individual vote in Wyoming has nearly four times the weight of a vote in California.

The Electoral College also creates the phenomena of swing states — where only a few states are the focus of presidential politicking. The Electoral College system combines with the “winner-takes-all” procedure to produce strange possible outcomes: candidates can be elected with less than 50% of the popular vote. This problem is exacerbated when third party candidates play the spoiler. Game theory shows that when there are more than two choices, less favored candidates can be elected.

In order to prevent such outcomes, we might prefer our two-party system. But what happens when you don’t like either of the two major party candidates? Those who are unhappy with the two main candidates may stay away from the polls. Others may vote in other races that matter, while leaving parts of the ballot blank. By abstaining, these voters may intend to vote “none of the above.” But our system is not set up to register a “none of the above” vote. Abstaining has no impact on the outcome of an election.

Henry David Thoreau explained, in “Civil Disobedience”: “All voting is a sort of gaming, like checkers or backgammon, with a slight moral tinge to it, a playing with right and wrong, with moral questions; and betting naturally accompanies it.” Some voters think like strategic gamers, perhaps by voting against one candidate, rather than voting in favor of another. But in our system, in order to vote against a candidate, we also have to vote in favor of another — even if we are not in favor of him or her.

Likewise, when voting on a proposition, we are asked to say “yes” or “no.” But life is more complicated than that. Our lives are not best described in bivalent decisions. In ordinary life, we rank a variety of things in multiple ways as we deliberate about our choices.

Decision-making in ordinary life is also a deeply social process. We talk things over. We listen to each other. We compromise and negotiate. And we aim at a consensus that is satisfactory to everyone involved. But voting is not like that. There is no talking or negotiating in the silence of the voting booth. We do not have to explain or justify our votes to anyone. The process is eerily un-social.

And yet, one reason we vote is that we like to participate in social life. Even though we know our votes don’t count for much, we like to be able to say that we voted. A sort of solidarity develops from voting. We like to wear our little “I voted” stickers throughout Election Day. We smile at our fellow citizens — even those in the other party — and celebrate our shared citizenship.

Voting is only a small part of political life, which also includes talking things over and taking action. We should vote. But we should also explain, argue, and act. Thoreau explained, “Even voting for the right is doing nothing for it.”

The act of voting occurs in a mere moment of time — as a pause from the tumult of political life. We mark our ballots — in secret and in silence — and then head home to watch the returns, enjoying the political game as a spectator sport.

Sometimes we forget that political life involves more than punching a ballot and spectating on the couch. We also need to exchange ideas and argue about the issues of the day. In a sense, the real work of democracy occurs after the voting is over, as we wrestle with the implications of the election, talk things over and begin arguing again.