Watching Judge Alito during the confirmation hearings was a mind-numbing experience that left me with a condition known as Starry Eyesis. The condition is induced by blather, lifeless repetitive rhetoric, combined with a lack of oxygen that leads one to say, when all is said and done, "Huh?" The condition develops slowly, outside one's awareness, until suddenly a point is reached where you are blinded to reality and left questioning your own sanity. As Alito talked for three days he slowly sucked the oxygen out of the hearing room with his banal and joyless ponderings on the law. If you watched one or two hours here and there you might have avoided this syndrome, but for those of us who watched most of it, there was no escape. Starry Eyesis leaves you in a kind of hypnotic trance where you begin thinking, "Hey, he's not Madonna, but he might be ok." It's a lot like the millions of Americans who once thought Bush an able President.

Alito's testimony did just that to me. Alito presents a Rockwell- like demeanor of a normal American or at least the ideal of one: calm, reasoned, and assured. His demeanor is soothing like a good hit of Prozac, but like Prozac, there are serious side affects.

When you recover from the trance, you realize that this guy with his calm demeanor saw nothing wrong when the police strip-searched a ten- year-old girl. He has routinely voted against worker's rights, and has ruled for the government in most cases. In one sense he uses the law to smooth out the rough and untidy edges of life.

Alito seems like a lot of people, with over-developed intellects and underdeveloped hearts, highly trained and specialized, but disconnected from their humanness. Academia, where I work, is littered with them, as are the medical and legal professions. Emotions, theirs and others, frighten these people. Their lives are ruled by the mind, and the rational. They seek order in all things. All that is messy, disordered, and chaotic is denied, and pushed into a dark corner of their psyches. They keep it there by adhering to a rigid set of beliefs, or zealous dogma, and when cracks appear in those beliefs they use drugs or alcohol or other compulsive behavior to keep those nasty emotions at bay. Their lives are a calculus, weighing and parsing the facts, the data, the laws, ad nauseum, and with it wringing all possible messiness from their lives.

What we end with are technicians who construct their lives rather then live them. They join the right clubs, go to the right schools, volunteer at the right places, say the right things, all the while avoiding any engagement in their lives. Years ago Edwin Singer defined mental health as the ability to tolerate spontaneity and surprise. He was right. Technicians live in the margins, a carefully constructed rational world cut off from the drama of life.

Someone like Alito, a brilliant and articulate man, a master technician who is able to reduce the complexities of life, and in this case the law, to a very narrow and rigid set of black and white, good and bad, right and wrong rules. Watching and listening to him talk you can detect the lifeless drone of one who is cut off from his humanness, with no room for compassion, no room for empathy, nor any room for the human drama.

This is not what I want in my judge, or teacher, or doctor. I want someone who knows first hand about human imperfection; who has made missteps, acknowledged and learned from them; who had been bruised and battered by the exigencies of life; whose given to joy, suffering, and does not shy away from the untidiness of life. Most importantly I want someone who is open to the spontaneity of life and all its possibilities no matter where they may lead.

When Alito sits in judgment I want him fully present with his own humanness, fully awake and aware of the awesome responsibility he has, and when he balances the scales of justice I want him always to consider the imperfect nature of all humans including himself before rendering a final verdict. He can only do so if he is fully present in his own life, and from what we saw and what we heard him say, he is not.

There is always the hope that he will recover his life, that some person or event will prick open his humanness and let it gush forth in all of its messiness. But chances are too slim to take a chance on him at this critical juncture in our history.

When he is confirmed, beware of Starry Eyesis and losing your own humanity and sense of wholeness in the face of rational, calm, and reasoned arguments by the Supreme court that produce laws that deny individual rights, and other basic freedoms critical to our democracy.

Bud McClure is a professor of psychology at the University of Minnesota in Duluth. He is on sabbatical this year living near Washington D.C. He can be reached at bmcclure@d.umn.edu.