Touching is an extremely important psychological element for mammals, especially social mammals. If you want to cause severe psychological damage to someone, do not touch them as an infant. They will grow up with severe psychological, particularly anti-social, problems. Experiments with baby monkeys show that they are more interested in a soft, cuddly "mother" over one that provides food. Children should be hugged and kissed every day by their parents, and should probably be hugged by their teachers and friends every day as well. Touching releases endorphins, the body’s natural pain killers. Touch raises serotonin levels, which relieves depression, and stops the release of cortisol, a stress hormones. Touch turns on growth hormone, making children grow. And it causes the release of oxytocin, the love hormone. Thus, touch strengthens social bonds, makes us psychologically healthier, and makes us feel safer. Experiments in schools with massage have shown that massage (specifically, the touching involved) relaxes students, makes them less anxious, makes them more attentive, and thus makes them better students.
Thus, the ban against "public displays of affection" at Mascoutah High School in Mascoutah, IL that resulted in 13 year old Megan Coulter getting 2 days detention for hugging two of her friends is deeply troubling -- and, quite frankly, deeply immoral. The very thing that could solve many of the problems in our shcools -- appropriate touching, and especially hugging -- is being banned. Of course, this ban is merely indicative of where our society as a whole is going. We cannot touch one another for fear that we will be accused of sexual harrassment or, in our schools, of child molestation. This has resulted in our legislating against touching, in our undermining one of the most important socializing factors that evolved in mammals.
What our schools -- and our society overall -- needs is MORE hugging, not less. Perhaps we should go so far as to replace the handshake with the hug. And as for those who are responsible for such bans -- I suggest that everyone go up to them and give them a great big hug. My guess is that it is something they are and have been missing in their lives. They could use one.
At the very least, they will learn the difference between a hug and making out.
Thursday, November 08, 2007
Wednesday, November 07, 2007
Gunmen Fire on Venezuelan Protestors
After peacefully protesting Chavez's attempt to seize total power in Venevuela, students were fired upon by at least four gunmen. Whether Chavez is behind this or not, I think we can see what Marxism is all about with this incindent.
Atlas Shrugged Turns 50!
Has it really been 15 years since I first picked up Atlas Shrugged? I know it's been 15 years because I have the 35th Anniversary Edition of the work. It has been quite a 15 years for me. In recognition of this anniversary, I think I will continue the longstanding tradition of telling how I discovered Ayn Rand and how she influenced me.
In college I was majoring in recombinant gene technology and minoring in chemistry. One Spring semester I wanted to take a New Testament class with a particular, highly recommended Professor, Dr. Joseph Trafton. But his class was full that semester, so I signed up for another class that would fulfill the requirements I needed: Intro. to Philosophy with Dr. Ronald Nash. It turns out that Dr. Nash was a Christian libertarian philosopher, so in his class we read his book "Poverty and Wealth: A Christian Defense of Capitalism." I was only tangentially interested in the rest of the philosophy in the class (mostly Plato), but the economics fascinated me. I went to the university library and began reading everything I could find with the word "capitalism" in the title, and I read without caring who the authors were. However, I have a habit, when I read, of noting who the authors quote, and then using that to find other things to read. I found it curious that in one of the works I was reading, there was constant reference to a novel. Why would a work on economics talk about a novel? It must be quite some novel, I thought. And so I went out and found that novel, and read Atlas Shrugged.
I later figured out that the book that was recommending Atlas Shrugged was none other than Ayn Rand's book "Capitalism: the Unknown Ideal." But that didn't matter. I was hooked by Atlas Shrugged at the age of 21. As a consequence, I went out and read everything by her I could get my hands on. She provided a clarity of vision, of ideas, of the world I had never seen before. She loved Aristotle, so I read Aristotle. She loved Spinoza, so I read Spinoza. She hated Plato, so I read Plato. She hated Kant, so I read Kant. She loved, then hated Nietzsche, so I read Nietzsche.
And then I read Nietzsche. The philosopher who drove me into the abyss and helped me back out of it. The philosopher who transformed me utterly from being a scientist to being an artist-philosopher. It was after reading Nietzsche that I dropped out of my Master's program in molecular biology to become a fiction writer, meaning I went to the University of Southern Mississippi to get my M.A. in English (where I was exposed to the postmodernists), and then went to the University of Texas at Dallas to get my Ph.D. in the Humanities, where I discovered, through Alexander Argyros and Frederick Turner, what lay beyond postmodernism. But I never lost touch with Nietzsche -- I in fact took several philolosophy classes at UTD on Nietzsche -- who I came to realize was the philosopher who showed the way beyond postmodernism even before the postmoderns came along (and misused and misunderstood him). I came to realize too how deeply Aristotlean Nietzsche was, partcuilarly in his ethics. He railed against the mutually exclusive "good and evil" to make way for the complementaries "good and bad." He purposefully erected severe oppositions as counterpoints to the weaknesses he saw in society, hoping to correct those weaknesses by dragging people back toward the middle way (he would have been severely disappointed at the way those extremes have been taken, and taken out of context, by Nazis and postmodernists). I suspect Ayn Rand detected this strong Aristotleanism running through Nietzsche's work, but since Nietzsche masked it well, and since Rand was an absolutist and did not believe people changed their ideas, as Nietzsche clearly did over his lifetime, she became disillusioned with him. She is, of course, neither the first nor the last philosopher to have partial blinders on in regards to another thinker.
So in short, I have a M.A. in English and a Ph.D. in the Humanities because of Ayn Rand. Well, truth be told, it's because of Ronald Nash, whom I took the last semester he taught at WKU only because the class I wanted was full. A philosophy of economics book took me from molecular biology to economics to literature to philosophy to the interdisciplinary studies of the humanities, where I used all of these to write my dissertation (which, btw, I am posting on one of my other blogspot blogs: Evolutionary Aesthetics). But Ayn Rand was a huge part of this development. It was because of her that I became a fiction writer (beginning with really bad political fiction, but evolving toward much better stories and even poetry -- good political fiction is hard to write if you're not an Ayn Rand).
I have come to realize too, in my reading, that Ayn Rand could, and perhaps should, be classified as an Existientialist (if we're going to throw Heidegger, Camus, et al into the mix with Sartre). Why would I do such a thing? We can start with her statement that "Existence exists," one of the most existentialist statements I have ever come across. And we can look too toward her agreement with the existentialists that humans don't have any instincts and that we are born as blank slates, without an essence. If it is agreed that she cold be classified as an existentialist, then we can see that existentialism is compatible with capitalism, fascism, and communism. Perhaps, too, this existentialism is why some are uncomfrotable with what they see as totalitarian streak in Rand and in her sexual libertarianism (similar to Sartre's). Even her certain eschewal of being put in with the existentialists, of insisiting that her philosophy is hers alone, would make her one of them. Not to mention the atheism.
I do agree with Ayn Rand that Objectivism is her philosophy, and hers alone. Yet, her thoughts undoubtedly make up one of the foundation stones of my own world view. There she joins the likes of Plato, Aristotle, Heraclitus, Lao Tzu, Epicurus, Spinoza, Nietzsche, Ludwig von Mises, Milton Friedman, Freiderick von Hayek, Walter Williams, Steven Piinker, Edward O. Wilson, Alexander Argyros, Frederick Turner, J. T. Fraser, Don Beck and Christopher Cowan, Fans de Waal, Richard Wolin, Ilya Prigogine, and innumerable novelists and poets. She's a strong part of my DNA, and I will be forever grateful for all she has done for me.
In college I was majoring in recombinant gene technology and minoring in chemistry. One Spring semester I wanted to take a New Testament class with a particular, highly recommended Professor, Dr. Joseph Trafton. But his class was full that semester, so I signed up for another class that would fulfill the requirements I needed: Intro. to Philosophy with Dr. Ronald Nash. It turns out that Dr. Nash was a Christian libertarian philosopher, so in his class we read his book "Poverty and Wealth: A Christian Defense of Capitalism." I was only tangentially interested in the rest of the philosophy in the class (mostly Plato), but the economics fascinated me. I went to the university library and began reading everything I could find with the word "capitalism" in the title, and I read without caring who the authors were. However, I have a habit, when I read, of noting who the authors quote, and then using that to find other things to read. I found it curious that in one of the works I was reading, there was constant reference to a novel. Why would a work on economics talk about a novel? It must be quite some novel, I thought. And so I went out and found that novel, and read Atlas Shrugged.
I later figured out that the book that was recommending Atlas Shrugged was none other than Ayn Rand's book "Capitalism: the Unknown Ideal." But that didn't matter. I was hooked by Atlas Shrugged at the age of 21. As a consequence, I went out and read everything by her I could get my hands on. She provided a clarity of vision, of ideas, of the world I had never seen before. She loved Aristotle, so I read Aristotle. She loved Spinoza, so I read Spinoza. She hated Plato, so I read Plato. She hated Kant, so I read Kant. She loved, then hated Nietzsche, so I read Nietzsche.
And then I read Nietzsche. The philosopher who drove me into the abyss and helped me back out of it. The philosopher who transformed me utterly from being a scientist to being an artist-philosopher. It was after reading Nietzsche that I dropped out of my Master's program in molecular biology to become a fiction writer, meaning I went to the University of Southern Mississippi to get my M.A. in English (where I was exposed to the postmodernists), and then went to the University of Texas at Dallas to get my Ph.D. in the Humanities, where I discovered, through Alexander Argyros and Frederick Turner, what lay beyond postmodernism. But I never lost touch with Nietzsche -- I in fact took several philolosophy classes at UTD on Nietzsche -- who I came to realize was the philosopher who showed the way beyond postmodernism even before the postmoderns came along (and misused and misunderstood him). I came to realize too how deeply Aristotlean Nietzsche was, partcuilarly in his ethics. He railed against the mutually exclusive "good and evil" to make way for the complementaries "good and bad." He purposefully erected severe oppositions as counterpoints to the weaknesses he saw in society, hoping to correct those weaknesses by dragging people back toward the middle way (he would have been severely disappointed at the way those extremes have been taken, and taken out of context, by Nazis and postmodernists). I suspect Ayn Rand detected this strong Aristotleanism running through Nietzsche's work, but since Nietzsche masked it well, and since Rand was an absolutist and did not believe people changed their ideas, as Nietzsche clearly did over his lifetime, she became disillusioned with him. She is, of course, neither the first nor the last philosopher to have partial blinders on in regards to another thinker.
So in short, I have a M.A. in English and a Ph.D. in the Humanities because of Ayn Rand. Well, truth be told, it's because of Ronald Nash, whom I took the last semester he taught at WKU only because the class I wanted was full. A philosophy of economics book took me from molecular biology to economics to literature to philosophy to the interdisciplinary studies of the humanities, where I used all of these to write my dissertation (which, btw, I am posting on one of my other blogspot blogs: Evolutionary Aesthetics). But Ayn Rand was a huge part of this development. It was because of her that I became a fiction writer (beginning with really bad political fiction, but evolving toward much better stories and even poetry -- good political fiction is hard to write if you're not an Ayn Rand).
I have come to realize too, in my reading, that Ayn Rand could, and perhaps should, be classified as an Existientialist (if we're going to throw Heidegger, Camus, et al into the mix with Sartre). Why would I do such a thing? We can start with her statement that "Existence exists," one of the most existentialist statements I have ever come across. And we can look too toward her agreement with the existentialists that humans don't have any instincts and that we are born as blank slates, without an essence. If it is agreed that she cold be classified as an existentialist, then we can see that existentialism is compatible with capitalism, fascism, and communism. Perhaps, too, this existentialism is why some are uncomfrotable with what they see as totalitarian streak in Rand and in her sexual libertarianism (similar to Sartre's). Even her certain eschewal of being put in with the existentialists, of insisiting that her philosophy is hers alone, would make her one of them. Not to mention the atheism.
I do agree with Ayn Rand that Objectivism is her philosophy, and hers alone. Yet, her thoughts undoubtedly make up one of the foundation stones of my own world view. There she joins the likes of Plato, Aristotle, Heraclitus, Lao Tzu, Epicurus, Spinoza, Nietzsche, Ludwig von Mises, Milton Friedman, Freiderick von Hayek, Walter Williams, Steven Piinker, Edward O. Wilson, Alexander Argyros, Frederick Turner, J. T. Fraser, Don Beck and Christopher Cowan, Fans de Waal, Richard Wolin, Ilya Prigogine, and innumerable novelists and poets. She's a strong part of my DNA, and I will be forever grateful for all she has done for me.
Tuesday, November 06, 2007
On the Importance of History
"If you do not know where you come from, you will always be a child." -- Cicero
In other words, you will be "without power, without authority, without the ability to act fully in the world or to understand properly how the world works" (Simon Goldhill, "Love Sex, and Tragedy", 4).
If you do not know who Cicero is, he is speaking about you.
Answer these questions, in the most fundamental way possible:
Who are you?
Where are you going?
What should happen?
What do you want to do?
Where do you come from?
If your notion of history only includes what happened during your lifetime, or even the lifetime of the United States, then you cannot answer these questions.
In other words, you will be "without power, without authority, without the ability to act fully in the world or to understand properly how the world works" (Simon Goldhill, "Love Sex, and Tragedy", 4).
If you do not know who Cicero is, he is speaking about you.
Answer these questions, in the most fundamental way possible:
Who are you?
Where are you going?
What should happen?
What do you want to do?
Where do you come from?
If your notion of history only includes what happened during your lifetime, or even the lifetime of the United States, then you cannot answer these questions.
On the Langage of Theater
To practice is both to learn to do something, and to do something well (as in to practice medicine)
To "act" is to both do something, and to pretend to do something. If we act a certain way, after a while those actions can become actual. As Hamlet said to his mother, we should
"Assume a virtue if you have it not.
That monster custom, who all sense doth eat,
Of habits devil, is angel yet in this,
That to the use of actions fair and good
He likewise gives a frock or livery
That aptly is put on. Refrain [to-]night,
And that shall lend a kind of easiness
To the next abstinence, the next more easy;
For use almost can change the stamp of nature,
And either [curse?] the devil or throw him out
With wondrous potency." (Act 3, Scene 4)
To perform is both to do something, and to pretend to do something
The world is a stage on which we practice, perform, and act
"Theater" and "theory" related to each other through their Greek sources. The Greek ancestor of theater is theatron, "a place for seeing, especially for dramatic representation, theater." Theatron is derived from the verb theasthai, "to gaze at, contemplate, view as spectators, especially in the theater," from thea, "a viewing." The Greek ancestor of theory is theoria, which meant among other things "the sending of theoroi (state ambassadors sent to consult oracles or attend games)," "the act of being a spectator at the theater or games," "viewing," "contemplation by the mind," and "theory or speculation." The source of theoria is theoros, "an envoy sent to consult an oracle, spectator," a compound of thea, "viewing," and -oros, "seeing."
Merely a theory? How can you understand what you are seeing without one?
To "act" is to both do something, and to pretend to do something. If we act a certain way, after a while those actions can become actual. As Hamlet said to his mother, we should
"Assume a virtue if you have it not.
That monster custom, who all sense doth eat,
Of habits devil, is angel yet in this,
That to the use of actions fair and good
He likewise gives a frock or livery
That aptly is put on. Refrain [to-]night,
And that shall lend a kind of easiness
To the next abstinence, the next more easy;
For use almost can change the stamp of nature,
And either [curse?] the devil or throw him out
With wondrous potency." (Act 3, Scene 4)
To perform is both to do something, and to pretend to do something
The world is a stage on which we practice, perform, and act
"Theater" and "theory" related to each other through their Greek sources. The Greek ancestor of theater is theatron, "a place for seeing, especially for dramatic representation, theater." Theatron is derived from the verb theasthai, "to gaze at, contemplate, view as spectators, especially in the theater," from thea, "a viewing." The Greek ancestor of theory is theoria, which meant among other things "the sending of theoroi (state ambassadors sent to consult oracles or attend games)," "the act of being a spectator at the theater or games," "viewing," "contemplation by the mind," and "theory or speculation." The source of theoria is theoros, "an envoy sent to consult an oracle, spectator," a compound of thea, "viewing," and -oros, "seeing."
Merely a theory? How can you understand what you are seeing without one?
A Few Observations About Economics
There is a connection between ethics and economics
Economics is not about money
The core questions of economics are: what is value? and How is it created?
"Economics" comes from Greek words for oikos "home" and nemein for "to manage"
Thus, it is related to the word "ecology"
"Market" is related to the word "mercy." Both come from the Roman god of messengers and commerce, Mercury
The word "money" comes from an epithet for Juno, the queen of the gods in Roman mythology
Consider the different meanings of each word (economic and non-economic). Note how many are terms used in ethics:
growth
development
profit
interest
bond
trust
goods
save
equity
value
mean
redeem
redemption
forgive
dear
obligation
honor
company
balance
credit
issue
worth
due
treasure
sacrifice
risk
royalty
fortune
venture
grace
Economics is not about money
The core questions of economics are: what is value? and How is it created?
"Economics" comes from Greek words for oikos "home" and nemein for "to manage"
Thus, it is related to the word "ecology"
"Market" is related to the word "mercy." Both come from the Roman god of messengers and commerce, Mercury
The word "money" comes from an epithet for Juno, the queen of the gods in Roman mythology
Consider the different meanings of each word (economic and non-economic). Note how many are terms used in ethics:
growth
development
profit
interest
bond
trust
goods
save
equity
value
mean
redeem
redemption
forgive
dear
obligation
honor
company
balance
credit
issue
worth
due
treasure
sacrifice
risk
royalty
fortune
venture
grace
The Middle Way, Part 7 (Liberty and Responsbility)
Before I begin my exegesis of another seciton of Marinoff's wonderful book, let me share something with my readers. As I've been reading Marinoff's book, I've been talking to my wife about it and sharing bits and pieces of it. Yesterday, as I was doing this, she expressed a great deal of frustration at the fact that "others are writing your books!" Indeed, I have found little in Marinoff's book that I have not already talked about with my wife or friends, or which I have not written about in various ways in various unpublished essays -- or here, on this blog. Maybe, if I can find both the time and the money (the two are intimately related, you know), I will be able to get back to work on my own book-length projects. In the meantime, it's good to know that i'm part of some kind of zeitgeist. Notwithstanding Nietzsche's observations to the contrary, even philosophers need society.
But that is an aside getting me away from the issue of the fact that, as Marinoff observes, "Liberty and responsibility go hand in glove" (83). I've already touched on this issue in other posts, talking about the difference between liberty and libertinage. True liberty exists on the borderlands of order and chaos, just as all complex, creative systems do. Marinoff explains that "As long as you are content to blame others for your discontents, as long as you refuse to accept the proper measure of responsibility for your unhappiness, you will not be liberated from your suffering. But as soon as you begin to understand the role that your own view, intention, speech, action, livelihood, effort, mindfulness, and concentration play in the production of your suffering, then you become free to produce the next moment according to your willingness to suffer, or not to suffer" (83). We suffer to the extent that our world is chaotic. But trying to push yourself into some sort of rigid order also creates suffering. We must find that sweet spot between the two -- that spot of liberty rooted in responsiblilty for both ourselves and others.
One of the things I learned from reading economics is that people are typically in the situation they want to be in. You are either accepting of the situation you are in, or you are actively working to change your situation. If you say you don't like your job, but you are not doing anything to change jobs, then your actions belie your words. We hear people all the time saying, "I would do anything if X," but they aren't doing anything to achieve X. It becomes clear that they would not do anything -- and are not even doing much -- to achieve what they say they want. There's an old (and quite unfunny if you're not a hard-core economist) joke that goes thus:
Two economists are walking down the street and see a Lambourgini parked beside the street. The first economist says, "I want a Lambourgini just like that one." The other economist replied, "No you don't."
The point is that if the first economist really wanted one, he would either have it, or he would be working to get it. Much of our suffering comes about when we go on and on about wanting this or that when in fact we really don't want it, or else we would be working to get it. We need to be honest about what we want, about what we need, about what our priorities actually are. My father is a coal miner, and if he wanted to be something other than a coal miner, he would have done it. But for various reasons, he has chosen to remain a coal miner. But ultimately, it was his choice. Ultimately, we have all chosen our lives.
But that is an aside getting me away from the issue of the fact that, as Marinoff observes, "Liberty and responsibility go hand in glove" (83). I've already touched on this issue in other posts, talking about the difference between liberty and libertinage. True liberty exists on the borderlands of order and chaos, just as all complex, creative systems do. Marinoff explains that "As long as you are content to blame others for your discontents, as long as you refuse to accept the proper measure of responsibility for your unhappiness, you will not be liberated from your suffering. But as soon as you begin to understand the role that your own view, intention, speech, action, livelihood, effort, mindfulness, and concentration play in the production of your suffering, then you become free to produce the next moment according to your willingness to suffer, or not to suffer" (83). We suffer to the extent that our world is chaotic. But trying to push yourself into some sort of rigid order also creates suffering. We must find that sweet spot between the two -- that spot of liberty rooted in responsiblilty for both ourselves and others.
One of the things I learned from reading economics is that people are typically in the situation they want to be in. You are either accepting of the situation you are in, or you are actively working to change your situation. If you say you don't like your job, but you are not doing anything to change jobs, then your actions belie your words. We hear people all the time saying, "I would do anything if X," but they aren't doing anything to achieve X. It becomes clear that they would not do anything -- and are not even doing much -- to achieve what they say they want. There's an old (and quite unfunny if you're not a hard-core economist) joke that goes thus:
Two economists are walking down the street and see a Lambourgini parked beside the street. The first economist says, "I want a Lambourgini just like that one." The other economist replied, "No you don't."
The point is that if the first economist really wanted one, he would either have it, or he would be working to get it. Much of our suffering comes about when we go on and on about wanting this or that when in fact we really don't want it, or else we would be working to get it. We need to be honest about what we want, about what we need, about what our priorities actually are. My father is a coal miner, and if he wanted to be something other than a coal miner, he would have done it. But for various reasons, he has chosen to remain a coal miner. But ultimately, it was his choice. Ultimately, we have all chosen our lives.
Obama vs. Colbert
So apparently the Obama campaign was an important factor in keeping Colbert off the ballot in South Carolina: Obama vs. Colbert
Here is the reason, given by former State Superintendent of Education Inez Tenenbaum, an Obama supporter: ". . . I thought it could have taken votes away from a lot of people."
This argument infuriates me every time I run across it. I supposes that only certain people deserve to receive votes, and that those who are deemed undeserving by the powers that be should not get votes. Isn't this a democratic republic? I don't care if he's doing it for a joke, or what the reason is anyone wants to run. The bottom line for me is that candidates and their campaigns should not be able to have a say as to who is running against them. People complain that Perot "took votes away" from Bush Sr.. People complain that Nader "took votes away" from Gore and Kerry. Nonsense! They didn't "take votes away," as though those votes rightfully belonged to Bush or Gore or Kerry. Those were votes cast for someone and rightfully belonged to the person running.
How is it even legal for a candidate or his campaign to influence who they are running against anyway? Isn't that anti-democratic? And even if someone could make the argument that it should remain legal, it still isn't right.
Here is the reason, given by former State Superintendent of Education Inez Tenenbaum, an Obama supporter: ". . . I thought it could have taken votes away from a lot of people."
This argument infuriates me every time I run across it. I supposes that only certain people deserve to receive votes, and that those who are deemed undeserving by the powers that be should not get votes. Isn't this a democratic republic? I don't care if he's doing it for a joke, or what the reason is anyone wants to run. The bottom line for me is that candidates and their campaigns should not be able to have a say as to who is running against them. People complain that Perot "took votes away" from Bush Sr.. People complain that Nader "took votes away" from Gore and Kerry. Nonsense! They didn't "take votes away," as though those votes rightfully belonged to Bush or Gore or Kerry. Those were votes cast for someone and rightfully belonged to the person running.
How is it even legal for a candidate or his campaign to influence who they are running against anyway? Isn't that anti-democratic? And even if someone could make the argument that it should remain legal, it still isn't right.
Monday, November 05, 2007
Euphemisms and Metaphors for Taxes
I'm the kind of person who reads more than one book at a time. So, in addition to Lou Marinoffs book, I am also reading Steven Pinker's "The Stuff of Thought." In it he talks about the use of metaphor in politics, leading him to discussing George Lakoff's recommendations to the Left on how to come up with metaphors to support their ideology. Thus, Lakoff recommends that "taxes" be reframed "as "membership fees" that are necessary to maintain the services and infrastructure of the society to which we belong" (246). Let me suggest why this won't work by refering you to another of Pinker's works, "The Blank Slate." In it he talks about something he calls the "euphemism treadmill." That is where "People invent new words for emotionally charged referents, but soon the euphemism becomes tainted by association, and a new word must be found, which soon acquires its own connotations, and so on" (212). He then points out that we went from "water closet" to "toilet" to bathroom" to "restroom" to "lavatory." He then observes that "The euphemism treadmill shows that concepts, not words, are primary in people's minds. Give a concept a new name, and the name becomes colored by the concept; the concept does not become freshened by the name, at least not for long" (213).
In other words, no matter what name we give taxes, it remains a fact that when you are taxed, that means that someone with more power than you is taking money that you earned and using it for projects that benefit them and which my or may not benefit you and which you may or may not agree with, and threatening to do you harm unless you hand over the money. When a private citizen does it, we call it being mugged. It is theft, plain and simple. Calling it a "membership fee" isn't going to change that. It's just putting lipstick on a pig.
In other words, no matter what name we give taxes, it remains a fact that when you are taxed, that means that someone with more power than you is taking money that you earned and using it for projects that benefit them and which my or may not benefit you and which you may or may not agree with, and threatening to do you harm unless you hand over the money. When a private citizen does it, we call it being mugged. It is theft, plain and simple. Calling it a "membership fee" isn't going to change that. It's just putting lipstick on a pig.
IQ
Interesting article over at Cato titled "Shattering Intelligence: Implications for Education and Interventions" by James R. Flynn. The site is Shattering Intelligence
I would comment on this article, except that I have already pre-commented on the article on this blog at On Intelligence
It is interesting to see how much Flynn agrees with what I posted. I have little doubt he's been working on intelligence longer than have I, but I haven't read anything by him before this, and it is interesting to see ideas converging like this.
I would comment on this article, except that I have already pre-commented on the article on this blog at On Intelligence
It is interesting to see how much Flynn agrees with what I posted. I have little doubt he's been working on intelligence longer than have I, but I haven't read anything by him before this, and it is interesting to see ideas converging like this.
Huckleberry Finn Under Attack Yet Again
I'm not sure I can say it any better than this when it comes to "Huckleberry Finn": Huckleberry Finn and "Muslim" Jim
We have become so uneducated in our country that we don't even know what education means. We are so illiterate in this country that there are people who haven't read this novel in order to know what it's really about. Sometimes offensive words are needed to make a point -- or a counterpoint. Twain here is a genius. But fewer and fewer are going to get to learn that.
We have become so uneducated in our country that we don't even know what education means. We are so illiterate in this country that there are people who haven't read this novel in order to know what it's really about. Sometimes offensive words are needed to make a point -- or a counterpoint. Twain here is a genius. But fewer and fewer are going to get to learn that.
Sunday, November 04, 2007
The Middle Way, Part 6 (Death vs. Growth vs. Cancer)
Extremes do not create happiness. How much is enough? How little is too little? Perhaps only each individual can answer that. But too much growth, to the point of it taking over every element of your life (or the world), is cancer, and none is death. You are not a better person just because you are very rich, or very poor. And likely, you are not happy in either extreme. As Marinoff points out, "Materialists who pursue pleasure and profit above all else remain unhappy. Religious fanatics who pursue denial of modernism above all else remain unhappy. American hedonism overproduces and overconsumes; religious fanaticism underproduces and underconsumes. Each accuses the other of evil. Each sees the other's extremism, yet each is blind to its own" (78). Shall we starve todeath? Shall we allow ourselves to be comsumed by a single thing? Shall we allow the world to be so consumed -- or starved? We forget that cancer causes death.
Perhaps a year ago I wrote the following essay. This seems a good place to share it.
On Health and the Holy
In English the words holy, whole, hale, and health are etymologically connected – Old English halig, hal, and hælth, respectively, which are all related to hal. Thus are they conceptually connected. To see the world as holy is to see the world as whole – it is to have the world “appear infinite and holy, whereas it now appears finite and corrupt” (William Blake, “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell”). The word holistic comes from the Greek holos, whole. Thus the holy is holistic – God is holy because He encompasses all. Perhaps one could even say that we can recognize the divine only when we come to see the world as a whole, when we see the universe as universal. When we can come
To see a World in a grain of sand,
And a Heaven in a wild flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand,
And Eternity in an hour. (William Blake, “Auguries of Innocence”)
Health and hale is the same. To have health is to have wholeness. To be hale is to be healthy – whole and complete. To make healthy is to make whole again. One is healed through medication. But ideally, one would rather maintain one’s health than have to withstand the ravages of medication (pharmaceutical comes from the Greek pharmakon, which means both poison and medicine – as it does today), though medication is necessary to stave off disease. This is the purpose of Plato’s Pharmakon, to stave off disease. For disease is the opposite of health.
The Modern Era, which we are still in, though we may be at the end of it, began when Descartes split man in two – body and soul. It was a necessary division for the development of modern science (which Descartes all but admits to – the division is so the Church will tend to the soul, while the body is left alone, to be tended to by scientists such as Descartes), but it was certainly an unholy division (as all divisions are, by definition). Kant deepened this division. Hegel tried to mend it through philosophical synthesis. Marx tried to mend it by recommending the overthrow of half of the world – the world would then be wholly Proletarian. Nietzsche responded to Hegel by dividing the world up even more – for him, humans are not divided into body and soul, but are instead a series of masks. With postmodernism, the division is complete: men and women, multiculturalism, radical Cartesian individualism divide us up more and more. Any universality is denied. A necessary development – and not without its truth (I am aware of the irony of using the word truth, which comes from the Old English treowth, related to the word troth, from which we get the word betrothed, to speak of an idea that is more interested in divorce than betrothal). But it is precisely as unholy as one can get.
The deep divisions fostered by postmodernism came about because of a view that grand narratives, attempts to universalize, and seeing the world as holistic created the problems of the 20th Century. The Marxist grand narrative gave us the gulag of the Soviet Union, the massacres of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, and any number of other slaughters done by governments who had embraced Marxist philosophy. We looked back on history after the Holocaust, saw the grand narrative of Christianity had in the past itself promoted the killing of Jews – particularly in the Inquisition – and concluded that it too was dangerous. One could also mention The Terror of the French Revolution. What did Marxism, Medieval Christianity, and the French Revolution have in common? One thing was that they were all grand narratives. Thus, the logic goes, it must be grand narratives which are bad. And what do grand narratives do? They see the world as a whole, which must be encompassed by their ideology. To make the world a whole, it must be placed under their one ideology. Thus, holistic world views were seen as bad – thus were they, and holiness, rejected. The path to Heaven – whether that heaven was celestial or earthly – seemed to lead us straight into Hell. Perhaps in part the rejection of holding a holistic view came about because it is related to the holy, and the holy has been rejected. To the extent that wisdom is the ability to see the unity of the world – meaning wisdom is the ability to see the world as holy – wisdom was also rejected as impossible, perhaps even undesirable.
The error in this way of thinking derives from the error made in seeing Communism, Christianity, or the ideals of the French Revolution as interested in seeing the world as holistic. None of them saw the world as holistic, as holy – they instead wanted to make the world whole, under their particular umbrellas. They too fostered divisions – there were enemies who had to be either converted or killed in order that the world could be made holy. “For the cherub with his flaming sword is hereby commanded to leave his guard at tree of life; and when he does, the whole creation will be consumed and appear infinite and holy” (Blake “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell”). Now Blake here uses the word “appear.” None of them saw the world as holy. It had to be made so – through conflagration, if necessary. Postmodern thought, by dividing the world even more, does not help us to see the world as holy – quite the contrary. However, by insisting on equality among the various parts – among individuals, among cultures, among religions, among any number of groups of individuals – postmodern thought may ironically make it now possible to see the world as being, rather than needing to become, holy.
It may seem ironic to suggest that only by reaching the most severe of divisions – seeing the world as eminently unholy – that we can finally come to see that the world is in fact holy, but I am not being ironic. To see the world as holy is not to see everything in the world as equal in an egalitarian sense. There are hierarchies. To see the world as holy is to understand how everything fits into the world as a whole. It is to see the world as an immense organism, and to care for its health. An organism is made up of systems, organs, tissues, cells, organelles, and various biochemicals. For one group to want to envelop the entire world in one way of thinking, believing, viewing the world, would be the same as one cell wanting to envelop the entire organism in that one type of cell. We have a word for cells that want to do that: cancer. The postmodernists have mistaken viewing the actions of cancerous cells for seeing the whole organism. Cancer must be fought, not mistaken for the animal it is in. That is the only way one can have a healthy organism – and it is the only way to have a holy world. Like a healthy organism, a holy world is complex. Like a healthy organism, a holy world has smoothly working parts in communication with each other through clear rules that proscribe what each part needs to do for the whole to work well. Like a healthy organism, this cannot come from any centralized authority – there is no one control cell in the body, and the brain must have the lungs just as much as the lungs must have the brain. A holy world is like a healthy organism.
In Negative Theology, one comes to know what God is by figuring out what God is not. Aristotle says that if you are not sure if something is good, try to figure out what is bad, and you can then deduce that what is good is its opposite.
The following are unhealthy:
1. Overeating, including eating a high percentage of foods with low nutritional value, while remaining inactive (not exercising)
2. Either stagnation or change without continuity – both create instability
3. Stress and anxiety – which comes about from not realizing that there are parts of the world that one cannot control, and can lead to anger at those very things
4. Hatred – aside from raising the blood pressure, it can cause one to act in ways that would be unhealthy for the object of our hatred
5. Cancer – already discussed
6. Excess – including the excess of moderation
7. Shackles – prevents sufficient movement, equating to lack of exercise
8. Pollution – it can lead to any number of diseases
9. An overly-clean environment – it can prevent our immune systems from developing properly, making us more susceptible to diseases, especially autoimmune diseases
10. Suicide – inherently and obviously unhealthy
11. Isolation – loneliness can lead to depression, which depresses the immune system
12. Ignorance – either of the world or of oneself, as one cannot maintain one’s health if one is ignorant of what can harm it or improve it
This leads one to posit the following are healthy:
1. Exercise, with a diet proper to the amount of exercise and of high nutritional value
2. Change with continuity
3. Realizing that there are parts of the world that one cannot control, thus reducing stress and anxiety
4. Love
5. Keeping the body in hierarchical harmony
6. Moderation in everything, including moderation – remembering that moderation is an extreme in the same way that life is an extreme state of organic chemistry
7. Freedom – remembering that freedom does not equate to a lack of rules, but is rather what is achieved through playing by the best rules
8. Cleanliness (which, as the saying goes, is next to Godliness, meaning it is holy)
9. A non-sanitized world – a world without dirt is a world that makes unhealthy organisms
10. Love of one’s own life
11. Friends
12. Knowledge – including self-knowledge
One can make a similar list of what makes for a healthy mind:
1. Taking in healthy information – good art, music, literature, philosophy, the sciences, etc. – with sufficient exercise of the mind through thought, discussion, and writing
2. Change with continuity
3. Realizing that there are parts of the world that one cannot control, thus reducing stress and anxiety, which can negatively affect the mind as well as the body
4. Love
5. Having a variety of inputs – obsession with one thing alone is a kind of mental cancer
6. Moderation in everything, including moderation – moderation of reading, of rigorous thought, sexual thoughts, work, play, physical activity, etc.
7. Freedom of thought – we must not think in shackles, but with flexible rules
8. Cleanliness of thought – this does not necessarily mean what it has traditionally meant in the West, though it can certainly contain some elements; thinking about sex is in and of itself not unclean
9. Realization that we do not and cannot live in a sanitized world, as that stops thought and creativity
10. Love of thinking
11. Friends – as Aristotle says in Rhetoric, “a wide circle of friends, a virtuous circle of friends,” and, I would add, a mentally stimulating circle of friends
12. Knowledge – including self knowledge – with the goal of wisdom
A holy world is one that parallels the healthy body and the healthy mind, and will have the above qualities, including moderation in everything, including moderation (i.e., it will be a just world), freedom (this is freedom from, not freedom to), love, friendship, and beauty. A holy world is a beautiful world, both having variety in unity, unity in variety, complexity, and fluid hierarchy that is self-similar regardless of scale. All of the parts, living in love and friendship (which does not exclude healthy competition, such as we find in sports and in free trade), living in a complex dynamic with each other, living as individuals in various communities, many of which overlap and are nested within other communities, must be self-similar to have a holy world.
In Greek, to kalon means the beautiful, but it can also mean the honorable or the noble – and kala can mean either things that are beautiful or things that are morally good. In the Rhetoric, Aristotle says that “Now kalon describes whatever, through being chosen for itself, is praiseworthy or whatever, through being good [agathon], is pleasant because it is good [agathon]. If this, then, is the kalon, then virtue is necessarily kalon; for it is praiseworthy because of being good [agathon]” (79). Elaine Scarry points out that in English too, there is a connection between beauty and the good (the just), when she points out that to say that something is fair is to say that it is either beautiful or that it is just. In Greek and in English, the beautiful and the good are connected. If a holy world is a beautiful world, it is a good and just world as well. As Heraclitus said, “For god all things are fair and just, but men have taken some things as unjust, others as just” (LXVIII). The key here is that we see the world itself as just – not the actions of each and every individual. The world is itself justified and cannot itself be unjust. This is consistent with the teachings of any religion that sees the world as having been created by God or the gods – how could a fair and just god create a world that was itself unjust? And if theistic religions are rejected, how can the world itself possibly be unjust? To say it is unjust is to give it anthropomorphic qualities. It is people who have taken some things as being just, others as unjust – but the world itself is self-justified. Those who do not see the world as just are those who do not see the world as holy – often they are the same people who think the only way the world can be justified is if the world is made holy through the transformation of it into a perfect mirror of themselves. But we have seen that a world made up of only one world view is a cancerous world – and the world, as a cancerous organism, will die. An organism cannot consist of one type of cell – that is the unhealthiest of organisms. And a world having only one world view is the unhealthiest of worlds. In the same way that a healthy body consists of a variety of cells that are variations of the same theme coded by identical DNA, a healthy world consists of a variety of peoples that are variations of the same themes coded for by our being human and sharing the same cultural universals.
Beauty is also related to health – as we can see in the beauty we find in nature. Healthy plants produce the most beautiful flowers. Healthy peacocks produce the largest, most symmetrical, most colorful feathers. Healthy gobies and other territorial reef fish have the brightest colors. All of this natural beauty is the advertisement of health to the opposite sex. The healthiest human bodies (neither overweight nor super model thin) are the most beautiful. Thus is there also a relationship between health, beauty, and sex. If beauty can thus be equated to health, we can see that beauty is again equated to the holy. And we can see too that sex in-and-of-itself is and cannot be unholy, as it is connected (but not equivalent) to beauty.
A holy world is a whole world. It is a healthy world. It is a good and just world. It is a complex world. It is a world of individuals in community. It is a beautiful world. But is it a possible world? I have already given the answer: the world is itself already holy. We just have to learn to see it as holy. That is how we will heal the world. And, as we do, we will become less and less likely to want or try to eliminate those who disagree with us – until we are all in agreement on this one issue, as all the cells in an organism are in agreement on the one issue that they must work together for the health of the whole, even as each performs its own function. Thus, the world will become more and more holy in our eyes. In works of tragedy, nomos (convention, human law, naming; from which we get the words nomad and nomenclature, and which is the changing and changeable aspect of the world) comes into conflict with physis (or nature; from which we get the word physics). That is the position we are now in. When we get nomos to map onto physis (Heraclitus calls this conjunction logos – which can be translated as saying, speech, discourse, word, account, explanation, reason, principle, collection, enumeration, ratio, proportion), we will see the world as it truly is: holy.
On the Holy
Where lies the holy in the modern world?
It lies in Blake’s world in a grain of sand –
It lies, and lies like the truth, in patterns
Like self-organized rings of rocks barren
Arctic fields create. It lies in the branch
Of every tree and species, leafing out
From the known into the unknown. It lies
In every song, painting and rhythmic verse.
We have looked at every leaf and petal,
At the bark and at the wood, every cell
And strand of DNA is now known –
And we have forgotten that all of this
Was once a tree that gave us shade and filled
The air with delicate sweetness and held
The grains of sand against its roots to hold
The ground in place, even as that ground moves
And changes in tiny ways we refuse
To see. In this we can see the holy.
This is where it lies, now and forever,
On the edge of order and wild chaos,
Where the infinite holds in the finite,
Where we, ourselves holy, have always lived.
Bibliography:
Aristotle. On Rhetoric Trans. George Kennedy. Oxford University Press 1991
Blake, William. The Selected Poems of William Blake The Wordsworth Poetry Library. 1994
Heraclitus. The Art and Thought of Heraclitus Trans. Charles Kahn. Cambridge Univ. Press 1997
Scarry, Elaine. On Beauty and Being Just Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. 1999
Perhaps a year ago I wrote the following essay. This seems a good place to share it.
On Health and the Holy
In English the words holy, whole, hale, and health are etymologically connected – Old English halig, hal, and hælth, respectively, which are all related to hal. Thus are they conceptually connected. To see the world as holy is to see the world as whole – it is to have the world “appear infinite and holy, whereas it now appears finite and corrupt” (William Blake, “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell”). The word holistic comes from the Greek holos, whole. Thus the holy is holistic – God is holy because He encompasses all. Perhaps one could even say that we can recognize the divine only when we come to see the world as a whole, when we see the universe as universal. When we can come
To see a World in a grain of sand,
And a Heaven in a wild flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand,
And Eternity in an hour. (William Blake, “Auguries of Innocence”)
Health and hale is the same. To have health is to have wholeness. To be hale is to be healthy – whole and complete. To make healthy is to make whole again. One is healed through medication. But ideally, one would rather maintain one’s health than have to withstand the ravages of medication (pharmaceutical comes from the Greek pharmakon, which means both poison and medicine – as it does today), though medication is necessary to stave off disease. This is the purpose of Plato’s Pharmakon, to stave off disease. For disease is the opposite of health.
The Modern Era, which we are still in, though we may be at the end of it, began when Descartes split man in two – body and soul. It was a necessary division for the development of modern science (which Descartes all but admits to – the division is so the Church will tend to the soul, while the body is left alone, to be tended to by scientists such as Descartes), but it was certainly an unholy division (as all divisions are, by definition). Kant deepened this division. Hegel tried to mend it through philosophical synthesis. Marx tried to mend it by recommending the overthrow of half of the world – the world would then be wholly Proletarian. Nietzsche responded to Hegel by dividing the world up even more – for him, humans are not divided into body and soul, but are instead a series of masks. With postmodernism, the division is complete: men and women, multiculturalism, radical Cartesian individualism divide us up more and more. Any universality is denied. A necessary development – and not without its truth (I am aware of the irony of using the word truth, which comes from the Old English treowth, related to the word troth, from which we get the word betrothed, to speak of an idea that is more interested in divorce than betrothal). But it is precisely as unholy as one can get.
The deep divisions fostered by postmodernism came about because of a view that grand narratives, attempts to universalize, and seeing the world as holistic created the problems of the 20th Century. The Marxist grand narrative gave us the gulag of the Soviet Union, the massacres of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, and any number of other slaughters done by governments who had embraced Marxist philosophy. We looked back on history after the Holocaust, saw the grand narrative of Christianity had in the past itself promoted the killing of Jews – particularly in the Inquisition – and concluded that it too was dangerous. One could also mention The Terror of the French Revolution. What did Marxism, Medieval Christianity, and the French Revolution have in common? One thing was that they were all grand narratives. Thus, the logic goes, it must be grand narratives which are bad. And what do grand narratives do? They see the world as a whole, which must be encompassed by their ideology. To make the world a whole, it must be placed under their one ideology. Thus, holistic world views were seen as bad – thus were they, and holiness, rejected. The path to Heaven – whether that heaven was celestial or earthly – seemed to lead us straight into Hell. Perhaps in part the rejection of holding a holistic view came about because it is related to the holy, and the holy has been rejected. To the extent that wisdom is the ability to see the unity of the world – meaning wisdom is the ability to see the world as holy – wisdom was also rejected as impossible, perhaps even undesirable.
The error in this way of thinking derives from the error made in seeing Communism, Christianity, or the ideals of the French Revolution as interested in seeing the world as holistic. None of them saw the world as holistic, as holy – they instead wanted to make the world whole, under their particular umbrellas. They too fostered divisions – there were enemies who had to be either converted or killed in order that the world could be made holy. “For the cherub with his flaming sword is hereby commanded to leave his guard at tree of life; and when he does, the whole creation will be consumed and appear infinite and holy” (Blake “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell”). Now Blake here uses the word “appear.” None of them saw the world as holy. It had to be made so – through conflagration, if necessary. Postmodern thought, by dividing the world even more, does not help us to see the world as holy – quite the contrary. However, by insisting on equality among the various parts – among individuals, among cultures, among religions, among any number of groups of individuals – postmodern thought may ironically make it now possible to see the world as being, rather than needing to become, holy.
It may seem ironic to suggest that only by reaching the most severe of divisions – seeing the world as eminently unholy – that we can finally come to see that the world is in fact holy, but I am not being ironic. To see the world as holy is not to see everything in the world as equal in an egalitarian sense. There are hierarchies. To see the world as holy is to understand how everything fits into the world as a whole. It is to see the world as an immense organism, and to care for its health. An organism is made up of systems, organs, tissues, cells, organelles, and various biochemicals. For one group to want to envelop the entire world in one way of thinking, believing, viewing the world, would be the same as one cell wanting to envelop the entire organism in that one type of cell. We have a word for cells that want to do that: cancer. The postmodernists have mistaken viewing the actions of cancerous cells for seeing the whole organism. Cancer must be fought, not mistaken for the animal it is in. That is the only way one can have a healthy organism – and it is the only way to have a holy world. Like a healthy organism, a holy world is complex. Like a healthy organism, a holy world has smoothly working parts in communication with each other through clear rules that proscribe what each part needs to do for the whole to work well. Like a healthy organism, this cannot come from any centralized authority – there is no one control cell in the body, and the brain must have the lungs just as much as the lungs must have the brain. A holy world is like a healthy organism.
In Negative Theology, one comes to know what God is by figuring out what God is not. Aristotle says that if you are not sure if something is good, try to figure out what is bad, and you can then deduce that what is good is its opposite.
The following are unhealthy:
1. Overeating, including eating a high percentage of foods with low nutritional value, while remaining inactive (not exercising)
2. Either stagnation or change without continuity – both create instability
3. Stress and anxiety – which comes about from not realizing that there are parts of the world that one cannot control, and can lead to anger at those very things
4. Hatred – aside from raising the blood pressure, it can cause one to act in ways that would be unhealthy for the object of our hatred
5. Cancer – already discussed
6. Excess – including the excess of moderation
7. Shackles – prevents sufficient movement, equating to lack of exercise
8. Pollution – it can lead to any number of diseases
9. An overly-clean environment – it can prevent our immune systems from developing properly, making us more susceptible to diseases, especially autoimmune diseases
10. Suicide – inherently and obviously unhealthy
11. Isolation – loneliness can lead to depression, which depresses the immune system
12. Ignorance – either of the world or of oneself, as one cannot maintain one’s health if one is ignorant of what can harm it or improve it
This leads one to posit the following are healthy:
1. Exercise, with a diet proper to the amount of exercise and of high nutritional value
2. Change with continuity
3. Realizing that there are parts of the world that one cannot control, thus reducing stress and anxiety
4. Love
5. Keeping the body in hierarchical harmony
6. Moderation in everything, including moderation – remembering that moderation is an extreme in the same way that life is an extreme state of organic chemistry
7. Freedom – remembering that freedom does not equate to a lack of rules, but is rather what is achieved through playing by the best rules
8. Cleanliness (which, as the saying goes, is next to Godliness, meaning it is holy)
9. A non-sanitized world – a world without dirt is a world that makes unhealthy organisms
10. Love of one’s own life
11. Friends
12. Knowledge – including self-knowledge
One can make a similar list of what makes for a healthy mind:
1. Taking in healthy information – good art, music, literature, philosophy, the sciences, etc. – with sufficient exercise of the mind through thought, discussion, and writing
2. Change with continuity
3. Realizing that there are parts of the world that one cannot control, thus reducing stress and anxiety, which can negatively affect the mind as well as the body
4. Love
5. Having a variety of inputs – obsession with one thing alone is a kind of mental cancer
6. Moderation in everything, including moderation – moderation of reading, of rigorous thought, sexual thoughts, work, play, physical activity, etc.
7. Freedom of thought – we must not think in shackles, but with flexible rules
8. Cleanliness of thought – this does not necessarily mean what it has traditionally meant in the West, though it can certainly contain some elements; thinking about sex is in and of itself not unclean
9. Realization that we do not and cannot live in a sanitized world, as that stops thought and creativity
10. Love of thinking
11. Friends – as Aristotle says in Rhetoric, “a wide circle of friends, a virtuous circle of friends,” and, I would add, a mentally stimulating circle of friends
12. Knowledge – including self knowledge – with the goal of wisdom
A holy world is one that parallels the healthy body and the healthy mind, and will have the above qualities, including moderation in everything, including moderation (i.e., it will be a just world), freedom (this is freedom from, not freedom to), love, friendship, and beauty. A holy world is a beautiful world, both having variety in unity, unity in variety, complexity, and fluid hierarchy that is self-similar regardless of scale. All of the parts, living in love and friendship (which does not exclude healthy competition, such as we find in sports and in free trade), living in a complex dynamic with each other, living as individuals in various communities, many of which overlap and are nested within other communities, must be self-similar to have a holy world.
In Greek, to kalon means the beautiful, but it can also mean the honorable or the noble – and kala can mean either things that are beautiful or things that are morally good. In the Rhetoric, Aristotle says that “Now kalon describes whatever, through being chosen for itself, is praiseworthy or whatever, through being good [agathon], is pleasant because it is good [agathon]. If this, then, is the kalon, then virtue is necessarily kalon; for it is praiseworthy because of being good [agathon]” (79). Elaine Scarry points out that in English too, there is a connection between beauty and the good (the just), when she points out that to say that something is fair is to say that it is either beautiful or that it is just. In Greek and in English, the beautiful and the good are connected. If a holy world is a beautiful world, it is a good and just world as well. As Heraclitus said, “For god all things are fair and just, but men have taken some things as unjust, others as just” (LXVIII). The key here is that we see the world itself as just – not the actions of each and every individual. The world is itself justified and cannot itself be unjust. This is consistent with the teachings of any religion that sees the world as having been created by God or the gods – how could a fair and just god create a world that was itself unjust? And if theistic religions are rejected, how can the world itself possibly be unjust? To say it is unjust is to give it anthropomorphic qualities. It is people who have taken some things as being just, others as unjust – but the world itself is self-justified. Those who do not see the world as just are those who do not see the world as holy – often they are the same people who think the only way the world can be justified is if the world is made holy through the transformation of it into a perfect mirror of themselves. But we have seen that a world made up of only one world view is a cancerous world – and the world, as a cancerous organism, will die. An organism cannot consist of one type of cell – that is the unhealthiest of organisms. And a world having only one world view is the unhealthiest of worlds. In the same way that a healthy body consists of a variety of cells that are variations of the same theme coded by identical DNA, a healthy world consists of a variety of peoples that are variations of the same themes coded for by our being human and sharing the same cultural universals.
Beauty is also related to health – as we can see in the beauty we find in nature. Healthy plants produce the most beautiful flowers. Healthy peacocks produce the largest, most symmetrical, most colorful feathers. Healthy gobies and other territorial reef fish have the brightest colors. All of this natural beauty is the advertisement of health to the opposite sex. The healthiest human bodies (neither overweight nor super model thin) are the most beautiful. Thus is there also a relationship between health, beauty, and sex. If beauty can thus be equated to health, we can see that beauty is again equated to the holy. And we can see too that sex in-and-of-itself is and cannot be unholy, as it is connected (but not equivalent) to beauty.
A holy world is a whole world. It is a healthy world. It is a good and just world. It is a complex world. It is a world of individuals in community. It is a beautiful world. But is it a possible world? I have already given the answer: the world is itself already holy. We just have to learn to see it as holy. That is how we will heal the world. And, as we do, we will become less and less likely to want or try to eliminate those who disagree with us – until we are all in agreement on this one issue, as all the cells in an organism are in agreement on the one issue that they must work together for the health of the whole, even as each performs its own function. Thus, the world will become more and more holy in our eyes. In works of tragedy, nomos (convention, human law, naming; from which we get the words nomad and nomenclature, and which is the changing and changeable aspect of the world) comes into conflict with physis (or nature; from which we get the word physics). That is the position we are now in. When we get nomos to map onto physis (Heraclitus calls this conjunction logos – which can be translated as saying, speech, discourse, word, account, explanation, reason, principle, collection, enumeration, ratio, proportion), we will see the world as it truly is: holy.
On the Holy
Where lies the holy in the modern world?
It lies in Blake’s world in a grain of sand –
It lies, and lies like the truth, in patterns
Like self-organized rings of rocks barren
Arctic fields create. It lies in the branch
Of every tree and species, leafing out
From the known into the unknown. It lies
In every song, painting and rhythmic verse.
We have looked at every leaf and petal,
At the bark and at the wood, every cell
And strand of DNA is now known –
And we have forgotten that all of this
Was once a tree that gave us shade and filled
The air with delicate sweetness and held
The grains of sand against its roots to hold
The ground in place, even as that ground moves
And changes in tiny ways we refuse
To see. In this we can see the holy.
This is where it lies, now and forever,
On the edge of order and wild chaos,
Where the infinite holds in the finite,
Where we, ourselves holy, have always lived.
Bibliography:
Aristotle. On Rhetoric Trans. George Kennedy. Oxford University Press 1991
Blake, William. The Selected Poems of William Blake The Wordsworth Poetry Library. 1994
Heraclitus. The Art and Thought of Heraclitus Trans. Charles Kahn. Cambridge Univ. Press 1997
Scarry, Elaine. On Beauty and Being Just Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. 1999
A Vague, Calculated Answer
While campaigning in South Carolina, Barack Obama said Hillary Clinton was giving "vague, calculated answers to suit the politics of the moment instead of clear, consistent principles about how you would lead America." Doesn't Obama know that if you speak from consistent principles that you will be able to be pinned down, meaning people will be able to criticize what you are saying, meaning your ideas will be challenged, and that will get people to think about what you mean by what you say, meaning you could lose votes? Vague, calculated answers are what you need if you want people to vote for you without knowing what you intend to do to, er, for them.
Saturday, November 03, 2007
The Middle Way, Part 5 (Morals vs. Virtues)
After spending a great deal of time talking about Aristotle's Golden Mean, Marionff asks the following questions: "Is every human behavior subject to Aristotle's golden mean? Does Aristotle sanction anything, provided that it's done in moderation?" (63). The answer is, of course not. Marinoff points out that Aristotle prohibits murder, theft, robbery, lying, and adultery. This set, prohibited by every other set of ethics throughout history and in every culture, are what we classify as morals. Aristotle's golden mean applies to virtues. Virtues and morals together are ethics. We are typically very careless about our terminology, and this has created many problems as people have claimed that all morals are relative, when perhaps they should have been talking about virtues.
Marc Hauser makes the argument in his excellent book "Moral Minds" that there is a biological source for our moral actions. He argues that we judge something as wrong first, then rationalize it later. More than that, we see that the moral prohibitions of murder, theft, robbery, lying, and adultery are all biological in origin. Let's take each in turn, then return to the issue of virtue.
Murder. Murder is the killing of someone in your own tribe. If you kill someone outside your tribe, that is not considered murder. The variations we see in the definition of "murder" only come about in the variations we see in who different groups consider to be in their tribes. The larger one's tribe is, the more people one considers illegitimate to kill. We in the West consider everyone to be in our tribe, so we have gone so far as to develop international treaties to extradite murderers and to protest our going to war with other countries. Now, if murder is to be defined as I have defined it, then how does that explain such things as human sacrifices? That is simple: ritual. In every case, the culture in question performs some sort of ritual that removes the person from the tribe, making them an outsider and, thus, able to be killed. We do the same thing in the U.S. when it comes to certain kinds of murderers: we perform a ritual (a trial) that removes them from society, so we can kill them. Those who oppose the death penalty simply do not agree that this is a legitimate ritual, or that we should any longer have such rituals.
Theft and Robbery. Each of these results in the taking of property from someone else, who is the legitimate owner. To even have theft and robbery, you have to have some sort of idea of ownership, or private property rights. In a much older post I talk about the evolutionary origins of property rights, to which I refer the reader. This deep evolutionary drive to protect one's property is the origin of the moral directive not to steal.
Lying. There is lying, and then there is lying. There are kinds of lying that are necessary for strong social bonds to exist -- the famous "white lie." Those are not the kinds of lies we are talking about here. I am talking about what the Old Testament prohibits: "bearing false witness." What is the difference between lying and bearing false witness? If you bear false witness, you are lying to either hurt someone else, or to benefit yourself at someone else's expense. This kind of lying, bearing of false witness, is prohbited precisely because it undermines social bonds and creates a society without trust. Telling a woman her ugly baby is cute is just being polite -- and it doesn't harm anybody, but on the contrary, creates stronger social bonds. However, we are in danger when we take this too far too. Should we tell a student their writing is fine when it is in fact incomprehensible? The student may like you that semester, but you have not helped that student (or society, for that matter) by lying to them. Sometimes you have to hurt feelings to make people better.
Adultery. This, again, breaks social bonds -- and it breaks the most important social bond of all, the familial bond. There are many different kinds of marriages that have been practiced, including open ones, but even in a polygamous or an open marraige, if there is adultery, or having sex with someone else without the spouse's knowledge, that inevitably creates hurt feelings and breaks the bonds of trust. Here again, it is the most basic of social bonds that are being broken here. And, as Confucius points out, the family is the ground of community.
What connects these immoral acts together is that they are all things that we would not do to a member of our family. For that reason, rape, too, should be included. Each of these behaviors results in the breaking of family bonds and, thus, the breaking of social bonds. The family is simply a small, self-similar part of the larger social fractal. As the family goes, so goes society.
The rest of human behavior is then covered under virtue. And with them, we have such things as manners. With the loss of manners, we have seen the loss of virtue. We have mistaken libertinage for liberty, allowing ourselves to do anything we want, thinking anarchy is freedom. The truth is, it is good rules which give us more degrees of freedom. Manners and virtue allow us to become better than what our biology commands us to be. It allows us to grow (the golden mean is the principle of growth, after all). It allows us to become more beautiful people, to develop more beautiful souls.
Marc Hauser makes the argument in his excellent book "Moral Minds" that there is a biological source for our moral actions. He argues that we judge something as wrong first, then rationalize it later. More than that, we see that the moral prohibitions of murder, theft, robbery, lying, and adultery are all biological in origin. Let's take each in turn, then return to the issue of virtue.
Murder. Murder is the killing of someone in your own tribe. If you kill someone outside your tribe, that is not considered murder. The variations we see in the definition of "murder" only come about in the variations we see in who different groups consider to be in their tribes. The larger one's tribe is, the more people one considers illegitimate to kill. We in the West consider everyone to be in our tribe, so we have gone so far as to develop international treaties to extradite murderers and to protest our going to war with other countries. Now, if murder is to be defined as I have defined it, then how does that explain such things as human sacrifices? That is simple: ritual. In every case, the culture in question performs some sort of ritual that removes the person from the tribe, making them an outsider and, thus, able to be killed. We do the same thing in the U.S. when it comes to certain kinds of murderers: we perform a ritual (a trial) that removes them from society, so we can kill them. Those who oppose the death penalty simply do not agree that this is a legitimate ritual, or that we should any longer have such rituals.
Theft and Robbery. Each of these results in the taking of property from someone else, who is the legitimate owner. To even have theft and robbery, you have to have some sort of idea of ownership, or private property rights. In a much older post I talk about the evolutionary origins of property rights, to which I refer the reader. This deep evolutionary drive to protect one's property is the origin of the moral directive not to steal.
Lying. There is lying, and then there is lying. There are kinds of lying that are necessary for strong social bonds to exist -- the famous "white lie." Those are not the kinds of lies we are talking about here. I am talking about what the Old Testament prohibits: "bearing false witness." What is the difference between lying and bearing false witness? If you bear false witness, you are lying to either hurt someone else, or to benefit yourself at someone else's expense. This kind of lying, bearing of false witness, is prohbited precisely because it undermines social bonds and creates a society without trust. Telling a woman her ugly baby is cute is just being polite -- and it doesn't harm anybody, but on the contrary, creates stronger social bonds. However, we are in danger when we take this too far too. Should we tell a student their writing is fine when it is in fact incomprehensible? The student may like you that semester, but you have not helped that student (or society, for that matter) by lying to them. Sometimes you have to hurt feelings to make people better.
Adultery. This, again, breaks social bonds -- and it breaks the most important social bond of all, the familial bond. There are many different kinds of marriages that have been practiced, including open ones, but even in a polygamous or an open marraige, if there is adultery, or having sex with someone else without the spouse's knowledge, that inevitably creates hurt feelings and breaks the bonds of trust. Here again, it is the most basic of social bonds that are being broken here. And, as Confucius points out, the family is the ground of community.
What connects these immoral acts together is that they are all things that we would not do to a member of our family. For that reason, rape, too, should be included. Each of these behaviors results in the breaking of family bonds and, thus, the breaking of social bonds. The family is simply a small, self-similar part of the larger social fractal. As the family goes, so goes society.
The rest of human behavior is then covered under virtue. And with them, we have such things as manners. With the loss of manners, we have seen the loss of virtue. We have mistaken libertinage for liberty, allowing ourselves to do anything we want, thinking anarchy is freedom. The truth is, it is good rules which give us more degrees of freedom. Manners and virtue allow us to become better than what our biology commands us to be. It allows us to grow (the golden mean is the principle of growth, after all). It allows us to become more beautiful people, to develop more beautiful souls.
Pakistani Martial Law
If Musharraf weren't pretending to help the U.S. capture bin Laden, who here thinks that the U.S. would, as of today, with Musharraf taking measures to make it impossible to remove him from office, be demanding that the international community suspend trade, diplomatic relations, etc.? Instead we have Rice "urging" Pakistan to return to democracy. So much for Bush's declaration that the U.S. would no longer support non-democratic nations even for strategic reasons.
This is not to say that I think suspending trade and diplomatic relations actually has any sort of beneficial effect. Right off the top of my head, I can't think of a single incidence where that happened. My point is that nothing has really changed with the way we support dictators -- including dictators that everyone has to know isn't actually doing a thing to help us, but is only putting on a show for us.
So what should we be doing? How about free trade with everyone, entangling alliances with no one? History has shown that the U.S. has had far greater positive influence on those countries with which we have had good diplomatic relationshiips and free trade agreements. China is an excellent example of things moving in the right direction (and also a good example of the fact that things don't turn around overnight. One does have to have patience); Cuba is an example of a place that is still in the mess it's in, with the U.S. taking the opposite approach. If we want to spread democracy, the only real way to do it is to freely trade with countries, allow the people to become wealthier and the society to become more complex, and then democracy will come on its own, from the people of the country. People who are poor and beat down and are surviving day by day can't revolt. And typically don't. Look at who really revolted in history: it was the well-off who decided they had had enough of the government aggravating them all the time. Often they are the well-educated. So we need to get people wealthy and well-educated in other countries if we want to spread democracy. The way that we can do it is through free trade.
This is not to say that I think suspending trade and diplomatic relations actually has any sort of beneficial effect. Right off the top of my head, I can't think of a single incidence where that happened. My point is that nothing has really changed with the way we support dictators -- including dictators that everyone has to know isn't actually doing a thing to help us, but is only putting on a show for us.
So what should we be doing? How about free trade with everyone, entangling alliances with no one? History has shown that the U.S. has had far greater positive influence on those countries with which we have had good diplomatic relationshiips and free trade agreements. China is an excellent example of things moving in the right direction (and also a good example of the fact that things don't turn around overnight. One does have to have patience); Cuba is an example of a place that is still in the mess it's in, with the U.S. taking the opposite approach. If we want to spread democracy, the only real way to do it is to freely trade with countries, allow the people to become wealthier and the society to become more complex, and then democracy will come on its own, from the people of the country. People who are poor and beat down and are surviving day by day can't revolt. And typically don't. Look at who really revolted in history: it was the well-off who decided they had had enough of the government aggravating them all the time. Often they are the well-educated. So we need to get people wealthy and well-educated in other countries if we want to spread democracy. The way that we can do it is through free trade.
Friday, November 02, 2007
Real Racism
Okay, so I admit to being a little behind on the Unviersity of Delware's support of racist views, but nonetheless let me weigh in. Here's the quote from the pamphlet UD distributed: "A racist is one who is both privileged and socialized on the basis of race by a white supremacist (racist) system. The term applies to all white people (i.e. people of European descent) living in the United States regardless of class, gender, religion, culture or sexuality. By this definition, people of color cannot be racists, because as peoples within the U.S. system they do not have the power to back up their prejudices, hostilities or acts of discrimination."
In the quote they define racism as white supremacism. However, if we break the word down, we see that "white" supremacism is not found in the word at all. Any time you have an "-ism" you have an ideology based on the root you attach "-ism" to. Thus, "racism" is an ideology based on race. Any time you have any kind of ideology that requires that you consider race, you have racism. So when you have a statement that "X applies to all Y kinds of people," you have a racist statement. Power is not involved in whether you believe in any sort of "-ism," and in fact, many "-isms" in the world are believed by minorities within a majority culture. It would be ridiculous to say that someone in the United States cannot believe in communism because the communists don't have the power to back up their ideology.
But let us, for the sake or argument, accept the idea that to be a racist, you have to have power. The last sentence would still be nonsense, as the victims of the Black Panthers know. A small group of people can easily get the power to back up their prejudices, hostilities or acts of discrimination. Or didn't the people in charge over at UD not notice what happened on 9-11?
So we have seen that sentence 1 is at best a bad definition. The second sentence is an outright racist statement based upon the actual definition of racism. And the third sentence is an outright lie.
This analysis does to some extent have one problem: it masks my true outrage at this statement. In saying I am a racist, it is saying that I hate my Mexican-American wife and our daughter. And for that I demand an apology!
In the quote they define racism as white supremacism. However, if we break the word down, we see that "white" supremacism is not found in the word at all. Any time you have an "-ism" you have an ideology based on the root you attach "-ism" to. Thus, "racism" is an ideology based on race. Any time you have any kind of ideology that requires that you consider race, you have racism. So when you have a statement that "X applies to all Y kinds of people," you have a racist statement. Power is not involved in whether you believe in any sort of "-ism," and in fact, many "-isms" in the world are believed by minorities within a majority culture. It would be ridiculous to say that someone in the United States cannot believe in communism because the communists don't have the power to back up their ideology.
But let us, for the sake or argument, accept the idea that to be a racist, you have to have power. The last sentence would still be nonsense, as the victims of the Black Panthers know. A small group of people can easily get the power to back up their prejudices, hostilities or acts of discrimination. Or didn't the people in charge over at UD not notice what happened on 9-11?
So we have seen that sentence 1 is at best a bad definition. The second sentence is an outright racist statement based upon the actual definition of racism. And the third sentence is an outright lie.
This analysis does to some extent have one problem: it masks my true outrage at this statement. In saying I am a racist, it is saying that I hate my Mexican-American wife and our daughter. And for that I demand an apology!
Altruistic Racist Warriors vs. Selfish Tolerant Pacifists
In the most recent issue of Science (Vol. 318, 26 Oct. 2007) is a fascinating article on pg. 636-640 titled "The Coevolution of Parochial Altruism and War" by Jung-Kyoo Choi and Samuel Bowles, with an accompanying review article on pg. 581-2 by Holly Arrow titled "The Sharp End of Altruism." You can probably find the two articles at www.sciencemag.org .
Using computer simulations, Coi and Bowles show that if you create beings with the follwing traits: either altruistic (A) or non-altruistic (N) and either tolerant (T) or parochial, or anti-stranger (P), you end up with two stable populations, depending on the conditions. Under peacetime conditions, you get "a society of selfish but tolerant freetraders" (Arrow, 581), but under wartime conditions, you get "a warrior society in which people help one another but are hostile to outsiders" (581). The other two combinations -- selfless, tolerant people and selfish racists -- seem to be unstable combinations, though more stable under peacetime conditions than under times of war. The researchers observe that one doesn't even need war to be that common for the PA combination to quickly dominate.
These conclusions make a lot of evolutionary sense. Without making the mistake of thinking of behavior as simply a choice between P and T genes, as behavior is more complex than that from both a genetic point of view and from a social point of view, by treating them as overarching behaviors that can be selected, we can see, nonetheless, that certain behaviors are more adaptive than others. Part of this has to do with territorialism. All land vertebrates are territorial to varying degrees. This allows individuals and groups to have enough food and water to continue to live. Protecting territory protects food. So we should expect species to protect their territory -- which they do. Now, if a species is going to protect its territory, it must confront those who wish to intrude on or take that territory. Various rituals have evolved that allow many confrontations to end without violence. But sometimes that breaks down. And more, in chimpanzees, we see an outright preference for attacking and killing members of other groups when the balance is in favor of the attacking group. This assumption was used by the researchers, and it led to the creation of a preference for racist altruists -- those that will sacrifice to protect family and tribe, but who hate and will attack those not in the tribe. Tolerant groups are less likely to attack first, meaning the racist groups are more likely to both attack first, killing the tolerant people of other groups. The end result is that the huan race has evolved to be racist altruists.
Now, the fact that we evolved to be racist altruists who love war in no way excuses such behavior. But it seems that this combination is the most stable one under condiitions of periodic war. The other combination is predominant under periods of peace: the TN individual. These people are tolerant of others and are willing to engage in interactions with people from different groups, yet are selfish. This is the paring most associated with Americans -- and it is no doubt because America's isolation from the rest of the world, keeping us out of constatnt wars, encourages the development of TN behavior. Does this mean PA is completely replaced? The authors don't say, but let me expand on their research a little with some thoughts on my own. It seems likely that wars may have resulted in natural selection for genetic PA's, though behavior, being complex, can still have other kinds of atrtibutes built on it by society. So in the U.S., for example, while people may be more likely to be genetic PA's, we have adopted the TN meme, and use it more often than we do the AP genetic tendencies we're born with. But as the Japanese learned in WWII, it is not difficult to awaken the "sleeping dragon" of PA behavior latent in people.
It seems, though, that so long as there are wars, the PA genes-memes will continue to dominate. However, the bad news for many of the peace activists on the Left who are TA's is that peace will not produce more of them. Rather, it appears that it will be more likely to produce more TN's -- people who are more and more likely to believe in and engage in free market economics. My guess is that Ayn Rand would be one of the few not surprised by this outcome.
Using computer simulations, Coi and Bowles show that if you create beings with the follwing traits: either altruistic (A) or non-altruistic (N) and either tolerant (T) or parochial, or anti-stranger (P), you end up with two stable populations, depending on the conditions. Under peacetime conditions, you get "a society of selfish but tolerant freetraders" (Arrow, 581), but under wartime conditions, you get "a warrior society in which people help one another but are hostile to outsiders" (581). The other two combinations -- selfless, tolerant people and selfish racists -- seem to be unstable combinations, though more stable under peacetime conditions than under times of war. The researchers observe that one doesn't even need war to be that common for the PA combination to quickly dominate.
These conclusions make a lot of evolutionary sense. Without making the mistake of thinking of behavior as simply a choice between P and T genes, as behavior is more complex than that from both a genetic point of view and from a social point of view, by treating them as overarching behaviors that can be selected, we can see, nonetheless, that certain behaviors are more adaptive than others. Part of this has to do with territorialism. All land vertebrates are territorial to varying degrees. This allows individuals and groups to have enough food and water to continue to live. Protecting territory protects food. So we should expect species to protect their territory -- which they do. Now, if a species is going to protect its territory, it must confront those who wish to intrude on or take that territory. Various rituals have evolved that allow many confrontations to end without violence. But sometimes that breaks down. And more, in chimpanzees, we see an outright preference for attacking and killing members of other groups when the balance is in favor of the attacking group. This assumption was used by the researchers, and it led to the creation of a preference for racist altruists -- those that will sacrifice to protect family and tribe, but who hate and will attack those not in the tribe. Tolerant groups are less likely to attack first, meaning the racist groups are more likely to both attack first, killing the tolerant people of other groups. The end result is that the huan race has evolved to be racist altruists.
Now, the fact that we evolved to be racist altruists who love war in no way excuses such behavior. But it seems that this combination is the most stable one under condiitions of periodic war. The other combination is predominant under periods of peace: the TN individual. These people are tolerant of others and are willing to engage in interactions with people from different groups, yet are selfish. This is the paring most associated with Americans -- and it is no doubt because America's isolation from the rest of the world, keeping us out of constatnt wars, encourages the development of TN behavior. Does this mean PA is completely replaced? The authors don't say, but let me expand on their research a little with some thoughts on my own. It seems likely that wars may have resulted in natural selection for genetic PA's, though behavior, being complex, can still have other kinds of atrtibutes built on it by society. So in the U.S., for example, while people may be more likely to be genetic PA's, we have adopted the TN meme, and use it more often than we do the AP genetic tendencies we're born with. But as the Japanese learned in WWII, it is not difficult to awaken the "sleeping dragon" of PA behavior latent in people.
It seems, though, that so long as there are wars, the PA genes-memes will continue to dominate. However, the bad news for many of the peace activists on the Left who are TA's is that peace will not produce more of them. Rather, it appears that it will be more likely to produce more TN's -- people who are more and more likely to believe in and engage in free market economics. My guess is that Ayn Rand would be one of the few not surprised by this outcome.
1st Amendment and Churches
I encourage everyone to read the following article: Church Free Speech. It is an editorial on the way our government restricts political speech in the U.S. It turns out it was one of the many mad ideas of LBJ made law. The First Amendment of the Constitution says that Congress shall make NO LAW either restricting the freedom of speech or setting up a state religion. This means that the government cannot tell people what they can or cannot say, particularly those in religious positions. It does not mean that religious leaders are not allowed to engage in political speech. The tax-exempt status was a sinister way of shutting down political speech in our churches by first offering them something, and then threatening to take it away from them. The result is that it is and can be used to intimidate people to not engage in political speech. And that is outright illegal. It is time churches got together and brought this to the Supreme Court so we can get rid of this illegal law.
Thursday, November 01, 2007
Gay Old Party?
Is the Grand Old Party turning into the Gay Old Party? In July it was Florida State Rep. Bob Allen. And then it was Idaho Senator Larry Craig. And now it's Washington State Rep. Richard Curtis. All supported anti-gay legislation. To paraphrase Shakespeare: "Methinks they doth protest too much."
This isn't all that surprising if you consider that many people hate precisely what they themselves are. Self-loathing can turn into self-righteousness. It sounds like this is a group where "know thyself" is a dictim more needed than ever. I think, too, that a true understanding of the biopsychological origins of homosexual behavior would help people immensely with knowing themselves and becoming comfortable with who they are.
And please note that I said "homosexual behavior." Our closest relatives, the bonobos, are quite the sexually active, bisexual species. They use sex to strengthen social bonds -- and social bonds must be maintained with both sexes. This is the likely origin of homosexual behavior among humans, though I would also note that our opposition to homosexual behavior likely came about when we became aware of the connection between sex and reproduction, with the recognition that in order for a tribe to survive, one needed to make sure most sex was reproductive sex. I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that at 6 billion people worldwide and counting, it wouldn't hurt if less sex were reproductive and more was for strengthening social bonds.
This isn't all that surprising if you consider that many people hate precisely what they themselves are. Self-loathing can turn into self-righteousness. It sounds like this is a group where "know thyself" is a dictim more needed than ever. I think, too, that a true understanding of the biopsychological origins of homosexual behavior would help people immensely with knowing themselves and becoming comfortable with who they are.
And please note that I said "homosexual behavior." Our closest relatives, the bonobos, are quite the sexually active, bisexual species. They use sex to strengthen social bonds -- and social bonds must be maintained with both sexes. This is the likely origin of homosexual behavior among humans, though I would also note that our opposition to homosexual behavior likely came about when we became aware of the connection between sex and reproduction, with the recognition that in order for a tribe to survive, one needed to make sure most sex was reproductive sex. I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that at 6 billion people worldwide and counting, it wouldn't hurt if less sex were reproductive and more was for strengthening social bonds.
Wednesday, October 31, 2007
The Middle Way, Part 4 (Fanatics vs. Fundamentalism)
Lou Marinoff makes an excellent distinction between fanatics and fundamentalists that all too many people do not make. We typically refer to Osama bin Laden as an Islamic fundamentalist, which groups him in with various Chrstian fundamentalists such as Pat Robertson. However, "It is primarily religious (and also political) fanatics who cannot tolerate beliefs that differ from their own. Fanatics are dangerously and sometimes violently intolerant of others' beliefs, while fundamentalists are passionately wed to their own beliefs but normally pose no threat to others who believe differently" (63). Having been rasied around -- and as -- a Christian fundamentalist, I can attest to this difference. I heard my pastor and my family complain voiciferously and constatntly about people doing this or that, or belieivng this or that. But the worst that any of them were ever going to do was sign a petition or vote for or against something. In the end, they were actually tolderant of the things they opposed, because they lived and let live. That did not mean, though, that they did not think they did not have the right to voice their opinions.
And this gets me to another point that needs to be made. Fanatics cannot stand for someone to disagree with them. Thus, they take action to silence their opposition thorugh various forms of intimidation. There are people out there who are free speech fanatics -- meaning, they think that they should have the right to say anything they want without anyone saying anything to or about them or their ideas. The attitude can be summed up thus:
Fanatic: "I believe that we should do X."
Opposition: "No, I think X is a bad idea."
Fanatic: "Opposition is infringing on my freedom of speech to say that we should do X!"
Pick your favorite cause and plug it into X, and you have probably heard someone make the above argument. It is not enough that they are free to say what they want, but others should not be free to criticize them for having said it. That is a form of fanaticism that in fact undermines the freedom of speech.
So fanaticism does not have to be theological in nature. But I do suspect that it is always religious in nature. Marinoff hints at this in the paragraph that ends the short section the above was excerpted from when he says, "Religious reform itself has now reached the other extreme [away from fundamentalism] in the West, whose societies -- from South America to North America to Europe -- hve become so liberalized that millions now have no religious faith whatsoever. This leaves them extremely vulnerable to moral anarchy on the one hand, and to political crusades on the other" (63). In other words, it has led to post-hippy, postmodern anarchy and libertinage -- or to various forms of secular-government religions such as national socialism, fascism, and communism. For many government is now their god. We saw this particularly strongly among the existentialists who, upon embracing atheism, became supporters of Naziism (Heidegger was a lifelong member and never recanted his membership in the party) and communism (Camus, de Beauvoir, and Sartre were all communists, at least for a while). Nietzsche warned against this, pointing out that people did not truly embrace atheism and all that it truly meant, but that they continued to act as good Christians or Jews, only transfering their loyalties to other entities.
What we seem to see now in the United States is a combination of moral anarchy and devotion to government as god among a certain element of the Left. There are people who don't want anyone to judge them for anything they do, but at the same time support the creation of an extremely large, controlling government. They seek to cut all natural social bonds, eliminate all natural social hierarchies, and support the government as the one, true and only social organizer. It's a very unnatural top-down yet egalitarian system. But it is a system conceived of by people who, to paraphrase Nietzsche, cannot conceive of a being greater than themselves. They naturally imagine themselves in charge of the very entity they worship.
WIth a natural set of social systems, we see decentralization and moderation at work. People join various social systems -- churches, neighborhoods, jobs, clubs, etc. -- and there is a natural hierarchy that forms. There is me, and I am in a family, and my family and I are in a neighborhood and go to a church, and each of those are imbeded in a hierarchical organization themselves: the community is in a town, in a county (two in the case of my town) in a state in a nation in a larger culture (the West) in a globalized world; the church is a member of a diocese, etc. As a member of diffferent groups, I am forced to get along with different people. There are people of different ethnic groups in my neighborhood and in my church (and in my family, actually), etc. I am friends with people of different religions and ethnicities due to the different organizations I have been a member of, or because of the places I hang out at. All of which contributes to moderate behavior (it's hard to hate people you know very well, after all). We live moderate lives by acting as we naturally act -- as social mammals -- while struggling against the unfortunate side-effect of evolving as a social mammal, which is hatred of those not in our tribe. We do this not by eliminating social behavior, but by expanding our notion of who is in our tribe. But all of this undermines government-fanaticism, and that is why anti-social efforts have been underway of late: anti-touching rules and even laws, etc. are becoming popular of late. It is part of a kind of fanaticism we have to fight against just as much as we fight against religious fanaticism.
But we have to remember: fanaticism and fundamentalism are not one and the same thing. We have to know that if we are going to fight effectively against fanaticism and make the world safe for moderation.
And this gets me to another point that needs to be made. Fanatics cannot stand for someone to disagree with them. Thus, they take action to silence their opposition thorugh various forms of intimidation. There are people out there who are free speech fanatics -- meaning, they think that they should have the right to say anything they want without anyone saying anything to or about them or their ideas. The attitude can be summed up thus:
Fanatic: "I believe that we should do X."
Opposition: "No, I think X is a bad idea."
Fanatic: "Opposition is infringing on my freedom of speech to say that we should do X!"
Pick your favorite cause and plug it into X, and you have probably heard someone make the above argument. It is not enough that they are free to say what they want, but others should not be free to criticize them for having said it. That is a form of fanaticism that in fact undermines the freedom of speech.
So fanaticism does not have to be theological in nature. But I do suspect that it is always religious in nature. Marinoff hints at this in the paragraph that ends the short section the above was excerpted from when he says, "Religious reform itself has now reached the other extreme [away from fundamentalism] in the West, whose societies -- from South America to North America to Europe -- hve become so liberalized that millions now have no religious faith whatsoever. This leaves them extremely vulnerable to moral anarchy on the one hand, and to political crusades on the other" (63). In other words, it has led to post-hippy, postmodern anarchy and libertinage -- or to various forms of secular-government religions such as national socialism, fascism, and communism. For many government is now their god. We saw this particularly strongly among the existentialists who, upon embracing atheism, became supporters of Naziism (Heidegger was a lifelong member and never recanted his membership in the party) and communism (Camus, de Beauvoir, and Sartre were all communists, at least for a while). Nietzsche warned against this, pointing out that people did not truly embrace atheism and all that it truly meant, but that they continued to act as good Christians or Jews, only transfering their loyalties to other entities.
What we seem to see now in the United States is a combination of moral anarchy and devotion to government as god among a certain element of the Left. There are people who don't want anyone to judge them for anything they do, but at the same time support the creation of an extremely large, controlling government. They seek to cut all natural social bonds, eliminate all natural social hierarchies, and support the government as the one, true and only social organizer. It's a very unnatural top-down yet egalitarian system. But it is a system conceived of by people who, to paraphrase Nietzsche, cannot conceive of a being greater than themselves. They naturally imagine themselves in charge of the very entity they worship.
WIth a natural set of social systems, we see decentralization and moderation at work. People join various social systems -- churches, neighborhoods, jobs, clubs, etc. -- and there is a natural hierarchy that forms. There is me, and I am in a family, and my family and I are in a neighborhood and go to a church, and each of those are imbeded in a hierarchical organization themselves: the community is in a town, in a county (two in the case of my town) in a state in a nation in a larger culture (the West) in a globalized world; the church is a member of a diocese, etc. As a member of diffferent groups, I am forced to get along with different people. There are people of different ethnic groups in my neighborhood and in my church (and in my family, actually), etc. I am friends with people of different religions and ethnicities due to the different organizations I have been a member of, or because of the places I hang out at. All of which contributes to moderate behavior (it's hard to hate people you know very well, after all). We live moderate lives by acting as we naturally act -- as social mammals -- while struggling against the unfortunate side-effect of evolving as a social mammal, which is hatred of those not in our tribe. We do this not by eliminating social behavior, but by expanding our notion of who is in our tribe. But all of this undermines government-fanaticism, and that is why anti-social efforts have been underway of late: anti-touching rules and even laws, etc. are becoming popular of late. It is part of a kind of fanaticism we have to fight against just as much as we fight against religious fanaticism.
But we have to remember: fanaticism and fundamentalism are not one and the same thing. We have to know that if we are going to fight effectively against fanaticism and make the world safe for moderation.
Tuesday, October 30, 2007
Nader Sues Democratic Party
Good for Ralph Nader for suing the Democratic Party and the Kerry campaign for what he believed were actions taken by them to keep him off the ballot to prevent his "taking votes away" from Kerry. The rules we have on the books in many states make it too easy for the two main parties to keep the elections to themselves. This is anti-democratic! So I hope Nader succeeds, so the American people will have more options. Some new ideas and untraditional candidates might also get people interested in participating in their government for a change.
But let's look forward to the future Presidential debates. It should be law that any candidate who can get his name on the ballot in all 50 states should be allowed in the debates. The current rules are designed merely to make it so that only the Republicans and Democrats are invited. My proposal has the benefit of solving the problem (really, excuse given) of letting everyone "running" on the ballot. I agree we should not necessarily let in every crank on the ballot in a state or two -- but if someone can manage to get on the ballot in every state, then they should be considered a serious candidate.
But let's look forward to the future Presidential debates. It should be law that any candidate who can get his name on the ballot in all 50 states should be allowed in the debates. The current rules are designed merely to make it so that only the Republicans and Democrats are invited. My proposal has the benefit of solving the problem (really, excuse given) of letting everyone "running" on the ballot. I agree we should not necessarily let in every crank on the ballot in a state or two -- but if someone can manage to get on the ballot in every state, then they should be considered a serious candidate.
On the Origin of Law
Laws (all laws in general, including laws of the universe) emerge from the interactions of the elements of the system. With humans, it is interactions within a social system that first give rise to custom-laws, which then develop into government-laws. Government laws are written down codes that have developed in the society at large. Nobody is actually inventing new laws ex nihilo, but rather observe laws emerging, then give then a name. I think if we truly understand the origins of laws, we will be able to more fully understand their role (and what their role should be) in our lives. Should every custom-law be turned into a government-law? Which custom-laws should be? Which should not? Are there some laws that are created in order to create new custom-laws? Are bottom-up laws better (or always, or necessarily better, if they are better) than top-down laws? (My own opinion: they are. Why? Because of the nature of complex systems. Though this does not mean that we don't need the occasional top-down corrective of bad bottom-up custom-laws.)
What does it mean for the understanding of law and justice if we take a complex systems approach to understanding the origins and consequences of law?
What does it mean for the understanding of law and justice if we take a complex systems approach to understanding the origins and consequences of law?
Discipline
Everyone should read this and take it to heart: Education and Discipline
Unless we realize that letting children -- all students, if you are a teacher of any sort -- have their way no matter what, we will continue to have the kinds of societal problems we have been having.
Discipline and disciple (which means "pupil") have the same roots for a reason. Without discpline, you cannot be a pupil, you cannot be a student, you cannot learn. Proper discipline, especially self-discipline, is what gives us true freedom. Liberty is not libertinage. Freedom is not chaos. Freedom is the golden mean between order and chaos -- it is arrived at through discipline.
Unless we realize that letting children -- all students, if you are a teacher of any sort -- have their way no matter what, we will continue to have the kinds of societal problems we have been having.
Discipline and disciple (which means "pupil") have the same roots for a reason. Without discpline, you cannot be a pupil, you cannot be a student, you cannot learn. Proper discipline, especially self-discipline, is what gives us true freedom. Liberty is not libertinage. Freedom is not chaos. Freedom is the golden mean between order and chaos -- it is arrived at through discipline.
WW III
After President Bush suggested that we need to be afraid that Iran getting nuclear weapons could lead to World War III, Denis Kucinich said, "I seriously believe we have to start asking questions about his mental health." I suppose, then, that we should also start asking questions about the mental health of French President Sarkozy, who said that a nuclear Iran would mean war. I wonder what Kucinich thinks the Iranians are going to do with a nuclear weapon if they were to get one?
Monday, October 29, 2007
America: A Prophesy
Unless we realize that school is for educating our children, meaning they should not be in charge of them in any way, shape or form;
Unless we realize that universities are there to provide students with a liberal education and are not places where they should even think they are buying a degree just to get a job;
Unless we realize that anything worth having is worth working for;
Unless we realize that we need to all grow up and take responsibility for our actions, thoughts, and education;
Unless we realize that most of us are selfish and petty and have no actual problems -- especially compared to the vast majority of people in the world;
Unless we reestablish and enforce the hierarchy between teacher and student;
Unless we provide students with a moral education;
Unless we stop preventing intelligent, educated people from serving on juries;
Unless we stop avoiding hiring people because they are "over-qualified";
Unless we stop excusing bad behavior;
Unless we realize that we are all in this together;
Unless we realize that the dominance of one way of thinking is cancer, but the dominance of pure plurality of thinking is isolating;
Unless we stop thinking that social issues, international issues, economic issues -- issues concerning government and who we elect -- aren't important;
Unless we take this world seriously;
Unless we take threats to our society seriously;
Unless we take our arts, literature, and culture seriously;
Unless we take beauty seriously;
Unless we take history seriously;
Unless we take truth seriously;
Unless we take justice seriuosly;
Unless we take virue seriously;
Unless we take love seriously;
Unless we reward the good and the deserving and let the bad and the lazy to be punished by the world and society and living itself;
Unless we stop letting the inmates run the assylum;
Unless we start standing up for what we know is right;
Unless we take risks to do what's right . . .
America is doomed.
Unless we realize that universities are there to provide students with a liberal education and are not places where they should even think they are buying a degree just to get a job;
Unless we realize that anything worth having is worth working for;
Unless we realize that we need to all grow up and take responsibility for our actions, thoughts, and education;
Unless we realize that most of us are selfish and petty and have no actual problems -- especially compared to the vast majority of people in the world;
Unless we reestablish and enforce the hierarchy between teacher and student;
Unless we provide students with a moral education;
Unless we stop preventing intelligent, educated people from serving on juries;
Unless we stop avoiding hiring people because they are "over-qualified";
Unless we stop excusing bad behavior;
Unless we realize that we are all in this together;
Unless we realize that the dominance of one way of thinking is cancer, but the dominance of pure plurality of thinking is isolating;
Unless we stop thinking that social issues, international issues, economic issues -- issues concerning government and who we elect -- aren't important;
Unless we take this world seriously;
Unless we take threats to our society seriously;
Unless we take our arts, literature, and culture seriously;
Unless we take beauty seriously;
Unless we take history seriously;
Unless we take truth seriously;
Unless we take justice seriuosly;
Unless we take virue seriously;
Unless we take love seriously;
Unless we reward the good and the deserving and let the bad and the lazy to be punished by the world and society and living itself;
Unless we stop letting the inmates run the assylum;
Unless we start standing up for what we know is right;
Unless we take risks to do what's right . . .
America is doomed.
Sunday, October 28, 2007
The Middle Way, Part 3 (al Qaida vs. moderation)
Marinoff makes a striking point about what it was al Qaida attacked on 9/11. We have heard they attacked us because of our freedoms (partially true, as we will see), and we have heard that they attacked us because of our excesses -- specifically our opposite excesses to their excess of abstinance. But if we had been attacked because of our excesses, we would have likely seen much different targets. Marinoff points out that "extremes of religious and political authority do impose abstinences on everyone, precisely because they will not tolerate moderation. That is why al-Qaida did not target the French Quarter of New Orleans on 9/11. They were not attacking their opposite extreme, namely excess consumption of alcohol; they were attacking something much more important, namely the culture of moderation, which tolerates both extremes" (61). Indeed, the French Quarter at Mardi Gras is an excellent example of numerous extremes. When I went there during Mardi Gras, at one end of the street was a gay bar with numerous gay men out in the street, many of them wearing assless chaps. Going up the street, I saw people in various levels of undress -- including women who were for all intents completely naked. And at the far end of the street, I sawa solemn procession of Catholics carrying a huge wooden cross marching slowly into the crowd. If al-Qaida were truly interested in attacking American excess, and getting a few devout Christians to boot, Mardi Gras in New Orleans would have been the place to do it.
So excess is not what they were attacking. Marinoff explains further: "The virtue of moderation tolerates extremes that are voluntarily chosen, but which do not seek to impose themselves forcibly on others. But moderation cannot tolerate those who use moderation as a weapon against itself. Extremists do not attack our vices; rather, our virtues, such as moderation in the liberty, trust, and tolerance we accord to our fellow travelers. Moderation and tolerance themselves were the primary targets on 9/11, as they are in all such suicide bombings, big or small" (61). Their goal was to push us toward extremism. Their war is against moderation and tolerance. Thus, if we remember Aristotle's golden mean of virtue, we see that their war is against virtue itself. More, it is a war against life itself -- the middle way between death and cancerous growth. They seek to be a cancer on the world, to make everyone like them -- their method is death.
So excess is not what they were attacking. Marinoff explains further: "The virtue of moderation tolerates extremes that are voluntarily chosen, but which do not seek to impose themselves forcibly on others. But moderation cannot tolerate those who use moderation as a weapon against itself. Extremists do not attack our vices; rather, our virtues, such as moderation in the liberty, trust, and tolerance we accord to our fellow travelers. Moderation and tolerance themselves were the primary targets on 9/11, as they are in all such suicide bombings, big or small" (61). Their goal was to push us toward extremism. Their war is against moderation and tolerance. Thus, if we remember Aristotle's golden mean of virtue, we see that their war is against virtue itself. More, it is a war against life itself -- the middle way between death and cancerous growth. They seek to be a cancer on the world, to make everyone like them -- their method is death.
Saturday, October 27, 2007
Unfair Sex Conviction Overruled
Genarlow Wilson has been freed by the state supreme court of Georgia, declaring his conviction "cruel and unusual punishment." And what kind of sense was there in the first place to bring charges against a 17 year old boy accused of having oral sex with a 15 year old? Weren't both of them underaged? Much has been made of the fact that this young man was an honor student, a football star and his high school's homecoming king and that he had been offered scholarships by several elite colleges before his conviction. But this conviction would be unfair even if none of that were true about him. But since it is true, and since he did lose out on such scholarships, I think the only fair thing would be for this prosecutor, who misused the law in Georgia -- according to the very lawmaker who wrot ethe law -- to pay for this young man's college education for as long as he wanted to go to college -- even if it led to a PhD., an M.D., or a law degree.
The Middle Way, Part 2 (American Denial)
Lou Marinoff observes in "The Middle Way" that China is on the ascendant, and that Americans seem not to be prepared for it. While I do not necessarily agree that a good Chinese economy is necessarily bad for the U.S. economy (again, the economy is not a pie divided up so some get more only when others get less, but is growing), he is right in saying that "Americans are already steeped in denial regarding the internal deficiencies contributing to their nation's decline -- not only in global public opinion, but crucially in cultural assets -- which means they are not prepared to reverse the damage" (38).
I do not think that Marinoff is saying that we should do everything we can to get everyone to like us. People who do that are not psychologically healthy, and we should not expect a country to do that either. However, it is a sign of some kind of sociopathology when you go out of your way to make people mad. Did the Congress really have to bring up for a vote the resolution against Turkey regarding the Armenians in WWI? Does the U.S. absolutely need anti-missile weapons in Poland and the Czech Republic? These are unnecessary annoyances and provocations. Further, our country needs to avoid the appearance of impropriety -- we need to not only not do some things, we need to make it clear we don't do them. This is why I'm in favor of transparency in most things regarding government. We would go a long way toward improving global public opinion if we were consistent in doing what we say we believe in.
This then brings us to the issue of cultural assets. I think if we give an honest assessment of most of the cultural products of most cultures, we will find far more pop culture than high culture. In fact, what may have been one culture's pop culture can become another one's high culture. Plato seemed to think that tragedy was mere pop culture for the hoi poloi -- his student Aristotle gave us the opinion we now hold of it as being the height of theater. So we do want to be careful about such divisions. But are we creating a public that truly appreciates good art and literature? The cultural elites love works by authors like Don DeLillo and Thomas Pynchon -- works which I myself like, but recognize that to be on the fringe of what the average human being can understand -- while the real best sellers are Christian Romances. There is a huge disconnect between the two that make students think art and literature have nothing to do with their lives and the real world. Our art is in the same situation, as is philosophy. How many people think that philosophy is something that can or should have an impact on our lives? This is because philosophy has turned into something that can noly be accessed by those who have Ph.D.'s in philosophy. This is exacerbated when postmodern philosophers insist that what they do has no value or purpose. If this is the case, why study it? And, if we look at it from a university standpoint, why fund it? Thus, our universities are turning into trade schools, and our students go in expecting to learn a trade and that the purpose of a degree is to get oneself a job. The "liberal" part of liberal education is going out the door, and nobody is making a single objection to it going. But without a liberal education, what will we be but workers in a machine? We will not have the freedom that only liberal education can teach. Literature gives us new worlds to experience. Art lets us see the world in new ways. Philosophy teaches us to know ourselves to live a better life. Or, at least, they once did. Now they are specialist fields as inaccessible to the public as is quantum physics. And that is the real problem: we deny the average citizen access to his own cultural assets. We treat them as something that belongs to an elite. The rest get bread and circuses. This is a dangerous division.
We should count ourselves fortunate that on occasion someone -- typically a filmmaker nowadays -- attempts to bridge this gap. But even so we typically see a gap between what the educated critics like and what the public likes. Why don't people think it is possible to have a work that is both entertaining and beautiful? We need cultural products that tap into all aspects of who we are as people: they should be entertaining, beautiful, intelligent, and emotional. Indeed, let me go back to one of the things in the list in particular: beauty. It seems that it is beauty which we are missing in our lives. And it is beauty which is the Middle Way which Marinoff seems to really be getting at in his book. The Golden Mean is a principle of beauty. This is why Aristotle, in talking about virtue as a mean between two extremes also says that virtue aims at the beautiful ("to kalon," typically translated as "the good" or "the noble"). It is beauty which is missing in America -- and in the world at large.
But there is a great deal of confusion about what beuaty is, so let me supply a list of what, together, constitutes beauty:
Beauty has the following features:
Complexity within Simplicity
Digital-Analog
Emergent from Conflict
Evolutionary (changes over time)
Generative and Creative
Hierarchical Organization
Play
Reflexivity or Feedback
Rhythmicity
Rule-Based
Scalar Self-Similarity
Time-Bound
Unity in Multiplicity
The following agonally unified opposites also constitute beauty:
Native – Foreign
Light – Shadow
Logos – Eros
Emotion – Intellect (Reason)
Conscious – Unconscious
Soul – Technology
Feeling – Thinking
General – Specific
Universal – Particular
I am convinced that there is a strong relationship between things that are evolving, growing, self-organizing, and emergentist and beauty. Thus, let us look at the features of self-organization and see why:
Emergence
Complexity
Cohesion (digital-analog)
Openness
Bottom-up-Emergence
Downward Causation
Non-linearity
Feedback loops, Circular causality
Information
Relative Chance
Hierarchy
Globalisation and localisation
Unity in Plurality (Generality and Specificity)
Emergence has the following features:
Synergism (productive interaction between parts)
Novelty
Irreduceability
Unpredictability
Coherence/Correlation
Historicity
When our cultural assets contain the above features, our culture will be healthy. When our government, our economy, our society and our selves have these features, then each of them will also be healthy. This is the true Middle Way. But you cannot cure a sick patient who denies that he's even sick.
I do not think that Marinoff is saying that we should do everything we can to get everyone to like us. People who do that are not psychologically healthy, and we should not expect a country to do that either. However, it is a sign of some kind of sociopathology when you go out of your way to make people mad. Did the Congress really have to bring up for a vote the resolution against Turkey regarding the Armenians in WWI? Does the U.S. absolutely need anti-missile weapons in Poland and the Czech Republic? These are unnecessary annoyances and provocations. Further, our country needs to avoid the appearance of impropriety -- we need to not only not do some things, we need to make it clear we don't do them. This is why I'm in favor of transparency in most things regarding government. We would go a long way toward improving global public opinion if we were consistent in doing what we say we believe in.
This then brings us to the issue of cultural assets. I think if we give an honest assessment of most of the cultural products of most cultures, we will find far more pop culture than high culture. In fact, what may have been one culture's pop culture can become another one's high culture. Plato seemed to think that tragedy was mere pop culture for the hoi poloi -- his student Aristotle gave us the opinion we now hold of it as being the height of theater. So we do want to be careful about such divisions. But are we creating a public that truly appreciates good art and literature? The cultural elites love works by authors like Don DeLillo and Thomas Pynchon -- works which I myself like, but recognize that to be on the fringe of what the average human being can understand -- while the real best sellers are Christian Romances. There is a huge disconnect between the two that make students think art and literature have nothing to do with their lives and the real world. Our art is in the same situation, as is philosophy. How many people think that philosophy is something that can or should have an impact on our lives? This is because philosophy has turned into something that can noly be accessed by those who have Ph.D.'s in philosophy. This is exacerbated when postmodern philosophers insist that what they do has no value or purpose. If this is the case, why study it? And, if we look at it from a university standpoint, why fund it? Thus, our universities are turning into trade schools, and our students go in expecting to learn a trade and that the purpose of a degree is to get oneself a job. The "liberal" part of liberal education is going out the door, and nobody is making a single objection to it going. But without a liberal education, what will we be but workers in a machine? We will not have the freedom that only liberal education can teach. Literature gives us new worlds to experience. Art lets us see the world in new ways. Philosophy teaches us to know ourselves to live a better life. Or, at least, they once did. Now they are specialist fields as inaccessible to the public as is quantum physics. And that is the real problem: we deny the average citizen access to his own cultural assets. We treat them as something that belongs to an elite. The rest get bread and circuses. This is a dangerous division.
We should count ourselves fortunate that on occasion someone -- typically a filmmaker nowadays -- attempts to bridge this gap. But even so we typically see a gap between what the educated critics like and what the public likes. Why don't people think it is possible to have a work that is both entertaining and beautiful? We need cultural products that tap into all aspects of who we are as people: they should be entertaining, beautiful, intelligent, and emotional. Indeed, let me go back to one of the things in the list in particular: beauty. It seems that it is beauty which we are missing in our lives. And it is beauty which is the Middle Way which Marinoff seems to really be getting at in his book. The Golden Mean is a principle of beauty. This is why Aristotle, in talking about virtue as a mean between two extremes also says that virtue aims at the beautiful ("to kalon," typically translated as "the good" or "the noble"). It is beauty which is missing in America -- and in the world at large.
But there is a great deal of confusion about what beuaty is, so let me supply a list of what, together, constitutes beauty:
Beauty has the following features:
Complexity within Simplicity
Digital-Analog
Emergent from Conflict
Evolutionary (changes over time)
Generative and Creative
Hierarchical Organization
Play
Reflexivity or Feedback
Rhythmicity
Rule-Based
Scalar Self-Similarity
Time-Bound
Unity in Multiplicity
The following agonally unified opposites also constitute beauty:
Native – Foreign
Light – Shadow
Logos – Eros
Emotion – Intellect (Reason)
Conscious – Unconscious
Soul – Technology
Feeling – Thinking
General – Specific
Universal – Particular
I am convinced that there is a strong relationship between things that are evolving, growing, self-organizing, and emergentist and beauty. Thus, let us look at the features of self-organization and see why:
Emergence
Complexity
Cohesion (digital-analog)
Openness
Bottom-up-Emergence
Downward Causation
Non-linearity
Feedback loops, Circular causality
Information
Relative Chance
Hierarchy
Globalisation and localisation
Unity in Plurality (Generality and Specificity)
Emergence has the following features:
Synergism (productive interaction between parts)
Novelty
Irreduceability
Unpredictability
Coherence/Correlation
Historicity
When our cultural assets contain the above features, our culture will be healthy. When our government, our economy, our society and our selves have these features, then each of them will also be healthy. This is the true Middle Way. But you cannot cure a sick patient who denies that he's even sick.
Friday, October 26, 2007
Future Human Evolution
This is one of the dumbest things I've heard of, for many reasons.
While there does seem to be some evidence of the division into "gracile" and "robust" forms in primates, Oliver Curry mistakenly says that chimpanzees split into robust chimps and gracile bonobos. This is not true. The common ancestor of humans, chimps and bonobos split into the descendants of chimps and a second group that itself split into the descendants of the bonobos and the descendants of the humans. We can see this in the fact that we are more closely related to bonobos and that we share some anatomical and behavioral features with bonobos, though many of our behaviors more closely resemble chimps, while bonobos physically resemble chimps more. So the evolutionary picture is more complex than Curry suggests.
The next bizarre statement, from an evolutionary point of view, is that "human evolution will reach its peak in about the year 3000." I don't know what this could possibly mean. Evolution does not have "peaks" in the sense that a species is as good as it gets. Species are always adapting to their environments. Humans are a strong generalist, and we are thus highly adaptive to practically every terrestrial environment. This leads into the nonsense about genetic regression. There is no such thing as genetic regression -- there is only more or less adaptive species to their environment.
This then leads me to the issue of evolution itself. When a species is as mobile as our own -- especially in the modern world -- natural selection as adaptation to the environment no longer occurs. What we have now in control is population dynamics, where a genetic change spreads rapidly and evenly throughout a population after a few generations. Now, Curry mentions sexual selection. But I see no evidence for differences in sexual selection. All the studies that have been done my evolutionary psychologists show that people universally find the same general proportions physically attractive. Globalization is, again, even eliminating many of the cultural differences that may (as unlikely as that is, since those differences were never actually substantial) have contributed to sexual selection. The elements contributing to intelligence, as I noted in a previous post, are so numerous as to make it difficult to determine what combinations are best.
This is not to say that over the time span he mentions -- 100,000 years -- that human evolution won't occur. Sure by then we will have colonized the moon and Mars, perhaps even the stars. And one would expect those isolated populations to evolve. But to keep things more down-to-earth, Curry fails to mention another type of evolution. It is a more important kind, and it is the kind that gave rise to human intelligence itself. And that is the evolution of more complexity. It is possible that certain people might evolve to have more complex minds -- perhaps as much more complex than humans as humans are over chimps and bonobos. It is unlikely they would appear to be physically any different, as the difference would be in the minds of the people who emerged into the more complex forms ot thinking. This kind of evolution seems more likely, and it seems more immediately likely. And if Claire Graves, Don Beck, and Christopher Cowan are right, it may have already happened in a small group of people. That is a much more interesting kind of evolution in my book.
While there does seem to be some evidence of the division into "gracile" and "robust" forms in primates, Oliver Curry mistakenly says that chimpanzees split into robust chimps and gracile bonobos. This is not true. The common ancestor of humans, chimps and bonobos split into the descendants of chimps and a second group that itself split into the descendants of the bonobos and the descendants of the humans. We can see this in the fact that we are more closely related to bonobos and that we share some anatomical and behavioral features with bonobos, though many of our behaviors more closely resemble chimps, while bonobos physically resemble chimps more. So the evolutionary picture is more complex than Curry suggests.
The next bizarre statement, from an evolutionary point of view, is that "human evolution will reach its peak in about the year 3000." I don't know what this could possibly mean. Evolution does not have "peaks" in the sense that a species is as good as it gets. Species are always adapting to their environments. Humans are a strong generalist, and we are thus highly adaptive to practically every terrestrial environment. This leads into the nonsense about genetic regression. There is no such thing as genetic regression -- there is only more or less adaptive species to their environment.
This then leads me to the issue of evolution itself. When a species is as mobile as our own -- especially in the modern world -- natural selection as adaptation to the environment no longer occurs. What we have now in control is population dynamics, where a genetic change spreads rapidly and evenly throughout a population after a few generations. Now, Curry mentions sexual selection. But I see no evidence for differences in sexual selection. All the studies that have been done my evolutionary psychologists show that people universally find the same general proportions physically attractive. Globalization is, again, even eliminating many of the cultural differences that may (as unlikely as that is, since those differences were never actually substantial) have contributed to sexual selection. The elements contributing to intelligence, as I noted in a previous post, are so numerous as to make it difficult to determine what combinations are best.
This is not to say that over the time span he mentions -- 100,000 years -- that human evolution won't occur. Sure by then we will have colonized the moon and Mars, perhaps even the stars. And one would expect those isolated populations to evolve. But to keep things more down-to-earth, Curry fails to mention another type of evolution. It is a more important kind, and it is the kind that gave rise to human intelligence itself. And that is the evolution of more complexity. It is possible that certain people might evolve to have more complex minds -- perhaps as much more complex than humans as humans are over chimps and bonobos. It is unlikely they would appear to be physically any different, as the difference would be in the minds of the people who emerged into the more complex forms ot thinking. This kind of evolution seems more likely, and it seems more immediately likely. And if Claire Graves, Don Beck, and Christopher Cowan are right, it may have already happened in a small group of people. That is a much more interesting kind of evolution in my book.
Iran and War
Democrats are worried that the sanctions and declaration of the Iranian army as a terrorist organization are preliminaties for justifying us starting a new war. They needn't worry. These are merely provocations to get Iran to make the first so that we won't have a choice but to go to war with them, since they will have made the first military move. Bush doesn't intend to start it -- he intends to get them to start it.
Turkey and Iraq
What if Turkey invades Iraq? Turkey is a fellow NATO country, but since we have set up and are supporting the Iraqi government, shouldn't we support and defend that government? We should perhaps be thankful that Turkey has not yet been allowed in the EU -- because what would the consequences be fore the U.S. to have to fight a member nation of the EU? And if we end up having to go to war with Turkey, who in the Middle East cold we be friends with? This is looking to head toward a real disaster.
Obama and the "Reformed Gay"
The latest controversy surrounding Obama highlights a disturbing element in American politics. Why is it that Obama thinks he can campaign with someone who offends homosexuals? Is it because he knows that no matter what he does, most homosexuals will still vote Democratic? Perhaps this explains why you can't find too many Democrats supporting too many gay rights initiatives, including gay marriage.
We see this pattern repeating itself in American politics. If gays are going to predominantly support Democrats, no matter what, then 1) why should Republicans do anything for them, since there is no way they are getting gay support, and 2) why should Democrats do anything for them, since there is no way they're not getting gay support.
Let's repeat this:
If African-Americans are going to predominantly support Democrats, no matter what, then 1) why should Republicans do anything for them, since there is no way they are getting African-American support, and 2) why should Democrats do anything for them, since there is no way they're not getting African-American support.
If Hispanics are going to predominantly support Democrats, no matter what, then 1) why should Republicans do anything for them, since there is no way they are getting Hispanic support, and 2) why should Democrats do anything for them, since there is no way they're not getting Hispanic support.
Fortunately for Hispanics, the Republicans still think they are in play. But if and when it becomes obvious they are not, don't be surprised to see Republicans stop being concerned with Hispanic issues. Cubans are predominantly Republican, so we see Republicans more than Democrats supporting Cuba-American positions regarding Cuba -- including trade barriers, though most Republicans have to know that trading with Cuba would have had the actual result the Cuban-Americans desired.
If different groups let each party know they were not party-loyal, they might get more of what they want done. This is a purely pragmatic argument on my part, as there are many things I don't think should be done, regardless of who supports it. But those issues are for future posts.
We see this pattern repeating itself in American politics. If gays are going to predominantly support Democrats, no matter what, then 1) why should Republicans do anything for them, since there is no way they are getting gay support, and 2) why should Democrats do anything for them, since there is no way they're not getting gay support.
Let's repeat this:
If African-Americans are going to predominantly support Democrats, no matter what, then 1) why should Republicans do anything for them, since there is no way they are getting African-American support, and 2) why should Democrats do anything for them, since there is no way they're not getting African-American support.
If Hispanics are going to predominantly support Democrats, no matter what, then 1) why should Republicans do anything for them, since there is no way they are getting Hispanic support, and 2) why should Democrats do anything for them, since there is no way they're not getting Hispanic support.
Fortunately for Hispanics, the Republicans still think they are in play. But if and when it becomes obvious they are not, don't be surprised to see Republicans stop being concerned with Hispanic issues. Cubans are predominantly Republican, so we see Republicans more than Democrats supporting Cuba-American positions regarding Cuba -- including trade barriers, though most Republicans have to know that trading with Cuba would have had the actual result the Cuban-Americans desired.
If different groups let each party know they were not party-loyal, they might get more of what they want done. This is a purely pragmatic argument on my part, as there are many things I don't think should be done, regardless of who supports it. But those issues are for future posts.
Thursday, October 25, 2007
Ethics and Flip-Flopping
When Mitt Romney suggested that the President should provide a positive example of family values for the country, and that he didn't think the Clinton family was up for the job, the response was Clinton adviser Howard Wolfson was, "Hillary Clinton needs no lessons on character from a man who switches his positions on a daily basis."
Really, Wolfson is comparing Romney changing his mind on the issue of abortion (which I believe he has done but once) to cheating on one's wife?
This gets us into the entire issue of flip-flopping. Is Romeny's change of opinion on abortion a 'flip-flop'? Not really. If you change your mind because you have learned more about an issue, then that should be commendable. You have learned more, and now you realize you were wrong in the past, and are willing to change your mind rather than bull-headedly sticking to your guns. If you change your mind based on the audience you are speaking to, then you are a flip-flopper. A thoughtless consistency is just as bad as inconsistency in my book. I prefer someone who shows the capacity to learn and the willingness to change their mind when faces with facts.
Certainly changing one's mind on something is not the same as adultery. Not in anyone's book (except, aparently, the Clintons').
Really, Wolfson is comparing Romney changing his mind on the issue of abortion (which I believe he has done but once) to cheating on one's wife?
This gets us into the entire issue of flip-flopping. Is Romeny's change of opinion on abortion a 'flip-flop'? Not really. If you change your mind because you have learned more about an issue, then that should be commendable. You have learned more, and now you realize you were wrong in the past, and are willing to change your mind rather than bull-headedly sticking to your guns. If you change your mind based on the audience you are speaking to, then you are a flip-flopper. A thoughtless consistency is just as bad as inconsistency in my book. I prefer someone who shows the capacity to learn and the willingness to change their mind when faces with facts.
Certainly changing one's mind on something is not the same as adultery. Not in anyone's book (except, aparently, the Clintons').
The Middle Way, Part 1 (Poverty, India, and the West)
I am currently reading Lou Marinoff's book "The Middle Way" -- which I highly recommend based on what I've read so far. I thought I would comment on things as I ran across them. So let's start in order, meaning we're going to have to start with something that is insightful, yet wanders off into being wrong, despite starting off in the right place. He is talking about where the West and Indian Civilization clash:
"Dire poverty in India and its neighboring states, afflicting hundreds of millions of people, is proving inescapable not only because of endemic corruption and socioeconomic rigidity in thse nations. But in addition, enormous agricultural subsidies paid to farmers in the affluent West, in tandem with prohibitive tariffs imposed on produce from developing nations, impede many of our Indian counterparts from bettering their lives. So the West's affluence depends partly but far from wholly on India's poverty."
Marinoff is completely correct right up to the last line. He makes the false and, quite frankly, anti-economic, assumption that subsidies and tariffs enrich the West. They certainly have the effect he attributes to them when it comes to India -- however, he does not realize that subsidies and tariffs are themselves overall impoverishing to the country using them.
Let's take a look at subsidies. A subsidy is a government payment to a business to support that business. This is done for two reasons: to keep unprofitable businesses in business, and to drive down the price of the goods produced by that business. The first reason results in government rewarding people for making bad decisions, thus encouraging people to continue to make bad, irresponsible decisions. The market rewards good decisions, encouraging people to make good, responsible decisions. The second reason, to drive down prices, is something we should look at in more depth, as it is the aspect of subsidies Marinoff is talking about.
Let's create a simplified economy. Let's say we have 100 taxpayers, 10 bureaucrats, and 1 subsidiezed businessman. The taxpayers all make $10,000 each, as do the bureaucrats. The businessman is making a product at $1000 each that all 100 taxpayers want. The businessman is subsidized 10%, meaning his product will be sold at $900 now. Are the taxpayers buying this product better off? Well, the bureaucrats all have to be paid, so to pay the bureaucrats and get enough money for the subsidy, the taxpayers will each have to pay $1100 in taxes in order to give $10,000 to the businessman so he can sell his product to them for $900 instead of $1000. In other words, it will actually cost the taxpayers more for the product + the subsidy than it would have for the non-subsidized product. The net loss is $100. And even if we could magically transfer the subsidy without any money going to bureaucrats, the price for the product would be the same -- all we have is an accounting trick of the sort that results in Enron-like scandals.
Supporters of subsidies will point out that we have to do this to get the businessman's price below overseas competitors'. In other words, to get the price, say, below $950, we subsidize. Thus, we end up with a net loss of $50 for each of the taxpayers. So who is better off here? Certainly not the taxpayers/consumers. The inevitable argument is that the businessman is not working in a bubble, and that someone is paying wages to the taxpayers/consumers, meaning someone must hire them. Fair enough. But what people fail to mention is the underlying assumption that the economy is a finite pie, and to make money, others have to lose money -- and this is simply not true. If the businessman can't make money selling what he was selling for $1000 each, he's not going to just give up and crawl off into a cave somewhere and die. No, he's going to go find something else to make that can make him money. Or he'll try to find a way to bring his costs down. But if he's receiving a subsidy, why should he bother to do either one of these things?
In other words, subsidies stagnate the economy where they're used, they impoverish the consumers, and they reward bad business behavior. Now tell me, how is this making the West more affluent? There is no denying our affluence, but, as Henry David Thoreau pointed out in "On Civil Disobedience," "Trade and commerce, if they were not made of India rubber, would never manage to bounce over the obstacles which legislators are continually putting in their way; and, if one were to judge these men wholly by the effects of their actions, and not partly by their intentions, they would deserve to be classed and punished with those mischievous persons who put obstructions on the railroads." Indeed, if any outside group of people were to try to impose on the U.S. economy much of the anti-economic laws our governments have imposed on it, we would declare it a terrorist act. Yet we tolerate it from our legislators. It is incredible just how wealthy we have become despite the subsidies and tariffs.
Which, of course, gets me to the issue of tariffs. Tariffs act in a way opposite to subsidies, but have the same effect. A tariff is a tax on imports, which of course drives up the price of those imports, making them more expensive for consumers. And, as everyone who has taken Econ. 101 knows, if the price of something goes up, fewer products are sold. Now I am sure that someone will object that we could take the money from the tariffs and use them to subsidize. Let's look at that. Say Import costs $900, but Homebilt costs $1000. If we subsidize Homebilt $100 by taxing Import $100 (we'll ignore the pay the bureaucrats are making for now), then IMport will cost $1000, and Homebilt will cost $900. But wait a minute: how are we supposed to collect taxes on Import if nobody will buy Import now that it costs $100 more? You can't collect sales taxes if you're not selling anything. Which means you won't have the money to give to Homebilt. So, if we are going to have the subsidy, we will still have to get it from the taxpayers, since it is impossible to get it from Imports. Now if we try to solve this problem by making the tariff $50 and the subsidy $50, then what have we really gained? And if human nature is any guide, we still have the same problem, as tribalism will cause people to choose Homebilt over Import if they cost the same, meaning the tariffs still won't pay for the subsidies.
In other words, we are impoverishing ourselves to impoverish places like India. And for what? To help a few incompetent businessmen in our own country? The fact of the matter is that even if (and this is a big if in my mind) we are purposefully impoverishing places like India because we think it will make us rich, then we are incredibly stupid and do not understand the nature of economy. The U.S. will only become wealthier as India and China and Africa and the Middle East and Central and South America become wealthier. Economic growth causes economic growth. We're not dividing up a pie. We're dividing up rapidly breeding rabbits.
One final note: it is not poverty which is historically unusual. It is wealth. Only when we realize this will we be able to do anything about poverty.
"Dire poverty in India and its neighboring states, afflicting hundreds of millions of people, is proving inescapable not only because of endemic corruption and socioeconomic rigidity in thse nations. But in addition, enormous agricultural subsidies paid to farmers in the affluent West, in tandem with prohibitive tariffs imposed on produce from developing nations, impede many of our Indian counterparts from bettering their lives. So the West's affluence depends partly but far from wholly on India's poverty."
Marinoff is completely correct right up to the last line. He makes the false and, quite frankly, anti-economic, assumption that subsidies and tariffs enrich the West. They certainly have the effect he attributes to them when it comes to India -- however, he does not realize that subsidies and tariffs are themselves overall impoverishing to the country using them.
Let's take a look at subsidies. A subsidy is a government payment to a business to support that business. This is done for two reasons: to keep unprofitable businesses in business, and to drive down the price of the goods produced by that business. The first reason results in government rewarding people for making bad decisions, thus encouraging people to continue to make bad, irresponsible decisions. The market rewards good decisions, encouraging people to make good, responsible decisions. The second reason, to drive down prices, is something we should look at in more depth, as it is the aspect of subsidies Marinoff is talking about.
Let's create a simplified economy. Let's say we have 100 taxpayers, 10 bureaucrats, and 1 subsidiezed businessman. The taxpayers all make $10,000 each, as do the bureaucrats. The businessman is making a product at $1000 each that all 100 taxpayers want. The businessman is subsidized 10%, meaning his product will be sold at $900 now. Are the taxpayers buying this product better off? Well, the bureaucrats all have to be paid, so to pay the bureaucrats and get enough money for the subsidy, the taxpayers will each have to pay $1100 in taxes in order to give $10,000 to the businessman so he can sell his product to them for $900 instead of $1000. In other words, it will actually cost the taxpayers more for the product + the subsidy than it would have for the non-subsidized product. The net loss is $100. And even if we could magically transfer the subsidy without any money going to bureaucrats, the price for the product would be the same -- all we have is an accounting trick of the sort that results in Enron-like scandals.
Supporters of subsidies will point out that we have to do this to get the businessman's price below overseas competitors'. In other words, to get the price, say, below $950, we subsidize. Thus, we end up with a net loss of $50 for each of the taxpayers. So who is better off here? Certainly not the taxpayers/consumers. The inevitable argument is that the businessman is not working in a bubble, and that someone is paying wages to the taxpayers/consumers, meaning someone must hire them. Fair enough. But what people fail to mention is the underlying assumption that the economy is a finite pie, and to make money, others have to lose money -- and this is simply not true. If the businessman can't make money selling what he was selling for $1000 each, he's not going to just give up and crawl off into a cave somewhere and die. No, he's going to go find something else to make that can make him money. Or he'll try to find a way to bring his costs down. But if he's receiving a subsidy, why should he bother to do either one of these things?
In other words, subsidies stagnate the economy where they're used, they impoverish the consumers, and they reward bad business behavior. Now tell me, how is this making the West more affluent? There is no denying our affluence, but, as Henry David Thoreau pointed out in "On Civil Disobedience," "Trade and commerce, if they were not made of India rubber, would never manage to bounce over the obstacles which legislators are continually putting in their way; and, if one were to judge these men wholly by the effects of their actions, and not partly by their intentions, they would deserve to be classed and punished with those mischievous persons who put obstructions on the railroads." Indeed, if any outside group of people were to try to impose on the U.S. economy much of the anti-economic laws our governments have imposed on it, we would declare it a terrorist act. Yet we tolerate it from our legislators. It is incredible just how wealthy we have become despite the subsidies and tariffs.
Which, of course, gets me to the issue of tariffs. Tariffs act in a way opposite to subsidies, but have the same effect. A tariff is a tax on imports, which of course drives up the price of those imports, making them more expensive for consumers. And, as everyone who has taken Econ. 101 knows, if the price of something goes up, fewer products are sold. Now I am sure that someone will object that we could take the money from the tariffs and use them to subsidize. Let's look at that. Say Import costs $900, but Homebilt costs $1000. If we subsidize Homebilt $100 by taxing Import $100 (we'll ignore the pay the bureaucrats are making for now), then IMport will cost $1000, and Homebilt will cost $900. But wait a minute: how are we supposed to collect taxes on Import if nobody will buy Import now that it costs $100 more? You can't collect sales taxes if you're not selling anything. Which means you won't have the money to give to Homebilt. So, if we are going to have the subsidy, we will still have to get it from the taxpayers, since it is impossible to get it from Imports. Now if we try to solve this problem by making the tariff $50 and the subsidy $50, then what have we really gained? And if human nature is any guide, we still have the same problem, as tribalism will cause people to choose Homebilt over Import if they cost the same, meaning the tariffs still won't pay for the subsidies.
In other words, we are impoverishing ourselves to impoverish places like India. And for what? To help a few incompetent businessmen in our own country? The fact of the matter is that even if (and this is a big if in my mind) we are purposefully impoverishing places like India because we think it will make us rich, then we are incredibly stupid and do not understand the nature of economy. The U.S. will only become wealthier as India and China and Africa and the Middle East and Central and South America become wealthier. Economic growth causes economic growth. We're not dividing up a pie. We're dividing up rapidly breeding rabbits.
One final note: it is not poverty which is historically unusual. It is wealth. Only when we realize this will we be able to do anything about poverty.
On Gun-Free Zones
"Students Strap On Empty Holsters to Protest Gun Restrictions on Campus" -- http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,304806,00.html
Good for them. Perhaps I'm not the only one who has noticed that there is a correlation between mass shootings and the fact that the locations of every one of the mass shootings have taken place at "gun-free zones." When we advertise a place as being a gun-free zone, we are advertising to fanatics that this is a good place to kill a lot of people without having to face any immediate consequences.
Good for them. Perhaps I'm not the only one who has noticed that there is a correlation between mass shootings and the fact that the locations of every one of the mass shootings have taken place at "gun-free zones." When we advertise a place as being a gun-free zone, we are advertising to fanatics that this is a good place to kill a lot of people without having to face any immediate consequences.
Wednesday, October 24, 2007
Politicizing Disaster
Harry Reid should stand out on the corner holding a sign that says, "Will Politicize For Food." To promote his energy bill, Harry Reid (D-NV) said, “One reason why we have the fires in California is global warming.” What a load of nonsense. The nonsense lies not in the question of global warming, but in the fact that the Santa Ana winds have nothing to do with it, but have to do rather with the geography of the region. Is Harry Reid blaming the mountains that push winds coming out of the east down, causing them to heat up, on global warming? Give me a break! The mountains and a weather system that is not uncommon in the US is to blame. What is happening would happen even if we entered an ice age -- the mountains are still there, and don't look to be going anywhere anytime soon. Thus, Reid is either an ignorant fool or he's taking advantage of over a million evacuees, many of whose homes have burnt ot the ground, for political gain on an issue that has nothing to do with the fires.
Along those lines, Senator Barbara Boxer should be ashemd of herself for the same reason, saying the fires have gotten out of control because we're in Iraq.
The real reason for the fires is a combination of a natural phenomenon that I at least have heard of all of my life and poor forestry management driven by environmentalists who have no understanding of what they claim to be protecting. Many of the forests in the U.S. are maintained by periodic fires that clear out the brush and keep the forests open. But ironically anti-forest fire policies have made the situation such that we get what we are getting now. Unless we address the real problems, and stop with the distracting politicization of this terrible situation, we're going to keep seeing this problem.
Along those lines, Senator Barbara Boxer should be ashemd of herself for the same reason, saying the fires have gotten out of control because we're in Iraq.
The real reason for the fires is a combination of a natural phenomenon that I at least have heard of all of my life and poor forestry management driven by environmentalists who have no understanding of what they claim to be protecting. Many of the forests in the U.S. are maintained by periodic fires that clear out the brush and keep the forests open. But ironically anti-forest fire policies have made the situation such that we get what we are getting now. Unless we address the real problems, and stop with the distracting politicization of this terrible situation, we're going to keep seeing this problem.
Tuesday, October 23, 2007
Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006
Everyone needs to support the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006, "a Google-like search tool that will allow taxpayers to hop online and see exactly how their tax dollars are being spent on federal contracts, grants and earmarks" (http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,304224,00.html). Write your Congressman and tell them to support it. Write your favorite (and not-so-favorite) Presidential Candidate to not just express their support, but sign the pledge to aupport it. Sen. Barack Obama, Rep. Ron Paul, Sen. Sam Brownback, Sen. Mike Gravel, Rep. Dennis Kucinch and Mr. John Cox have all done so. Good for each of them! We should support as much transparency in all levels of government as is humanly possible.
Fortune Favors the Bold; Markets Favor the Meek
I stole the above headline from EconLog. I've been thinking a lot about this headline separate from the actual contents the follow it on EconLog.
The first thing I would like to note is that it is true. This is how the meek have inherited the earth -- through the free market system. The markets favor those who are easy to get along with. If you want a job, just show the potential employer that you are a "team player," meaning, you will do anything he wants when he wants it. The more social you are this way and the more submissive, the more likely you are to get the job. Now, this can all be a facade just to get your foot in the door so you can then be bold and shoot up in the company -- but it can't be a complete facade. You still have to continue to act meek and to play all the games necessary to succeed. And there's no getting out of the game. In every job and potential job there is a game. The most onecan hope for is to be involved in the occasional rule change.
Here's another way to word the headline: "Fortune favors the idealist; markets favor the pragmatists." In this case I am refering to social pragmatists. One can be a social pragmatist and still ignore physical reality. Those who go along to get along, who try to fit into whatever the social melieu of the company or organization is, are social pragmatists. Those who may think there is right and wrong, and that one should always come down on the right, and those who may think there are better ways of doing things than the boss, are typically advised to keep their mouths shut -- you may win, in which case you become the hero; but you may lose everything you worked for as well.
If this all sounds pessimistic, well, it is pessimistic in a sense. But it's not necessarily bad. The vast majority of people are "the meek" and are social pragmatists -- and thus the free market favors them. This is why people are generally better off in a free market system. But at the same time, I am coming to understand the objections to the market by Nietzsche on precisely this issue. Nietzsche, of course, did not favor the meek. He favored the bold -- and good fortune. I can thus understand where his objection to the free market system comes from. This does not mean, of course, that I agree with Nietzsche (with whom I agree more often than not) in his opposition to free markets -- but that disagreement would only occur if we are to understand Nietzsche's objections to the free market as objections in the sense most people mean it by, and not in the way Nietzsche means it when he attacks something: as a way to strengthen it. If we understand Nietzsche's opposition this way, we then have to ask: is this disfavoring of the bold by the markets harmful to the markets?
It certainly suggests that it is harmful to the bold, for economics tells us that if the markets do not favor something, it will soon cease being offered. And where would that place the free market system? Can it truly exist without the bold?
Of course, if fortune favors the bold, we shall perhaps never be rid of the bold, as we shall never be rid of fortune. But where's fortune when you need it? My own boldness keeps getting in the way of my success in the market -- how ironic, then, that I continue to support it. What can I say, I'm just not selfish enough to want to do away with it for my own sake, and thus harm so many millions of meek. And what does that say about myself? Am I bold or meek? Or boldly meek? Or meekly bold? Or maybe I'm just so stupid as to not know when to stop fighting for what is right. Sadly, it doesn't seem to pay the bills.
The first thing I would like to note is that it is true. This is how the meek have inherited the earth -- through the free market system. The markets favor those who are easy to get along with. If you want a job, just show the potential employer that you are a "team player," meaning, you will do anything he wants when he wants it. The more social you are this way and the more submissive, the more likely you are to get the job. Now, this can all be a facade just to get your foot in the door so you can then be bold and shoot up in the company -- but it can't be a complete facade. You still have to continue to act meek and to play all the games necessary to succeed. And there's no getting out of the game. In every job and potential job there is a game. The most onecan hope for is to be involved in the occasional rule change.
Here's another way to word the headline: "Fortune favors the idealist; markets favor the pragmatists." In this case I am refering to social pragmatists. One can be a social pragmatist and still ignore physical reality. Those who go along to get along, who try to fit into whatever the social melieu of the company or organization is, are social pragmatists. Those who may think there is right and wrong, and that one should always come down on the right, and those who may think there are better ways of doing things than the boss, are typically advised to keep their mouths shut -- you may win, in which case you become the hero; but you may lose everything you worked for as well.
If this all sounds pessimistic, well, it is pessimistic in a sense. But it's not necessarily bad. The vast majority of people are "the meek" and are social pragmatists -- and thus the free market favors them. This is why people are generally better off in a free market system. But at the same time, I am coming to understand the objections to the market by Nietzsche on precisely this issue. Nietzsche, of course, did not favor the meek. He favored the bold -- and good fortune. I can thus understand where his objection to the free market system comes from. This does not mean, of course, that I agree with Nietzsche (with whom I agree more often than not) in his opposition to free markets -- but that disagreement would only occur if we are to understand Nietzsche's objections to the free market as objections in the sense most people mean it by, and not in the way Nietzsche means it when he attacks something: as a way to strengthen it. If we understand Nietzsche's opposition this way, we then have to ask: is this disfavoring of the bold by the markets harmful to the markets?
It certainly suggests that it is harmful to the bold, for economics tells us that if the markets do not favor something, it will soon cease being offered. And where would that place the free market system? Can it truly exist without the bold?
Of course, if fortune favors the bold, we shall perhaps never be rid of the bold, as we shall never be rid of fortune. But where's fortune when you need it? My own boldness keeps getting in the way of my success in the market -- how ironic, then, that I continue to support it. What can I say, I'm just not selfish enough to want to do away with it for my own sake, and thus harm so many millions of meek. And what does that say about myself? Am I bold or meek? Or boldly meek? Or meekly bold? Or maybe I'm just so stupid as to not know when to stop fighting for what is right. Sadly, it doesn't seem to pay the bills.
Monday, October 22, 2007
Liberals, liberals, and liberals
I see a problem with the way the word "liberal" is used. We talk about how liberals have historically opposed fascism and communism, but which liberals are we talking about? Are we talking about liberals as classical liberals, which by definition support liberty? I'm certainly one of those. Or are we talking about liberals as the modernist Left, whicih supports communist ideas and helped to create the modern socialist and welfare states? Or are we talking about liberals as the postmodern Left, whose ideas were in no small part developed by the Nazi philosopher Martin Heidegger, giving us ideas such as political correctness? One of these has historically opposed fascism and communism. I can't say the same for the other two.
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