The Emperor Drives an AT-AT

Next year is an election cycle in the United States, and the airwaves will be filled with congressmen and other officials demonizing their rivals and hurling invective, promising change or restoration, before sweeping into office to do what their predecessors have done for dozens of years previously: very little of worth. A few years ago I wrote that the American political system had been ruined by finance-driven election campaigns. I still believe this, but in recent years I've begun to see it spoiled in another fashion. When considering how vast the government has grown in attempting to tackle complex problems, I suspect it has gotten too big to be effective. I consider it a truth that the greater the complexity in a system, the greater its fragility.

In 2008, I was  joyful that Barack Obama had been elected president. Not that I voted for him; that was out from the moment I learned he had supported the PATRIOT Act.  But -- in addition to dreading Palin and the bellicose McCain -- I had become fascinated with popular political movements, direct action,  direct democracy -- the politics of people congregating in mobs and forcing the government to respond to them, as with the Civil Rights movement.  Obama's language indicated that he believed in that, too; his best political speech to date was one given after he was beaten by Hillary Clinton in the New Hampshire primary; he told a story of America that featured ordinary citizens as the agents of change, the central actors in the drama:

It was a creed written into the founding documents that declared the destiny of a nation: Yes, we can.
It was whispered by slaves and abolitionists as they blazed a trail towards freedom through the darkest of nights: Yes, we can.
It was sung by immigrants as they struck out from distant shores and pioneers who pushed westward against an unforgiving wilderness: Yes, we can.
It was the call of workers who organized, women who reached for the ballot, a president who chose the moon as our new frontier, and a king who took us to the mountaintop and pointed the way to the promised land: Yes, we can, to justice and equality.

Save for the mention of JFK's enterprising vision, , the people in this story were not civic leaders, and certainly not politicians; they were ordinary people effecting changes themselves. Maybe he had voted for the PATRIOT act so he wouldn't be criticized as soft on terrorism, I thought. In view of his emphasis on grassroots campaign financing, I dreamed: maybe the man and the vision were one, maybe he was a leader who wanted to empower people to help themselves. The president of the last six years hasn't been that man, however; he has instead been like the last man to sit in the big seat:  frightfully comfortable with its power. The chair in the oval office is one that molds the occupant to its contours, rather than being molded by theirs. I do not believe Obama is malevolent;  I believe the NSA scandals and the like simply bear witness to the fact that power is corrosive. People weren't meant to wield the power a president has;  there's a reason lawmaking was supposed to be the province of a Congress that would spend its time arguing instead of doing things, because our brains can't handle the rush.  Although I am woefully disappointed in the dream, the failing is in the system and not the man. Simply put, I do not believe Obama, Bush, or any congressman is actually in charge.  The systems controlling American politics -- banking, economics, etc. - aren't under the control of any one man.  Perhaps these systems aren't even under the control of a group of men, perhaps they're plowing along under their own inertia.

We look to the President or to the Prime Minister to do stuff because at heart we are chimpanzees whose idea of a leader is an alpha who can take direct, immediate, precise action. He can say "move", and the troop moves; "attack", and the troop attacks.  Modern political leaders aren't in that position. Even if they sit in the big seat and amass power, , they can't do it because the things they're trying to do are too vast.  A president can't dictate food prices, or alter the atmosphere. They can try -- they can pour enormous subsidies into agriculture, for instance -- but they won't necessarily get what they want. At that level, they're using so much power they can't predict what will happen. Nixon wasn't trying to create a nation where obesity and diabetes were more common than health, or where the life of rural and small-town American had been destroyed by agribusiness, but that's what he did.   The politics of the modern state put a leader in a position of having to exercise enormous power that he can't really control;  he is made captain of a runaway locomotive. The tracks dictate his course;  he can blow all the whistles he likes, but the machine is moving on its own inertia.  This brings to my mind -- my SF-addled mind -- the image of someone trying to drive an AT-AT.

The AT-AT, introduced in Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back,  is the largest, most stupidly-contrived war machine one might imagine.  They are enormous and under the direction of men sitting in their heads, who are somehow expected to move four clanking legs and direct fire from the head while being unaware of anything happening behind them. In the movie, the machines are not destroyed by weapons, but by their own clumsiness: the rebels trip the legs and the great terrible machine falls down.  Imagine how destructive these machines would be in action, even without their guns;  the clumsy 'feet' would constantly smash things on the ground even if the drivers weren't aiming to.  AT-ATs are too big, too removed from the action, too sluggish to respond -- they are doomed by their own size, either to blundering or to eventual destruction.

For this reason I have lost interest in national politics, because it doesn't matter who is captaining the AT-AT: it's going to ignore important matters,   crush life underfoot, and stumble ever-forward intending destruction.  The state, I think, is a machine that answers to no one's direction, and takes would-be commanders of it along for a ride. National politics, because it seems to be an exercise is spending money, and arguing, neither of which fascinates me. What I am interested in, what I think we need all over the world, are healthier places and more fulfilled people. My politics are local, limited to my home, my neighborhood, my city. Beyond that governance is too abstract to bother with.  I don't know how this emphasis will be expressed in my life; presently I am researching local, sustainable agriculture. There is a great deal of interest in that in this area, for we are an agricultural region and still peopled by those distrustful of those in power, from corporations to the state.  Whatever the expression, I believe localism is going to be at the heart of my thinking, and both the end and the means have to be local.  Living in a town with the painful history and lingering problems, I know we have to effect its healing on our own. Industrial agriculture can't restore topsoil and heal the land;  that takes the careful husbandry of a few people on the ground, people with a stake in restoring it. The same is true of other political problems; we have to build on personal, civic responsibility. I am no longer interested in people forcing the government to respond to them; people ought to effect the changes themselves and let the AT-AT stumble about as it will.  We have to create our own pockets of civic health everywhere.

Fate

If I've learned anything in the last ten or so years of my life, it's to appreciate the fact that there's much in it I can't control...especially fate. Time and again I've set myself on a course of action and decided: "This is it. This is the way my life will go," only to look back later and realize how short-sighted I was. Regardless of the thoroughness of our plans, of the care and thought we put into them, they do not always come to pass...and this is not something to be bemoaned, either, because our plans for the future aren't necessarily the best that we might have pursued. In deviating from plans, either by accident or thoughtlessness, we may in fact put ourselves in a situation where we are better served.

For my own part, part of me sometimes thinks I might have been better off had I gone directly to university after high school, bypassing community college and the 'wasted' years between my graduation there and my entrance into a full university. But had I not gone to that community college, I would not have met particular people, people who changed my life.  And the time I spent working a factory between college and university was most formative to the person I am today. It was there that I learned to be an adult, to stand on my own two feet - there that I learned the value of money and time, there that I started to question the way society worked. If I had gone directly to university following high school graduation, would I have gained anything by it? Would a Pentecostal boy have appreciated the intellectual stimulation of the university? Would I have flourished intellectually as an adult had the soil of my mind not already been tilled by those difficult years following graduation where I struggled to find myself?

I do not know, but I'm tempted to say, I doubt it. Maybe early separation from Pentecostalism would have freed my mind more quickly, but I for one think whatever mental strength I have came from the fact that I had to fight for my ideals, my thoughts, and my beliefs against oppressive dogma.  There are other examples in this theme; for instance, when I moved to university I became friends with someone who betrayed me, and while part of me thinks if I had known that in advance I would have avoided him from the start, I am glad for the experience.  The end of that friendship changed my life dramatically; it introduced me to the study of Stoicism, and  made me aware of my own weaknesses. It gave me humility, which I never anticipated needing or profiting by.  These little events could make quite a list. Time and again my plans for life have fallen apart, and for a time I thought myself lessened for it. I might groan at my mistakes, or regret hoped-for opportunities that never transpired. I might think my life had derailed...but every time my life has gone off the route I had planned for it, I've somehow found myself better off for it.

A more traditional person might say this is the Hand of God active in my life, moving me to where I am intended to be, working to ensure the best outcome. This is not the attitude I take, but when I reflect on my life I can't help but feel a sudden burst of gratitude. I didn't intend to live the life I'm living now, but I'm happy.

You may have heard the saying that fortune favors the prepared mind. This question of destiny is to me an interplay between fortune and virtue. Fortune, the happenstance of life, is fickle. It is a mistake to believe we can direct its course, either by praying to deities or relying on good luck tokens. For us, it is chaotic. One small action can set into action a course of events that leads in a different direction that we might have ever intended. We can't plan fortune;  but we might manage it.

I mentioned an interplay between fortune and virtue, virtue being (in this case)  preparing ourselves for the fickleness of fate. We do this in part by not becoming attached to any one series of events: we can't predict the ultimate outcome, so the attachment is foolish. An excellent choice one moment might set us up for great failure down the road, and a mistake might be a launching pad for greater success than we could ever imagine.

 I'm reminded of a favorite fable or proverb I read a few years ago while doing readings in Buddhist philosophy.

There was a man in a distant village with a prized horse, and one day the horse ran away.  The man's neighbors approached him in sympathy, saying, "How terrible this is! Your best horse, gone! You must be distraught." The man only shrugged, and said, "We'll see."


Shortly thereafter the horse reappeared, but he had attracted followers, his own herd. There were dozens of horses, and the man and his son corralled them all. They had enough animals to begin breeding them! Profits would be enormous! And the neighbors came by to celebrate, saying, "What a marvelous stroke of luck! You must be so pleased!". But  to their surprise, the man only shrugged, and said -- "We'll see."


The next day one of the horses kicked out at the man's sons; both of his legs were broken. Again the neighbors came in sympathy, saying, "Your only son, crippled! How terrible!".  And the man shrugged, and said, "We'll see."


A few months later, the nation went to war, and all the villages were called upon to send their young men into battle. The village's young men all went, with the exception of the crippled boy, who could not march. The nation's forces met in battle, and all of the village's sons were lost on the field. The grieving parents came to the man and said to him, "Of all of us, only your son has been spared. You must be pleased."

And again, the man shrugged, and again, he said: "We'll see". 

The fable ends there because all must end somewhere, but the point is that this interchange between the man and the villagers could have gone on forever. Life is never finished:  it is a perpetual chain of events. We can never see what awaits us.  That in mind, another way to be prepared for fate  is to anticipate the responses we might need if life goes awry. For instance, I am saving up to go to graduate school and get a degree in library science --but I am also trying to find a way to learn less specialized skills, because there's no way of knowing that librarianship will be a viable career. The jobs may not be there, or the few which are may not enough to support me.  That in mind, I want more resiliency.  I also think we need to be courageous enough not to shy away from unexpected roads. Not only must we let go of plans which have been rendered impossible, but we have to move forward...and that is difficult to change-adverse creatures like ourselves. For my own part, I take courage in the words of Marcus Aurelius, who advised himself not to fear the future....for we will meet it with the same reason we have with us today.

All that we can do, essentially, is the best that we can do.  We must make the best choices we can, in any given circumstance. If these turn out to be the wrong choices, or choices inferior to others (in hindsight), there is nothing to be gained in berating ourselves for these mistakes. We are not omniscient; we cannot account for everything, We have to make these choices moment to moment, based on information which is limited at best.  Life is not a gaming competition: there's no scoreboard, no judge, no points to stack against one another. We're alive, so we might as well enjoy it.

Confessions of a quasi-Luddite

Recently I surprised a blogger at the KunstlerCast forums when I mentioned my minimalism regarding cellphones. I currently don't have one and rarely miss it: when I did own one, I kept it turned off until the late evening after my day of activity was over. My friends and I didn't need phones to keep up with one another, so I used mine to keep in touch with family. It doubled as an alarm clock. Unlike most of my generation, I never took to the cellphone. Early on I despised the way people answered them in the company of others, even at the dining table, and regarded the practice of talking while driving madness. I endeavor to keep the phone in its place -- turned off, and hidden deep in my pockets.

I suppose it is a little unusual that someone as young as I would have such a hostile attitude toward technology. I did grow up in a generation where being tech-savvy was the norm. Not a year went by without producing some new toy  -- new game machines, watches with more features, CD players, mp3 players, etc. I used to keep up with it; I subscribed to appropriate magazines and spent long hours in the Electronics section of superstores, looking at all the wonderful stuff I might someday have. And yet, as I grew older, the allure faded. The constant stream of novelty began to bore me, as experienced prompted me to realize that no matter how excited people grew about one object or another, in a matter of months it would be broken and forgotten if not rendered obsolete by yet another gadget. By this time I'd entered the workforce and started to learn the value of money -- and for me, gadgets simply weren't worth my time and labor.

Beyond the factory, I've grown less starry-eyed about the advance of technology in general. I don't think our lives are actually improved by bigger televisions, smartphones, and monstrous vehicles with built-in TV players. History informs me that there are no actions without consequences, and the way people eagerly embrace changes without considering where they might lead concerns me. Take, for instance, cellular phones. I'm indebted to Neil Postman for giving me the vocabulary to articulate why the things bother me so: the ability to be connected constantly seems to have convinced people that we ought to be connected constantly, and moreover that there's something WRONG with not being connected. I for one like my privacy. I value solitude and quiet, and I truly despise the racket of a television and the obnoxious electronic whine of a phone. Every time one rings at home, I contemplate smacking it with a hammer. This ability of people to constantly demand one another's attention strikes me as entirely uncivilized: it is a medium of communication that demands virtually no consideration on our part, and the way people use them bears this out. They pull them them out everywhere, answer them everywhere, and let the world go by while their faces are drawn evermore frequently to a glowing blue screen, creating or reading some grotesque abortion of a sentence in English. Such is the practice of 'texting'.

Another example is that of automation. The term Luddite derives historically from a community of people who were angered that automation was rendering their work irrelevant. Their livelihood had been destroyed by machines, and rightfully they struck out against them. While I acknowledge that automation has made goods cheaper, I am also ever mindful of the human cost, and I cannot support its expansion unless some accommodation is made. I'm thinking of the other costs of automation, though: energy and the consequences of human inactivity. Although the US is in a prolonged energy crisis and over a third of Americans are obese (and susceptible to attendant health issues, like diabetes, hypertension, and cardiac woes), we insist on making life easier for people. We have constructed a society where most people MUST drive to get anywhere, by creating places unsafe to walk and bike, and spreading destinations across so wide an area that walking isn't remotely practical. Our homes are filled with 'energy-saving' appliances that force complete reliance on electricity, even when they're not in use. Considering that we are still relying on fossil fuels -- of which, in accordance with the laws of the universe there must be only a finite supply -- to power all this, the system is patently unsustainable. This is folly. We have made our lives so easy that we have to schedule time for 'exercise', whereas once we actually had to participate in life. I've come to believe that effort gives life meaning.

And so, for the last year or so, I've been phasing out dependence on some forms of technology when I can. I do this in part because I place so much value on sustainable -- reasonable -- living. I do this also because it makes my life simpler, quieter, and imminently more pleasurable.  There are fewer distractions to badger me, and fewer drains on  my resources. I'm evermore free to focus on the things which matter to me; the joy of living.

It's not that I'm a technophobe or an Amish convert. I'm enthusiastic about scientific advance and technological progress, but I don't confuse the latter with human progress. I simply believe we should be more mindful of our relationship with  technology, considering its consequences. It's no more sensible to embrace novelty for its own sake than it is to cling to tradition for the sake of tradition.  We should embrace or reject ideas based on their impact they have on our ability to enjoy happy, meaningful lives. A humanist in all things, I believe our actions and habits should be examined in the light of what they do for us -- or to us. We should be the masters of our tools, not the other way around, just as tradition and culture should serve us and not be our masters.  So the next time the phone rings during your dinner, or while you are in the shower or reading a book, exercise your dominance over the phone. Don't answer it. Don't worry about it. And if keeps ringing, smack it with a hammer.

(Works for me.)

Related:
"TV and Me"

Re: Sinews

A few months ago I mentioned here that I've committed myself to a more active lifestyle. Motivated by a health scare, I started walking every morning and eventually added an evening jaunt to my routine as well. I'm happy to report, many weeks later, that the committment endures.

Physically, the results are striking. My legs are stronger than they've ever been, as is my lung performance judging by how steadily the pace of my walk has quickened as the months have passed. Most of my clothes no longer fit, and I have more energy so I'm constantly looking for ways to get in more activity. I'd like to get my bicycle fixed so that I can start touring the countryside on the weekends, for instance, and begin commuting into town on two wheels instead of driving.

In "Sinews" I wrote that I viewed my walks as not just physical exercise, but spiritual exercise: in introducing myself to physical disicpline, I hoped to improve my mind's mastery over the body. The fact that I'm still going on a daily basis, having overcome a great many mornings of discomfort and outright pain, testifies to my success, I suppose. In the beginning I had to stress endurance and persistance to myself, as my feet were still adjusting to the routine. Now they typically no longer pain me, and the aches and soreness come from my legs, protesting at the ever-quickening pace that I speed down the road with.  Some mornings are effortless, and I come home feeling exhilerated from the action and not tired in the least -- but there are mornings when I struggle for every step, when my mind constantly chatters distraction. I must work to keep my focus and maintain my stride, knowing that most of the time this discomfort is temporary and the barrier it represents a phantom: if I push, if I persist, I can make it all the way and marvel that I contemplating giving it a rest earlier.  I suspect the physical results of my exercise are much more noticable than the mental effects: as I read the thoughts of those who have made exercise a daily part of their lives, I can't help but note that everyone admits to days where they have to force themselves to get out there, no matter how long they've been at it.

The walking has been good for me in other ways. The quiet time to myself gives me space and energy to think, and sometimes to muse. It gives me opportunities to appreciate nature. I'm able to practice Stoic nonjudgment every day, especially as we head deeper into winter and I find myself feeling frustrated that the weather is denying me tolerable walking conditions. I can walk when it is freezing out, but when it is freezing, windy, and raining?  I'm not that good at feeling indifferent to physical discomfort!  The most noticable physical result is weight loss, something that I'm quite happy about. That, too, is an opportunity to practice nonjudgment;  while I was able to maintain a losing streak for a couple of months,during the last week of November that ended when I gained an ounce. The next week I lost it and much more, but I had to remember that my focus is not losing weight but staying active.

Aside from the physical gains (or losses), the greatest boon of my walking is that it gets me active in my neighborhood. My neighbors have become accustomed to seeing me: I recognize their cars as they drive by me, and I wave cheerfully at everyone. I'm able to talk with someone almost every day -- kids riding bikes after school, a man raking leaves from his yard, an elderly fellow watching the ducks in the pond behind his yard in the morning. I know most every dog in the neighborhood. There are friendly dogs and hostile dogs, dogs that bark from behind fences but which are cowards outside of them, dogs that are friendly when I walk but who chase me when I jog. I feel like part of the neighborhood; my life is daily connected to the lives of others. I have even had people join me on walks.

And so, I look forward to many more future walks and my increasing good health.

A Man in Full

As a kid I took the future for granted. I assumed that I would grow up, go to college, and find my place, or at least a place, inside society. I grew up in the late eighties and early nineties, though, when the economy was roaring and gas stayed below $1.40, sometimes even dipping below a dollar.  Even though my parents were thoroughly working class and didn't have much use for intellectual arts, the world of the intellect and high culture appealed to me. I had no interest in learning a trade, and certainly not my father's vocation of automobile repair. My future didn't involve work coveralls and a day of dirty labor: I would wear clean clothes, have soft, clean hands, and would work in an office somewhere. I thought this was the way things should be for everyone, except for people who wanted to work on cars for whatever unfathomable reason.

That has changed. Part of it, surely, is simply the aging process. That complacency belongs in the mind of a sheltered child, but as we grow older and learn from experience, we realize that the future does not drop into place for us. We have to apply to colleges, apply for jobs -- we have to be active about our futures. But I've also been influenced by my studies these past five years -- freethought, social criticism, Stoicism, anarchism -- and their combined effect in enriching my sense of humanism. I don't mean humanism in the most modern sense,  this excellent belief in ethics based on reason and compassion and emphasis on improving and enjoying the here and now. I mean it as in humanitas, as Cicero would have used it -- as the cultivation of the best in myself, in my humanity.  I wish to live gloriously -- not to be gloried, but to fulfill in part what I find so wonderful about human potential, to lose myself in the ecstasy of being human.

I can no longer be content playing a normal role in society, in being so dependent on the system. The universe is change, and I want to be quick-footed enough to respond to those changes. I want to be able to roll with the punches that life will surely send my way, to spring up time and again ready to engage. In recent years, and most particularly in the past few months, I have experienced a growing desire to be potent.  I want to be capable of doing things. I want to be able to cook, and cook well: I want to be able to repair an automobile, to use weapons, to fix and even create furniture, to effect household repairs, to take care of a garden and create both beauty and food.  I'm pretty good at being an intellectual, but I feel as though I have pursued only half my potential up until now. There are a great many people who have the skills I desire, but scorn intellectual liberties. We are both impoverished. I want to be a Renaissance human -- developed intellectually, physically, philosophically, morally -- a man in full.

The Discus Thrower, Myron.

I am enraptured by human potential, by the beauty of action. I want to be self-reliant not only because it's the wise thing to do, but because the idea of self-reliance resonates so strongly with my perception of what humanity is capable of. We're such versatile creatures. While we may admire a cheetah for its speed or a bear for its strength, our hands and brains make us beings of near-unlimited potential. I take pleasure when I explore that potential.

I have a recurring vision of a man in deep emotional distress who has lost everything, but he holds his two hands up before him and weeps. "With these two hands," he cries, "I made all which I lost -- and with these two hands, I shall make it again."  I do not know where this image comes from -- whether I read something like it in a book, or if I simply dreamed it up. But I want to be able to say that of my own two hands.

May Day

May Day is an international holiday created to celebrate the accomplishments and trials of the men and women who have, throughout history,  made the modern world possible.  I celebrate this day not  because of my own personal politics, but because of my basic moral outlook. When we celebrate the worker, we celebrate the majority of humanity -- for most of the world belongs to the working class.

On this day, I invite you to consider that  most everything you can see and touch around you was created by the labor of another human being not unlike yourself. We live in a world created by one another, and virtually everything in our lives has been touched by the lives of countless men and women across the world. The food you eat, for instance, was planted, tended to, harvested, inspected, cleaned, packaged, transported, unloaded, and stocked in the store by people. We are constantly connected to one another.  This is worth being mindful of.

We should also be mindful of the widening gap etween those who create the wealth and those who horde it, between the working poor and the idle rich. It is more present now than at any time in history, for the strength of the few has been increased against the many upon whose backs they are perched.  The reasons for this are many, but the solution is the same.  We must stand together and work -- organize, protest, and defy.  We do not enjoy the civil rights and political liberties that we do because the powerful kings of the past thought it  was the right thing to do: we enjoy them because men and women of the past asserted those rights, demanded those liberties. They used the one weapon which can never be taken away -- strength of numbers -- to force reaction.  Human progress is the story of courage's advance and tradition's retreat.

While there are many appropriate songs I could share today, the song below has the most meaning for me. Back in 2007, as a self-described social democrat, I searched for 'democratic socialism' out of curiosity. I heard Billy Bragg singing the Internationale, and I listened to it again and again that weekend. It spoke to my humanist morals,  to my idealism,  and has taken on a powerful significance. Translated throughout the world into various languages, it may be the most sung song in history. 

Other suggestions:

1. "Power in a Union", Billy Bragg

2. "Ludlow Massacre", Woody Guthrie

3. "Solidarity Forever", Pete Seeger

4. "The Internationale", Alistar Hulett (traditional English lyrics)

     No savior from on high delivers

     No faith have we in prince or peer

     Our own right hands the chains must shiver

     Chains of hatred, greed, and fear.

5. "Internationale 2000", Maxx Klaxon (even more modern lyrics with more of an electronic than a folk sound.)

     Turn off their televised illusions

     Stand up and look them in the eyes

     Declare your mental liberation

     Shake off the dust, and claim the prize. 

Stand up, O victims of oppression

For the tyrants fear your might

Don't cling so heard to your possessions --

You have nothing if you have no Rights.

 

Let racist ignorance be ended,

For respect makes the Empires fall               

Freedom is merely privilege extended

Unless enjoyed by One and All 

So come brothers and sisters

For the struggle carries on

The Internationale unites the world  in song!

So comrades, come rally --

For this is the time and place

The International ideal 

Unites the human race.

Fall of the Berlin Wall, 9 November 1989

Let no one build walls to divide us,

Walls of hatred nor walls of stone

Come greet the Dawn and stand beside us

We'll live together, or we'll die alone

Earthrise

In our world poisoned by exploitation

Those who have taken, now they must give

And end the vanity of nations --

We've but Earth on which to live

So come brothers and sisters

For the struggle carries on

The Internationale unites the world  in song!

So comrades, come rally --

For this is the time and place

The International ideal 

Unites the human race.

"Tank Man". Tiananmen Square. 4 June 1989. 

 And so begins the final drama,

In the streets and in the fields

We stand unbowed before their armor

We defy! their guns and shields

When we fight, provoked by their aggression

Let us be inspired by like and love

For though they offer us concessions,

Change will not come from above!

So come brothers and sisters

For the struggle carries on

The Internationale unites the world  in song!

So comrades, come rally --

For this is the time and place

The International ideal 

Unites the human race.

On Being Politically In/Correct

Abraham Lincoln: What a charming Negress! Oh, forgive me, my dear. I know in my time some used that term as a description of property."
Uhura: But why should I object to that term, sir? You see, in our century we've learned not to fear words.
(Star Trek, "The Savage Curtain")

What is political correctness?

In middle school I thought it was the practice of altering one's language or remaining quiet about some beliefs to avoid engendering offense. In seventh grade I remember kids making a game of inventing 'politically correct' descriptions: essentially, we attempted to find the most convoluted way of describing people and things we could. "Short" became "vertically challenged", and "fat", "horizontally enhanced". In a less juvenile context, the motivation to avoid being offensive is why accepted terminologies for minorities change through time: 'cripple' has become 'disabled' or 'handicapped', and "Negro" has eventually developed into African-American, though "colored" and "black" were intermediaries.

While it is understandable that people would resist changing the way they speak to please someone else,  there are also reasons why certain words and phrases have become 'n-words', and why we perhaps ought to rethink our use of them. Language is constantly changing: as time passes, words are separated from their original meanings and intents. "Retarded" may have once been a clinical description indicating that a patient's mental abilities were impaired or inhibited, but people now use it to attack those who they believe are acting foolishly, or simply to demean those whom they disagree with or dislike. They thus corrupt the word: their  base intention has turned a once objective description into a mean and contemptuous term.  Those who prefer their language to be civil are right to to avoid such vulgarity.  Politically correct terms also sometimes make more sense than those which they replace: 'native American' may be lengthsome, but 'Indian' is ignorant.

Political correctness in language has its shortcomings as well: politically correct descriptions tend toward the ungainly (it being much harder to shout "Hey, person with a higher-than-normal body-mass index!" than "Hey, fatty!"), and some phrases simply do not work. "Differently-abled" is an example of this:  it says nothing, for we all have 'different' abilities.  The full use of arms and legs is considered a normal, typical ability of human beings, (thus the appropriateness of 'disabled') but it is not an insult to be abnormal despite the fact that there are those who take pleasure in mocking others for being different.  I understand why people who are sensitive about being different in some way would prefer that people didn't draw attention to their difference, but insisting that others use ungainly phrases will attract more hostility than the proposed phrase deflects.

I believe political correctness exists more as an imagined object of hostility than as a monolithic force in itself. There is no language commission in the United States which ruthlessly seeks out every indecorous word and sends it to a speech-gulag somewhere.  Instead,  people attack particular words linked to particular minorities as the minorities, the people themselves, begin asserting themselves. The titular "n-word" has been sent to a speech-gulag by people who stood up for themselves and forced the majority to consider: why are you using that word to attack us? Why are you keeping us segregated, denied equal rights and opportunities?

The reactionary mentality does not like being forced to consider its actions and beliefs. It does not want to consider that it was in the wrong, that it remains in the wrong by protesting instead of admitting to having acted poorly or having been ignorant. They thus invent the phrase 'politically correct' as an insult to approve their own actions. Suddenly, they are not the oppressors: they are the victims. Behold, the great white majority  are being persecuted because they can no longer call a wop a wop and a chink a chink! Politically correct language doesn't allow them to justify their distrust or contempt of others with a blow-rendering label.

 Imperial Christians are especially bad about this during Christmas. Christmas in the United States is only partly Christian: it carries the Catholic title "Christ's Mass" in its name,  but I daresay most people don't darken the door of a church on Christmas Eve or Christmas day. They certainly don't hear a mass. Many of the practices stem from sources other than Paulinism:  Christmas trees and yule logs are German, caroling and reveling Roman, and shameless consumerism  oh-so-very modern.  The date of the holiday itself comes from the winter solstice, acknowledged by most cultures in the northern hemisphere -- and yet Christians will claim the holiday is all theirs, that every thing about it is the exclusive property of Jesus Christ Incorporated. If anyone dares acknowledge that the Roman church's mass isn't the only religious or festive ceremony held in late December,  this is a source of great umbrage to the Christians, who construe "Happy Holidays" as an insult to their beliefs and every utterance of "Solstice" is an assault on the body of Christ.

I believe this reactionary mentality is why those who take pride in being politically incorrect tend to be aggressively rude and insufferably opinionated:  they like being jackasses, by god, and how dare you judge them for acting like a jackass? Being proud of being politically incorrect is tantamount to seeking a license to be a jackass, and doing it in the name of free speech, yet.  There's irony here, it seems: people rail against their actions being judged as rude or uninformed,  even though their actions themselves were judgment of other people.

For my own part, I don't think the labels themselves are the problem: they are merely a symptom of the tendecy of people to attack and demean others.  Judge the intent of language: once that is known, the expression is mostly garnish.

Evidence as a Facade

In The Geography of Nowhere, author James Howard Kunstler commented on the Beaux Arts architectural style of the late 19th century, an example of which is seen above. While buildings planned in this style often used Greek-style pillars, Kuntsler notes that the pillars are a lie. They are a facade: they have no functional purpose other than to decorate the building. These buildings are not fashioned on classical principles, but modern: their infastructure is provided by a steel skeleton, not  Doric columns. The buildings pretend to be classically-derived, but they are more modern than not.

That came to mind today when thinking about explanatory models and theories, more particularly about the distinction between a theory that rises from the evidence and a theory that only uses the evidence. This is the difference between evolution, for instance, and creationism. One is the result of Darwin's lifetime of peering at the facts as he knew them. The strength of Darwin's theory lies in his collection of the evidence and his attempt to find explanations that fit it. This is not the case with creationism, particularly the young-earth variety. There, the heart of the idea is belief: belief in the Bible, trust that the words of parochial iron-age personalities thousands of years ago are valid. To be a young-earth creationist, you must use the Bible: that's your "support".  The same is true for holocaust denial: its true base is hatred of Israel. In both instances, the evidence -- Greek pillars -- may be applied to the model in order to justify it, but the real heart of these ideas, their true infastructure, is something else altogether. Thus, these models of evidence are only a facade.

TV and Me

(One of the many Bill Watterson strips that I've appreciated more as an adult than as a child reading them in the newspapers.)

I have a curious relationship to television. I knew it rarely as a child:  television sets were barred from my parents’ Pentecostal home, and so we only saw shows if we visited friends or relatives or stayed a motel. Like all children, I assumed what my parents said was  true and right to follow, although the rule made increasingly less sense as the years went by. Why could we watch Full House at my aunt’s house, but not at our own?

Eventually television found its way into our home in a very limited form. It never became a central pillar of my life, although I did grow accustomed to a routine of shows and thought my life ill-served if I missed one. When I moved into college dorms for the first time, I gained access to cable television on a constant basis. If I wanted to, I could spend every hour of the day watching something: sitcoms, dramas, documentaries, music, English football matches -- whatever I wanted.

And yet… I didn’t. I was experiencing no lingering conviction from my Pentecostal upbringing:  the anti-television rule made so little sense that I was thwarting it before puberty, covertly hooking up an antennae to a monitor we used for watching VHS tapes to watch shows when my parents were away.  What I was experiencing was the honest enjoyment of life, and had been doing so for a little over a year when I first gained cable access. I found everything mundane to be wonderful -- the skies, the trees, the sound of dogs barking and people talking, even the feel of grass under my fingertips.  This was the result of my leaving the Pentecostal cult and realizing I was a Humanist at heart, someone who wanted to be in love with the world but who had before then been forbidden to.

Now I was madly in love, and television’s enjoyment seemed shallow by comparison. I could and at times did spend hours at a time immersed in the blue glow, but once the day ended I felt nothing but remorse for having wasted the day in such a manner. I cannot say the same of the days I spent under trees, reading Thoreau and writing in my journal, or walking around town with friends and discussing philosophy. Those days I remember vividly: they had a magic about them. I sometimes suspect that everyday could have magic about it, if we truly lived it.

As my formal education increased, my disinterest in television grew. I think this disinterest began when I became a skeptic and started spotting all of the advertising gimmicks in commercials -- the dishonest little tricks advertisers were up to.  More significantly, the past two and a half years have turned me into a social critic, at least in private.  After reading Neil Postman's Technopoly and Amusing Ourselves to Death, I wondered if his advice wasn’t valid. It resonated with the Stoic idea of only concerning ourselves with matters we could control. It seemed to me that Postman was right: people have grown addicted to being entertained by drama outside themselves.

Soon, every facet of my intellectual life was grumbling about television -- it became a tool of consumerism,  a values-defining tyrant as despicable as organized religion, and a medium through which the economic elite manipulate the news in their favor.  It reduces human conversations to exchanges of shallow, obnoxious one-liners while glorifying violence and  prostituting human beauty and love. It’s insulting, insipid, and ignorant.  Worst of all -- it’s noisy! How can a person think through that barrage of moving pictures and sound?

The irony of this is that while my parents go to a church with an official ban against television, they and nearly everyone else in that church possess a well-used set. Their son who has emphatically rejected Pentecostalism and its many decrees, meanwhile, only watches television if it happens to be on while visiting at someone else's home.

That I again have something in common with Pentecostalism makes me uneasy, and I do not like the possibility that I'm becoming a self-righteous snob where television is concerned. I find precious little to recommend television, however: what intelligent and humane shows I do like, I can find on Youtube sans commercials. On those happily rare occasions when I want to slip into a mindless hour, I have DVDs a-plenty of How I Met Your Mother, Boy Meets World, and the like.

Feelings? Nothing More than Feelings?

I have heard a number of times from apologists like C.S. Lewis, Ravi Zacharias, Donald Keller, and those who subscribe to those authors’ works that the existence of real, god-given principles is proven by our reaction to their being violated. At the same time, they decry people making choices based on their feelings -- this they call relativism.

The aforementioned apologists are correct in that there are some principles at work. I doubt very much that deity hammered them out in its cosmic workshop and then built a world out of them, but I think they’re there. For instance, I’m very much opposed to the idea of being murdered or physically assaulted. I object strongly to the idea of my food being stolen. Am I to believe that these feelings -- and that is what they are -- are the result of my witnessing Thou Shalt Not Kill and Thou Shalt Not Steal being violated, rather than that they are my very natural, wholly biological, response to my well-being being violated? When my dog growls at someone who attempts to take his food away, is he observing religious principle or simply responding to this attack on his well-being? The same goes for an angry bear who has been shot by a hunter’s rifle.

I believe in natural morality, in not doing to others that which I would not have done to myself. That I can plan my behavior accordingly is an example of emotions being tempered by reason: I am making myself stronger, better prepared to live among my fellow creatures. Everyone, to an extent, follows this principle. Rage or power might change the extent to which they follow the “golden rule”, but they follow it all the same. The exceptions are sociopaths. Thus, just because morality may be based on emotional responses is no reason to discredit it.

At the same time, however, feelings themselves must be examined. In the case above, the feelings exist naturally: I don’t want to be hurt, you don’t want to be hurt. In many other cases, however, the feelings exist only because they have been made to be there: the people involved have been conditioned to feel a certain way. In the sect I grew in, women were expected to keep their hair uncut and their rears in dresses -- trousers were “men’s clothing”, and were not to be worn by females. The observance of these "Holiness" and "Separation" standards were very important to the Pentecostal identity, and observance of the rules resulted in smug or honest satisfaction that "God's will" was being observed. Thus, when my pastor’s eldest daughter showed to church with nicely-trimmed hair and a pair of fashionable slacks, her friends were reduced to tears. "Her glory is gone", they said. A Muslim may be driven into a dreadful rage at the idea of Islam being mocked, because for him Islam is world-definingly important and utterly personal. These are both examples of conditioned responses: the feelings are artificial, subjective to cultural background.

These two categories are not wholly mutually exclusive: take the case of a high-school teenager who is reduced to weeping when his team loses a homecoming game. This may have both biological and cultural elements: emotional investment in tribes and groups being biological and that instinct being applied toward an athletics team being cultural. The same is true, too, for xeno- and homophobia. The root may be fear of those who are different, but these feelings are interpreted and magnified by culture.

I do not consider fabricated or culturally-driven feelings to be of much use in my own life, and I doubt laws based on them will be either rational nor humane. To be of use to human beings, moral laws must be based on our natural feelings as they are tempered by reason.

God, Religion, and Me: Musings

The below are scattered thoughts I've been having on God and religion. I just wanted to try to collect them and see if they made any more sense once they were ought of my head: I also wouldn't mind constructive feedback. For those interested, I have a few essays in the works -- mostly about humanism.

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I can’t say I ever identified with God or Jesus growing up as a kid. I was close to identifying with God -- the Hebrew god. He was violent and brutish, but he was reliable and he only got violent when the rules were crossed. Sure, the rules were a tad silly at times -- “Don’t boil a goat in its mother’s milk”, that sort of thing -- but they were there, and if you followed them you wouldn’t get boils and God would protect you from mean people. That sort of thing appeals to a bullied kid like myself.

Jesus I never understood. He was a bully in his own way: he stoked the fires of Hell, even as he said nice things. I didn’t appreciate that much. There’s no way to reconcile love of any kind with eternal pain. Once I got old enough to walk away from Christianity , I did. But as a humanist, I wanted to identify with people: I wanted to understand my fellows more. What about Jesus or God did they need?

When I left Christianity and realized that Humanism was what I’d wanted for my entire life, it seemed clear to me that religion was ridiculously unnecessary. It seemed to me an imposition: the priest thinks up a religion and makes people under his power swear to it, and since not everyone has the same priest, people start killing one another over their religion. I didn’t appreciate this: I hated it. It made my blood boil.

I remained mostly confused about why people tolerated religion bossing them around until I became aware of ethical philosophy -- living philosophy. I then started seeing philosophy in religion and began thinking that maybe religion was just a power structure for implementing ethical philosophy. I forget when I discovered ethical philosophy, but it was probably in 2007 when I began reading about humanist spirituality and discovered Doug Muder’s excellent “Humanist Spirituality: Oxymoron, or Authentic Path to Enlightenment?”

I began thinking about ideals. I seemed to rely on ideals, and I wondered if perhaps religious people were the safe way -- if they hadn’t just taken their ideals out of their head and put them in the cosmic ether, where they assumed a human form which they called a God. Maybe God is a projection of what people want to be or value most? When I put the ideas of God-as-ideal and religion-as-power-structure together, I thought I had some sense of what made religion tick. I knew there was more to it -- the need for community and connection -- but I was concentrating on why people thought they needed God, not just a community.

Around the same time, I was studying Stoicism and its view of God. The ancient Stoic view of God is more subtle and complicated than any I’d encountered previously: they saw God as being sort of the fabric of the universe. It wasn’t a being separate from the universe: it was the universe. It was the order in the universe: it was reason and conscience both. The Stoics believed that when we do as we ought, -- as reason dictates -- we will be happy. Although I’m still trying to find the right balance between my emotional humanism (“Dammit, Jim!”) and my more Stoic leanings “(“Control yourself, Doctor.”) -- between the need for detachment and the need for attachment -- generally speaking I think Stoicism works well even for a nontheist like myself. Someone at the Stoic Registry, now called the “New Stoa”, wrote that the difference between a theistic Stoic and an atheistic Stoic is that one sees the Order of the universe as conscious while the other doesn’t.

What this did for me was make me aware of the power of the God-as-source idea. Previously I’d thought of this as silly. People pray to God and he doles out courage or wisdom? But now I get it: Marcus Aurelius referred to a well within us that will bubble forth if only we will dig -- if only we will apply our reason to find the best course of action. I don’t know how to explain this idea properly beyond that I get why people think of God as a universal source now. I understand it. If I thought it were real, I could revere it. As it happens, though, I cannot think of the universe as being conscious based on the information I have.

At the same time, I’ve realized there are bounds to knowledge. We can’t understand the universe as it may truly be -- only as it appears to us. I think we can know a great deal about the universe for our purposes: we can destroy a disease, land a machine on Saturn’s moons, invent a farm machine that analyzes the viability of rice even as it picks it from the ground. We can do an awful lot, but I don’t think we can contemplate the walls of the petri dish we call the universe. That’s sort of how I think of us at times: one-celled creatures in an overwhelmingly vast universe who don’t have a shot at really understanding it.

This is the mystery: this is where rationality cannot go, because it has no evidence to operate from. The natural laws I understand that explain the formation of our galaxy and of Earth and the development of life and society can’t penetrate the walls of the universe, wherever or whatever they may be. I suppose this is where ideas like “faith” come in, and so help me if I haven’t gotten to the point where I can say I understand a little of what that means.

My worldview is ever-evolving, and not in ways I would have ever expected. I keep wanting to connect to religious humanity -- to come to terms with the people who I once couldn’t understand, but who now I do but cannot connect with anyway. My own sense of spirituality, and even my sense of religion if you want to go that far, are distinctly Humanist: I believe we’re all alone and should do the best we can. I don’t think life is anything to complain about.

What’s happening to me is a growing sense of not having answers, but not really needing them too much. Sometimes, though, I wonder if all my claims to understanding God and faith are just attempts by some part of me to connect to the rest of humanity. I think about this, and then I think that maybe we’re not that different to begin with, that we’re all just doing the best we can to get along and that we all try to make the universe make sense to us. Most of us do this within the bounds of our culture: some of us reject that. Maybe that’s the difference? I don’t know where all this is going, really. Only time will tell.

Walking through Suffering

This morning I woke in misery. About once a month, I am visited by a motley crew of symptoms: a sinus headache and pressure, severe fatigue, and intermittent nausea and gagging impulses. There is no medicinal clue for this, as far as I know. Although sleep is the only escape from the pain, it often aggravates the headache -- which is strange for a sinus headache, but which only occurs during this "visit". The first time this hit me was in August 2006, and I was in bed for a week, lacking the strength to do anything else. It lost strength each time it hit me again, eventually coming lasting about a day and half, on average. Although it can be very weak some days, the period is never pleasant. Its precense today was especially inconvienent, given that I have classes to attend, work in my university's history office, a paper to finish, and six chapters of German to finish reviewing. (I had intended to finish my paper yesterday, but the library was closed for Easter.)

I realized early this morning that doing these things would be difficult. How could I endure aerobics class, for instance, if I couldn't even hold a cup of hot tea without my trembling spilling it on the table? After having breakfast and realizing that I wasn't going to be feeling better anytime soon, I decided to send my teacher an email telling her I wouldn't be there and trembled my way across campus to the university library, where I finished my paper and studied for German. The morning passed, and I felt oh so miserable. By the time 12:30 had arrived and I was leaving the office for lunch, I thought to myself "You know, I think if I found a handgun I wouldn't even wait to write a note!"

At lunch, I sat myself and pondered my situation. I still had so much to do -- how was I going to make it through the day? What I really disliked, beyond the physical pain and "Oh, just shoot me" feelings, was how the suffering had eroded my ability to interact with people. I found myself trying to get irritated or angry at trivial things (like the sound of someone walking behind me). I was also having to deal with feelings of paranoia. People kept staring at me, or so I thought, and I kept going to the rest room to check my zipper to make sure it wasn't open. When I began feeling irritated at two professors quietly talking, I knew I had to do something.

According to The Stoic Life, the Stoics believe that everything that happened to us left an impression upon our consciousness, but that we could "give assent to" or "Deny" those impressions. "Denying" the idea that people were staring at me because my zipper might be open was one thing, but denying my mental suffering was quite another. I knew it could be done, though. As far as I know, there are two types of pain: physical pain, as received through our nervous system, and mental pain. Mental pain, or suffering, can arise from both physical stimuli (a hammer hitting our thumb) or emotional stimuli (the loss of a friend). If suffering is in the mind, then I can deal with it -- disarm it. But how?

After lunch I had planned on walking through town to my local library for my weekly visit. My fatiuge had made me wonder if I shouldn't just go later this week, but I value my books to the point that I decided to stick it out. Leaving the dining hall and trailing behind the two whispering academics who had annoyed me so much, I decided to do something. I decided to sing to myself. "It's a good day...for shinin' your shoes, and it's a good day...for losin' the blues..."

While the song is one of my favorites, the lyrics refused to come to me. I continued walking -- and then tried again. "What did Dela-ware, boys, what did Dela-ware? What did Dela-ware, boys, what did Dela-ware? She wore her brand-new Jersey, she wore her brand-new Jersey, she wore her brand-new Jersey, and that's what Dela wore..."

It didn't seem to be working, and singing tired me. I continued, though, because there was nothing else to do. "Why did Cali-phone ya, why did Cali-phone ya? Why did Cali-phone ya, was she all alone? She called to say how-ah-yah, she called to say how-ah-yah, she called to say (Hawaii) and that's why she did phone!"

I continued singing softly to myself, stopping when I met a friend coming back from the library. We spoke a little and I went on my way, singing "How did Wiscon-sin, boys? She stole a new-brass-key. Too bad that Arkan saw boys, and so did Tenne-see! It made poor Flori die boys, it made poor Flori-die you see, she died in miss-our-i boys, she died in misery!"

And there I was, walking across the park to the library and I was feeling not "good", but...a lot less bad than I had before. The suffering had diminished. Thrilled, I continued humming to myself until I arrived in the library, at which I stopped as they generally frown on such things. I got my books, and noticed that one of them was not what I had expected. A week ago, while searching for "world religions", I found a book called "Embroidered Textiles". Then I was somewhat entranced by the title, thinking to myself that the author was going to look at the rich tapestry of human religious and spiritual experiences and then show to us the patterns hidden within. What a marvelous metaphor! I was quite looking forward to it. Imagine my amusement, then, when I opened the book to find that it was about actual textiles -- blankets, cloaks, and so on. I laughed for a while, and as I did realized that the suffering had diminished even more.

On my walk back through the park, I noticed a tennis ball. I made a sound of glee -- two weeks ago I'd found a similar tennis ball and had for a week kept it on my person for impromptu games of handball. I lost it last Sunday while throwing it against a building and catching it, because it hit a gutter pipe and bounced off at an odd angle into a trench that I couldn't access. And so there I was, walking back home, singing to myself, bouncing the tennis ball against the wet pavement. I had a headache and was still very much tired,but my suffering was gone. I had denied it through my behavior, and now felt strangely energetic and playful. Such is the power of the mind and mental denial.

And here is another thought: were I still in my parents' religion, I probably could have accomplished the same by singing a song of praise. Then, however, I would have interpeted what happened as being the work of God, who rewarded praise for relief from mental anguish. Either there's power in singing gaily, or Perry Como rewards those who keep his memory alive by singing his old songs.

If you want to hear the song I was singing, here it is below.

Community and Identity

"We humanists serve as best we can the only abstraction with which we have any familiarity, which is our community." - Kurt Vonnegut

I've been thinking about the question of identity and community. We human beings are social creatures, and to meet our needs we associate with one another and form communities. Outside of this urge to be social and to be with our fellows, however, there seems to me to be another driving force behind our gathering in communities: it is an urge to create identity for ourselves by attaching the idea of who we are to communities bigger than ourselves -- consequently enlarging our own feelings of self-worth. How attractive to think of oneself as member of something greater -- how well it feeds the ego. How many billions have perished because of pride in one's town, region, or country?

Searching for and creating identity seems to be a major occupation of the human race. Many people seem to try to create their identity based on the objects they own: their idea of self-worth based on the condition of their home, their cars, their clothes. They form their identity based on the television shows they watch, the music they listen to, the people they quote. Religion is a good example of people attempting to create their own identities by attaching themselves to something they perceive as greater -- and so is humanism. I have realized that I find greater meaning in thinking of myself as a member of Humanity. I now look at my deconversion experience through the lens of identity, and find that it makes much more sense now -- as does my progress in being able to move on.

Outside of the human need to socialize, I suspect the driving force behind this quest for community-centered identity is that of our own sentience. We are aware of our individual selves, so much to the point that it's very easy to regard ourselves and small and insignificant. While I have never felt small or insignificant, I have felt the loneliness of sentience, that longing to find a situation in which one belong. It was a loneliness that departed swiftly when I realized my humanist heart, but that loneliness is kept away through my persistent reaching-out to people. I don't want to depend on an idea or an ideal for my identity, even if it be a noble one: I want to be comfortable in my own skin, and I think I'm growing more and more so. At the very least I now realize when I am being drawn toward an organization to feed that subtle desire for identity. I seek to be so comfortable in my own identity that the only benefit organizations would bring me would be to give me a social outlet -- for I know that there are some needs that I cannot meet on my own. I need community, but I do not need an identity through it.

Truth and Meaning

One of the biggest obstacles facing a dialogue between believers of a particular faith and nonbelievers is that of the meaning people ascribe to ideas they believe as truth. It is one thing to believe something as true, but quite another to attach meaning (and thus emotion) to the idea. Meaningful ideas are not "bad", and they are probably unavoidable -- but when two people are discussing the truth-or-no nature of an idea, if they do not separate the meaning they derive from that idea from the idea itself, they will unavoidably confuse the issue. As Epictetus said, "the first duty of the truth-seeker is to rid the mind of one's conceits": do not assume the premise you attempt to prove.

I do not expect the people I encounter on a daily basis to separate the meanings they attach to ideas to the ideas themselves. I would if I were dealing with historians or scientists attempting to work out the truth of a matter, but on a daily basis, people aren't that engaged in the seeking of the truth. There are professions where truth claims are quite important -- banking, law, academia, and so on -- but for most people, I don't think truth claims come up that much. I think most people just live their lives, only needing to deal with the occasional truth claim. As such, the meaning attached to an idea they think of as true is more important than the actual veracity of the idea. I'm going to address Christianity specifically because it is the religion I have the most contact with. The average Christian, I would wager, does not spend a lot of time thinking about arguments for and against the idea that Jesus was God. If they were a serious Christian, though, they probably do spend time thinking about the meaning of that claim. They draw inspiration from his life: they are moved by feelings of mercy, humbleness, and love when they think of them. Other meanings are less pleasant to dwell on -- think of how a fundamentalist sees Jesus. What matters to most people, I think, is not the truth of the matter, but what meaning their ideas have for them. This is why it is easy to embrace theism and reject atheism: what meaning is there in atheism?

There isn't any. There isn't supposed to be. People can ascribe meaning all they want, but I don't think it is a far-fetched claim to say it's easier to create meaning out of a god than it is a lack of a god. The biggest obstacle to a civil discussion between Christians and nonchristians, or between believers in general and nonbelievers, is this matter of truth having taken on intense personal meaning. Personal meaning is subjective: it cannot be debated to any real purpose anymore than two people in an art gallery can argue over the "real" meaning of a painting. They can learn from or derive value from the other's interpretation if -- and only if, I think -- they accept that both of their interpretations are just that, interpretations. A Christian who is proselytizing, whoever, is not likely to accept the idea that what they believe to be true is just an interpretation -- nor are they likely to react to the proposition that their interpretation is wrong with any amount of grace. This is not a jibe at Christians in particular: if you believe something so forcefully that you're willing to knock on doors and intrude into the personal worldviews of strangers, it is not likely that you are a person who will suddenly back off and say "Well, yes, mine is only an interpretation". (Or, for that matter, that the people who wrote the text you take so seriously are only in possession of opinions, and not truths.)

I am starting to believe that discussions about atheism and theism are completely irrelevant. I recognize that some of my ideals are just that, ideals: they are not practical truth claims. I may have some rational justification for practicing the Golden Rule or for regarding all of humanity as important, but I accept that these are primarily ideas that mean something to me -- that I can't argue them, I can only say "This is what I believe". In so doing, though, I also put myself into the position of recognizing that for other people, the rational justification for believing in Jesus may be of only secondary importance -- that for them, what is important is the meaning they attach to those ideas. That, for someone who believes in the importance of believing what is true, is an odd thing to get used to. Stranger still is the fact that I'm more or less okay with this apparent contradiction between values. (I say apparent because I think the truth of the matter is, expecting humans to be rational is irrational.) What I want is for people to treat people decently. I want people to believe in themselves, to attempt to make their lives better. I'm starting to realize, though, that the philosophical life isn't for everyone and that those who do pursue self-growth may not do so on the terms I do -- and that's okay. (The idea that it wasn't okay at one point now strikes me as bothersome.)

So those are my thoughts, as they are now, on truth and meaning. I may develop this further as time wears on, but for today I just wanted to organize and express some thoughts of mine.

On Goodness

A few weeks ago, I stumbled upon a universal definition for ‘good’. I didn’t intend to do that: it popped up while I was writing on another topic. The definition that came to me was the measure of how well we fare when compared to our ideals. This definition makes it both objective and relative, in that you can use the same standard to understand the word “good” when it is being applied to a variety of situations.

For instance, say I had an uncle who I described as a good mechanic. This means that this uncle of mine comes very close to meeting the standards of an ‘ideal’ mechanic (the ones I can think of, anyway): he is extremely knowledgeable about all automobile matters; he is deft with his hands and always strives to prevent accidents; he treats his customers fairly, and he is creative at figuring out what the problems are with a car when the customer has a problem. Good’s opposite, “bad”, is a measure of how poorly we fare when we compared to our ideals. The bad mechanic, then, would possess limited knowledge, would be clumsy, would cheat his customers, would do his work sloppily, and so on. This does not mean the mechanic is a bad person -- just a bad mechanic. (Of course, if he is cheating his customers, I would not wager that he is a good person.)

I can apply this approach to any matter, I believe, and it works. I use it to understand why people say the things they do. We can see the reason why people from different systems of thought frequently come into opposition: their definitions of "good" vary. The reality that "good" is dependent on individual perceptions is objectionable to many, who strive for Absolutes. This is a topic I've written on before -- but even if someone were to set up an absolute code, goodness would still be dependent on independent perceptions, because "absolute" laws have to be interpreted by individual people. A good example of this is one of the Jewish "Ten Commandments", "Thou Shalt Not Kill". What does that mean? Ask five different people and you will probably arrive at five different answers. That statement has given rise to pacifist interpretation, vegetarian interpretation, only-in-self-defense interpretation, if-there's-a-just-war interpretation and a well-if-god-tells-you-to-it's-OK interpretation. Even as something as basic as "thou shalt not kill" is subject to a wide amount of interpretation. How many more interpretations are there for more complex codes of behavior?

Interestingly, based on this approach, I can see how people can come into conflict with themselves. If they are judging themselves by two separate sets of ideals, those ideals might conflict. For example, let's take a soldier who holds himself to the idea that you shouldn't kill. Another ideal he has, though, is that one should serve his country -- so he joins the Army and is taught to kill. He goes to a place like Afghanistan, for instance, and has to shoot people who attack him. He's taking life: he's betraying his ideals. The result would be self-conflict, but because his ideals are subject to his purposes, he rewrites the rules to make murder not-murder: he makes it self-defense. But what if he has to attack someone on suspicion that they might attack him, like say a checkpoint? Then he has taken life without actually being attacked, or even knowing he was attacked. Self-conflict ensues unless he is able to rewrite the terms once more, to justify it to himself somehow. There are many other opportunities for self-conflict: a businessman who tries to provide for his family and create a good business without mistreating his employees or cheating his customers with shoddy equipment: a lawyer who provides defense to someone she knows is guilty: an idealistic preacher who tries to keep a couple together even though the man is beating the woman, a young woman who has an abortion because she knows she can't provide a good life for a potential infant, or because it would be born with severe birth defects, and so on. In each instance, one ideal is conflicting with another.

Also, using this approach, we can see how people can come into conflict with one another and each party think of themselves as "right": We can see conflict between multiple "rights", and this is a very uncomfortable idea to live with. Take the immigration issue, for instance: I don't see a battle between the unconsciously illegal immigrants and the hard-working people who are being shut out of their jobs. I see a tragic conflict of rights: the immigrants, in my view, have a right to feed their families -- and so do the people who they are accidentally displace. Look at the American War of Independence: from the British perspective, the colonists had cost the Realm money because of their aggressive settling of Indian territory, leading to the necessity of the British defending the colonies, and the subsequent expense of it. The colonists were expected (fairly, from their perspective) to help pay for the expenses of maintaining an army. And yet from the colonial perspective, I can understand why they would resent the sudden imposition of financial burden. I understand both sides: I can support neither over the other.

I began writing this to share my definition of goodness, but I see this train of thought is not yet ended. I believe the definition I propose -- goodness being how well we fare when measured against our ideals -- is quite workable, and shows the origin of conflicts. I want to write on how we can greatly mitigate self-conflict and interpersonal conflict, but that will have to wait for another time: it strikes me as an important enough issue to merit its own post.

Emotional Maturity

I'm beginning to think that the foundation for emotional maturity is the realization of two things:

• We cannot control what happens to us.
• The only thing we can control is our response to what happens to us.

In the summer of 2006, I fell sick for nearly two weeks. I don't know what hit me, but the two symptoms I was conscious of were (1) extreme fatigue and (2) prolonged and severe headaches. I was bedridden the majority of the time. Despite this, though, I somehow had the presence of mind to write "...we have good days and we have bad days, but we deserve neither." I realized that I was sick, but I realized as the first week wore on that the symptoms were lessening, that it would pass.

It was this attitude that allowed me to maintain my composure while I was sick, to not give in to despair. I simply laid in bed, resting, thinking of other things. I won't deny that if I could have fallen asleep and died that I would have welcomed the relief -- for such was my physical misery -- but I survived. The lesson of that sickness has stayed with me, and has guided my thinking ever since. It's important to me. I don't know where it came from, but ah! -- how useful it is.

We do have bad days. We're attacked by viruses, mistreated by others, are stuck in traffic jams, have unexpected financial difficulties -- in summary, suffer from circumstances beyond our control. You can't stop people from talking about you -- you can't help catching a viruses. The air is filled with them. On the same note, though, we also have good days where traffic moves just the way we want. We go to the zoo and the animals amuse us: our path crosses that of a friendly stranger, and we make a personal connection. We have an easy day at work -- we go outside and find that the weather is ideal.

The idea that we can keep bad things from happening, or make good thing happen, is behind every superstition. Our ancestors did rain dances and sacrificed virgins to keep the sun rising: our contemporaries pray to the heavens to send rain. They weep and pray at their alters, trying to invoke the gods' favor to give them a raise, find them a mate, keep them from harm. People buy rabbit's feet and contractors design buildings that skip from floor twelve to floor fourteen.

Despite all of this effort, though, they can't actually change what happens. If I pray to Athena for good traffic on my drive to someplace, the effect will be exactly the same as if I had prayed to a bag of Skittles or not prayed at all (provided the time I spent praying instead of driving is taken into consideration). I can be as friendly as I like to people, but I'm not going to generate "karma" that makes people treat me kindly in return. Oh, some will return my smile with a smile, but that's only a natural response in people who like being treated with friendliness. We can't change these vents of life, and we waste considerable time, effort, and energy in trying to do so.

As much as we can't control, though, there is one powerful thing we can control: our own mind. It's safe to say that our emotional impulses give us much reason for regret: we make bad choices on them, and later say "I wish I'd thought that through". How many people are in the prisons today because they did something out of impulse -- threw a punch at someone, for instance? Human beings are so passionate that many religions and philosophies push for more self-control. Even emotional Pentecostalism teaches that self-control is part of the fruit of the spirit -- although it's not actually practiced. (An ex-Pentecostal joke: when is self control not a fruit of the spirit? In a Pentecostal church.)

People do learn self-control in varying degrees. They learn fairly quickly, for instance, that you have to watch what you say in front of authority figures. Some people are better at controlling themselves than are others. But this kind of self-control is limited to what we do, to how we respond rather than react to what's done to us. It doesn't include an ability to control what we do by ourselves, or how we think -- and these things are just as if not more important.

Why is how we think important? I believe it is so because our thinking defines our reality. If you go outside and look at a tree, you're not really seeing the tree: you're seeing the image your brain drew of the tree, using the light that is reflected or absorbed from them and taken in by your cones and rods. If you have "normal" vision, you will see it as a collection of greens and browns, probably. But what if you're color-blind? What if the equipment that draws your image of a tree is different from most everybody else's? The image drawn will be different.

The same is true of every sense, I think. Our brains create a reality based our senses. This is true for the sense of reason, which has to be trained rather than being automatic. (The idea of reason as a sense is another essay, I think.) I learned at a fairly young age that I could manipulate the way I sensed things. Have you ever noticed that a location that is new to you looks different than it does when you're familiar with it? Take a house -- does it "feel" different from the way it did when you first moved in? When things are new, they are colored by our imagination, by possibilities: when we are familiar with them, they're colored by our experiences. I realized that I could manipulate my thinking and see something old through new eyes -- and see something new through a sense of familiarity.

Not everyone is conscious of this: just last year, while walking up the stairs in my residency hall at my university, I commented to someone that 'I can still see this place the way it was when I first moved in.' He turned his head and looked at me, replying "It looks just the same. We haven't changed anything..." It wasn't the sight of the place, it was feeling of the place: what it meant, and through that, how it looked. It's a subtle difference, and I'm not sure how to explain it. But this taught me that I could manipulate the way I thought about things.

In late 2006 or early 2007, I read an essay titled Humanist Spirituality: Oxymoron or Authentic Path to Enlightenment? by Doug Muder, a Unitarian minister. In it, he explores the idea of spirituality, and connects it to the Stoic practice of being mindful of one's thoughts: of thinking about how you think and how your thoughts impact your state of mind. The lecture impressed me to the point that I re-read it every so often, and when I read it I began trying to put it into practice. I began to examine my thoughts, to apply reason to them and ask if they were doing me any good. When the way people treated me inspired anger, I seized that anger and thought: will growing angry do me any good? Or will it just make matters worse? When I want to give in to hate, I think: do I really want to sacrifice part of my emotional well-being to this person? Why? When I grew upset or despair at a situation, I turned that anger or despair into the willpower to change the situation. I forced my emotions to work for me -- and if they weren't useful, I neutered them. The podcasts of Zelig Pliskin -- amusingly, an Orthdox rabbi- helped. He advises his listeners to think about the way they're thinking and feeling, to apply reason to them.

I think that this Stoicism is a logical extension of being a freethinker. I said in my "This I Believe" essay that inspired by the successes of the scientific method, I adopted critical thinking as part of my worldview. If I use reason as my guide for what I believe, why not use it to order the way I think? A year ago -- Thanksgiving week, 2007 -- I read my first bit of Stoic literature, that of Marcus Aurelius' meditations. Shortly before Thanksgiving this week, I read Epictetus' Discourses and Manual for Virtuous Living. In both, I found amazing insights that built on this distinction between that which we can control and that which we can't. I've shared my favorite quotations from Aurelius before, and I plan to post my favorites from Epictetus in a week or so. I've been thinking about writing this essay -- or musing, whichever it has turned out to be -- since the summer, and I didn't want to post Epictetus until after posting this. The reason is partly vanity: the distinction between what we can control and what we can't is the essence of everything Epictetus said, and I like the fact that the stuff I think of independently has already been thought of before by people I consider wise. It makes me think I'm doing something right.

Because I read Epictetus before I finished articulating my own thoughts, I'm going to end this with a few quotations from his works that illustrate the theme of what I was writing about. It seems an apt way to conclude.

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Happiness and freedom begin with a clear understanding of one principle: some things are within our control, and some things are not. Keep your attention focuses entirely on what is truly your own concern, and be clear that what belongs to others is their business and none of yours.

When something happens, the only thing in your power is your attitude toward it: you can either accept it or resent it. What really frightens and dismays us is not external events themselves, but the way in which we think about them. It is not things that disturb us, but our interpretation of their significance. [...] We cannot choose our external circumstances, but we can always choose how we respond to them.

People don't have the power to hurt you. Even if someone shouts abuse at your or strikes you, if you are insulted, it is always your choice to vie w what is happening as insulting or not. If someone irritates you, it is only your own response that is irritating you.