Between a barbarian and a taliban

Over 25 % of men in a recent South African survey admitted to rape.  The article quotes a government official as saying that this behavior is so ingrained in the culture that it isn’t a law enforcement issue, it is a deep-seated cultural issue.  At issue is what it means to be a man – and, without putting too fine a point on it, a human being.  So this is barbarism.

In the Swat Valley, villagers have taken up arms against religious thugs who think that throwing acid in the faces of school children, and stoning girls for unspecified offences is the way to honor god.  We’ve got to find a way between these two extremes.

We’ve got to find a way to have discussions about deep-seated differences without resorting to violence.  Can you be vocal about a pro-abortion stance without risking murder?  Can you be gay without risking being mugged?  If our history has shown us anything, it is that we cannot know the truth (though thinking we know is something else again).  Given that, we need to admit a certain amount of tolerance, a certain amount of latitude – until we can no longer put up with it.  Then we need a set of laws to sanction the behaviour, and if required, to protect us from evil.

Open the gate too wide, and we are awash in aberrant behaviours that are not good for civil society.  Too narrow, and we demonize anyone who thinks or acts differently than we do.  And in any event, laws enforce norms – what we need is to adopt and promulgate a series of norms that strike the right balance.  To do this, we need a comprehensive education aimed at more than getting a job, a democracy encompassing engaged, informed citizens, sensible curbs on the power of money to buy votes and a functioning balance of power.

We need a nation of people convinced of the necessity of civil liberties, of economic justice, of common courtesy and respect.  We need to throw off the attempts of corporations to drive the culture into shallow consumerism and voyeurism – we need an American dream, a global dream that is attainable, affordable, sustainable and ultimately satisfying.  We do that by seeking, and finding, this for ourselves and our community – and then from that base, reaching out to the world around us, and working to provide that same opportunity for everyone – even people who have a different dream in mind.  Not any dream – there are limits, as we are learning as we watch the men of South Africa or the Taliban of Swat valley pursue theirs.  Not any dream, as we watch corporations horde more and more of the world’s wealth, and squander more and more of our dwindling resources.  Not any dream, as we watch our culture descend into narcissism and opportunistic materialism, valuing neither themselves nor the people around them.

The answer cannot be to descend into religous fundamentalism – exchanging chaotic horror for relgiously-sanctioned horror.  We’ve got to open our eyes to the fact that only as each one of us behaves less selfishly, as each of us promotes peace, and practices tolerance and mercy can we build a better society.  We can begin to change the game by ourselves playing  by different rules, and by working to ensure that the rules apply to everyone.  The alternative is chaos.

 

Extortion in the Name of God

Rep. Mike Pence was asked by Chris Matthews if he believed in evolution.  Mike could not admit that he believed in evolution.  Why?  Because he know the price he would have to pay amoung his conservative Christian base.

Please be clear – there is no controversy, no doubt at all that the facts support evolution.  What there is is a religious objection to evolution – because it contradicts some folks’ reading of the book of Genesis.  Dr. Tood Woods, a creationist and a scientist qualified to understand the evidence for evolution writes:

I have hope because I’m a sinner saved by grace. That’s my whole reason. It’s not because I can refute evolution (I can’t) or because I can prove the Flood (I can’t) or because I can make evolutionists look silly (I don’t).

So while the usefulness, relevance and certainty of evolution continues to grow, the demands of certain religious conservatives are also growing – demanding that what they could not get in the university, in the science lab or in the courts (the right to teach religion in science class), they are now demanding by threats and intimidations.  This is only a problem if we give in.

So what?  Why not let them have their “teach the controversy?”  A few things are happening – first, many people, raised in a conservative Christian faith, are distancing themselves from science becuase they are being taught that sceintists are the enemies of faith, and that evolution is an atheist conspiracy.

This antagonistic view of science is damaging.  Though it is not doubt true that science can be bought, the antidote in cases like the dangers of smoking was better evidence and fewer cover ups.  Creationism is just the opposite – and insistence that we bury the evidence and cover up the fact that there is no scientific controversy.

Mind you, there is a controversy – but this over how to read the bible.  Is it a magical book, right in everything written between its covers, or is it an artifact of human culture, reflecting the peoples, civilizations and worldviews of its various authors?  This controversy should not be worked out in science education and litmus tests for political candidates . The religious controversy, not the proxy war over creationism – is the struggle that Christians should be facing up to.

We need to find ways of embracing evidence-based living – looking around us to see what actually works and what doesn’t, not battling over things that have already been established – like evolution and the age of the universe.  If we don’t, we will find ourselves talking across a vast gulf – with mutually exclusive ways of understanding the world, and very different approaches to addressing the problems we face.

 

New York Times columnest David Brooks argues for the power of local solutions to global problems:

The correct response to these dynamic, decentralized, emergent problems is to create dynamic, decentralized, emergent authorities: chains of local officials, state agencies, national governments and international bodies that are as flexible as the problem itself.

Local ownership and community responsibility is not only a great way to reintroduce responsible capitalism into the culture – it is also good national security and threat response.  Without turning inward, we need to find ways of engaging citizens at the local level – as a way of unleashing creative, locally-relevant solutions.

 

The Myth of The Self-Made Man

One of the enduring American myths is that we shape and control our own destiny.  A recent Pew-commissioned poll found that more than 70% of Americans believe that their own hard work was the major factor in upward mobility — even as the middle class has experienced stagnating wages and witnessed an historic transfer of wealth to the top 1% of the US population.

By a 71 to 21 percent margin, Americans said that personal attributes such as hard work and drive are more important to economic mobility than structural issues such as the state of the economy and one’s economic circumstances growing up.

Are self-motivation and personal responsibility important?  Absolutely.  Is it all there is to the story?  Not by a long shot.  In the past few decades, changes to  tax policies and lack of regulations have  enriched the top 1% of the economy at the expense of the middle class.   Meanwhile, real wages for the middle class have been stagnant for decades.   Rather than face this fact, we cling to our belief in exceptionalism.  “These statistics may apply to someone else, but not to me,” we seem to think.  This is, of course, the same viewpoint that leads folks to the casinos and lottery-ticket-dispensers.   Ironically, it is this very belief that keeps us from being properly outraged at  a whole series of bubbles – from real estate to tech  to mortgage-backed securities – that have allowed a few individuals to become obscenely wealthy by doing nothing more than manipulating the financial markets – no value added at all.

An even-more-disturbing downside to this view is that, in our religion and politics, as well as our economics, we value individual concerns over corporate concerns.  Salvation over justice, tax cuts over fiscal responsibility, my own income over a living wage and an equitable distribution of wealth.  We are quick to yell “Socialism” when money goes to those who need it, but have only admiration when the elites raid our own bank accounts to enrich themselves (which is exactly what has been going on in the US, with the amount of  income going to the top 1% increased from 8.9% in 1972 to 21.8% in 2005).  This is certainly a redistribution of wealth, and one that hurts us all.  But the millionaire right-wing pundits, for some reason, don’t see this as a problem!

It has gotten to the point that even folks like Alan Greenspan and Richard Posner are questioning their former support for deregulation and “free-market” capitalism.  It should hardly comes as a surprise when you champion the idea that profit should be the only motivation in an economic transaction that this creates a tremendous pressure to align laws and practices around maximizing of profit at the expense of all other values – including human rights, conservation, pollution, global warming, local communities and even basic community values like honesty, hard work and respect for your neighbor.

So the appropriate response?  Insist that corporations behave like good neighbors, and make profit just one aspect of their mission statement.  This means, for example, finding a way to pay a living wage, providing universal health insurance and a way to save for retirement that is not based on the shell game that the stock market has been shown to be.  It means discovering a way to pay for the full cost of goods and services – from extraction to transportation to manufacturing, marketing  distribution and disposal.  It means finding a way to value strong communities and local ownership, while valuing universal human rights and ecological responsibility.

Some may argue that this is already happening, with businesses heavily involved in corporate philanthropy, public-private partnerships and community planning.  Not only is this kind of corporate citizenship rare, but all too often, the “good neighbor” part of a business is divorced from the core mission of the company.  Yes, there are positive examples of manufacturers working to reduce their environmental footprint, becoming proactively involved with local concerns, and holding their off-shore suppliers accountable to better standards of responsible practices.  But all-in-all, these are the exception, not the norm.  What is more, as companies become more global, local and regional philanthropy and involvement decline, if for no other reason than the owners are no longer on-site, experiencing the impact of their operation and the needs of the community first hand.  And at the end of the day, a company is judged solely on its short-term financial performance.  This cannot help but have dire consequences for issues like the ecology and quality of life that have no hard economic value.

We’ve seen, once again, what happens when we give business a free reign.  The antidote is personal responsibly.  Not theirs (at least at first) but ours.  We have to insist that our own employers behave more responsibly.  We have to insist that the folks we buy from behave more responsibly. We have to reject the notion that our most important role in life is that of consumer, and reshape an economy where our primary role is a member of a community, a nation, the world.  When each of us takes on, as our own personal responsibility, working for justice and equality and fairness, when we each make it our personal responsibility to advocate for meaningful work at a living wage for everyone then we will have made a start.

Can such a thing happen?  Well, we’ve managed to believe the lie that unregulated capitalism is good for us, why not accept the truth that  personal and corporate responsibility is the only path to a livable future?

 

Why Local?

As the disparity between rich and poor continues to grow, and in the US, as the middle class is put at risk, and the concentration of wealth (which will only increase as a result of this economic downturn) increases, the importance of strong communities with a local focus become even more urgent.

Why strong communities with a local focus?

David Korton underscores what is at stake when he writes:

One of the important lessons of history is that those who own, rule. Even in titular democracies, the powers of ownership readily trump the power of the ballot and play an often decisive role in shaping cultural values. For these reasons, growing living economies that democratize economic relationships in the deepest sense is a leading edge of the work of birthing Earth Community.

“The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community” (2006, p342+)

When we let corporations, who exist to generate money, manipulate values and consumer preferences for their own ends, things like quality of life, character and the environment become collateral damage.  A possible response?  Local ownership and accountability.

Read a longer excerpt here (link will open in a new window).

 

Character and Community

We are suffering from a crisis of character.  This is because we are in a faith crisis — we are in the midst of a sea-change of worldview brought about by the scientific revolution and enlightenment thought.  We are in the middle because most people in the world still embrace a magical worldview, and hold narrow, parochial views in which they believe that they are the special focus of supernatural concern and action.  We will be over the hump of this transition when the vast majority of us recognize that we are all human beings, sharing a common past and a common future, equally deserving of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness – and that as far as we can tell, the course of our life is determined by our evolutionary heritage and our cultural, political and economic context.   We will not complete this transition until we realize that it is fundamentally wrong to force the majority of the world to support our privileged lifestyle, simply because we got here first.

I am describing the issue – I am not suggesting how we get there.  I imagine that we will find a host of ways – I do not believe that we need a single world order (in fact, I suspect this will impede progress), nor a particular political or economic system.  True, I suspect progress will most likely involve  some sort of democracy, and some form of free enterprise – but I also suspect that there is lots of latitude here as well.

Character is the glue that holds our ship together while we navigate through the sea of life.  Character is the sum of the rules and strategies by which we determine how and what we do – and so our character is demonstrated by our words and actions.  Community is the group expression of character.  It is a self-reinforcing embodiment of what we will and will not tolerate, demonstrates the way members want to be treated, and the illustrates the quality of life we want to experience.

Both character and community are informed by our beliefs – which are the justifications we give ourselves for the character and community we promote.  Faith, finally, is the confidence we have that our beliefs are accurate.

So in what is our faith?  What do we believe?  How does that manifest in character and community?  The answers to these questions determine the shape of our lives – our family, neighborhood, government – even corporations.  The things we value, the aspirations we have, the ways in which we define quality of life – these are the datums that democracy and capitalism respond to – the things that cause us to vote and buy.

When we are silent, or when we allow politicians, religious leaders or corporations to define our character for us (as Bush did after 9/11, when he defined us as consumers, stating that the appropriate response to the terrorist attack was to go shopping), we are shaped into caricatures of humanity – single issue voters, consumers, defined by our appetites and hates.

We need to reverse the order here – and wake up to the fact that government, corporations, even religious movements should exist for us – not the other way around.  The only way to make this happen is through activism.  Rather than be herded, surveyed, split into demographic groups and manipulated – we need to get back to a character rooted in a shared humanity, and a respect for one another (where ever in the world that other lives), our environment, and an enduring quality of life.

These are not idealist values (or not only idealistic), but the simple reality – as we face shortages, pollution, climate change and the rising power of governments, religions and corporations, we must find a way to create – world-wide – people-sized communities where basic human principles of freedom, tolerance, sustainability and an acceptable quality of life is the norm.

No central force (religious, economic or governmental) can achieve this.  One of the lessons of large militaries facing insurgencies is that it is very difficult (if not impossible) to put down a popular, grass-roots, decentralized movement.  All of humanity must become such a movement – not at war with each other, but relentlessly at peace with ourselves, our community, the world and our ecosystem.

 

Why Look to the Rich?

Many of us watch the stock indexes, read the jobless numbers, listen to the what Buffets and Sorroses have to say about the markets while we wait for the rich oligarchs on Wall Street and the capital markets to decide that it is safe to play again, and get the engines of the economy moving.

Why look to these selfish elitists, who are obviously only in it for themselves?  They didn’t show such great judgment leading up tho this debacle, did they?  Missing the warning signs, ignoring the risks, reaping vast profits, heedless of the potential impact on the entire world.    They are the ones who devised the complex and deceptive financial instruments that got us into this mess, or were duped into buying them.  They are the ones we have entrusted the economic health of the planet to – and as it turns out, they were off enriching themselves, and not at all interested in what happened to the rest of the world.  And these are the folks we look to for turning things around?  These are the folks we are bribing with infusions of cash, mortgaging our future to coax into coming out to play, so the whole cycle can be repeated again in a few decades, when the public memory has grown dim?

What we need are accountable communities – a system with absolute transparency, measurable effectiveness, and clear goals and objectives.  Under the current approach of global capital, we see economic exploitation, yawning gap between the rich and poor, ecological disasters and a frivolous use of our dwindling natural resources.  We see a stunning lack of fore site and planning.  A system based on a few individuals getting rich at the expense of the rest, a system where our job is simply to shop – this system cannot produce a rational, fair and forward-thinking economic or social policy.

At the same time, a return to some religious view of personal morality is not the answer.  Their focus on personal morality has proven to be a distraction.  While religious leaders are expound on their version of sin, the social and economic systems continue unchallenged.  The churches all too often breed a narrow, self-interested view of life and our place in society – one that uncritically accepts consumerism, lack of accountability from business and government, and ignores the larger social, political, environmental and economic ramifications of their faith.

The US is a pluralistic, secular democracy.  Though people are free to live out their beliefs concerning social relationships, morality and community (within limits), they are not and should not be allowed to impose their views on these arenas on others.   What is somewhat ironic is that one area where a personal moral message could have an impact on the current crisis is in the area of consumerism – the very topic that is off-limits in many faith communities, due to the close connection between religious and social conservatives and capitalism.

What is more, these “culture wars” are a distraction.  The narrow focus on things like gay marriage and gun control have effectively distracted us from issues like the ecological & climate crises, our crumbling infrastructure and our dependence on foreign oil.

The prescription?  More accountable, less hierarchical communities.  Churches are often great communities – but they do not reach enough people.  Social and civic groups are often too narrow in who they target.  Gangs are a kind of dysfunctional community – essentially, a kind of clan capitalism – distorting the idea of a community to make money or promote the power of the bosses.  As has happened before, these gangs need to make the transformation from criminal to social enterprise.  Though they may have little utility to global capitalism, these folks can be functioning members of local communities.  What we cannot allow, however, is to replace rule of law with rule by gun, democracy with the “big man,”  legitimate work with crime.  All of this is undermined when we celebrate a life of crime because it is a way of asserting power and personal dignity in a system that seems people as interchangeable parts in a machine designed to make a few wealthy and the rest wage slaves.

This involves a return to a local economy.  One reason that owners should be local is because they can be held accountable – not just by laws, but by personal relationships.  Owners ought to know and love the local community, geography, political situation – rather than be part of a disconnected economy where both product and profit are consumed by faceless strangers.  What people do for work ought to be connected to who they are and where they live.

This also involves rediscovering how to live in community.  Community is a skill, and a community can be a good thing, or it can be a toxic thing.  But we know how to encourage vibrant, effective communities – we know how to develop skills, spot talents and abilities, emntor and recognize the gifts and abilities that foster and maintain communities.  As a society, we need to learn to identify, train, support and honor the hard work and dedication it takes to foster community.

This does not mean a return to some parochial village model – a modern model of the human psyche and the our information infrastructure can connect us – humanize our trading partners, prevent a completely local focus – but returning a personal, accountable, local nature of work will be a good start- and we should take advantage of this current economic crisis to take back our economy and builtstong, local, diverse communities.

 

Rules are not enough

I ran across an interesting book review.  Part of it reads:

The Greeks recognized that it takes more than a sound argument to get people to do the right thing. People need to be trained to desire and be motivated by the right kinds of things, beginning in childhood. Aristotle’s basic insight regarding moral education is that people don’t learn how to live virtuously in a classroom or a weekend seminar, because virtue requires not good lecture notes, but practice. Good arguments might be necessary for justifying our actions or for understanding why our actions are right, but they are certainly not sufficient to transform us into moral people. In addition to praising the life of reason, by emphasizing the cultivation of virtue, involving exercise and practice, the Greeks offer a deeper conception of what it is to live well, and an assurance that striving for virtue is itself the pursuit of happiness.

This idea of life as something we practice, and that a well-lived life is something that we learn to do – something that takes discipline and attention is critical if we are to recapture a public sense of virtue and shared values.

We seem to have bought the notion that only an ethic imposed from without – by God – is valid, and sense we’ve by-and-large abandoned God-as-rulemaker (even if we believe), we are adrift.  This is nonsense – dangerous nonsense.

The recent IG report on the Justice Department had conservative Christians hiring people based on candidates attitudes towards “God, guns, and gays” even though this was an explicit violation of the civil service rules.  These same conservative Christians have swept aside the constitution and justified kidnapping and torture, illegal wiretaps and placing unqualified candidates in critical government jobs – all on the basis that their faith and philosophy trumps.  Personal integrity and a sense of obligation to the public they serve does not seem to enter into it – I suspect because they think of themselves as answering to a higher power.  The moral decay they decry has in fact infected them – because they look to a set of rules for their morality, and not the discipline of working hard to live a virtuous life.

One lesson o take from this is that adherence to the beleif that morality existis in any set of rules is insufficient.  No matter what, you have to do the hard work of developing a life worth living – which comes from cultivating virtue, not by espousing rules.

 

Self-Awareness: Bolted on Real-World Modeling

A recent study seems to suggest that we often make decisions before we are conscience of making up our minds. It makes sense to me, when you think that self-awareness evolved late in the game. Perhaps self-awareness is primarily useful for building accurate models of the world – perhaps it is useful in building cohesive social networks – but it does not seem to be central to decision making.

This reinforces the idea of “gut reactions” and “sleeping on it.” We have very efficient decision-making skills that predate self-awareness. Self awareness adds a mental model of the world we live in and the importance of social relationships and cultural factors. Our decision-making ability may ignore all of that – which is why a gut reaction can be refreshing, ruthless, inappropriate… in short, it is a decision without regards for social status or “big-picture” ramifications. Literally, cutting through the Gordian knot, because it is an immediate solution not open to anyone who censors their instincts by their social and political awareness.

So self-awareness adds a social and ethical dimension to our decision-making. Who knows, perhaps our social and ethical ideas, our “big picture” models of how the world works can also inform our “gut reactions” – but then again, maybe they can’t. This would go a long way in helping us understand why we have such a hard time aligning our actions with our ideals – our gut is constantly short-circuiting our ethics, and offering clear decisions that may not align with how the world really works, or the larger realities (about which our intuition knows nothing).

If this is true, it might help us understand why wise men are also hermits – because they can align their intuition with their lifestyle, without running afoul of the complications of civilization.

 

The Real World?

It is important that we understand that there is a real world, and that we live in it. The mantra of “real for me” and “true for me” is a distortion that makes a real difference in how we live, the choices we make, and the kind of community we seek.

One of the implications of the the success of the scientific world view is the vindication of the existence of the real world. I can run a test for iron in your blood, confident that your body works essentially like mine, and that the test for iron will work the same on your blood as it does for mine, no matter where you live or what you believe about bodies, science or blood.

But to say we all live in the same, real world is not the same thing as saying that we all experience or think about the world in the same way. We perceive the world through a subset of all possible perceptions, all possible senses. For example, we have no ability to see into the infrared, so we don’t visually observe the heat of an object. What we sense about the world is a subset of what is “out there” to be observed. So one person can see a rock and not know it is hot,while another person can see and feel it, and so knows that it is hot. Because we don’t all observe all of the world’s properties, our starting points can and do differ.

Next we process and filter what we sense. For example, we have 3 color receptors (some birds have 4), so we “sort” light waves into 3 bins – a somewhat arbitrary choice that limits what we report to our brains. We have blind spots, chemical fatigue, we have special receptors to process lines, etc. What we pass on to the brain has been filtered and enhanced before it ever leaves the eye.

Then we process and filter our perceptions in various places in our brain – for example, converting a chemical signal from the eye into the experience of color, looking for faces, identifying patterns, processing motion – we do quite a bit of pre-processing before our awareness of the outside world gets to our consciousness. For example, out brain suppresses background noise, especially when we concentrate, so we may not “hear” someone talking to us, though there is nothing wrong with our hearing – it has literally been blocked by our brain. Sometimes, our perceptions get passed onto different parts of the brain on “priority override” and we find ourselves on our feet and running before we are consciously aware of some perceived threat.

Finally we make decisions about the meaning and significance of what we see – ignoring some data, rationalizing others, assuming other things not in evidence. Some of this is under our control, lots of this is not – and our responses can be predicted by our genetic makeup, physiological state, upbringing, education, faith and culture.

What we pay attention to, how we assign significance, what responses we can conceive of in responding to what we perceive – these are all in large part not going to change from experience to experience. It may be that you can “expand your consciousness” to encompass possible ways of thinking about and responding to the world around us – but this is a difficult, unpredictable and time-consuming process. Even conversion experiences and “ah-ah” moments are the culmination of complex cascades of thought and experience.

In the past, challenging someone to a fight over a slight of honor would have been commonplace. Today, it is less accepted, at least in some circles. Once, changing your path to not cross that of a black cat’s would have been deemed prudent. Today, I hope, not so much. Once, you would have taken on your father’s job, or been married, or taken a religious vocation. Now, there are lots more options. Once, the world was full of dangerous capricious spirits – in the trees, in the water, behind the wind, in the creatures we encountered – a magical, potent nature to be approached with awe and fear, and propitiated. It is not quite so numinous these days, at least for most people. Are we exercising our free will when we walk, unafraid, across a stream that our ancestors knew housed a capricious water sprite, or do we just see the world differently?

A more recent example are the reactions to the 2000 Florida presidential vote. Researchers found that they could predict an individual’s attitude to the crisis by looking at a person’s education and background, even though the judges, lawyers, business people and so on interviewed thought they were judging the evidence. It is a sobering reminder that what we feel so strongly to be a rational decision may be more about who we are and how we were educated and raised, than about the facts themselves.

What we think of as free will is much more determined by the culture in which we live (and that does include concepts like materialism, and faith, and the nature of “reality”) than by any absolute intellectual categories. Even so, materialism does not posit that because we are “just” biological machines, we are limited to mechanical responses to inexorable forces. Rather, it suggests that the world we see around us is governed by knowable principles. Even if things are too chaotic to predict, the possible consequences can be modeled, and predictions can be made and assigned various probabilities.

This is why you or I can go to a store and buy jeans that reflect our individual style, even though they were made months ago in the tens of thousands by strangers on the other side of the world! But still, within certain guidelines, we do choose this brand and not that, this style and not that one. And we can, within limits, decide to look at the evidence and begin to change how we view and react to the world.

So angels do not push the planets in their orbits – you need to look to physics to understand the motion of celestial objects. People not not fear loud music because their mother was scared by a cannon shot while they were in the womb. We look to the physiology we inherited, and our own experiences. The witch in the next village is not making your cow sick because she put a curse on you. We turn to veterinary medicine and epidemiology, and forgo burning the witch.

The choices we make are bounded by how we sense, how we filter, the things we have inherited from our culture that tell us how to make sense of our world. And within the degrees of freedom provided by our physical and psychological faculties, and within the range of things that we can imagine, given the times we live in, we make choices. Not completely free, but not completely bound, either.