3/6/10

I was a Virginian for fifteen years. I grew up there and went to the University of Virgina and got my baccalaureate degree in Russian Studies there. I have relatives in Virginia still, and I keep close contact with the University as a proud alumnus. I contribute annually to the University, and in fact, partly because of alumni who contribute, the University of Virginia has attained and maintained superior status among universities, (currently ranked 2nd among public universities, but often tied with UC Berkeley for 1st), all this despite the dramatic funding cuts from Richmond.

These cuts are nothing new. During the Reagan years the percentage of the University's budget coming from the Commonwealth dropped into the low teens and hovered there for years ... never rising, but always being nibbled and then gobbled away as a perversely and ironically ignorant state population elected Republicans to keep house in the Old Dominion. But the percentage of state support for the University of Virginia has reached a new low this year, down to a mere seven percent of the total budget. It is all the more ridiculous then for the state's Attorney General to demand that all "public" universities in Virginia rescind their admission and conduct policies that extend protection to persons "without regard to their sexual preferences."

This is what you get when you elect ideological morons from the Right. The denizens of southern and southwestern Virginia are particularly responsible for this outrage. If the Board of Visitors at UVa actually complies with this bogus concept that only the state Assembly can identify classes of persons ... which is threadbare reasoning to begin with ... I will be visiting the Grounds Thomas Jefferson created and I will be quite vocal about removing the University from the ranks of public universities. Richmond telling Charlottesville how to conduct a university is like the guy who wipes down your car after a carwash telling you where you may drive.

JB

1/12/10

From a friend in the UK comes this magnificent demonstration of the power of individual people ... like you. Iron Mountain was founded on the principles that a military-industrial state supporting an elite (including the central finance sector) cannot survive without brain-washing its population. See what you can do ... at home ... at work ... wherever your voice can be heard.

JB

1/11/10

The epigram in the title of today's essay suggests that god manifests him/herself through the people ... as a whole. It is an interesting concept which often is turned around to suggest that deity is us. No matter really, the problem in all of this is us. And, the problems we have are quickly manifested in politics and culture generally. Today's subject is mental health and the decline of it in recent years.

When I read this article about mental disorders increasing in teenagers and young adults that was forwarded to me by a colleague in Boston, a couple things leapt into my mind: the irresilience of the human mind and the consequences for democracy where significant numbers of people are not completely "sane."

What I mean by irresilience is that given any number of people there will be a percentage who cannot accommodate themselves readily or easily to change, especially significant change like a Great Recession or rapidly evolving technostructures or revolutions in social mores. I do not mean that all people have significant irresilience, but I do mean that all people have some and some people have a lot and it shows on little studies as blips in the overall percentages. In other words, sometimes things change too fast for some people, and they become disoriented, anxiety ridden, and to one degree or another incompetent.

The consequences for democracy are pretty clear. The more people who are acting and behaving out of unhealthy mental states the less likely the country is to be making good decisions about the commonwealth and our need to pass along a stable society to our progeny. It raises the awful question of whether democracy is the right way to handle statecraft.

The answer to that question is that democracy finds a home where people demand it, and otherwise the forces of elites tend to fill in the vacuums created by distracted and disorient mental health. We are in such a situation now with finance elites basically calling the shots from their own self-perceived Olympus. The flaw in their reasoning, of course, is that any group of human beings is susceptible to bad mental health and bad decision-making.

To put this all in tangible terms, it appears that the White House is suffering from a hubristic elitism that accepts the notion that Finance has its hands on the toggles and switches, so ipso facto they must know what is going on. How the White House comes this conclusion is that their view of the general society is full of misgivings, particularly as the rant from the right suggests ever increasing "insanity." It gets to you after a while ... and the White House is no exception.

JB

12/14/09

The History Channel premiered a "revisionist" version of American history,"The People Speak," Sunday evening that has created a stir here and there. Here, I was moved by both the readings and the words, by—finally—having these words included into American history as a theme, not just as spicey-but-errant noise in the background of Manifest Destiny or What's Good for General Bullmoose. Howard Zinn, is preachy, and if you are not careful, or don't have a Ph.D. in History, you might easily miss the point that his is definitively not THE history of the American republic. He never says it is, but he says his history ... which is a social history of politics, rather than a political history of society ... has been glossed over and sometimes left completely out of the picture and narrative of American History.

The stir "there" has been very mixed. Tom Shales, (yes, I know you have never heard of him), at the Washington Post did not like the four hour show all that much. People further right or those inclined to be supporting the status quo, take your pick, have even nastier things to say. On the other hand, perhaps predictably, Mary McNamara, of the Los Angeles Times was strongly supportive of the History Channel effort.

I don't know when or even whether the two part documentary ... sorry, Shales, these are real words by real people who were really consequential in American history ... will air again, but I certainly recommend it. I recommend it with the proviso that it be understood as just the tiniest beginning of a popular social history of the United States. For those of you on school boards, I frankly do not see how you can continue to teach American History as if these things were not said and the circumstances of their being said did not happen!

Finally, after watching this show I watched a documentary on the narcotics problem along the Mexican border, within Mexico, and within the United States. The problem was distilled succinctly by a narrator whose name I missed. The problem is that drugs are the largest single business in the world. The United States is the biggest market. The market is billions and billions of dollars. "Apparently, Americans cannot face their democracy without drugs," he said!

Well ... sooner or later people are going to see a connection between our national obsession with drugs and the cognitive dissonance of our mythologies!

JB

11/30/09

An Open Letter to the People of Iran

Iran is the heir to Persia, and as such is a very, very old civilization. Every literate person in the world knows this. Modern Iran is not an old civilization, however, and even modern Iranians may not understand the implications of their country's relative youthfulness. The truth is that a huge percentage (43.2%) of the Iranian population is under thirty years of age. Of these males outnumber females, which is also more than just interesting.

These demographics play to some very interesting psychological, moral, and cultural issues. For instance, in the western democracies (where the population is more evenly spread across older age groups and sociology is a highly developed study not only by universities but by insurance companies) it has been discovered that the average male does not develop a full appreciation of personal risk until well into their twenties, often not until the age of thirty. Accordingly, young drivers are understood statistically to be much more dangerous drivers of automobiles, for instance, but also much more likely to be reckless in other ways.

One of the basic and universal stages of human development is the transition from dependency on one's parents or other familial elders to independence. This usually a period of conflicted emotions, false starts, and reassessments of one's personal social environment. Successful transition depends on youth acknowledging (however grudingly) the wisdom of elders and equally on the practice of wisdom by those elders ... not overlooking any member of youth.

One of the complications of this universal transition is the flaring of sexuality as the gonads mature and begin to pump surprising hormones into the bodies of young people who are simultaneously approaching full adult height, if not weight, and certainly not experience. Sexual awareness carries with it social and personal issues relating to passion and to economics, since it becomes almost universally understood in this transition period that babies happen when girls and boys engage in sex. It is one of life's biggest concerns, and yet it is in most cultures treated as if it were not a central issue, obscured by embarrassments of various kinds, dubious moral principles, over a background of half-truths, outright falsehoods, and perplexing taboos.

Sexual and most other kinds of youthful recklessness in the West and some Asian cultures is moderated by strong pressures brought to bear on young men and women by large and strong cohorts of more mature (that is, risk cognizant) older people, usually cohorts who hold the keys to certain kinds of life opportunities like education, jobs, and political interests.

In populations like Iran's (and many other countries) the demographics have been skewed toward youth for a very long time. Where large and strong older cohorts were not available to exert moderating pressures on youth, religion took up this responsibility. You can see this in the older practices and principles of the Roman Catholic Church that presided over medieval Europe, in certain Hindu traditions, and very clearly in Confucianism and Islam.

In many respects the ferment in Islamic societies is due to the fallout from political and economic injustices that rain down on a youth population demographic constrained by religious and moral principles that are at odds with modernism and especially modern communications. Islam cannot replace the stern and admonishing father figure when it is vividly obvious that that father figure is trapped by religious principles more appropriate to bygone non-technological centuries.

And yet ... youth in Islam know full well as their risk appreciation increases and their full social mentality matures that there needs to be something to hold down the passions and excesses that the rowdier of their cohort participate in and from which comes so much trouble and grief.

Perhaps the younger citizens of Iran already know that Grand Ayatollahs are prisoners of their own awareness of a disconnect between faith and fact, between the reasons for certain moral principles historically and the reasons now ... if any. Perhaps the young people of Iran know that their form of government is a last gasp of an ancien regime, but they do not know how to make a society behave the way they expect without the trappings of "revealed" authority.

Know this young Iran: nuclear weapons have been used already, so if you develop them you can be pretty sure they will be used by you. If you use them, the older people cultures of the planet will annihilate your country.

If your country acts as if it is unique and given by Destiny or Kismet to take its place among the nations of the earth, then know that it must grow up. You must grow up! You must figure out a way to survive to be older, to provide the necessary moderating influence on the passions of youth, know them, respecting them, but moderating them.

There are many of us in the outside world who believe you can do it. Know that we will support you and that mistakes will be made. Learn tolerance and forgiveness.

JB

11/12/09

The Illusions of Arrogance

I missed this excellent essay when it first came out in the Boston Globe. In some ways there is an irony to the geographical origin of the piece, since New England spawned the "city on the hill" and the Emersonian mythos of American rugged individualism. A look around the country, though, will reveal that the idea of American exceptionalism is deeply rooted everywhere, fed to our children in whopping doses in public (and private) schools, paraded by civic groups and veterans associations, paid mete adoration by politicians of every conceivable stripe, and ground into the fabric of society by marketeers through television, movies, and national sports associations. It is embarrassing!

But, as Neal Gabler clearly writes, it is a lot more than just embarrassing. It is dangerous for us and for the rest of the world. You just don't hear the Danes or the Dutch or the French, Norse, Portuguese, or almost any other nation of peoples strutting their national myths across the planet like we do, nor do you see them arrogantly declaring themselves the savior or the model for all to emulate. There is something sick in our polyglot society.

Some historians point out the fact that leaders of our country were afraid a new nation made up of peoples from all over the planet could not possibly survive because of the wide variances in cultures brought into the American "melting pot." Their anxieties may have seemed quite vivid in the great days of European immigration that brought fiercely contesting peoples into this country. Their solution, to raise the bar, to declare that America was an exception among nations, was to preclude the idea that old-country animosities could work to destroy the "united" states. In effect they said that until you began to mouth the platitudes of American exceptionalism you were not truly American. It was a stroke of genius, but also a fatal mistake.

It is clear by now, after Vietnam, Panama, Grenada, Lebanon, Iraq, North Korea, Iran, and now Afghanistan that we are simply mortal, error-prone like all human beings, but in love with our toys and our myths to the exclusion of evidence and rationality. It has been said for decades that this will be our unraveling—our destruction. We will see if Obama has the courage to stand up to this huge malignant mythology and reverse our course in Afghanistan and Iraq. There has been almost no preparation of our culture for the necessary change of attitude, so I guess we should be prepared for the worst.

JB

9/7/09

It is Labor Day 2009 and Labor is hurting. The lead story in the San Jose Mercury is about not wanting to celebrate 9.7% unemployment, especially with the prospects for recovery any time soon being so poor. Congress and the White House in their misguided attempts to be frugal about the T.A.R.P stimulus package (and believe me most people think that 700 billion dollars is not frugal!) have undercut the ability of the "natural" economy to recover quickly. You hear people talking about V-shaped and L-shaped recoveries. Obviously L-shaped portends a long haul, whereas V-shaped suggests a much briefer dip and then "business more or less as usual."

With these thoughts running around in our head this often misunderstood day, I was amazed to see James Carroll in the Boston Globe offering up a version of the situation that seems to blame economists. Actually he pretty much identifies them as witch-doctors.

What is going on here? Tested categories of economic analysis have all been applied. Depression. Recession. Business cycle. Soft landing. Money supply. Credit crisis. Catastrophic deficits. Statistics. Data. Globalization. Mumbo jumbo. Are we to be consoled that every society on earth is at the mercy of such disorder, or that the one reliable social law - impoverished groups and individuals always take the hardest hit - is holding true? After two years of expert predictions being shown up as wild guesses, and mathematical projections as stabs in the dark, a mask has been ripped from the face of the science of economics, exposing primitive superstition. The debunking of the academic study of the structure of wealth is equivalent to astronomy being shown up as nothing more than astrology after all. “I saw the best minds of my generation,'' to take off from Allen Ginsberg, destroyed by the smug assumption that they knew what the hell they were talking about.

But Carroll goes on in his Monday column to suggest an even more fundamental and more disturbing phenomenon. He edges up to

... the sneaking suspicion that beneath today's massive economic dislocation is some kind of species-changing shift in the way humans relate to work itself.

Carroll puts his case perfectly in this passage from his concluding paragraph

The nightmare of modernity, since Jules Verne and H. G. Wells, has been of an invasion of the home planet by creatures from some other world, but we have reversed that story. With our laptops and iPods, not to mention, say, our laser beams and drone bombers, we stand on the threshold of a world inhabited by aliens all right, but, as our home planet becomes something unrecognizable, the aliens are we ourselves.

Carroll is straightforwardly disconcerted by the acceleration of knowledge and of expertise (and one intuits that he is equally upset about the beneficiaries) in our modern era. To be fair, Carroll is worried about re-establishing some sort of golden period where the dignity of labor meant sweat, tears, toil, and sometime blood. It is an irrational idea, because it is formed from a very narrow and Olympian point of view. The truth is that everything that is happening now is not good, but that everything that happens now is either "inevitable," given the nature of our national and planetary cultures and economies, or a matter of the "free will continuity or change" of history. The bugger in this is "Change."

Change is for human beings both desired and feared. Rapid change upsets routines before they can adapt to the different circumstances. Rapid change reverberates throughout a culture calling into question verities and first principles, some of which, are then made out (like "primogeniture") to be obsolete and (like "racism") to be destructive of the human spirit. Very slow change, like filling the atmosphere with heat absorbing gases and causing global warming, is invisible to most human beings and the portents of global warming are lost on them, more than lost, these portents suggest changes that are altogether unpalatable ... and so are resisted with every synapse.

Modest change and the other kinds, rapid and glacial, hit populations across a wide range of acceptance, from rejection to eager adoption. James Carroll seems now to be a public intellectual who sees his world crumbling under the onslaught of epiphenomena caused by laptop computers and iPhones and Wii systems. He is floundering because somewhere in his daily ambit he stepped over an important lesson about Change. Change is inevitable, not constant; it is a condition of an entropic universe that suggests—nay, demands!—that human beings not settle in to comfortable ideas so well that they cannot get up and change, too.

Obviously, what the United States is experiencing now is Change, for some too rapid and for some too slow. We must take the initiative in Change and understand that those for whom Change is feared are real people, but that over time their psychology will adapt. For those for whom Change is too slow, they must be tutored in the realities of political reality. We pass laws that effect everyone simultaneously whether every last one of us are ready or not. Some people still refuse to fasten their car's seat belts when driving. We fine them now, but it is a fact that highway deaths per miles driven are way down. These doubting Thomases have a right to doubt, but they must understand the nature of collective (political) wisdom. It is now long since time for seat belts and for national health care reform!

JB