Society
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30 November 2022
Our Society is Broken
The pressure on the citizenry of the United States is intense. People in other countries would laugh at this notion and think us spoiled rotten. They would be correct. We are spoiled generally by our various successes and there is a rot in our society that looms forbiddingly over this end of the calendar year holiday season—again. We have a dream (a fantasy) that our society is fair and honest, and it is not. We imagine that people are fundamentally good, then some are made bad by circumstances beyond their immediate control. But it is much worse than that. There are violent and malevolent people out there accumulating political power. The accumulation of political power by objectively bad people under a constitution like ours is foreboding. Of course our two major political parties, both with seriously flawed actors over the course of history, have done that, and we live with the consequences all the time. The consequences are fashioned by the program or philosophy of the individuals within the parties. It used to be that the parties would reject or severely isolate rogue individuals. We now know, though, that the former President of the United States and declared candidate for that job again consorts with White Supremacists and rabid anti-Semites, which in his case means that he intends to use them to satisfy his own agenda, which by now most of us understand to be personal financial and volitional gratifications. Many think his agenda is relatively benign—something the democracy can contain—but this is an error drawn from experience with much smaller numbers, and it reflects very poorly on the judgement of millions of voters who supported and avidly continue to support his candidacies. What we are encountering now is the prospect of there being a permanent and fundamental rift based on personal commitments to diametrically opposed understandings of what is happening in our society where as recently as the 2022 General Election it was thought by many—but not me, btw— that we could halt the progress of the rift and settle back into the nation we grew up in. In fact though, millions of people now see themselves (and are encouraged to see themselves) as "aggrieved," and to believe that there is no peaceful prospect for making the nation into the thing in which they feel most comfortable. Things did not turn out the way they wanted, and so they are now saying that it is necessary to destroy the agreement we have had to be "united" in and among our several states. As Newt Gingrich said in the 1990's, (paraphrase) well, shit, we'll just have to burn it to the ground. It is obvious there are hidden and not-so-hidden interests at work in all of this. Since the beginning the wealthy have understood they must become actors in politics to secure their future wealth. The Founding Fathers were this breed. The magnates and industrial tycoons of the post-bellum period and onward into the 1920's, WWII, and ever since, seek to control the arrangements that provide for them. The Iron Mountain Hypothesis is a classic case. The religious try as hard as they can—some more successfully than others—to fashion the behavior of society to suit their understandings of human nature and a variety of teleological fantasies. And underlying much of what happens is naked human nature itself, expressed as anxiety and fear of the Other, clannishness, tribalism, distilled into fear and hatred of Jews, Asians, LGTBQ people, Latinos, Polish immigrants, Irish Catholics, loners, geniuses, virtually anyone who is marked or marks themselves as unfathomably different. It has always been this way. What has changed is that we are no longer just 1.2 million, but 330 million, and we now can communicate to or at everyone in the world virtually. There is almost nothing common to in the congeries of cultures making up the "American Experience" of multi-cultural, multi-racial democracy to deal with this, certainly not patriarchal, vertically oriented institutions like the US Supreme Court, which now contains rogues put there by wealthy persons who have tagged their justices for certain purposes, religious dogmas, their wealth machinery, and virtually anything supported by a codex of axioms and postulates about dreaded Others. Chto delat', "What is to be Done?" is the Russian expression uttered by Nicolas Chernyshevsky and later by Vladimir Ilich Lenin about this kind of problem. Both men had ideas about how to approach a problem as big as a broken society. Chernyshevsky's novel's ideas were about a possible program-forward in 1863 (just before the Great Emancipation of 80% of the Russian population) were utopian and radical, as explained by the controversial professor of Political Science at Boise State, Scott Yenor. His thought was that too many young people go to college was not very well accepted in Idaho. I hope you literature majors enjoy his explanation. Listen for the words that still make sense in our culture. I think he does a pretty good job of framing the novel, which was introduced to me by my friend the late Dr. Arnold Springer. Both of these Russians were optimistic about their ideas, which were not enthusiastically accepted as the way forward or just "out" of the broken society situation in which they were mired. Nick Fuentes, who does not deserve the attention I am giving him, or KanYE West, about whom Netflix's "My Next Guest" with David Letterman episode is sufficient polish on a very disappointing racist/Jew-hating PoS and not important except that they break through a glass floor in the basement of society. It may be that writing and promoting revolution is, in itself, a recipe for mayhem rather than desirable change. Change is inevitable, though, unless the ruling philosophy is unassailable, such as the Middle Ages Roman Catholic Church extablishment in a centuries-long epoch of massive illiteracy. Consciousness itself, was the target of both Russians. They wrote to inspire people out of their dogmatic slumbers and self-satisfied imaginations. Bringing people to an awareness of the situation into which they have become accustomed and, perhaps accommodated, is the trick, if you have a way for the aroused to play out their roles in bringing about change at a pace that is not so overwhelmingly disruptive. The so-called free marketplace of the contemporary First World recognizes market disruptors and manages to not commit suicide when they arrive. Think about how the world responded to a) the internet and its World Wide Web, and b) about the cell phone, one in every pocket and loin cloth! Market disruptors give something to people they want, even before they knew it was possible to express that want. Political disruptors, Jefferson, Samuel Adams, etc., gave their subscribers opportunity to use their backs, brains, and "free" land. Disruptors solve problems, and usually some group takes it in the neck when things change. The Roman Catholic Church has never actually accommodated itself to The Pill, even as everyone knows the world has plenty of human beings and, therefore, the Church's pragmatic goal of sustaining our species, supported by an ethic about the "sanctity" of human life is a train wreck of almost unimaginable hypocrisy. Fighting for principles is the fiercest sort of fighting. The spoils of that kind of conflict are grim satisfaction that so-in-so is now dead and quiet. I am optimistic that we can overtly decide to overhaul and renew government and some of its now obsolete and inadequate principles without laying off too many people and creating a backlash that kills us. We have to tell each other that we trust that change can be planned in ways that give society and its markets and philosophies a chance to evolve along with the whole flow of political evolution. I think we can arrest Trump and send him to prison for stealing and mishandling and lying about and obstructing our efforts to retrieve our property without setting off a civil war, although I doubted that here at Iron Mountain a year ago. I think we need to say that if someone tries to ignite a civil war, we will deal with them once and for all. Our Bill of Rights is not a suicide pact! JB Category: Society
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29 October 2022
Free Speech and Original Sin
It is easy and wrong to say that Attorney General Merrick Garland is taking too long to prosecute the apparent crimes of Donald J. Trump. In this case getting it completely right is mandatory—dotted I's and crossed T's are required. Ultimately responsible for the horrific attack on Nancy Pelosi's husband Paul early yesterday morning is the man who did it. Our civilization is completely predicated on the idea that each of us is responsible to society for what we do wrong. The problem is not that AG Merrick Garland is afraid of charging and trying a former president, nor is the reason that there will be even more violence in the streets and around the trial and sentencing, although this is a great concern. The reason is that when the out-of-power party regains power, they will impeach or indict the opposition's current or most recent president. President Biden has already been threatened with impeachment, if the GOP takes the House in the November 2022 election. The reason has already been expressed by House Minority Leader McCarthy and quite a few others. Tit for tat; nothing more complicated; nothing more adult or civilized. Just that sort of childish and revengeful behavior. It will mean the end of any pretext of concord in Congress. Such is the state of our society and civilization! The Trump Party that has taken over the GOP has sworn undying animosity against the Democrats. Not the first, but the signal statements were those of Newt Gingrich back in early 1990s. Clearly, Far Right rhetoric and behavior has been getting worse and worse over time, compounded by Trump's own rhetoric, lies, and behaviors, and about which we will soon find out whether a jury believes it was criminal, for at last, at last, there are clear signs that very soon Trump will be indicted. The problem antedates the service of Merrick Garland, but seems to be culminating with him. The problem is that consequences for dangerous talk and actions have not yet been forthcoming—inciting an insurrection and attempting by that and other means to overturn a presidential election AND theft of highly classified materiel AND obstruction of justice! One of the first things I think of is the moral attitude of parents for the past two score years, namely, that children should not be spanked and that their attention to their misdeeds and misspeaking should not be too stern or frightening, but recognizable as a just comeuppance. The ethical guidelines and, in fact, the entire ethos of this era borders and plunges wildly into the irresponsible, so why should we wonder that morons and amoral and immoral people take advantage. I am not sure who said it earlier in the week on Deadline White House, probably Frank Figliuzzi, but the words were very close to the following: "We desperately need to see Justice and Jailtime for the perps." It is not only the carrying out of Justice, but the civilization-wide observation and recognition that it has been carried out. For what he has done, if you are doing the arithmetic, Trump is facing what amounts to a life sentence for the Mara Lago Documents case alone. With the January Sixth Insurrection et alia, he will be in over his head, so to speak. The lingering problem is real and has been with us for well over 250 years. The crack in our Liberty Bell was for conceding and tolerating slavery by the majority in the colonies and the fledgling republic. But, you see, it is the same problem: consequences. It has outgrown the moral boundaries of enslaving other human beings, and, as one could (and did) predict, this evil has grown roots in the character of our civilization here in North America, roots that capitalize on or, if you will, correspond to and nurture the parts of the human brain trained in virtually all human societies so far to prepare humans to defend their security. So now, it is not just patriarchy (as I pointed out in the most recent essay), it is now The Other, racially, religiously, politically, and boiled down and reduced to hatred. Alex Wagner the host of her news program on MSNBC at 9pm ET-6pmPT had a very productive interview with Ilhan Omar, (D), Minnesota Representative to Congress, as I watched and listened, the sevens paragraphs above this one seem very academic. In fact the state of affairs in American right now seems headed for a real and ugly and deadly disaster, which is the goal of a very small minority who believe the whole thing—the USA—must be destroyed. Personally, I believe "the whole thing" must be fixed, but violence and utterly destroying it is not my plan. People are rightfully afraid. One way to express the problem is: what will you give up to fix it? It seems to me that having swept problems under the rug until fixing them will easier politically or economically has not worked. It has compounded the problems and created new ones. Thinking in terms of how we discipline our children, we need to have a "time out." Some will have to go up to their rooms for a while to think things over. Some will have to be asked not to speak until ... until we are more secure that civility rules—not violence. So, I am talking about my First Amendment rights and yours and his and theirs. It seems to me that everything happening now is pouring gasoline on a fire that invaded the Capitol of this nation. We cannot go on this way without horrible consequences! I will shut down Iron Mountain, if that's what it takes. But, I have not provoked anyone to violence, and as a precaution, I have taken the advice of those who threatened me years ago. JB Category: Society
23 October 2022
The Metaverse
There is an article in the New York Review of Books of October 20, 2022, titled, suspiciously, , The Spector of Our Virtual Future, the article written by Sue Halpern of the NYRB and Middlebury College, the book being "reviewed" is The Metaverse:And How It Will RevolutioniedtoEverything by Matthew Ball (Liveright). Mr. Ball, who Halpern says has "an intimate understanding of the work necessary to bring the metaverse to fruition, and what might derail it," decided to go to the the recently announced "top." And so, when Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook would be called "Meta" from October 21, 2021, onward, both Ball and then Halpern assumed Mark was the fountain of expertise on this subject. Neither were correct ... or even close, whoutich astounds me still, given that the New York Times over the past 15+ years has written about burgeoning exemplars of the not-yet-labeled metaverse. You will not find the words "Second Life" or "Open Sims" in the Halpern review, and so it is useless. It may be that Ball does not mention them either, so in some sense Halpern is also guilty of not doing her homework, which nowadays is very, very easy to do on something of this nature. As it happens I have had accounts at at least five Open Sim grids, each an enterprise run by enthusiasts using freely available software, something if you were younger and more enthusiastic you could run on your (or my) desktop computer and link to the wider-global enterprise. Ah, and that right there is a potential problem for those who still think in terms of Big Blue and warehouse-sized computer arrays. Derailing the metaverse is easier if there is just one big player and the rest just referred to as hobbyists. When the meta verse is distributed, preferabley widely, like the metaverse called Second Life, then thousands of people can enjoy all the benefits and headaches of virtual living, including virtual buying and selling of virtual or real things, in my case as an art gallery owner, modern art, pixels online or canvas if you buy for the RL (real life). When I logged in this morning there were 48,345+or- avatars logged in already. SL (Second Life) is the largest of these version of the metaverse. It used to have over a million registered avatars and a gross enterprise product approaching $3million real USD, conducted however in Lindens, named after the San Francisco company Linden Laboratories that invented it, and then who had the moxey to spread it around the world. In my large art gallery complex I have just under 50 resident and visiting artists from: the US, Canada, Brazil, Argentina, UK, Ireland, Norway, Finland, Germany, France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Greece, Romania, Russia(?), China, Japan, Australia, and sometimes New Zealand. Two of my artists have died in RL, so I have a little memorial site for them in one of the galleries. Art sells well enough in galleries all over SL that artists acquire sufficient funds to become property "owners" and open their own personal galleries. They get together and built bigger galleries for their friends, sometimes with thematic concepts built into the structures and the art displayed. Because SL happens on one of my computer screens it is paradigmatically a visual experience, but also sonic, and kinetics, since dancing is one of the favorite things to do while as one pursues an interesting avatar for more intimate goings-on later, for which there are animation scripts that will curl your imagination. Imagination is what Ball and Halpern seem to be missing. Nevertheless, the US government and others have had a presence in SL for the purpose of dispensing information about services and career opportunities. Hospitals like Boston General have sites where nurses learn bedside manners without the worry of hurting a RL patient. Cal State Chico has a site to demonstrate gender bias for future teachers. And, as the NYT reported a few years ago, the SVR and the FBI and CIA are busy inside SL pursuing one another and achieving communications with accomplices and agents world wide. If you are interested in seeing the metaverse for yourself, I recommend this link for Second Life. A good Open Sim grid is Discoverygrid.net owned and operated by a nice guy in Germany, all subject to EU regulations, which are much more strict than those in the US. You will need a "viewer" so you can maneuver your avatar around the virtual environment. SL has its own, but many/most of us use a third party viewer called Firestorm, which is more intuitive than your $50 wristwatch that counts your steps daily and your heart beats. There is learning curve, of course, so be prepared to be a "noob" for a while. You cannot get into much trouble, if you use RL common sense. You will be asked a number of questions as you join a grid. The most important one, from your perspective is the name of your avatar. The avatar name is not your "username" which should be close to your real name, as it is used in your membership account. My avatar is known far and wide in SL as Ernie Farstrider, and he has an inventory of purchased and created things, addresses, scripts, textures, etc. that I would hate to lose, which would happen if you decide your avatar is not named well and you start another. I have a female avatar I use to discern the ambience of crowds of people I do not know well. She gets hit on quite often. Her name is Karenina Warwillow. But, you will find online avatars called Buzzkill Forjoy and Spiritual Love. One of my artists is Rage Darkstone. It is best to take a positive name from literature or movies and alter it just a little. There are hundreds of Farstriders in Second Life, Ernie is my grandfather's first name. I particularly recommend SL or DG to older, retired people whose ambits are closing in due to health and trick knees. There are lots of us out there. There are neurotic people logged in, there are males pretending to be otherwise with female avatars and vice versa, there are cancer patients and parolees and just about a cross-section of non-virtual reality. The trouble-makers are weeded out by HQ based on verified complaints. Oh, and it is free, unless you want to buy something or build a house out of pixels on virtual land you "own." It is more fun that you can imagine right now. I have 12 years worth of avatar friends whose RLs are private or not, depending on their own wishes. They are real people either escaping a challenging RL or just looking for a good chat and to explore the amazing imaginations of today's real people. JB Cat: Society
10 October 2022
The End
Last time I wrote about a "precipice" of the several important issues facing us all at once this year or next. The metaphor is about falling off, of course, and being killed by the fall or being mangled not so much physically as mentally—culturally. I lreft off global warming, not because it less important, but because it is overwhelmingly more important. It is an existential situation, which means we may not survive physically or in any other way, save the trash we leave on the planet, the occasional artifact like the Statue of Liberty, which could be up to her left elbow in Hudson estuary water by the end of the century, if everything we do fails. What can we say about this "global warming" thing. First thing is: heat. Yes, warming means more heat. We live best at 72 F 22.22 C. As we age we can live comfortably at 80 F. A few years ago it got to 121 F at my house. It was probably a flukey but tiny hot cell blown here off the not-too-distant Mojave Desert. I cannot live in prolonged 121 F temps. I will have to move from ousy perch in the coastal mountains. This is the general topic of a review of three books in the October 6, 2022, New York Review of Books by Bill McKibben. The article is "Where Will We Live?" The dimensions of the onrushing calamity include numbers—really big numbers. The number of human beings who will be existentially affected very soon are almost imponderable. McKibben says that These numbers are enormous-100 million is more than the population of, say, Germany or Turkey or Vietnam. But they are a small fraction of what we can expect as temperatures rise: the International Organization for Migration has predicted that we could see 1.5 billion people forced from their homes by 2050, and in 2020 an analysis by an international team of academics in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences said that by 2070 as many as three billion people could be living in areas stressed by high heat. Canada, here we come; Alaska, Sweden, even radioactive Siberia. Where will you move? For me the question is very nearly academic. I live 15 miles from the Pacific. The California Current flows from the north and provided a 20th c. Mediterranean climate from San Francisco south to Ensenada in Mexico. I am 1650 feet up from the surf. I am old and have the self-satisfaction that, if I have fifteen more years, I have very little impact on warming, but still there's the dread of knowing that hordes of displaced people will soon be here, swarming, displacing, lawless, starving, still procreating. President Biden hopes in a second term to have a good Congress that will address the widely-known to be broken Immigration System of the US. Let's be serious! Immigration is for those days of yore when the image of a finger in the dyke made any sense at all. What we are dealing with now is mass migration, some—a trickle so far—from global warming, but the vast majority from untenable political and economic situations. You could say that politics is the canary in this mineshaft. You also say that we have not even begun to think at the scales of the problem facing us, personally, individually, or politically. Politics reflects the needs and anxieties of the people, and under even moderate stress it quickly reverts to tribal thinking, chieftains, strongmen, dictators, whose actions are expected to be unfettered by incessent argumentation, whose actions can be dramatic and exciting, uplifting one's spirits for the moment, but always—ALWAYS— unable to manage the immensity of society. I don't want to end this essay muddling around in definitions of politics or trying to predict the 2022 elections in the US. I do want people who read this to understand that the question really is "where will we ALL live?" Think of a set of your ancestors in the Russian Empire, in Ireland, Poland, China, in southern Italy, or share-cropping in post-bellum Alabama. What moved them to seek refuge in America, in the cities? They were at the ragged edge of survival and there was a glimmer of an answer, a dream, a slender prospect of a new beginning. It may be that all most of humanity can hope for is a different, less unpalatable, less painful, end. JB Archv: Society
8 October 2022
The Precipice
Surely you have noticed little variations in your routine thoughts. Your adult behavior has some features now redolent of your young past when taking a stand somewhere was expected and you liked the mini-thrill of it — and even some of the baser emotions. Maybe I am projecting on you all. Maybe the fact that so much of importance is hanging, dangling, swinging at the end of a rope—one of our first inventions back on the savannah—has gotten to me at last. Give us enough rope and ... we'll use it to hang ourselves, they say. The fact is right now not one of the ropes will help us with the precipice we have stumbled forward to.
Well, maybe not. This morning at breakfast Scientific American put the following sentence on my plate: Topologists analyze a succession of simplicial complexes built at various scales to find the essential features of the data cloud. The article was titled "Squishy Math" but was really about advances in cognitive neurology—at the level of mice, so far. I marveled that all the words in the sentence were familiar except the term "simplicial complexes," which reads oxymoronically at first. And then the sentence (and paragraph) ended with the "data cloud," a term that could have been meaningless not too long ago, but which I interpreted as a sign they were using very big computers in their research. And, my point is, the world is getting very complex fast, and leaving most of us way behind, wondering how our kids and theirs are going to absorb all this stuff and fix it for us like they do our smart-phones and other modern devices? It is clear that government and politics are now operating at the level of extended "simplicial complexity," culturally conditioned quo-to-goal interpolations, or in other words, for Americans, operating as if the Constitution were a reliable guide to the future. Perhaps it is. Perhaps human nature evolves only very slowly, despite "simplicial complexity." I think I see in it all the squirming flesh of mass anxiety. And, I think it may be time for a break. I think that the opposition came to this conclusion years ago. The precipice looms. All of the questions could be answered, if not actually resolved, by Christmas this year. That is a huge lot of stuff to happen, and we have to wonder how it will affect us in our daily lives. I think it will affect us like being in a hurricane or typhoon. Some will lose everything, some will evacuate and come back to only trash in the yard. Some will die. Seven thousand one hundred and twenty-three Americans die every day, five per minute. There are so many "imponderables" these days. Stacked up they look like precipices. JB Archv: Society
4 October 2022
The Male of Our Species
Long, long ago I came to the conclusion that as a bright, scrawny kid I would not prosper being pugnacious or being more disciplined and merely competitive in intramural sports. I did not want to be mentored by the likes of Vic Blue, the high school wrestling coach, or really any of his colleagues. My dad did not play golf, I could not afford it until I was forty, and so my world view and my self-esteem grew out of being able to grasp things, sometimes complex things, rapidly and to respond with measured speed as well. So, perforce, I have been an outside observer of all the rest of us, the testosterone-toting breed, the American male. I had a high school friend for a while until he decided to steal a Schlitz Beer truck. He was an abused child become very much an "outsider," but I appreciated the probable painful view from Buddy's spot on the even more remote "outside" of the culturally-programmed competitiveness that urged his father into violence and infused our time then and even now. So it was, when I read Michelle Goldberg's opinion piece in today's New York Times Boys and Men Are in Crisis Because Society Is," which is really a book review of Richard V. Reeve's new book, Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do About It. Michelle is a thoughtful person who appears on television news-analysis programs fairly frequently, and I was sort of disappointed that she did not take this opportunity and run with it much, much further. Admittedly, it is a huge subject and rarely given as much as a tenth of the polite analysis that heterosex gets these days. In other words, a diagnosis of "ailing maleness" calls into question what "not-ailing maleness" is and more importantly what it should and must be. Let me have Michelle express what the larger problem is and why, therefore, she did not and I cannot give it here the attention it deserves. She writes Even if you're not inclined to care much about men's welfare, their growing anomie and resentment is everyone's problem, fueling right-wing populist movements around the world. People who feel unmoored and demeaned are going to be receptive to the idea that the natural order of things has been upended, the core claim of reactionary politics. Some of men's dislocation is an inevitable product of modernization, which, by making physical brawn less economically important, blurs men and women's social roles. It is not just America, after all, where more women than men earn college degrees. ... Isn't that plain enough! The male world very much is upside down now. The societal value of having the male physicality and disposition always handy, not only is no longer there, but in significant ways it is demeaned, if not despised, yet well over 50% of males are born with and socially try to be physical and sometimes pugnacious ... and society has until about 1968 put up with it. The two Kennedy and the Martin Luther King, Jr. assassinations and the Manson murders in America blew a fuse in our culture, the fuse protecting the circuit that protected the idea that "boys will be boys," a pernicious doctrine that gave broad permission to boys and men to be more than just pugnacious. It was not announced on "Sixty Minutes" or anywhere else. Its announcement was the resolve we "all" took to give girls and women more power in society. So, you see, it was not a light-switch moment, it had been building for a century or more and subdued by current events that seemed—or it was said that—these times required "a few good men." I come to the conclusion, like we all did about the nature of human sexuality in society, that we could not continue on the same prudish, nervous pathway that had dominated western society from the time of Queen Victoria to the time of Marilyn Monroe. The equation of femme physical beauty with stupidity was shattered in the commons by MM and others with 160+ Stanford-Binet IQ scores. The women's movement gained force and took down pieces of the scaffolding supporting the male-dominance culture. The future had arrived, the time was now, the tables must be turned, and they were, and there were millions of boys and older boys in the western cultures who did not believe it, did not keep their copy of the script, and were cock-sure the whole thing would blow over. It has not blown over yet, but there are incredibly entrenched forces that try every day to stop it. In Iran last week femmes were burning their hijabs, taking risks in that culture that could mean death. The Force is with them. We have to take advantage of the relative peacefulness of the transition, and make it a lasting part of our societies. Meanwhile, we have to explain to Vic Blue that being a male is not based in pugnaciousness or dependent on everyone else conferring privilege on us. My small contribution is to suggest that the term "woman" and the term "female" be retired completely forever. The French "femme" and "homme" will do just fine and they do not imply a linguistic or any kind of intellectual dependent relationship on wives and sisters and mothers. We cannot let the anomie of American and British and French, German, Polish, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese, Korean, Chinese, etc. men make a shambles of government by polluting politics with their "lost cause" grievance. We can think of thousands of ways to approach the mini-events in life that might convert their Lost Dominance into Won Respect. We have to. Human survival is at stake, if you think about it. JB Archv: Society
25 September 22
Teaching White History
Owing to unique circumstances I was moved from up-state New York to Washington, DC, just as my personal sentience was taking shape. I had had sentience of various kinds and levels before, but by age seven I was confirming within myself who I had been up to then, giving a vocabulary to things that had just been spontaneous behavior and unruly thoughts, and by that I mean "unruly" literally to mean that, as the animal I am, my thoughts were a lot less involved in a construct of rules called "Jim" than in enabling my pragmatic survival in really quite mellow cirumstances. The mellow dissipated one day, as is the case with many, it just happened that the rug was pulled and off we went to Dixie. I had no earthly idea of Dixie, and when we crossed the Mason-Dixon Line into Maryland, I could not tell the difference. It was farmland and then more farmland and then the northern suburbs of DC began to appear, then College Park, then trolleys, then our destination. It was winter, so lots of naked trees and bundled people. They looked like people in Ithaca and Cortland and Syracuse, except there were some that looked browner. Some looked disillusioned or poor or slowly losing their struggle for survival, all of these thoughts came without vocabulary. I re-entered 2nd grade there on Piney Branch Road and discovered that my teacher demanded the honorific of "ma'am" when speaking to her. I told her that in my family we did not say that, and I was rebuked just two days into this new environment. I also remember that this teacher was promoting a different way of learning new words. When I was asked to say the word "rough," which was new to me, I did it phonetically, and the teacher mocked me and my former teachers up there in what certainly must be a dissolute and all-too-fancy New York. It seemed not to matter that my father was an English teacher at GWU. So, a million years later, I am having breakfast over the latest edition of the September 22nd edition of The New York Review of Books and there's a piece entitled "The Complicity of the Textbooks," which is, of course, the complicity of publishers and authors and school boards, but deftly euphemized. The review is of a new book by Donald Yacovone of Harvard University called Teaching White Supremacy: America's Democratic Ordeal and the Forging of Our National Identity. Briefly, the book is a report of rooting through all the textbooks in the Harvard Education Library to see what they say about race, Negros, civics, and everything associated with this subject. No surprise, really, the overwhelming result of a hundred years of textbooks is that African-Americans are thought, when thought about at all, as subhuman, incompetent to govern themselves, etc. In other words the lack of surprise is the emotional fog response to and obscuring the intellectual conclusion that America has been training itself to be racist, north, south, east, and west forever. Textbook answers are accorded the virtue of being correct in modern parlance. That's how we do it, a textbook response! "Forging Our National Identity" is not something I have seen as a job underway behind the curtains or in plain sight, for that matter. Of course there are stark differences about what is going on here in North America since 1609, the year settlement of this vast land began in earnest by Europeans, but is a "national identity" something we need. The answer is "apparently." I still have a hard time thinking about this in terms of race. I have no problem with the idea that we have set out to create a multi-cultural democracy here, which is a fact, but just one identity seems to be oddly narrow. But, it is narrow, and the tribalism gene in some people is way more powerful than we suspected. Currently, the "white supremacists" have their narrow view of what America must be. It is based on what they see as facts, textbook, that white Europeans founded the country, so it is Theirs! Implicit is the idea that the African human beings they bought and sold are subhuman—even in 2022—and are an accident of history, which is an entirely impossible concept. History is what was. Or is it? History is—unfortunately—what is acceptable to those reading it. History is the tale told by a stake-holder in a construct where he is less harried by fear than others, whom, by the way, he suppresses and oppresses. Currently, white supremacists are politically very active and head-strong. They mean to reorganize society so that it looks and feels more like what they have been taught for at least 200 years! CRT is their bogey—Critical Race Theory—the audacious writing of history in terms of its unpleasant facts, which contains within it the idea that all human beings are human beings, that in a democracy all adult human beings have the rights that were enunciated for all white human beings, except women. History is not that "tale told by and idiot, full of sound and fury, and signifying nothing." It is the view from 30,000 feet through thin clouds of self-righteous anxiety and thick clouds of irrational prejudice. Occasionally, there are clear spots, sometimes ignored. JB Archv: Society
15 September 22
God Save the Queen!
So, Kenyan television station NTV reported a week ago that Queen Elizabeth II's "...eldest son, Charles automatically becomes queen." This is quite funny and provides a peep-hole of perspective into the royal nomenclature understood in the Commonwealth. The rest of The Cut news agency posting is way less respectful of the glowering, fidgeting, pompadilly who's now the UK monarch, that is, "one of a kind." As I have said on FB, were it not for Charles I, my ancestor William Brett would not have escaped England in 1638 in favor of Massachusetts to practice his Puritanism with a few of the original and their next-gen folk from the Mayflower right there at Plimoth Plantation, and therefore, I would be writing this from Kent or Singapore or Melbourne or Vancouver. It could have been worse, but my mom gets left out if Charles I had been a model monarch. He was not, and he lost his head for his intemperate and recidivist caesaropapism. The Hanoverians / Winsors of the United Kingdom are not the only monarchy in old Europe. The ones still going are: Belgium, Denmark, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Monaco, Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden. Missing are France, Italy, Germany, Greece, Austria-Hungary, Romania, Poland, Russia, and maybe a few more in the pre-WWI Balkans. The ones listed are, of course, all "constitutional monarchies," which indicates that the term "monarch" is something of an oxymoron. So, I am not in favor of "Charles in Charge," neither that song, nor the dude who is now queen of England, Etc. Etc. He is a prick. A petulant boil on the body politic. He inspires nothing. His IQ, though, is right up there at the top of the bell-shaped curve. Were I he, and with better luck at and since Hastings, it could have happened, had the Duke of Normandy been shot and crippled rather than my putative ancestor, who as a favored accomplice, accompanied him across the Pas de Calais to contend with Harold II, who took a way worse beating than my putative ancestor, Brito, a Norman favorite, a Breton with connections to the bastard William, who granted him a huge swath of land right there in Hastings for his trouble with an arrow in his torso (or wherever). There is nothing more for me to say about Chas III. His son would be a good target, if Chas has the good sense and demostrated obliquy to first trim down the expanding herd of Winsors and then resign or renege or whatever it is called when a monarch, realizing he's an oaf, refuses the job — abdicates. (Curious word that means "to go back on one's word.") William has been in the straight-line succession for quite a while, so he probably could step into the job fairly easily. His younger brother does not want that job, so the hoped-for war of succession is off. We have enough trouble already! JB archv: Society
29 August 22
A Fluffy Civil War?
There are ideas and mottos and single words flying through the air these days signifying a growing discontent with, intolerance of, and rabid hatred directed to people of a different and opposing view of what life should be like here in our country. Iron Mountain and its owner/author is, perhaps, complicit in this welter of divisive assertions. Within the past few days—roughly a few days after the FBI executed a warrant to search and seize government documents—my next-over neighbor began flying his American flag upsidedown. Our homes are not close together—about a nine minute walk down the mountainside for me, up for him. Democrats in my area are outnumbered, probably at a ratio of 7 to 1, although the county we are in has gone blue in the last two or so elections. Covid-times are difficult to analyze in terms of red and blue, but clearly our US Rep is MAGA and voted with the MAGA Republicans to not confirm the Electoral Vote on January 6th, 2021. In other words, we live here, three miles from San Diego County, in an atmosphere of suspicion and distrust. The question is: could it erupt into violence and escalate into civil war. Yeah, I think so. The word "could" is so ambiguous that I have not bent reality by saying "violence and civil war could break out here." This brings me to a point made by Sarah Vowell's Guest Essay in today's New York Times, "What's With All the Fluff About a New Civil War, Anyway?" Boseman resident and well-experienced explaining America to Americans, Ms. Vowell's opinion should be worth considering. One does have to consider why she used the term "fluff" in her essay, though. For some reason, Vowell chooses to use the American Civil War of 1861-65 and its almost imponderable 620,000 lost lives as a model for what might come. She posits a result: two countries living uncomfortably next to one another in the aftermath, and so departs from the 19th c. model. The fluffiness of her argument may be in her style and rhetorical point of view, but maybe she means something else by "fluffy," something like a meringue whipped into "stiff peaks." It strikes me overall as soft polemic against those of us who are warning that things could go "south" in a hurry. The US is complicated, and perhaps most complicated in its financial systems. For instance, if Texas were to secede, albeit illegally (and so what to that?), how would all 20 million Social Security accounts be recovered to their rightful owners? The Johnson Space Center should not belong to Texas, so maybe the Houston region would not secede. How would they deal with zillions of dollars of already withheld income taxes? Assume that they would Texasize all Army, Navy, and Air Force forces into the Texas National Guard. Some soldiers, sailors, and airmen&women would not like that much. It is definitely not "fluffy," not even as a daydream, if daydream's what she means. Mass movements in the US are rare. Thin and ephemeral ones like the Age of Aquarius, more or less evaporated. The "great religious awakenings" of the 18th and 19th century were considerably more than the tepid "Boom Awakening" of the late 1960's and 70's, but they all left a ring around the tub, so to speak, a reminder of how beset with evils our population is. The overall culture has tolerated religious extremists and thought most of the religious enthusiasms of the country to be something possibly therapeutic and really not dangerous. But ideologies are different from religions. Ideologies do not require "licenced" pastors or priests. Any goddamned fool can stand up and shout "fire" and mayhem ensues. There are core features to ideologies, and among them are assumptions about the world and its human populations that are sometime incompatable. Racism is endemic since well before the last ice age. Ideologies based on black-white racism shade off into religious doctrines some of the time and most often are based on the psychology of social status and standing, then the competition for what are considered fixed amounts of happiness in society. Religion, racism / anti-immigration-ism, and fear of losing control — or even just the illusion of control — over one's local environment and society are the essence of the current situation. And, frankly, those on the other side of the fence are having a hard time seeing how to disabuse millions and millions of otherwise acceptable people of their ideological prostheses. Meanwhile, of course, there are people monetizing and enjoying the divisiveness being sown into the landscape of society. Americans have taken extreme (and unlawful) positions about the views of Others in the past. The Congress had the House Unamerican Activities Committee for years. Roosevelt and Truman and Eisenhower had a List of Subversive Organizations, some of which definitely were, and many of which were not. Segregation was a way of avoiding all the issues of tolerance and open-mindedness and of hardening racism into public philosophy. Monetizing is a sacred cow for many. Some see monetizing snake oil as a right. Monetizing racism or Fox-like divisiveness is thought to be protected by the First Amendment. It seems that the very basic values of our society are employed to perpetuate and harden down the differences of opinion and point of view. So, how are we to avoid violence and armed conflict? In Boseman, Montana, it has to be a lot easier to find a common frame of reference. There's nothing fluffy about running cattle or growing grain or anything dealing with a cool temperate climate. But, what exists where most of the country's population exists is something else. In fact, most of these urban area populations could easily ignore the antics of the racist, misogynist, religious fanatics, if they would pledge to respect the democracy that we have built in 240 years of hard trying. But, now they are pledged to the opposite. And that is unacceptable! And, ultimately it will lead to mass violence. JB see also: Society
The Problem with Deference
Korean Air Flight 801 of August 6, 1997, has passed out of our ken a quarter century later. The flight was headed to Guam, it was raining heavily in and around Guam, the pilot made several errors of judgment and 229 people (of 254 on board) were killed in the crash. This case is interesting because the US National Transportation Safety Board came to a conclusion about the pilot and his flight crew that was so instructive Korea Air subsequently went to great pains to retrain all of its flight personnel and has had a very good record since. The Wiki on this is illuminating of a situation in which I was involved, and years later, one which the National Archives and the US Department of Justice has been involved. A paragraph from the Wiki tells the story: The NTSB was critical of the flight crew's monitoring of the approach, and even more critical of why the first officer and flight engineer did not challenge the captain for his errors. Even before the accident, Korean Air's crew resource management program was already attempting to promote a free atmosphere between the flight crew, requiring the first officer and flight engineer to challenge the captain if they felt concerned.[1]: 59 However, the flight crew only began to challenge the captain six seconds before impact, when the first officer urged the captain to make a missed approach. According to the cockpit voice recorder (CVR), the flight crew had suggested to the captain that he made a mistake, but did not explicitly warn him.[15] The flight crew had the opportunity to be more aggressive in his challenge and the first officer even had the opportunity to take over control of the aircraft and execute a missed approach himself, which would have prevented the accident, but he did not do this. Despite examining Korean Air's safety culture and previous incidents, the NTSB was unable to determine the exact reasons why the flight crew failed to challenge the captain, but at the same time noted that "problems associated with subordinate officers challenging a captain are well known." The problems may be well-known, but the lesson is still extremely vague to "captains," including my captain who in restricted waters assumed "the Con" from me and ran the ship into a kelp forest, the clingy likes of which kept us immobilized for hours, as local news helicopters circled above like flies over a pile of "drying seaweed." I had done only what I dared to do—frown—and the Old Man picked up on that, but went ahead with his "all-ahead full" in the cramped and crowded sea space we had. Deference to rank and "experience" is all the more pregnant with trouble when the President of the United States is involved. News reporters natter away at Presidents, asking important questions and silly ones, and trying to put words into Presidential mouths. It is the sort of fool's courage that could use better curricula in journalism schools, but also there should be a "buck stops here" motto for Presidents tattooed on their egos. Noticing the lack of reporterly deference, some presidents snap back, some just walk away, some answer some other question they had prepared for, some call the press names. Former President Trump, twice impeached and disgraced by the evidence that was mounted against him, is the most unlikely of men to have gotten that tattoo or understood the reason for it. Rank is a privilege where the responsibility is so big and apparent that it is forgotten that the holder of rank is very likely to make mistakes, just like the rest of us, or be an evil son-of-a-bitch that we are stuck with for a while. What we know for certain today as the redacted Affidavit ... for a Warrant to Search and Seize reveals is that The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) fiddled away precious time deferentially confronting Citizen Trump for return of immensely important classified and other documents, which he pilfered from the White House in the intensely troubled transition of power to President Biden. If I had "accidentally" carried a top secret document off my ship over to the O-Club to read while having a beer, I would be writing this essay from the Federal Prison at Leavenworth. The fact is that the National Security Evaluation Team in the Department of Justice and the agencies originating the documents have not a beer drinking, O-Club visiting, junior officer's afternoon to deal with. They have 19 months of exposed top secret SCI documents to declare COMPROMISED and equally human beings and technology that produced the content of those documents COMPROMISED. That decision is unavoidable. Even Trump knows how to use an office copier machine. His off-spring might know how to upload a document to the web. All that material is compromised the day it went astray, BUT the shilly-shallying around at the Archives just gave Team Trump months and months—January 2021 to January 2022— to do with these materials things that almost any other person would never consider. The problem was not referred to DoJ/FBI until January 2022! Check your wristwatch: it's now almost September! It is high time, at long last, to take possession of Mara Lago, NY Trump Tower, the golf courses, and any other place where he could have squirreled away our National Security documents, including, of course the residences, offices, safes and bank vaults of the off-spring and everyone else in a close orbit of Donald J. Trump. We need to have the originals, at least, back in secure circumstances. And, it is high time for the executives, hosts, analysts, and guests at MSNBC do be done with the deference to this twice impeached and many times disgraced criminal. The notion that he is innocent until proven guilty in a court of law is specious. The Affidavit specifies that we hold all the prima facie evidence needed to convict. He has committed heinous acts against our country and must be detained prophylactically and immediately! JB also in Society
19 August 22
Visions
I grew up in the Eisenhower era. By "grow up" I mean my second decade of life. Life in those days was predictable in a way that the contemporary accelleration of change seems to dismiss as utterly impossible. Well, violence does seem predictable! For the twenty years before the Eisenhower era America had been governed by Democrats through the Great Depression, which of course was caused by greed on Wall Street, but Main Street, too, and through the bloodiest and most consequential war ever waged on this planet, WWII. Americans came out way ahead of what we were when Franklin Roosevelt began his first term. We were, undeniably the world's No. 1 power, but a bit less secure behind our oceans, nevertheless a productive giant amid the rubble of Europe and the western Pacific. I think that despite the "stability" there was an uneasiness abroad in the land. There was much that Democrats had not accomplished during those twenty years, but they had begun to chip away at the formidable edifice of aparteid in America. The role of women was changed by the war, but the "trend," which is basically a part of our topic today, was to bring mom home from the factories and offices, and leave the producing and governing to men. Young women were college-bound in numbers unimagined in 1929, and it would take two generations of femme collegians to make a point. And, politically, the great bogie of American politics was Communism and Soviet Communism internationally. Senator Joseph McCarthy (R-Wis) was the jagged surface of that iceberg, but the bulk of national sentiment by 1955-6, in the lead up to the second term election of Dwight Eisenhower was, yes, we do not want Communism, but we do want civil rights. So the slow gray battle for hearts and minds took place a bit below the surface of things. Consumerism was king, and everyone seemed to understand that a rising tide lifts all boats. Of course, some boats were bigger, but society was buoyant about the possibilies, and saw very little of the '90s or 1920's excesses sloshing national wealth into the gaping maws of the greedy. It happened, but we did not notice. That was then. Now is different in serious ways. Then was before the Civil Rights Act of 1965, and so as Charles Blow says outloud in his New York Times column yesterday, Republicans Are America's Problem, America, for all its own propaganda, really was not a democracy, before 1965. You might call it a "limited democracy," but millions of human beings subject to the laws created by government, HAD NO SAY IN IT. It was still organized and conducted by white men. Blow said it outloud again on "The Last Word" with Lawrence O'Donnell on MSNBC: Republicans and their forebears before the Civil War were never in favor of democracy, and they still are not. As the panel on "Deadline White House" just agreed—completely—the life-expectancy of 1965 democracy, as deliberately maladministered as it is in places, is short, very short. On the day after Donald Trump is indicted or arrested or locked up somewhere it will go away, probably for the rest of our lives and our grown children's lives! We are destined to have another civil war ... or ... we are forced to concede that Trump is effectively "above or beyond the law." Mark Danner emphasizes this point in his lead article in The New York Review of Books "We're in an Emergency—Act Like it!", which is not as diagnostic as Blow's, but certainly exhortative. He is right. People who will not live in an anti-democratic nation must vote for Democrats this time. It is that or the radical fascists take over. I think that a number of my classmates in the 1950's understood at least vaguely that America was, and had been since the early 1800's with Ralph Waldo Emerson, awash in its own propaganda, but that some of it was even in the 50's looking and feeling a bit threadbare. I think, too, that the comfortable notion that something was seriously wrong with our democracy was only a tiny voice within our heads, but rarely raised as a subject of political discussion. There were Dixiecrats staging Jim Crow mayhem on Blacks, mainline Democrats wondering how to regain and retain power. There were Taft Republicans quietly ensconced in white privilege politics whose dog whistles were understood as easily as a Currier & Ives Christmas Card. Currier and Ives is a paradigm of light gray propaganda, purveyors of imagery that what we've got in our hearts at Christmas, under a blanket on a sleigh-ride through the nearby countryside, is the way we really are. Well, who is the WE? In a true democracy it would be all of us. It is not all of us. Yes, it would be nice to have things calm down for a decade or so. It would be nice to be able to predict a stable future. It would be nice to feel secure in our persons and things. But, we cannot go back to limited democracy. We must hear from everyone, give respect to every rational person, understand that the goals of human beings are basically the same. Some like okra and grits, some like red-flannel hash, others marbleized steak. They all want to be viable—hopefully "comfortable"— financially. They all want to know more about the physical universe, the human universe, the artistic and poetic universe. But, truly, I believe we are going to lose our democracy, the one we have fought so hard to achieve. For some it will be a return to a world they understood generations ago, in which not everyone could even hope to participate. When that happens, I am going to live or die on the battlefields here. So should you! JB also in: Society
3 August 22The Whole Truth 1000 words It's hot here. It has been for weeks and weeks. Straight nineties, a monsoon up out of the Sea of Cortez—the same one Tucson "enjoys" each summer. Humidity. The pace in Washington is about to pause as Congress and lots of the infrastructure of government heads out or over to Chesapeake beaches, down to Virginia Beach, or—more sanely—north to family favorite places where gray clouds of mosquitos descend on backyard barbecues, carrying godknowswhat sort of modern plagues. So, at last, my segue. All my life I have been plagued with the problem of philosophical (and practical) relativism. As I tried to mature, I could see and hear people skateboarding down the slope to the familiar comment, "well, it's all relative, isn't it." Points of view have become "hardened" into axes (plural of axis) of world views. The now prostrate ideal of Truth is the casuality, as if this idea that some things are true and somethings are equally false is itself false. I hear commentators on news analysis shows saying "well, there's no law against lying to the press." The media understand lying by omission, of course, but now these hardy souls are confronted with politicians who seem to believe their own cant and lies. The essential thing lost is that there might be a fact—a true thing—that now no longer exists culturally and is past the point of being acceptable or relevant in public. I watch MSNBC, which the Trumpist guberatorial candidate Kari Lake in Arizona calls MSDNC. Is Lake wrong? Well, yes, the Democratic National Committee has nothing whatever to do with what MSNBC is, except that MSNBC is not Republican any more, not "W" Bush/McCain afficianda Nicolle Wallace, not Eisenhower Republican Rachel Maddow, certainly not Moynihan Democrat Lawrence O'Donnell. They toe the progressive-liberal line most of the time. They omit stuff that is relevant and obnoxious. Is that lying? Does it distort and waylay the pursuit of Truth? Does it cripple the idea that there might be a Truth out there to find, swallow, metabolize, and move forward fortified by? If you were a grievance-oriented Fox channel devotee, you would instantly say, "YES, of course!" and perhaps you would embroider your faith with some emotional expletives. Have we all become "relativists" since Einstein showed how the universe itself is relativistic? There are such things, I will assert from at least 50 years of study, things called "root metaphors," which are words, events, concepts that give shape, form, even detail to our thinking processes, our brains being analogy machines at least half the time (in our prime). Thought itself is replete with analogies on a whole universe of personal and shared-social experience and addressed consciously via root metaphors. You need to know that at the time of Wm. Shakespeare the social code contained a disdain for metaphor, because they were deliberately not actual or true — just intriguing! There is an opinion (does that make it untrue?) piece in the New York Times today about the newish book entitled "After the Ivory Tower Falls," by Will Bunch. The reviewer takes Mr. Bunch's argument apart nicely, I think, despite the facts that higher education is much less than an ivory tower these days. I speak from about a dozen years as a student and thirty as an instructor, and during that thirty as an academic administrator. I point this article out simply to show how one person's ideas, predicated on some grievance and, perhaps, guilt, can be shown to be irremediably distorted and in specific details violently wrong. I have a sense today, as Kansans voted 58% to 42% (97% of the votes tallied) to reject an amendment to their state constitution that would have removed the right to abortion from that constitution, setting up an inevitable frenzy of anti-abortion law-making. Kansans have found within themselves a new axis for their democracy. I have to deal, though, with Michiganders defeating Rep. Peter Meijer, who voted to impeach Trump. Apparently, the preponderance of Michigan's Republican voters are Trumpists, which is an amazing rejection of the accumulating evidence that Trump is an outright outlaw. For me the question is whether a society like ours, our real society, can ever shed the habit of treating facts as a matters embedded in relativity? In science, all things are provisional, but as corroborating EVIDENCE is assembled, the provisionality of that idea attenuates markedly, almost to zero. I doubt many people understand this very well. In 1912 Alfred Wegener suggested that the available evidence suggests that the Earth's continents move about and once fitted together. He asserted his Theory of the Floating Continents and gave credit to preceding such hypotheses. He was laughed out of town, so to speak, until 1957 when as the result of investigations of the floor of the Atlantic Ocean during the International Geophysical Year Project, the mid-Atlantic ridge was discovered, the efficient mechanism that shows that tectonic plates exist and are "floating" on sub-sea oceans of magma. It took just under half a century, evidence, and an identifiable means to vindicate Wegener and millions of school children who could see with their own eyes how Africa and the New World fit together. So, the answer to my question is not a resounding "yes," but it is possible that societies will begin again to rely on evidence when coming to conclusions about things. Assertions, especially hypotheses, need evidence. Without evidence assertions are not worthless, but they definitely are not Truth, much less the Whole Truth. Meanwhile, in the US we have a problem with people who are steadfastly pro-fascist. They are that way because they see that their social values are not respected, in fact abhorred, by the majority of citizens. Their only escape is to dispense with majoritarianism ... democracy. Grievance and fear are blocking their view of how to survive their minority views. More to the point, fear and grievance are preventing them from seeing the evidence that the majority are much closer to the Truth than they are. JB also in: Society
14 Juillet 22
Fęte nationale française
1790 in France was marked by a growing awareness that the Oath of the Tennis Court a year earlier, the defiance of the non-privileged in the Estates General, the creation of the Assemblée nationale was just the beginning. There was so much more to do. Prise d'assaut de la Bastille was an event with more psychological impact than real effect. The French nation knew, though, that the evolution of French government from its roots in medieval customs and laws was actually a revolution, and devil take the hindmost! In 2022, I just discovered, there is considerable anxiety that restoring the rule of law in our country, after our experience with medieval combat in the Capitol building and DJ Trump's wish to become our emperor, is not necessarily going to be easy. The commentators I watch were all speaking today about the inconceivable silence from our Department of Justice. Most often the pundits say that Merrick Garland was duty-bound to restore order in DoJ, an order that was viciously disrupted by Trump right up to the bitter end of his time in office. What these pundits never say is that Garland may be overwhelmed by the recalcitance of GOP senior leadership in the Department, a lot of whom are guilty of sitting on their hands (or Trump's) during the fracuses. So, maybe there is that kind of an excuse for AG Garland's silence, for the lack of dependable evidence that DoJ is actually doing anything to pursue Trump. Meanwhile Joe Biden's poll numbers are in the low 30's. One could assume Joe has spoken with the Attorney General about all this, and one would have to agree that conversations like that would be privileged. Still, I am going to stake out a position that the President should have been talking: that he has the obligation to reassure us that all's well at DoJ. The fact that he has not done that leads to the conclusion that all is not well at DoJ, that the President is reluctant to assert that it is, lest such a statement blow up in his face, that the President has not had that "wood-shed" talk with Garland because either he does not want to know ... or he does not know how to. The old guy's poll numbers slip into the 20's as I think about this. A couple more things. Kamala Harris is obviously not, or ever has been, the "last person in the room with the President." He has done almost nothing to reassure us that he is preparing her well for the ever more likely time when she will have to take over. Rumors are out all over the place that she does not have his confidence. Those rumors are in the national press. My friend in NYC has been saying for over a year that the pair of them cannot possibly be on the ticket in 2024. My first guess is that Biden does not know how to work with Harris, and that is because he is too deep in the old school view of women. He passed the signing pen for his recent Executive Order on women's pregnancy care to her in such an abrupt way that I had to comment aloud. It looked petulant, not decisive. Old school thinking is abroad in the land, including Ohio where the reactionary government and toadies in the press denied that a 10-year old pregnant girl was real. They got their comeuppance yesterday or Tuesday, but the issue is now resolving into its starkest form. The abortion issue is only partly, probably less than half, about the act of getting or administering an abortion. It just as much about control of women — putting them back in their place and away from the ballot box! This sick, sick machismo is appalling, but since Trump's grab 'em by the hoohah comment, that has been the drill. It goes way further back, as I commented a few days ago, about slave-owners impregnating their female slaves to create new slaves, as one Thomas Jefferson was wont to do. If you have not done so yet, read Steven Erickson's Arc d'X. It's Sally and Tom in Paris, while the Constitution was being written. Sending Trump to some American bastile or prison for twenty years is necessary, but that does not solve this problem of male arrogance. Nothing, absolutely Nothing could be more fundamental to righting the ship of state than extirpating the misogyny from this nation. The abortion issue is about control of women, tying them down with the rapist's off-spring, insulting their very right to autonomy of mind, spirit, and body. JB Archived at: Society
11 July 22
Riceville, Iowa
4 July 22
Mere Words and Others
Thus Adam inquires of all the animals in Eden how he came to be, and they, if it were known. It is the ancient pondering on the impression — the experience — of one's consciousness of existence, an ouroboros sort of question, if ever there were. The question asks itself as the snake chews upon his tail. We know our own consciousness, but when asked about our sister's, brother's, neighbor's consciousness we have no real idea, except that we extend our own experience and assume. Catherine Nicholson's amazing review of four new books about John Milton (1608-1674) and his Paradise Lost (1667) in the 23 June 22 New York Review of Books is an erudite review and, I got to thinking, perhaps a parable of some importance these days. She ends the article with a string of words, a piece of English prose about the Apple and the Fall, that, for me, took hours to resolve: ... when he came at last to write his own version of this story, Milton allowed himself-and us-to linger in an imaginary world where none of this was yet the case: where the wisdom to choose and the freedom to experiment were exercised on an almost infinite array of blameless alternatives, limited by a single prohibition. To know good by knowing good is the privilege of the unfallen, and in the middle books of Paradise Lost, we see just how surprising, variable, and rich with potential such an existence might have been. It's pretty certain that a parable on our situation in America in 2022 is a long stretch from innocence, but it is among us well-believed that knowing good from knowing good is a less fullsome path to knowing good by also knowing evil. And, clearly, Americans should count their blessings, the temporarily most prominent of which is: that we have survived and are surviving such evil as to make even the Canterbury-bound Miller blush. Perhaps the main point is the "long stretch," the near absurdity of our pretense of innocence, the three say-no, see-no, hear-no monkeys against Critical Race Theory, the on-going perversions of democracy, our imminent fall from the fabricated grace of our privilege, the hypocrisies of this one Day in July. Relativists rebel at the notion that our paradise is lost. Would it not be better to abandon paradise in favor of a just republic! JB archived at: Society
18 May 22
♬"River City"♬
I am from the far northwestern corner of New York State, not far from mourning Buffalo to the south, or Rochester to the east where I concluded my bumpy gestation, miles from Syracuse where I lived as an infant, or Black River as a toddler, or Groton as a kindergartener-plus. New York is complex, I know that now from my retirement perch on the fabled Left Coast. Our entire country is complex, and this is both deliberate and random, chaotic even. In 2022 after last year's national political convulsions many of us are bewildered about the fact that things have not settled down. It is pretty obvious that the things that should have died down have not, although in the past they did. It is equally obvious that there are people around, all around, deliberately stirring the pot. The most obvious conclusion that somehow the myriad parts of politics in America have now begun to act more like a team or army might, less individual, more scripted, say. The most obvious national happening is Former President Trump's reorganization of the Republican Party from its moorings in the concept of representative democracy to more fascistic and centralist ideas about governance and combined that with a long American History (and some say American Purpose) of White majority rule. One wonders how this happened so suddenly, but in discussions like that on the "Deadline White House" news analysis program on MSNBC Monday afternoon, eventually the speakers came around to a better understanding of the obstructionist and peremptory misbehavior of Republican office holders at all levels. It turns out that seemingly individual actions are instead in fact also broad traditions that have been seething just under the calmer surface of national, state, and local politics since the beginning of the nation almost 250 years ago, namely, the fear of Black human beings now stoked by so-called Replacement Theory, as NY Times columnist Charles Blow clearly enunciated in the beginning of what was a very intense discussion of where we as a nation are this year. So then in that very conversation, Michael Steele, the former Chairman of the Republican National Committee, said that this goes way beyond party politics. It is in the culture, the social history of the United States! The rest of this discussion crashed into the invisible barrier to the understanding of this (and other) epiphanies—inadequate vocabulary— and it is also a shame that the rest of it was not archived for the online audience, because it was perfectly blunt. (In some ways MSNBC is run by buffoons. For instance they find it difficult to keep the name and title of people speaking on screen while they're speaking!) The existential take-away from the discussion is that the United States pretense to be a multi-cultural democracy runs aground on the stupid idea that the color of a person's skin is a sign of their alien culture, their unacceptability! Europeans are White, mostly, and their cultures (despite centuries and millennia of warfare) can get along in America, because they are White! Truly unfathomable! I was in Groton when we stopped moving to different towns in New York State. We left for Washington, D.C. in the winter of 1947. I was in 2nd grade. Washington was a "Southern" city then, even with the wartime influx of people from everywhere in the 48 states. Of course I tried to fit in at school. I did not understand clearly why Washington was so different, except that it was huge compared to Groton's 2500 people. I think there may have been one Black family in Groton, but in DC half the 800,000 were Black, and they were all obviously being discriminated against, even more so where we bought a cheap house across the Potomac River in Arlington, Virginia, in Dixie where there were twice as many public restrooms and drinking fountains, all to remind you that you were sharing these spaces and air with people of a different kind. What kind? You know, as I grew, basically a Yankee transplanted into Dixie, I watched military families come and go. If they came from the north or west they bit their lips, lowered their chins to the overt and covert racism, and got used to it. There was, I clearly thought at the time, in the corners of their eyes a signal that they were holding back their dissent from Dixie culture, American apartheid. Or, later in high school, there was a wall we were not to look over, a world apart from the White world where things were good and safe and moral (except for sporadic nuclear warfare duck and cover drills), a way of life we were to assume they liked in which they were left to their own devices as long as they kept away from us. It is more than slightly ridiculous that the media are surprised that White Nationalist / Supremacy ideas are not strictly speaking political ideas. The social origins of racism are not political—and, we all know, politics has been seriously unable to do anything about it. As Charles Blow puts it, in the world the difference is greatest between the colors black and white. The cultural ramifications of dark versus light go back to the Book of Genesis. The failure of everyone to ignore ancient folklore and mythology in favor of declaring and then creating a new kind of homeland for human beings from everywhere is the failure we now seem poised to amplify and pass on to generations yet unborn, this time, again, with terrible violence. I sit here a resident of the magical internet many hours each day. I was an early adopter, and I was evangelical about it. My boss, a Black man from Trinidad, saw the internet and specifically the communications possibilities as at once marvelous and liberating, but more likely destructive and likely to unleash the classical Furies to take vengeance on mankind for, as the Iliad says, having sworn false oaths. The web, the dark web, the smart phone in every pocket have revolutionized politeness, civility, and politics. These technologies may have destroyed them all. But we do not get off that easy! Technology is innocent; people are not. The technology can be used for good, and it is, but it is also used to amplify fear and evil. It makes lots and lots of money for a few, and confers power to them as well. All the reasonable responses to these excesses will take years to prove themselves, and we do not have years, only days. On the political right, the people have decided to raise up a flawed, but iconic figure, one who represents some sort of average main street and occasionally side street morality and education, and who epitomizes the self, the self-indulgent everyman. He is their creature, not his own creation. He is an avatar of what they have become as grieving also-rans in the economy and history. One does not need to have graduated from Harvard to understand what he is made of and how he thinks. He is pudgy fat, tall, talkative, sort of stupid stubborn, an everyman, but big enough to be national rather than just a neighborhood bigshot. He is also a bully, and fully understands that bullies need someone to prey upon, to use violence against! N.B.—Robert Preston Meservey as con man "Professor Harold Hill" in the 1957 (!) broadway musical, The Music Man convinces a naive midwestern town that they have a problem—right there in River City. The play is gentle enough about the naivete of the townspeople and opaque enough about the "boys' marching band" he intends to con the people with, a not exactly obvious metaphor about "pretend-patriotism" and "calling their own tune." He lights on the new pool table in the billiards parlor as an intrusive symbol of an alien big city culture inhabited by people not very much like River City's folk. And so the story winds around and around focusing on remarkably illogical connections to a clash of cultures. If you have not already, click on the title of this essay and watch. You will see how very vulnerable good people can be ... and that we already knew that in 1957 before I was out of high school. JB (Society, The Project)
3 May 22
Roe and Casey
Justice Alito, at his comfirmation in the Senate, said that all cases brought before the Supreme Court should be decided by the Law—the Constitution and Statute Law and Case Law, i.e.. precedent (stare decisis literally "old decisions")— and, moreover, he said, public opinion should have no role in the Court's decisions. Alito is the author of the First Draft (of February 2022) Opinion on the Mississippi law which limits abortion to the first 15 weeks of gestation (a case known as Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization), believed to be a pretext case to have the recently imbalanced Supreme Court overthrow Roe v. Wade (1973), and Casey (1992), which supported Roe and reaffirmed the concept of precedent. Alito is from all outward appearances and self-identification a male human being, who doubtlessly believes that abortion is tantamount to murder, based on the idea that after the "conception stage" during which the mass of cells established by the fertilization of the ovum by one spermatazoon slowly begins to form (or not) into an embryo ("the embryonic stage" defined for humans as the 5th through 10th week of pregnancy), during which cells that will form into the heart muscle begin to "beat." After much ado, most anti-abortionists believe that the "heart-beat" is conclusive evidence of human life, and that the embryo and later the fetus has a Constitutional right—but not in the Constitution—to life, which is in the province of government and law to defend. Human life as humans see it is precious and "sacred" for those whose world view incorporates deity as the first cause, the continuous cause, or a variety of other concepts that place deity beyond mere human logic. But at some point societies recognize that there must be a first moment when a human being begins to exist and becomes biologically viable, that is, however immature, it could live on its own, but not necessarily independent of parental care, as with all babies. Choosing the heartbeat as the symbolic moment when a human beng is potential is based on a fallacy of reasoning. Heart cells beat because of the bio-chemical structures of which they are composed, and heart muscle cells can and do beat on their own in a Petri dish. The sanctity of human life is questionable as a societal "norm" or principle. Right now there is at least one war going on in which the combantants are earnestly, and with the grace of their deities supporting them, killing other human beings on purpose. All societies understand at some level that death of humans by accidents, storms, wars, traffic, self-abuse, homicide and other causes is inevitable ... and only in cases where humans intended that outcome does Law come into play. One of the most difficult things to prove is mammalian intent, particularly human intent. Does human sexual intercourse signify an intent to procreate? Well, it could, but most of the time, I am told, there is no such intent to make a baby, and rather, that is the furthest thing from either mind. If you do not intend to make a baby is that the same as you intending to not make a baby, but rather to only enjoy the physiological and emotional outcomes of sexual intercourse. I think the difference is whether you had any intentions at all: not intend v. intend not. This is the precise logic of language, but Law cannot say of the man or of the woman which of these was present during that sexual intercourse ... or later when the spermatazoon finally found the ovum. The Law, being incompetent in this, has no business intruding on the privacy (another word not found in the Constitution) of presumptively ethical human women and men. The consequences of government and/or religions interfering with these private matters are dire indeed. Moreover, there is the stark and very dark suspicion that such interference is deliberately intended to reduce the civil liberties of female human beings to the advantage of males. This is unacceptable in every respect! The draft opinion was leaked to provoke public opinion—despite Justice Alito's horror of that—and to bring this matter to the only acceptable final conclusion that abortion is entirely a matter of personal health between a woman and her licensed medical care-giver. JB (Society, Government)
29 April 22
What Would An American Dictatorship Look Like?
Maybe it would be more appropriate to ask why a question like that posed above in the title is even relevant? The relevance is that the Republicans are no longer the simple political party with an elephant mascot, the party of Lincoln, but are now and since 2015, if you will, demonstrably involved in an on-going criminal conspiracy to acquire governmental power with which they overtly intend to limit the franchise to people like themselves who cannot abide sharing democracy with people they deem cultural aliens, untrustworthy and fundamentally inferior: in general Blacks, Browns, Asians, Muslims, Liberals, Atheists, Jews, LGTBQ people, direct household welfare recipients of any color, Socialists, and Communists. Admittedly, that is a long laundry list of people to fear or hate and to whom they have already vocally expressed their undying enmity. To be fair, though, not every Republican fears and hates all of these types of people, but they bring people with those fears and hatreds under their political tent, all of them, because all of them no longer respect the democratic principles they once did—or once quietly pretended to. They see themselves out-numbered and threatened with extinction. Boiled down to its fundamental essence Republicans no long espouse (and quite the contrary, despise) equality of all Americans under the rule of law, or put another way, the have declared the "great American experiment in multi-cultural democracy to be an abject and intolerable failure. And, moreover, a situation which no longer fits with their baseline idea that the United States was intended (by God) to be a nation where White Christian People are in charge." The first epoch of the American Dictatorship will look very much like the American Republic looked in 1949 or so: segregated, Protestant Christians in power nearly everywhere, Roman Catholics biding their time and occasionally to occupy serious policy and power wielding offices. Jews were restricted to local areas or low-visibility positions. There were no prominent or annoying Muslims in America in 1949. Atheists kept to themselves with certain notable exceptions, some of whom monetized it. Trade unions were corrupted at almost all levels. Corporations had acquired many key members of either house of Congress. The Eisenhower eight years ending in 1960 were sedate, censored, with rumbling fears of corporatist fascism surfacing not nearly often enough. This epoch will last only six or so years, linked to the presidential election cycle. Elections will frequently be corrupted and decided by Republican state legislatures. Leadership and the grievance-base it depends on will plot carefully the removal of key opponents, usually for tax evasion. Putin likes that sort of finesse. For a good majority of the electorate the consolidation of power will seem quite far off, and it will be poorly reported in the news. In 1949 through the mid-1960's the South was run by Dixiecrats whose agenda was continued suppression of the Black culture, unless it could be monetized by and for Whites, the middle classes of which enjoyed a world of consumer delights, many of which were to assist women who had been returned to the home household from their wartime emancipation. Notre Dame was a favorite college football team, but various state universities vied for the top laurels. Professional baseball was barely integrated, but still basking in the illusion of being the national pasttime. College students drank copiously, but did not demonstrate in public about the social inequities or the rapacious corporate culture. They wanted careers more than opporunities to fix all the cracks in the Bell, but to be steadfastly anti-Communist and girded for a long cold war. Cities were growing and spreading out into delightful but poorly funded and staffed suburban townships. Basic industries were not yet fully impacted by less costly goods produced "overseas" —a quaint term underlining the illusory independence of the US from Europe and Asia. For some, mostly White, it was an idyllic time for which many Republicans wish to return or reinvent with our new technologies. Washington and state capitals were reported in less detail by news media, and that will be replicated first. Television journalists already foresee this and are hewing to the "fair and balanced" neutrality they were taught, despite the glaring fact that balance is now a comparison of apples to toadstools, and fairness is essentially complicity against democracy. The second phase of the American Dictatorship will follow its logical pathways to situations like Tamany Hall in New York, Huey Long in Louisiana. It will prosper in situations like the theocratic government in Utah, and Protestant-pandering statehouses in semi-rural places like Oklahoma and Missouri and Indiana, all of the South, and even the upper midwest, especially states like Minnesota heavily "burdened" by Islamic immigrants. There will be more corrupt "buy-off/trade-offs" like price supports and land banks for agriculture, so that they would stay quiet in those states like Pennsylvania, Indiana, Iowa, Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, the Dakotas, Montana, et al. Economic sub-sector welfare will be balanced by Military sub-sector welfare. Basically, rolling the sow over onto her side and giving suck to whomever could raise enough political noise to get it. The news cycle was managed by those running the big three news companies and in cahoots with the few major newspapers not already headed for oblivion. These things will happen in Washington more and locally worse. But in Phase 2, as now, the principle of "Leninist democratic centralism" will guide Republican politics, that is, the value or valence of everything will be declared at the center of the "Party," as it is now by Trump and his avatars in wards, precincts, and all the way to Washington. The power apparatchiki will continue to use "dog whistle" language. Journalism is protected by the First Amendment, yet the nightly news is not protected from the corporations that own their means of production. Prominent journalists will be scorned and shuttered as the dictatorship takes hold through endless lies and mendacity. The rest will bow out of contention, and journalism departments across the nation will fold for lack of customers and under pressure from fearful alums. The word "truth," which was assailed endlessly before the last free election, will not be used as much anymore. Universities and colleges will retreat into Aesopean curricula as alumni and state legislatures are transformed into censorship boards wielding power through budgets. Again those most affected will be that long list of the feared and hated, including now the Progressive moles that pop up to criticize and are slapped down into obscurity. So far most of this will be tolerable if you are White or Rich or both. The discrepancies between ideal and real will increase, but these will fall most problematically on all those kinds of people Republicans fear and hate and cannot tolerate participating in our government. The White middle class so aggrieved by our national failure to adapt our economy smoothly and equitably to the online, computer-managed, world economy with all its natural disortions from asymmetric economic evolution, will demand redress, but the center will not tolerate that much dissent. It could take a generation before these aggrieved, the fascistic base, learn their lesson. It could take another generation to throw off the tyranny. Progressives and Recovering Republicans will watch in horror—and fear—as this happens. So will the world, which by the way is fairly used to "American self-deceptionism." There will be movements for secession in New England, New York, New Jersey and the west coast. There could be civil war over this, but it could also trigger the wary everywhere to reconsider the cost to their freedom and our democracy. The seeds of absolutist, anti-democratic, fascist politics are planted deep in our soil. Fighting our way free of dictatorship will be very difficult, for many fatal. JB (Society, National Politics)
20 April 22
Is Censorship Obvious?
Stimulated by an article in The New York Review of Books of April 7, 2022, by Ariel Dorfman, "The Futility of Censorship," I understood immediately what the point of the piece might be. My own thoughts are taken up with Putin's hold on the imaginations of the Russians, and yet here at home the hold Donald Trump & Co. have on millions of imaginations in the absence of countervailing censorship. I have been wondering a lot about whether Russians can see through the fog of lies and notice that not only are certain possibly more-truthful commentaries about reality now missing entirely, but also that a lot of west European and North American businesses are no longer there. How can it be that intelligent people do not—or choose not—to fully and carefully and habitually evaluate and appreciate the fields of human discourse on which they work and play? I wonder what the counterpart is for the Trumpists, since it is not vicious censorship. There is a factor at play that for some reason we largely miss in this discussion, which acts like censorship. Is it self-censorship?Of course, to be honest about it, we in the US have various kinds of censorship playing out in every television program and every newscast, even in our porn, I am told. Why we deliberately censor the "pubic hair" of reality is a long story, which I am going to summarize as follows: the point of censoring discourse—including commercial advertizements, childrens stories, the evening news from what used to be the "big three," and even to some extent in movies and novels,— is to avoid riling up, embarrassing, challenging, or leading astray people whose attention and comfortable agreement is wanted. Censorship is the suppression device of thought exchange. Social taboos are rarely called out by their names. Political ideological divergence is, until recently, downplayed to make it easier to hope for agreements and to avoid questioning the efficacy of the status quo, the mechanisms of political activity. Religious ideas are left aside, unargued, somewhat patronizingly, to comfort those who need that comfort.The religious realm is where censorship has been in action for a long, long time. Ariel Dorfman mentions ancient Greeks like Protagorus who wrote that the gods were not real. Clearly, those with a stake in the god-given status quo could not abide such heresy. For my own part, I did not think to question my Episcopalian universe until I understood that respectable grown-ups had done and were currenty doing so. In that sense, the general censorship about questioning authority, specifically eclesiastical authority, was not obvious, in the the sense of answering the title of this essay. I suspect that the less sophisticated minds in Russia are accepting Putin's view of the world in a similar way, that is, without much from accepted authoritative sources to compare it to. So "authoritative" and "authorities" themselves are parts of the ill-discussed factor inhabiting the world of censorship. Adherents to one idea will not easily reliquish their adherence to that idea, and will reject out of hand the challenging idea until the emotional bonds to the original idea are broken or severely damaged. "Authority" is a key concept. As a thirteen year old, the American Flag Barer in the procession and recession rituals of my church, I put my trust in the vicar without seeing the vicariousness of the relationship to God. When the priest turns out to be just another vendor in the marketplace of ideas, authority is gone, and so eventually is the religion1. For the Russians to overthrow the Orthodox clergy for their human iniquities is too heavy a burdens. For the Trumpists to see that the "base-everyman realism" of Trump is an outrageous, cynical con, threatens their own self-confidence in being able to take the measure of another human being, that is, their own position in the polity, which was in doubt anyway, given the evolution of national demographics. So, we cling to ideas for our "own" reasons and do not resist the imposition of that censorship, which shelters us from antithetical ideas. Censorship is not exactly "futile" as Dorfman hopes, because it can have century's and even millennia-long effects. Censorship is also not exactly "obvious," because censorship plays to our need to protect ideas to which we hold and mold ourselves.
1 — I understand that many people within a religion hold to the artifacts of the faith as a common and, therefore, reassuring stablity, so that they can enjoy the companionship of their fellow human beings in the repose offered in the "shelter"2 of the edifice. I am speaking only about religous organizations, not the spirituality that infuses faith with personal authenticity. 2 — "Shelter" means the deliberate, accepted, pervading censorship from extraneous or competing views. JB (Society, The Media)
14 April 22
Patterns in the World
Our brains are evolved to notice patterns in what we perceive around us all day long and into the night. Some patterns are quite different from those large paper things our mothers' used to cut out fabric for a dress or blouse. Where the furniture is placed in your home is a pattern, and you notice quickly when something is "out of place." There are patterns in behaviors, too, such that when a neighbor, whom you may or may not actually know, does not show up as usual for the 7:15am bus into D.C., the one that goes through the Pentagon, you may or may not consciously notice, but your mind does. It is one of the thousands of things that register and set up micro-anxieties or micro-pleasures or just micro-data. The brain, based on your previous mental behaviors, decides whether to lodge these small bits into short-, mid-term-, or long-term memory. So, if you were asked, by someone representing themselves as Mr. Stan Beeman, FBI, say, whether Mr. Philip Jennings was on the bus today or yesterday, you might be able to answer with something more than: "I have no idea." People like Mr. Beeman would probably know. It takes practice. We all develop pattern "practices" in our daily routines. So Beeman is not extra-ordinary, but some of us are amazingly adept at pattern recognition. Name That Tune winners who "get" a song in three notes are amazing. There are pattern recognition people whose patterns are very low frequency event constellations, slower than the procession of seasons, slower than long term memory in most cases. The apparition of Halley's comet, for instance, which usually requires reference to historical notes and calendars, but which after several apparitions allows you to make a periodicity calculation, so that 76 years later an observer might say to herself, 'hmm ... could this be Halley's, it's about time for it.' As a professional historian I am acquainted with event patterns that, although they are not exactly the same, they do seem to rhyme. There is something similar about them that allows for different players and agents, different specific objectives, yet the latest event seems predictable in some measure. That, of course, is why we (and other animals) have become pattern recognizers—to be able to predict favorable and unfavorable situations. Conflicting purposes are as old as two hunters in the same valley. The conflict is about which of the hunters will score that red elk both of them have seen fleetingly. The conflict is really about which of them, given a range of antecedent nutrition events, will survive this winter. Being a genealogist, myself, I often wonder what sorts of conflicts were mooted or out-right won by any of my ancestors, such that I appear on the scene just in time to become a Vietnam War combat participant, and yet survive. I think that my "patterns analyses" and my "possibilities projections" were such that I was able to organize my situation to be less dangerous than it otherwise could have been. Yes, we do project our pattern recognition analyses into our futures, otherwise what would be the purpose of it all. Right now our civilization is projecting a recognized pattern of warfare behaviors into a future that will have many, many such projections also there to aid or confuse us on how to behave at that point when the military phase of this warfare is over and done—or sooner, if need be. We have detected a pattern of Russian military behavior that in previous instances has been analyzed and codified into the expression "war crimes." In other words, we see Russia doing barbarous things to non-combatant people in Ukraine and we are even saying "genocide" out loud, even though we know that the international laws about war crimes and the worst of them all—genocide—are exceedingly difficult to assert in court, especially when the perps are not in our custody, or are perhaps a large part of a society, rather than just individuals. Why then are we making such a loud protest about war crimes and genocide, when we do not even know for sure that our team will win the day. Well, we are setting the stage for cognitive processes and international political behaviors we know will take place, because we are pretty sure we will not lose. Those cognitive processes will contain assertions and evidence that Russia is, in fact, a rogue state, a state that we cannot trust to act civilly in the future, and we do this now to assure our future selves that the relief we feel about the termination of military warfare does not beguile us into thinking that Russia, as it actually is exists in reality, is capable of contrition or reforming itself! Vladimir Putin is an incarnate megalomanic monster, a kind of human being for whom nothing humane can be done to improve him for life among the rest of us. The people around him are a lot like that, as well. The people they lead in the largest country in the world are to some degree, in some percentage, willing and unwilling victims of their leaders. Their world view is so alien and dangerous that we cannot just let them run free to do this all over again and again and again. What is it that makes Russian soldiers want to rape and murder? The answer is that they get away with it. The deeper answer is that survival in Russia has been less assured than in other places equally cold and equally ancient. We are approaching what is perhaps the most serious, self-generated, existential inflection-point in the history of our species, and we need to know with reasonable precision what we are doing. Half-measures must be off the table. Russia and Russians must be reorganized. The Japanese came to this point in 1945. Through the discipline and compassion of many, they were led out of the cul-de-sac of their cultural evolution into one that made much more sense for them and us. Russians have no more and no less pride in their own cultural achievements than did the Japanese. If the Japanese can do this, so can the Russians. We all must see that it is done! The Russian pattern of paranoid absolutism must be abolished! JB (Society)
8 April 22
Critical Thinking
On Thursday the 7th, Nicolle Wallace had a segment with Julia Ioffe and Igor Novikov (on the right of your screen click on the name "Igor Novikov"), unfortunately this valuable session was clipped short before Julia Ioffe was able to also speak about the last comment Igor Novikov made—about a 100 million Russians "zombified" by State propaganda. Of course we have our own problem with conspiracy theorists and cynical politicians repeating mammoth lies that lead to conclusions they favor—the White "Christian" Supremacy myth of American greatness fighting the LGTBQ liberals and abortion-mongers and commies. In the missing part of the clip Igor mentioned the problem of getting information into the Kremlin media, using a form of (my term) "rhetorical jiu jitsu" to charm the censors with facts and images that will betray the Kremlin message. Igor used the expression "critical thinking," and I think he was drawing our/my attention to the futility of painting the whole Russian population with tar, when it should be obvious, and if not, then plausible, that Russians are just as capable of discerning propaganda as centrist Republicans in America are. Yes, Putin anc Co, are doing a populist lap-dance on the Russian population, just as Trump and Co. are titilating the grievance-ridden imaginations of their base with a very steady diet of lies and conspiracy theories. In the American case that base has a real grudge and dislike, hatred sometimes, of liberals, who they see as inadequately masculine, wishy-washy, do-gooder, socialists stealing their hard earned money to bribe Blacks and Browns and LGTBQ's to vote for them, hence their lack of enthusiasm for democratic principles of government. For their own part, the Russians have been whipped into a froth of jingoistic nationalism, which plays to a reconstitution of the beloved empire enjoyed by the Tsars and the Bolsheviks, and conversely a hatred of those who have chosen to have their own democratic country, the Ukrainians. Besides looking a bit like Jimmy Fallon (as he said on his first interview with Nicolle), Igor Novikov is a very smart man, educated and trained to do what he has been doing—educating the free world about the situation in Ukraine. Here is another clip from Nicolle's show about the "real" war for the hearts and minds. And, I am trying to figure out a way to learn from our own American experience to penetrate Vladimir Putin's even stronger and tighter grip on Russian public information and views. It was not by accident, by the way, that Igor said it is possible, too, that Ukraine will win the coming battle for the eastern regions of Ukraine. So, you see, the occasional stick in Putin's eye is useful, too. JB (War & Peace)
6 April 22
"Populist Lap-Dance"
On Tuesday evening on Lawrence O'Donnell's The Last Word news analysis program Lawrence managed to get actor/director Sean Penn to come into the studio to talk. Sean had just returned from a meeting with President Zelenskiy, a follow-up on a documentary Sean began with him before the invasion by Russia. Sean looked every minute of his 61 years, mostly tired, but not too tired to hatch a great bon mot about contemporary America. I have taken the liberty to title this essay with his words. I think the mot does not translate directly, but clearly to me, the perspective Sean has of what we look like from around the world and maybe had reinforced by talking with President Zelenskiy begins with the idea "utterly vulgar." In today's NYTimes there is a guest essay, which caught my attention, "America's Vanishing Kingdom" by Thuy Linh Tu, a professor now of social and cultural analysis at NYU. Her story is more than just interesting, and her narrative has a riveting statement in it about American responsibility for what we do in and to the world. I heartily recommend it. The Washington Post has a piece today: "NATO says Ukraine to decide on peace deal with Russia — within limits", which I think is about as muddled a piece of journalism as can be imagined on such an important subject. Maybe the Editors thought this was as careful a "headline" as the Post could afford today. I think the point is that a country fighting a war with its own army, but with arms from NATO gives NATO the right to set limits for the "deal." Think about that for the rest of the day, please. JB (Society, War & Peace)
1 April 22
"It's All Too Much"
For me, an edgy, aging, glabrous, retired academic, a lifelong Democrat, an optimist—(or otherwise I wouldn't be writing these essays and tossing them out into the electronic winds)—the hands-down best two hours I spend each weekday are with Nicolle Wallace on her MSNBC show Deadline: White House! Hands down!! Nicolle and her producer staff and assistants and, especially her guests are tops. Today was the best time for her to have that discussion of how bad it is outside our comfy homes and necessary illusions. From the traitorous jabbering of Trump, the sophomoric mouth of Madison Cauthorn (sp?) and Marjorie T.G., the spinelessness of the Minority Leader in the House, (I keep forgetting his name), and the arrogance of the mush-mouthed Minority Leader in the Senate, that homunculus from Kentucky, and now the scorched-earth bloodbath in Ukraine, the prideful paranoia of the brain-washed Russian people and their willingness to commit mass murder to make a point of their appalling failure to grow up to be a responsible society, to Putin himself, an ugly reminder for us of how simple it was to create a hell-bent monster to rule the people of his country and terrorize the rest of us. Us! The American experiment in multi-cultural democracy is hanging by a thread. The main reason it is only a thread is because the other political party has decided that they cannot prosper in a democracy, especially one that already threatens their ability to muster up a base of voters who believe in their thinly veiled white supremacist program, their anti-Semitism, their do-nothing, know-nothing conservatism, their flouting of the rule of law ... and truth ... or civility itself! They could well take the Congress this November and bring the experiment to its knees. If so, two years hence and after perverting the election processes around the country, the presidential election will be a farce hidden in a pile of lies and threats of violence. Stocking up on toilet paper will not be sufficient. We must deal with traitors and remove them from society, and those who harbor traitors must suffer the appropriate consequences. It is hard to say what I am most interested to comment upon, but given all the time and effort I have put into my education, I think that I can teach people with open minds about Russia, and to a lesser degree China, what they are doing. In today's Deadline: White House website video there is a menu of segments/blocks Nicolle covered. The menu is on the right side of your screen, and the item down one from the chat with White House Chief of Staff, Ron Klane, is a segment about Putin featuring Julia Ioffe of Puck news service. Click on that photo of Putin or on the name Julia Ioffe. I hope you take the time to watch it here: Is Putin being misled?. Watch until it closes briefly, please. Okay, I apologize for having Julia Ioffe deliver more bad news, but, well, on April 30th I did finish the essay on "Sovereignty and Wishful Thinking" with this: "It will be international Cold War for quite a while, time measured in years, I fear. I think we might have the adequate attention spans finally." I agree that Putin or someone else will try to complete the work of destroying Ukraine as a viable country on Russia's border ... or even, as a "difficult" component of Russia itself. If that is the case, and even if it is not, someone—hopefully Attorney General Merrick Garland—will shut down the traitor and his disgusting minions soon. Well maybe it isn't too much. I got a good bit of it into just about 700 words. It requires nested lists of things to do and not do anymore. It—this new Cold War with Russia—will be "won" by the people with the most truth and stamina. If that's what it is, it is exactly what Russia wants, an excuse to be the "thumotic" empire of northern EurAsia. Yes, it has both slowly and rapidly become very complicated again. I could not even complete a short essay before that happened. This weekend we will look at "thumos" as former-Governor of California, Jerry Brown, finds it in his essay in The New York Review of Books of March 24th, about how Washington is preparing again for the full elaboration of the Iron Mountain hypothesis, this time with China. JB (Society War & Peace)
13 March 22
Putinology
David Brooks is a well-known NY Times opinion columnist. His latest piece is "This Is Why Putin Can't Back Down." The first thing you see in the Times web presentation after the title is the photograph of Putin's eyes. If you are one of those people, like me, who see faces or parts of faces in the front-end of automobiles or clouds or the grain of wooden doors, etc., you may notice the IPD (interpupilary distance) of Putin's eyes is noticeably less than usual among the gene stock of most Europeans. His eyes have not yet converged into one, thankfully, but they seem to provide Putin with a "narrower view" of things. If this makes some kind of homey, informal, backyard sense to you, that's exactly what it is—an association fallacy. Brooks's analysis of Putin's personality is of this kind. Brooks asserts early on that Putin has helped Russia to recover from the psychic trauma of experiencing the demise of the Soviet Union. But please, Russians then and now get to think of themselves as citizens of the largest country in the world, a country with fabulous arts, amazing science and technology, and dreams very much like the dreams of people almost everywhere. There are no doubt people in Russia who were "traumatized" by the dissolution of the Soviet Union, disgusted, perhaps, embarrassed, surely, but I know Russians who could hardly wait for the slow-motion collapse of the corrupt, inept, and legendarily brutal regime to finally go away. Russians have had an identity as Russians throughout the almost seventy years of the "experiment" with Leninist communism. Brooks would have you believe that Russians lost their identity as Russians when Gorbachev resigned. It just isn't so. People everywhere like to think of themselves as being affiliated with some kind of important event or tradition or history. Brooks would have you believe that Russians lost their dignity when the USSR disappeared from under their feet. It is just not so. I have written here that Russians have a naive dignity that surprises westerners, but it is real and manifest. Putin, doubtless, would like to be taller than his 5' 7" as Volodymyr Zelensky down in Kyiv might, too. But Brooks's notion that Putin would like to be the next Peter the Great, at 6' 8", wracked with epilepsy, and the paradigmatic Westernizing tsar of Russia is silly. Clearly, in every way Putin cannot be "Vladimir the Great" without bringing down the house in gales of derisive, uncomfortable laughter. Brooks began poorly, but he is correct in saying that since Putin joined Boris Yeltsin's government Putin has been been aimed at converting the mass of Russian citizens to his own more than paradoxical and falacious view of the world and particularly of his view of the Russian people who did not surrender to, but rather survived Soviet communism. Using the carrot first, Putin brought western businesses in, all to convince Russians they were modernizing. But he did not invest the profits of western-style commerce into the civilian economy. Then came the stick, the slow, steady clamp-down on the nascent democracy. Instead he invested in the oligarchs of the kleptocracy, and ran Russia like a mob boss. In this way, Brooks is correct that backing down will be very difficult for Putin. Mob bosses have endless enemies, and the methodology of asserting himself as boss paints himself into the corner inexorably. Like most ego-infested men, Putin began to think of himself as beyond vulnerable, and then he made this classic mistake. He is now a dead man walking. JB (Society)
22 February 22
Slavery and Serfdom: Lessons Hard to Learn
There is a medium length book review in the New York Review of Books, February 24, 2022, "In the Shadow of Slavery," by David S. Reynolds of the Graduate School of CUNY. The work under review is How the Word is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America by Clint Smith, published by Little, Brown. Clint Smith, an African-American, took his first academic degree at Davidson College and his PhD in Education at Harvard. Reynolds took the B.A. at Amherst College and a PhD in American Studies at UC Berkeley. His review contains some misunderstandings about history, I think. (First though: I know that most of my readers do not subscribe to the NYRB and so are limited to a simple "taste" of the review article, but click at least to see the photograph that leads the article, of a statue of a dark angel kneeling and holding the body of a young Black child. Poignant is a thin word for this.) Serfdom is not really the subject of this essay. The immediately preceding essay about "The Russian Mind" got me thinking deeply about serfdom as I wrote. The political science of it I learned in college began to make sense again, especially about the pervasive pall the peasant commune kind of feudalism caste over the whole history of Russian civilization. Writing about it kept American slavery off screen, but not out of my head. The parallelisms between Russian civilization and American are many: emancipations in the same decade, eastward movement to the Pacific and our westward movement to the Pacific begun at about the same time, mythologies about Exceptionalism and Holiness, and several others, including 16th century Nostradamus prophecies about the "inevitable" conflict between the two countries. Clint Smith's book could be called "critical race theory," except it is not theoretical. It is tangible reality for which Smith has assembled copious evidence and prepared it for us with as much humility and reserve as anyone could hope to muster on a topic of brutal horror and hideous hypocrisy. Reynolds objects to Smith writing that Thomas Jefferson's Declaration of Independence is "'a parchment of half-truths and contradictions.'" As fate would have it, I am a graduate of Mr. Jefferson's University of Virginia where, you will find it easy to believe, he was honored beyond any reasonable measure of decency. The original physical university was build by slaves, and we there knew that, and we daily passed by the evidence just like Reynolds holds to the words in that Independence document as if they were primarily written for the Ages. Jefferson was writing to his fellow colonists and to King George III and his counselors, and to Parliament. If you think about it, Jefferson and Madison and Washington and thousands of others were not just seeking Independence from Great Britain. They were, ironically, hoping to preserve their dependence on slave labor, the basis for their wealth, their educations, and their power. They were seeking a way around the growing anti-slavery movement in Britain and in the northern colonies. They were very well accommodated to the privileges of owning other human beings and one moment treating them like humans and the next like unruly draft animals. Jefferson swore to his dying wife that he would never remarry, but when Martha Wayles Jefferson died he took to her quarter-Black, half sister, household slave, and was with her often enough to have had six children be born, each one into slavery at Montecello. "Dusky Sally" Hemmings accompanied him to Paris and was lionized by the upper crust of French, who were themselves teetering on the brink of class oblivion. She was never manumitted by her owner. I am ashamed of my deaf self, but I have written to the University President, Jim Ryan, that the dog-whistle statue of Mr. Jefferson must be moved to a better place than where it stands now, signifying that he is responsible for what the University has become. There are gardens in the original "Academical Village" where slaves once lived, gardens that will please the unreconstructed among us and remind all that Jefferson was just a man among humans of, well, darker shades of pale. UNESCO will not remove the "World Heritage Site" honor bestowed uniquely on that Jeffersonian architecture, when it is given proper provenance at long last. Reviewer Reynolds has not really read these words for what they baldly and falsely asserted in the face of his contemporary reality: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, .... Even allowing for the contemporary ethos, is this not hypocrisy writ boldly and with gusto! But, given that Jefferson stood at both the epistolary and evangelical pulpits of a brand new nation, leading, expressing admittedly ideal concepts, but also preparing for bloody war with these words, even understanding this early that the new nation must sooner than later confront the issue of work in this new America in terms of free exchange, not compulsion and slavery, wouldn't you think he could have begun with humility and planted a seed?Professor Reynolds misses the evil irony in Jefferson's words. He wrote: "The faults of Jefferson and Madison do not negate the merit of the principles that they championed." Oh, but yes they can and do! Even a child knows to consider the source! I will go so far as to admit that, upon first being taught about the Declaration of Independence and already knowing that Negros in Washington and Arlington were descendants of slaves and still very poorly treated, I did not put the two together. But I was seven and then a teenager. Reynolds is ~74, and apparently holding to the idea that the American republic, with all its problems, was given birth by licensed obstetricians, and that "all those labor pains" were matters to be covered up by the 3/5ths rule. Quite the opposite, what is almost universally known (and spoken of in public) as the "shit-show" that Congress has become is EXACTLY because the planters (and others) were deliberately intent on weakening the new federal government, circumscribing democractic processes, and keeping real control within the grasp of themselves and their posterity. The Constitution should have had a sunset date for slavery of no later than January 1, 1800. That would, of course, kept the "union" from happening and so America would continue to be Balkanized into helpless figments of the Enlightenment imagination. Well maybe not, but we can leave that to Hollywood to explore. Meanwhile Clint Smith and new generations of more clear-eyed historians will ease this nation into the resolving truth. JB (Society)
15 FEB 22
What is Race, If Not Real?
I have been thinking a lot about Adam Serwer's statement in February's The Atlantic that I quoted in my essay, "Race and Racism" on February 11th. Here is the quotation again:
It is not necessary for race to be real for racism to be real. It is only necessary that people believe race to be real. When people act on fictions, those actions have repercussions even if the underlying belief is false-even if the people know that the underlying belief they are acting on is false. The fact that anti-Semitic conspiracy theories about Jewish control of the media, of governments, and of financial institutions are untrue does not rob them of their explanatory power for those who choose to believe in them. For Thomas Jefferson to know, somewhere in the disquiet of his own conscience, that slavery was a "cruel war against human nature itself" did not in and of itself grant freedom to those he owned as property.
Having just said that I am obliged to also say that there is no evidence that To unpack this let me begin to define a situation where a person of some "distinctions" from others asserts they and others with similar distinctions are being discriminated against or should be recognized for having those distinctions, those distinguishing characteristics. At some fairly large number of the distinguished group, they are called a "race." This would apply to persons who believe themselves to be part of the Master Race as well as to those who celebrate their origins as African or Spanish or Irish, Italian, Polish, Jewish, Japanese, Chinese, etc., and much that goes with that heritage, set them apart, so for short, as the That-named race. Obviously, taken from the opposite points of view, looking at others-with-distinguishing characteriscs and calling them a race uses a similar logic and illogic. The illogic is what concerns us. Here in the lands and epoch of plenty (with huge, glaring, irrational, and immoral exceptions) "race" groups have much less to fear from the Other race groups than once they did thousands of years ago. Black is dark and associated with nightime, night terrors, impaired vision, hidden threats, evil, and so on, but none of those are causally related to skin color, except by the association fallacy. Nighttime—in darkness—is also the time of rest, relief from hard work, recuperation, sleep and marvelous dreams, and restored health, yet these qualities are suppressed by the fallacy of exclusion and suppressed evidence. People cherry-pick the characteristics that bother themselves most, and then they associate and assign these characteristics to inheritance because they want to assert that those things are not a matter of choice. The die is cast for them; they are fixed that way and, therefore, always problematic. No need to investigate further. There is ample evidence that human minds' pattern-seeking skills are involved in these and other fallacies of reason all the time. Some, probably most, of it is to establish "wieldy" (manageable) concepts out of unwieldy ones. So it is like the creation of slogans for more complicated situations we want to refer to easily and often politically. There is a cousin of metaphor the trope (figure of speech) that refers to a whole thing by one of its parts, for example: "Lend me a hand with this, please." "The farm was run by five hands helping the owner." The synecdoche [sih NECK duh key] trope directs your attention to the hand because that is the object of interest and value of the loan or the employment, skilled hands, but clearly one is not supposed to detach one's hand and give it over, nor is the farmer surrounded by detached hands. You may have never heard of synecdoche or metonymy or even know much about metaphor, but there are those of us who believe that tropes like these (including irony) are clues as to how and why many human cognitive processes take place. The race word "negro" is a synecdoche. One characteristic is pulled out to be representative of everything a dark-skinned person is and wants to be. A "wetback" is a synecdoche on getting a wet back from swimming across the Rio Grande River from Mexico to the US. A "kraut" is a person from Germany who supposedly eats lots of sauerkraut, a metonymy. The "ugly American" was a somewhat homely guy in the novel, who was actually the hero, but the synecdoche with the man's ugly face ironically became the label for the not-so-nice people in the book and eventually in society the oblivious and worse among real American tourists. A "rag-head" is a metonymy on desert people who wear a turban or other cloth head-covering. And so, it goes: reduction of complexity, elimination of qualities, concentration on something perceived as negative. One point should be coming clear by now, however. Race is a mental, mostly linguistic construct—an idea, not a physical reality. Being a real idea, it becomes a social reality, unfortunately. If extra-terrestrials are visiting our planet, they do not perceive in their physical probings and examinations of us anything like race. If they are looking at our literature, though, they can see what is going on in our minds ... and cultures. It is shameful, of course, but advanced species understand that as we slowly emerge from our more primitive selves and tribes we are likely to have certain elements of our cultures persist into more modern situations, including our situation now. JB (Society, Today's Isms)
11 FEB 22
Race and Racism
It is not necessary for race to be real for racism to be real. It is only necessary that people believe race to be real. When people act on fictions, those actions have repercussions even if the underlying belief is false-even if the people know that the underlying belief they are acting on is false. The fact that anti-Semitic conspiracy theories about Jewish control of the media, of governments, and of financial institutions are untrue does not rob them of their explanatory power for those who choose to believe in them. For Thomas Jefferson to know, somewhere in the disquiet of his own conscience, that slavery was a "cruel war against human nature itself" did not in and of itself grant freedom to those he owned as property.
We could call it "culturalism," and we do have already something called "culture wars" here in America. But, many seem to like the nuance and idea that the characterists and behaviors of those people go beyond culture and deeper into (in the modern world) genetics,—to something that is inherent and immutable within them, something that could not be untaught, but rather would have to be annihilated. I believe this is a holdover from our nomadic traditions in which the margins for error were narrow, indeed, and our tribe might meet yours when we might be weakest from illnesses or previous encounters. We have not been able to eradicate this security anxiety from within our cultures, because all of humanity are not on the same page, at the same level of cultural evolution. We only became modern settled human beings about 10,000 years ago, that's only 200 50-year lifetimes ago, during which patriarchies were interested in conquest and power, and mostly unconcerned with the evolution of societies. The formal and aching question we have is very rarely answered to anyone's satisfaction. How are we to take a vicious fiction into account in our reality? You see, our cognitive failure to make a clear distinction, a boundary for such ideas, is casually written off as the "human condition." Yet this "quirk" of human mental behavior appears everywhere, sometimes viciously, sometimes not. We love fictions, fables, histories, and ballads about important deeds. We often think that children learn best when the truth is wrapped inside a fable. It is my experience that universities addressing the problem of critical thinking rarely get through to the epistemological or the behavioral reality of the overall appalling situation. In 2022 we have a gigantic snowball of fictions all frozen together as one thing which is perhaps 10,000 years in the making. Who would dare, besides, the intrepid Whoopi to peel some of that away to look closer! Jews, in my understanding of this world, are not a race—they are a complex culture, which often includes religious observance of Judaism, but often not. The culture generally promotes a respect for learning and for the evidence employed in and for teaching, but there are illiterate and uneducated Jews, who do not lose their Jewishness because they may have learning deficits. Jews are thought to be agnostic about the supposition of a human afterlife. There are Ashkenazim (Ashkenaz being the Hebrew word for German) and Sephardim (Jews of Spain and Portugal) who are as biologically related as non-Jewish Germans from Hamburg are to non-Jewish Portuguese from Lisbon or Seville. The important point is that the "human condition," which incorporates all the physical and mental biological systems and organic traits emerging from these systems, all which have survived through natural selection, all exist today in all of us. Each of us needs food, shelter, and opportunity to procreate or not. In addition there are cultural ideals and prohibitions that also have been transmitted during our current run at being a world-wide species trying on civilization for size. A good many of these genetic and cultural characteristics are about changes to ourselves and arise from within the huge change from being nomadic to being settled in agriculture and then pursuing arts, commerce, and industry all relatively recent departures from the skills and traditions of perhaps 250,000 years of our species existence. Humanity's "modern" religions, Hinduism, Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Buddhism, Mithraism, Christianity, Islam, particularly, seem to have a component or even an axis of altruism and reflectiveness that is not apparent in contemporary spiritual ideas of the planet's remaining primitive people. We seem to be slowly, very slowly, accommodating ourselves to a larger and larger picture of what it means to be and what it demands of us to be civilized humans. To characterize that evolution we note that we humans are hungry, naked, and intensely procreative, so we are also intensely competitive and often combative, jealous, envious, frightened, concerned, apprehensive, especially about strangers. We prefer people who "understand" our diet and the reasons we have for it. (Haggis and Lutefisk and BigMacs, for example) We prefer people who speak and perhaps read our language and the stories and points of view embedded in it. We prefer people who respect the work we have put into our own sustenance and may choose to imitate us rather than directly competing against us for the benefits it could offer to anyone. But, again, we are not all on the same page. We do not know how to teach the boundary between early and recent humanity, partly because there are many still on the early side some or all of the time. It is one of those things that does not evolve very fast because the pressures to evolve are often not stronger than the many pressures to be "uncivilized." We decry bullying in families and schools, but have very few methods to apply to eradicate it. We have not set that boundary yet. We do not have a common understanding of "human nature" as the differences between Christianity and Islam could show. We countenance lying, and we have not distinguished it from the art of fiction, even the "harmless" fictions of songs ... like "Onward Christian Soldiers." That one is an obscene straddle if ever there was. What we are looking for is that boundary between our old semi-wild selves and our new "domesticated" selves. As an enthusiastic science-fiction reader, I imagine interstellar species to have found that boundary and the personal and group ways to honor it. If you have been looking, reading, for a solution, I do not have it. I believe myself to be not a racist, yet I probably harbor something from growing up in suburban DC Virginia and accommodating my burgeoning self to the realities (in my day) of Colored and White drinking fountains, restrooms, and most importantly those segregated schools. All of us are what we are, and most of us rarely think about it except by contrastive comparisons. One thing we could do is encourage analogous, convergent, even harmonius comparisons. Religious authorities urge us to be conscious of our selves as (very ill-defined) modern humans, but like children's stories, they get bogged down in the traditions and fictions used to convey their message, becoming more and more absurd as passed down over millennia. In the United States in our current epoch we are confronted with a crisis of authority as White Supremacists seek control led by the recent President. But I am pretty sure that one step toward a solution to racism is to set boundaries. What I mean is that it is fatuous of us today to imagine that very early homo sapiens, our fellow bipedal primates, the ones we call our direct ancestors as far back as 250,000 year ago, were very much like us.. For one we know only their skeletal remains and some of their artifacts and symbols. The Lascaux cave paintings are thought to date from 15,000 to 17,000 BCE, so many times older than any written record of ancient civilization (i.e., the Gilgamesh Epic from ancient Sumeria at 2100 BCE, giving a lot of slack in the timeline to develop language and numeracy before that. What I am trying to do is establish a boundary between our epoch and the epoch in which the survival skills of our species were actually warranted. The point being to assert that modern homo sapiens must be actually and truly sapient = wise to the point that they—some reasonable fraction of them—understand and generally practice being not savage, but sapient. Immediately you say to yourself, I know of very savage people here and now in my country. Some of them have learned to sublimate what we now understand to be unacceptable behaviors into more civil and productive behaviors, such as Rugby and American Football or Short-Selling in the stock markets or playing dodgeball on the school playground at recess, but the savagery and risk-taking thrill is close to the surface. I agree, and yet we do not have a well-reasoned boundary line on such behaviors. The reason is, again, very obvious: there are very few of us still who have deeply sublimated every element of savagery perfectly and continuously, but some have come close and provide us a possible model of what our species with all its brains and hindbrains could accomplish, if only the incentives were not wrapped in unbelievable stories and religious dogma, but in scientific terms, postulates and axioms convertable to judicial statements. I think that the history of ideas is dialectic, that it zig-zags, buffeted around by contesting ideas, and that the syntheses, the new ideas, sometimes die on the vine. Today's public discourse is too often yelling and screaming almost meaningless aphorisms and mottos. Bad thoughts drive out good new ones that require nurture and careful tending. So, we have to get back to a condition of ideational tolerance, where you can assert, if you wish, that haggis is good for me and present your evidence, and when you are laughed out of town, you will be given a ride home by those of us who know your thoughts were pure and well-meant. I remain hopeful. I remain proud of what Whoopi Goldberg was attempting, but I think it could not have easily been said in the context she chose to say it. JB (Today's Isms, Society)
19/1/22Revolutions of Rising Expectations~1000 words In Dr. Thomas T. Hammond's Modern Russian and Soviet History class—long ago—we learned the anatomy and physiology of revolutions (1905 and 1917) in Russia, and presumably elsewhere as well, the French, the British Glorious, the American, the Risorgimento in the Italian peninsula, the Spanish Civil War, the Chinese. The key ingredient we learned was that revolutions, although they may be sustained by the masses, are usually begun by reasonably large groups of people with means. These are people who have improved their socio-economic status against the odds presented by the system in power. Having gotten that far, they see the impediments and the people defending them for what they actually are, subjugating them certainly not by right or with privilege from God, and so they rise up to fulfill their expectations to continue to improve their lot, sometimes to a utopian standard, quite often just to get the overlords off their backs. The implicit key to successful revolutions of rising expectations is that, in one way or another, the larger mass of the population, lower in social standing and sometimes entirely impoverished, are convinced that they too can benefit from the revolt as well—although they understand some will die. Yesterday evening, while watching The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell on MSNBC, we were introduced to a scholar whose work is directed toward the question of whether or not the US is headed to a second civil war. Barbara F. Walter, PhD, wrote How Civil Wars Start and in the interview she said the second civil war, if we have one—and South Africa, a country that recently looked like it was staring into tha Abyss, did not!—it will not be armies in fields shooting at one another point-blank, but rather an insurgency, a protracted insurgency, "random" bombings, assassinations, riots, mayhem, but not military as we currently use that term, but very much a war, nevertheless. Dr. Walter said the reason South Africa did not fall into outright civil war was because the White leaders in the economy said it would ruin them, and so said to the militant leadership: NO! The causes of a possible civil war in America center around social, economic, and political fears of displacement and replacement, namely that some sectors of the White population in the country believe that they have already lost control of their economic and cultural status and are about to become a minority "in their own country," losing control of politics and their privileged social status. Clearly, this would not be a revolution of rising expectations, but just the reverse—a revolution of falling expectations. While it is statistically inevitable that White people will cease to be the majority "race" in America by 2045, it is by no means probable, nor obvious, that they will derrogate into the mass and be scorned, stoned, and treated like, well, some of them deserve. Perhaps there are lots of them who know they deserve criticism and, perhaps, shame for their previous racist disrespect of Blacks, Browns, Natives, Asians, that is, all those Others who now and always have composed this deliberately multi-racial, multi-cultural country. It is easy to say that fear is the emotion underlying all of this. Fear of change is endemic in our species, because it requires individuals and countries to plan without all the relevant facts. It is disconcerting! And yet in the span of my lifetime Change has been the constant. What's more, the pace of Change is accelerating as population and communications expand. The point of Fear is that it predicates behavior and planning and politics, AND Fear is easily passed along to the unwitting, the unwary, AND the witting and wary, no one is immune, so deliberately planting fear is dangerous, exceedingly dangerous. The real revolutionists are that very, very tiny coterie of people wielding power and privilege today, all of whom fear they stand to lose the most. They are propagandizing the rest of us unremittingly. The American Experiment, it is often called, has that tentative and aspirational aspect to it because it is an amalgam of wildly different peoples and their cultures, mores, and dreams—and has been since the beginning. Are other countries aspirational? Are Italy, Germany, Spain? Certainly, many Italians, Germans, and Spanish are aspirational, but are their countries, or are the US and France the only ones founded on that idea? The question has always been, can people from the huddled masses, yearning to breathe free, people from cultures that in the Old World fought one another for a place in the sun for (probably) 200,000 years and with unusual zeal in recent historical times, live and work together toward a better life for each succeeding generation? I think there are here among us those who believe in their marrow that the answer is no. They believe that most of their countrymen and women never believed it, but just went along to get along. They believe that strangers are strange and probably dangerous, some evil. They believe that the reality is red in tooth and claw, that in the last analysis people will be vicious animals. I think the vast majority of us know someone just like that, but are ourselves steadfastly "immune" to the emotions thinking like that engenders. It is an evolution that has been going on for thousands of years, reflected in the progress of religions, philosophy, sciences, and deliberate compassion—altruism. It is about extending self-control and mindfulness of emotions. Huge numbers of us are there—most of the time—and will act to preserve and protect and perfect our civilization. JB (Society)
1/9/22
Human Nature: An Introduction
The reason we have governments is because of human nature! The nature of human beings is genetically determined and then socially determined, the latter a mask or template over the former, or an amplifier or inhibiter. From one individual to the next of the same gender the genetic inheritance varies and produces differences in behavior. The genders also provide differences which are discernible within each gender cohort and in contrast to another gender. And clearly the social environment, including nurture (or lack thereof), varies widely across the world. In so far as the social environment remains similar the differences in behavior seem to be slight enough most of the time that we have the term "human nature." Some people are calmer, some are hyper (we say). Some are aggressive, some are passive, some are violent. Some are good-natured (we say), some are bad-natured (?), and how do we say that really? Some are "dark," "morose", "sarcastic," "evil," "solopsistic," "narcissistic," "greedy," "selfish," "arrogant," "brutal," "stupid," "irrational," etc. And then for nuance we say some are moody, affected only sometimes by good or bad moods, depressive, dark, troubled, etc., as if there were yet one or more masks over their "true" or basic selves. As humanity has discovered facts and points of view on human nature over the ages by various means, we have categorized the features and qualities of human beings differently. Some things have no literal or known explanation and so we once attributed those features to the gods, stars, phases of the moon and planets, but some we think of as Fate, gifts, or complex traits of personality. Some we now think of as caused by disease or genetic mutations or kinds of environmentally induced deformity. Deformity suggests knowledge of good-formity, so quite often personality traits are categorized according to variations in the physical being and its behavior, establishing valued expectations. The "gift of gab" being one of those gifts near the mid-point between positive and negative. The unanswered set of questions is whether human nature ever evolves, and if it does what, if anything, remains unchanged and, of course, what changes, and why? Likewise, we understand that environmental conditions like nurture, training, trauma, and so forth can only go so far to change elements of human nature, but perhaps only those features we measure on spectra. So many of the features of human nature can be seen as lying on a spectrum of that kind of feature. Intelligence is such a feature, for instance, as we see "normal" people with quite varied cognitive abilities and yet see intelligence as genetic. Can we ask science to identify those features of human nature that do not evolve? Can we then define for purposes of governance what respect must be paid to unchanging human nature, including those features on a spectrum? Are we already doing that when we say that intelligence is inherited? Clearly we humans are not all the same, not equal in many respects we consider important and even essential. When I write this, I have to wonder what is meant by the idea of equality under the law. And, almost instantly I am thinking about law as the expression of governing authority over a people of mixed gifts and faults for and about which nothing can be done—people taken at face value. Nothing surgical or educational or even spiritual is likely to change these gifts and faults, and thus the person is taken at their face value. Face value is an expression that arises out of an estimation usually of self-similarity and of exchangable usefulness, as in comity, community, commerce, and so forth. Already in this paragraph we are deep into the questions about how, as a pack of upright, bipedal mammals, we are to take advantage of those good things that are common among us, but protect ourselves individually and socially from those not-good things which being common are dangerous, or being uncommon, unknown, misunderstood, frightening, and also probably (we guess) dangerous. Governments are instituted among human beings first as families, then modeled on families, then on communities, then models of communities, until finally you have governments that function to organize, protect, and even nurture millions of people (and in the last 100 years billions) AS IF they were all essentially the same sort of being, equal in a significant proportion to one another, or not, in which cases exceptions are made for those whose face value is more than others, royalty, elites, or less than others, servants, slaves, criminals, and strangers. I use the word "strangers" rather than foreigners, because of its original and obvious meaning. The face value is at best indeterminate because we cannot immediately see the kind of face value we commonly see—or we do see it, but it is like our own experience with bad and faulty persons and, therefore, antithetical to us and our purposes. A constitutional convention brings together with each participant a set of understandings about human nature that are quite often a mess of ideas of mixed value, importance, and categores. But, thank goodness, some of the key features of human nature en masse are "documented" in political statements, the one I will be referring to often is The United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which I am going to provisionally assert could be the baseline understanding we need in order to do the work of a constitutional convention. Having read it at least once, you can see how ASPIRATIONAL it is, and how predicated on the idea that when certain basic standards of behavior of governments are attained, the people will prosper and fulfill the purposes of their existence. So the questions that remain unanswered are about those various differences among us all, our individual nature (genetic) and personality (social) that might need a DESCRIPTIVE statement to insure Our Human Dignity is established and retained. Maybe a descriptive statement that persons unable to understand elementary arithmetic, counting, say, retain a modified dignity classification for which certain things may not be possible, voting, for instance. Already this feels slippery in several directions. Constitutions should not be suicide pacts. For some perspective on this knotty subject, there is a Star Trek episode, TNG, that features Dathon, the captain of a spaceship from a hitherto unknown species, a First Contact story, and our Captain Picard, trying to understand one another in the face of a lethal monster on the planet they have been taken to. Dathon speaks in a language completely composed of metaphors unknown to Picard (or the Universal Translator). He speaks of "Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra" by which Picard eventually figures out from a very slowly building context that Dathon is telling him about two adversaries marooned together on an island in his world, where they realize that having a common enemy is likely to bring them closer together. Picard, finally understands the allusion and responds to Dathon's next question: whether humans have such an epic in their history. Picard takes a brief moment and then relates an ancient story from Earth just as Dathon is dying: (here is a piece of this script) Picard--"Gilgamesh, a king. [pause] Gilgamesh, a king. At Uruk. He tormented his subjects. He made them angry. They cried out aloud, 'Send us a companion for our king! Spare us from his madness!' Enkidu, a wild man… from the forest, [who looked very much like Gilgamesh], entered the city. They fought in the temple. They fought in the streets. Gilgamesh [barely] defeated Enkidu. They became great friends. Gilgamesh and Enkidu at Uruk." Dathon--"At Uruk…" Picard--"The… the new friends went out into the desert together, where the Great Bull of Heaven was killing men by the hundreds. Enkidu caught the Bull by the tail. Gilgamesh struck him with his sword." Dathon--"(laughing) Gilgamesh…" Picard--"They were … victorious. But … Enkidu fell to the ground, struck down by the gods. And Gilgamesh… wept bitter tears, saying, 'He who was my companion, through adventure and hardship, is gone forever.'" The rest of the story is about Gilgamesh searching the world for a way to bring back Enkidu by magic or bargain, but it cannot happen, and Gilgamesh becomes wise in matters of life and death. The epic of Gilgamesh is the oldest written tale known to humanity. It is among other things a story about human nature, violence, and about the nature of governing. The writing about this "event" is thought to have occurred probably around 2900 BC. In other words, we humans have been at this task of understanding and writing about our societies for nearly 5,000 years! (Yet) Homo sapiens emerged about 250,000 years ago. JB (Society and The Project)
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biology, genetics, or inheritance are causally involved. Being Irish does not give you a bad temper or make a poet of you, but it does give you an unfair chance of red hair—10% chance—otherwise in the world 1-2% on a planetary basis. Yes, people with red hair really are treated differently and so they learn stuff that the rest of you do not. (Author and daughter when author's hair was still red.)