Diary of a Daoist Hermit

Dao of Time

2013-04-16T18:35:00.002-06:00

I like to watch cheesy science fiction shows and some of my favourites come from the "Stargate" franchise. A while back I watched a rerun and found myself thinking about some things.

The plot involved a woman finding an ancient time machine and using it to go back 10,000 years in time to visit an advanced race of people who had built an ancient city. In her time, she was part of a group of explorers who discovered the abandoned metropolis, but in doing so set in motion a process that resulted in the destruction of said city and the death of everyone else in her group. In order to prevent this from happening, once she settled in among the original inhabitants she made some changes in the way the city was organized and put herself in slowed-down animation so she could come out and do some maintenance from time to time over the ten thousand year wait. The plan worked, when the expedition arrived, its members didn't destroy themselves. Eventually they found the woman in her preservation capsule, but by then she was the equivalent of 120 years old and she died soon after explaining what had happened.

There are two interesting points that the episode brings up.

First of all, the people who built the city were talking to the time traveler and going about their lives just as if the future wasn't known or even of concern. This makes sense, but jars against my intuitive understanding. If someone comes from the future, then the people in the past are already dead. Moreover, their lives have already been lived. But yet they eat, talk, make decisions, have dreams, etc.

Secondly, the woman who lived out her life in a pod that slowed down her aging explained her situation to the younger version of herself that survived because of the work she did to prevent the catastrophe. This younger expressed regret that the older had lost her life sitting in slowed down animation. But the older one refused to accept this interpretation. "No, you are me. I still get to live a full, rich life. We just did this thing in order to save everyone else."

What I'm wrestling with here is how we understand "time". I think that insofar as most people think about time, the see it as some sort of "one damn thing after another". But when I was at university I came to the conclusion that it makes more sense to think of it as another dimension. Think of it as something like a ruler with a cursor point that slides up and down the index, like an old-fashioned slide rule.

The line on the transparent piece of plastic is how we experience the "now" of existence. But that doesn't mean that all the stuff that has happened in the past has ended or the future doesn't exist at all. Instead, we are just being aware of the "now" at any given point.

The "nowness" was what the aged woman was getting at when she told her younger self that she was going to live a full rich life through her counter part. She understood that for everyone----time traveler or not----all we experience is NOW. The past is a memory and the future is anticipation. And as modern science tells us, even memory is to a large part as much a created, illusory experience as our anticipation of the future. So it is literally true that the physically separated body of the time traveler has as much connection to the younger woman before her as if they shared the same body instead of two identical ones.

I first seriously thought about this issue when I came across some essays by philosophers who were trying to undermine naive assumptions about life. Two arguments come easily to my memory, so I thought I'd share them.

The first is a response to the question of "What evidence could we have that time is a spacial dimension?" Briefly stated, the argument starts out by asking how a being who inhabited in two dimensional space would be able to conceive of three dimensions. The answer is to think about congruent triangles which look different.

These two triangles have the same angles at the corners, and could easily have the same length of sides (this was the best example I could easily find), but they are different. That's because they have been "flipped" through a third dimension. That is to say, if they were actual pieces of cardboard to make them overlap perfectly (assuming they are the same size), you have to turn one of them over. This is how someone who lived in just two dimensions might begin to think that there is a third dimension beyond the two he perceives. In a similar sense, if you look at your two hands---left and right----you know that they are the same. Yet, they are very different. One is the mirror image of the other. The argument is that they are the same but "flipped" through a fourth dimension.

The second argument comes from a question that immediately comes to mind when we think about time as a spacial dimension. We can easily change our direction and go back in space, why can't we do the same thing with time? The answer comes from thinking clearly about what we mean when we decided to "reverse our gears" and move backwards. When I decide to turn around and go backwards I'm actually doing nothing of the sort. In fact, what I am doing is going forward in a new direction. Indeed, "backwards" is a totally a subjective definition. It has to do with what particular direction we arbitrarily describe as where we want to go. If we look at things this way, it seems to me that our inability to go backwards in time is no more odd than our inability to go backwards in space.

Nicolas of Cusa

Most people reading this will probably think that what I am talking about is about as important as the old medievalists debating how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. But a book I was assigned to read at university got me seeing this sort of thing in a different light. Said book, On Learned Ignorance by Nicolas of Cusa, (you can read a translation here) goes through a range of confusing questions and suggests that a little humility is a good idea when it comes to understanding the world around us. I find that when I contemplate things like the nature of time a similar humility presents itself to my consciousness.

This sense of humility has recently come to light from following various "skeptical" blogs and discussion lists that I spent some time following a while back. While I've always been interested in organizations that debunk a lot of the bunkum that we can find in everyday life, such as "truthers", anti-vaccination types, etc, I have noticed a really arrogant tendency of various supporters to "dumb down" and dismiss any understanding of the world that doesn't fit into a simple, 19th century materialistic reality. One example that really got me thinking about his was a blanket dismissal of the whole category of "organic agriculture" that degenerated into a sort of "frat boy pile on" once I suggested that while the term is ambiguous, many important things in life are not easily defined. One particularly brilliant response to my suggestion was when a fellow suggested that someone once offered him a dog turd which was fine because it was "organic". Alas, I have come to believe that there is not much difference between many "true believers" in skepticism and those supporting many other dogmatic belief systems.

The Daoist Zhuangzi obviously connects to this sort of thing. His book is full of discussions about how little it is we actually know about the world around us and how much humility we should have about what we know. Some of his analogies have become part of the universal culture of the world, and illustrate the limits of our understanding. He was the man who said that he didn't know if he was a man who was dreaming he was a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming he was a man. He also suggested that what we know about the world around us is as limited as that of a frog who has spent it's entire life at the bottom of a well. Thinking about time helps me remember this important point.

The Life of Dust, or, Zhuangzi and the Turtle

2013-04-10T12:20:00.004-06:00

I recently read the book Dead Man Walking by sister Helen Prejean. For those of you who haven't heard of the movie, the book deals with the capital punishment in the USA as told by a Roman Catholic nun who gets involved in the lives of several prisoners on death row and decides to devote her efforts towards eliminating the death penalty.

Its a gripping book, but a couple small parts of the story really struck home for me. One involved Prejean meeting with the head of the Louisiana parole board, a Mr. Howard Marsellus. In this initial meeting, she explained the research that had been done on both the death penalty in general and the case of this particular prisoner. It is clear that it is imposed in a capricious and racist manner. For example, murders who kill non-whites almost never get executed, and, wealthy defendants (who can hire competent lawyers) never end up being sentenced to death. Mr. Marsellus, who is not an ignorant man, readily admits all these things are true and Prejean leaves the meeting feeling that the parole board may recommend clemency to the Governor, who can commute a death sentence to life in prison.

When the verdict comes down, however, it is clear that not only did Marsellus not convince the other members of the board to suggest a pardon, he himself did not vote for one. Prejean is flabbergasted.

Years later, the nun finds out that Marsellus has been convicted of taking bribes while sitting on the parole board and has been sent to prison. After he served his time and came out, she contacted him and asked for an interview. He agreed and explained his actions to her.

It turns out that the parole board was never designed to actually deliberate and suggest pardons and paroles for prisoners. Instead, its purpose was to create "plausible deniability" for the Governor and his political machine. When Marsellus was hired, he was told that he only had the job as long as he was willing to vote the way he was told to vote. That meant that the Governor could still make unpopular decisions regarding paroles and pardons, but that he could blame the board for them.

As for the bribery, it turned out that when wealthy convicts wanted to buy a parole, they were asked for large sums of money that were turned over to the political machine, which in turn was used to fund election campaigns. Some of the money went back down to Marsellus (partially to keep him quiet, but probably more to make sure that he took the fall instead of someone higher up the food chain.) Money was then used to get members of the state legislature to change their votes on certain bills and put forward the Governor's legislative agenda.

Marsellus went along with all of this because he realized that any hope he would ever have of getting ahead in politics was tied to his ability to show loyalty to the party machine. If he ever refused to "play ball", he'd just become another "nobody".

Another small part of the puzzle involved a conversation she had with a Major in the guards of a prison she visited. This fellow had the unenviable job of being the guy who officiated over the mechanics of execution. He got to know the condemned men and he watched as he was strapped in and electrocuted. He found the experience intensely distasteful. He also had serious doubts about the fairness of the system and suspected that he had even killed innocent men.

Prejean asked him about his personal sense of responsibility and he said that he didn't create the laws or make sentence people, he just followed orders. She suggested that at the very least he could find another job. He was close to retirement, so he didn't feel that was an option, but he did transfer and died of a heart attack shortly after her talk.

Several ideas come to me from these little stories.

First of all, I suspect that because Prejean is a nun, she has privileged access to people in positions of authority. I know a few people in authority and none of them would ever have opened up to me, and I suspect anyone else I know, like this. (She is probably also a remarkable personality, too.) I've found that one of the key supports of "the system" is the way people become isolated in their own particular little social "bubble". Managers don't talk openly and honestly with non-managers. Working class people learn early on that they cannot speak their minds with people in authority---if they ever get a chance to meet them at all---because there will be severe consequences if they do. People high up the chain also develops habits of conversation that ensure that no one ever does tell them the truth. This enforces the "distance" necessary for command. One of the most common is a tendency to bully people lower on the food chain by having an explosive reaction whenever someone says something that doesn't fit into the higher ups view of things. And people learn early on that many managers are far from fair and will carry a grudge for a long time if they take a dislike to someone.

As a nun, Prejean is in a strange position of being almost part of the elite. She was also somewhat protected from retribution, which allows her to say honest things to people that they rarely could hear from anyone else without being able to inflict pain on them.

Secondly, Marsellus and the Major were not just isolated individuals. I suspect that a great many other individuals in the execution machine had similar qualms about what is going on. But they had that little bit of extra conscience that allowed them to speak more honestly to Prejean. I also suspect that they had that little extra bit of self-awareness and sensitivity that allowed them to face up to themselves how idiotic and cruel the system truly is. Probably there are expanding rings of people in any system of power. Some folks feel that everything is just fine as it is. Others probably have profound misgivings, but cannot voice them to anyone else. Others feel that the whole system is a crazy mess, but that the voters (or "powers that be") wouldn't allow anything else so you have to "play the game". Others still probably think that the system is sick and twisted, but if they don't get involved someone far worse will and ultimately if they amass enough power they can start changing things for the better.

I suspect that all our institutions are filled with people following all these different personal strategies. They don't honestly talk to each other, because that would make them vulnerable to manipulation. So collectively they work together to create a system that almost all of them feel is an abomination.

There is a strain in Daoism that believes that an essential part of being a human involves retaining the ability to make spontaneous decisions outside of constraints of human society. That is where all the stories of Daoist recluses and eccentrics come from. But it is important to remember that this was a response to a society that involved wrapping everyone in chains of loyalty to family and empire. The Daoists couldn't rebel collectively against this sort of thing, because to do so would involve creating an institution that would start the whole process all over again. Indeed, it probably is a very "human" thing to wrap ourselves up in these sorts of collective fantasies and delusions that lead to things like death houses and prisons. But there is still inside many of us a subversive, irrepressible element that glows like embers in the forest duff---waiting for a strong wind to burst back into flame. The following story is a one of those embers. It still glows after thousands of years.

Chuang Tzu Story - The Turtle

Chuang Tzu with his bamboo pole
was fishing in the Pu river
The prince of Chu sent two vice-chancellors
with a formal document:
We hereby appoint you prime minister
Chuang Tzu held his bamboo pole still.
Watching the Pu river, he said:
“I am told there is a sacred tortoise offered
and canonized three thousand years ago,
venerated by the prince, wrapped in silk,
in a precious shrine on an altar
in the temple.
What do you think?
Is it better to give up one’s life
and leave a sacred shell
as an object of cult
in a cloud of incense
for three thousand years,
or to live as a plain turtle
dragging its tail in the mud?”
“For the turtle”, said the vice-chancellor,
“better to live and drag its tail in the mud!”
“Go home!”, said Chuang Tzu.
“Leave me here
to drag my tail in the mud.”

The Dao and Pessimism

2013-04-02T09:36:00.001-06:00

I've always been concerned about the state of the earth. Frankly, I cannot understand people who are not. But I think it's very important to think rationally and logically about this. I raise this point because someone very close to me recently stated that she thought that because of climate change in fifty years there will be no more multicellular life left on the planet earth.

Major Extinction Events

I looked around a bit and tried to figure out whether or not there is any reason to believe such a thing. Perhaps the best argument against this point of view is to put a little energy into reading up about past extinction events from the geological record. A good summary, as usual, is on the Wikipedia. Basically, there have been many extinction events in the past. Several explanations are offered, including gamma-ray burst from super novas, volcanic activity leading to massive climate change,
asteroid impacts, and so on. The thing to remember about these is that many of them are far, far more damaging than anything human beings are capable of doing, and none of them came close to killing off all multi-cellular life. Indeed, the mass extinctions that took place mostly involved elimination of species that were peculiarly adapted to the pre-existing climactic conditions and unable to thrive in the new. For example, in times of warming, species that were able to survive under tropical conditions thrived and those that had adapted to the cold failed. As a general rule "weed species" that survive best when a climax ecosystem is disturbed tended to do well. (Since humanity is the ultimate "weed species", this bodes well for human civilization.)

IMHO, this gets the "science bit" of this discussion out of the way. That allows me to deal with what I think is the real issue at play. I think the real problem isn't the environment but rather the existential dread that some sensitive modern people feel when they reject the existence of God.

As I see it, a fair number of the most intelligent, sensitive and conscientious people that are alive today find themselves in a significant bind. They can see that the "old way" of being-in-the-world just doesn't work anymore. Intelligent people can no longer simply believe that God is going to make all things right. Nor can they believe that some sort of Marxist Utopia is going to arrive because of blind historical laws. Neither can they believe that science is going to bring some sort of "Star Trek" inter-stellar paradise. Instead, all they see is the same old stupid human species mucking things up on a greater and greater scale. This is a profoundly depressing state of affairs. Given this background, is it any wonder that the human imagination takes the next step and projects that life is not only not going to have any meaning but that it also will no longer exist?

George Orwell

I've just finished reading the collected essays of George Orwell and they serve as an interesting vantage point to think about this problem. Most people who don't know him well tend to think of him as an ardent anti-communist. This is accurate up to a point, as he was the author of probably the two most devastating critiques of Communism ever written: Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. But if you read his other work, you will see that he was just as hard on Capitalism and Colonialism. For example, his short essay "Shooting an Elephant" (which you can read here), explains how colonialism forces a class of men, colonial administrators, into doing certain things in order to exploit people in other countries. His essays about the life of the poor, such as "How the Poor Die" (also available on line), illustrate how badly the poor of England and mainland Europe were being treated under the capitalist system of the day. In fact, Orwell always described himself as a "democratic socialist".

This put Orwell in a very delicate position during his time. Most intellectuals had decided that you had to choose one way or the other----either capitalism or communism. Orwell would not compromise, however, and steadfastly refused to excuse the excesses of either in favour of their supposed benefits. Indeed, he even refused to "opt out" in favour of the sort of pacifist "third option" that people like Gandhi were offering. He fought as a volunteer in the Spanish Civil war, for example, and clearly described the vile infighting, the secret police, etc, that riddled the Spanish Republican Forces----yet still argued that the war was just and had to be fought.

I'm sure that George Orwell was a royal and mighty "pain in the ass" to just about every organization that he came into contact with because he adamantly and absolutely refused to avoid seeing uncomfortable and painful realities. I'm sure that this unwillingness to avert his gaze also caused him personal anguish. He certainly had a very bleak vision of the future, which he thought was bound to be dominated by totalitarianism. Think about this quote: "If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face---forever." Isn't this vision as bleak as my dear friend who contemplates the extinction of all multi-cellular life within fifty years?

I raise the example of Orwell because I want to suggest that the problem that both he and my dear friend face are similar in nature and also come from the same source. I suggest that they come about because both of them have totally rejected the existence of God, yet hold onto a sort of "ur philosophy" that goes with it. It seems to me that this places them in an intolerable position and would like to suggest a way of looking at the world that will help them out of their pessimistic outlook.

I mentioned before that this sort of affliction only affects the especially sensitive and intelligent. This lets almost all people who believe in God off the hook. After all, if there is an omnipotent "Daddy in the sky" who is totally involved in our day-to-day lives, can't he fix everything? Even if there is a real apocalypse on the horizon, won't a post-death life in Heaven make everything all right? I suspect that most atheists also have nothing to worry about, as the overwhelming majority are the type who don't give much thought to the issue one way or the other, but just reject God as "so much bosh" and leave it at that. Most folks who can just dismiss religion this way have an equal facility to dismiss just about everything else that doesn't relate to them personally and immediately.

So if an intelligent sensitive person rejects God, what is it that I believe they hold onto that makes their life miserable? There is a Sanskrit saying that sums up the problem succinctly: "Tat Tvam Asi", or, "That art Thou". The phrase comes from the Chandogya Upanishad and refers to the idea that in some sense the concept of "self" and/or "soul" is directly linked to the idea of "God". I think that there are two key issues at work. Our naive assumptions of life are a: that there is this single, atomic entity known as the "self" or "soul" that b: exerts something called "free will" in order for us to choose one action over another. This is the "ur philosophy" (or, naive common sense view) that just about everyone in our society holds even if they have long since turned their backs on the "daddy in the sky".

The problem with it is that it posits an enormous burden of responsibility on people. If you are intelligent, you can see just how incredibly bad the state of your world can be. And again, if you are sensitive, you feel an enormous responsibility to "do your bit" to make the world better. In Orwell's time this responsibility extended itself for people to fight against the excesses of Capitalism (made manifest during the Great Depression), and, the dangers of Hitler, Fascism and totalitarianism in general. People devoted their lives to "the party", they went to fight in the Spanish Civil War, they went underground and joined the resistance, they joined radical organizations and suffered real repression. My experience from reading about people did do good things like organize unions, hide Jews, etc, is that most felt that they were morally obligated to do so. Indeed, it is also my experience that the various projects I have undertaken over the years as an environmentalist and community organizer also come from a personal sense of obligation to "do the right thing".

For people in Orwell's generation this sense of obligation came with the added burden of their feeling that often had to make soul-destroying moral compromises based on the principle that "the end justifies the means". This meant that many people supporting what they thought was a good thing---socialism---had to find ways to justify things like secret police and show trials in the Soviet Union. During World War Two, they also found themselves having to justify the non-aggression pact that Stalin signed with Hitler after a decade of proclaiming that the Nazis were the worst danger that civilization faced. They did these things because the context they inhabited seemed so absolutely bleak that they were forced to choose between two different options, neither of which seemed terribly appealing. If you didn't support the Soviet Union, then you were supporting the capitalism that was destroying the working class, exploiting the colonies and building up the Nazi menace. Trying to exist as a sensitive intelligent person in that sort of moral landscape was absolutely degrading because many felt that there was only two choices and you had to choose one or the other.

In the same way, anyone with a well developed social consciousness who lives in the modern Western world has to understand how they are personally participating in a process that is undermining our environmental infrastructure and will result in a great deal of horror for all living things. We have a direct experience that seems to tell us that we are independent beings with the ability to choose one course of action over another, we see how badly we are abusing the earth----and yet we continue to participate in this abuse through the simple act of living our lives. The feeling is inescapable that the very act of life commits us to killing the future.

The problem with this intense feeling of personal responsibility, however, is that there are devastating arguments, both ancient and modern, against it. This is because the feelings that we have of as independent "souls" exercising "free will" are fundamentally illusions.

The ancient argument against the soul was developed independently both in the East and the West. This involved the use of careful self observation which resulted in the insight that there really isn't any single unitary thing that could be called the "soul". Instead there are just momentary, fleeting thoughts. In the West, David Hume pointed this out.

For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception…. If any one, upon serious and unprejudic'd reflection thinks he has a different notion of himself, I must confess I can reason no longer with him. All I can allow him is, that he may be in the right as well as I, and that we are essentially different in this particular. He may, perhaps, perceive something simple and continu'd, which he calls himself; tho' I am certain there is no such principle in me.

In the East, Buddhism came across the same insight, which they described as "anatta", or, "no self".

The modern argument is based on modern research into brain physiology. Various experiments have shown that what we call "self awareness" is a sort of overlay that exists on a wide variety of different processes. This can be shown experimentally. For example, if a person has their brain cut in half (this is done as a last resort to treat a terribly debilitating form of epilepsy----I'm not referring to Nazi medical research here) different parts of her brain will no longer be able to communicate with each other. This includes the eyes, each of which will each be associated with parts that control different aspects of the body----such as the hands and voice. So if the eye associated with the hands is given one picture, those hands will pick up one specific object to represent it. If the eye associated with a different part of the brain, such as the voice, is shown a different object at the same time, the voice will say that the object is something different. If both are shown at the same time, the conscious mind will attempt to reconcile the incongruity by hypothesizing some sort of special example. The main point is that what we call the "soul" is not a simple atomic entity, but rather a virtual construct that organizes a collection of different, fundamentally independent activities.

A second important failure of common sense is the idea that we each have some sort of personal freedom to choose one course of action over another in most aspects of our daily life. The ancient argument against this comes from an analysis of the concepts of "freedom" and "causation". If we are free to choose one particular act over another, then surely we must also be able to freely choose one idea over another. That's because if I choose to make a cup of tea, for example, that choice is only "free" if I can choose to have that particular thought (i.e. to have a cup of tea.) If the thought just "pops into my head", then it hardly seems free as I am constrained by whatever process results in this happening. But if I can freely choose to have this idea (which is not what, on self-reflection, seems to be happening), then surely for that choice itself to be "free", would I not also have to choose it too? The ancient argument against free will indicates that the concept either leads to some mysterious agency that simply creates ideas out of nothing, or else some sort of infinite regress where we are forced to believe that we choose to choose to choose to choose, etc, for everything we do. Neither of which seems palatable.

The modern argument against free will comes from modern psychology which shows that a great many of the higher order decisions that people make in their life seem to be strongly influenced by the chemistry of the brain or the environment in which they developed. For example, it is pretty clear that a certain percentage of people who are given certain types of anti-malaria drugs will exhibit violent behaviour. In the same way, a significant percentage of people who have traumatic experiences will go on to make very bad life choices while in the grip of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. How free are these "choices" if you can predict their frequency based on the specific chemistry or background of the individual in question? In fact, I find it pretty hard to continue to believe in the existence of free will when I am confronted by someone suffering from just about any form of mental illness.

How exactly does giving up on the idea of a soul or free will help someone who is upset and pessimistic about the world around them? Of course, the whole problem with casting doubts on free will is the fact that you could argue that we are constrained to still believe in it. And the same thing goes for the soul----we still have the feeling that we are a single, atomic person and may be constrained to believe that it actually exists. As I see it, however, even if we don't have the ability to choose to think one thing or another, the fact that I am thinking that I may not have free will and you are reading about this idea, means that might actually be possible to turn our backs on the idea and develop something of an improvement on the concept.

The first thing that occurs to me is that if we discard the idea of a "soul" and instead believe that this is an illusion caused by the integration of a whole range of sense impressions mediated by the brain over a period of time, we could also extend this notion to include culture. That is, I am not only the sum total of my sense impressions, but also of the concepts that I have been exposed to in conversation with other people and through things like reading books and watching movies.

Another way of thinking about this is to consider our naive assumptions about "personality". We assume that the boundary between who we are and all the people that surround us is a very hard shell that cannot be penetrated. But in actual fact, we are constantly absorbing ideas and feelings from the people around us. If we didn't, how would culture ever change? Where would fads and fashion come from? Would love between people be possible? I think that this is at least partly what John Donne was on about when he wrote that

No man is an island,
Entire of itself.
Each is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less.
As well as if a promontory were.
As well as if a manor of thine own
Or of thine friend's were.
Each man's death diminishes me,
For I am involved in mankind.
Therefore, send not to know
For whom the bell tolls,
It tolls for thee.

As I see it, I am not just a single "soul", but am also connected in a real sense to my wife, my family, the guys I work with, and everyone else that I've ever met. They talk to me and that influences the way I see the world around me. This interaction flows both ways, so when I talk to them, I influence how they see the world. And, in a similar way, I'm also connected to people like David Hume and George Orwell, and every other writer that I have ever read and tried to understand. And, in the same way, anyone who reads this blog is also influenced by by me.

This interaction is what I see as being a substitute for "free will". I don't "choose" to have a cup of tea. Nor do I "choose, to choose, to choose, a cup of tea". But now, when I make a cup of tea, I make it with loose tea and a tea ball instead of a tea bag, because my wife talked me into doing it this way. Similarly, she now drinks more tea than she ever did before she met me and had to accommodate her American self to my Canadian ways.

This is a long way from the extinction of all multicellular life or a future of endless boots grinding endless faces into the mud. But what it does do for me is take some of the pressure off. I am not an individual "me" who is watching the human race run like lemmings over a cliff. Instead, I am part of the human "process" that is working its way through a problem. And that problem could be described as: "How does a species gain the wisdom to make the transition from being a passive part of nature to becoming the most important force of nature?"   Another way of saying it would be "How does life make the transition from being unconscious and governed simply by physical natural selection to being conscious and advancing through cultural processes?"

In a sense, what I'm saying is that I'm beginning to see myself as part of the Dao. This "Dao" isn't some sort of replacement for God, it is not some sort of pantheistic deity. I am simply referring to the sum of all parts of the universe. Probably not even all of them, just the relevant bits of my culture, personal history, physical surroundings, etc. They aren't self aware, they don't have a personality, will or anything else. But they are what give me the illusion of choice. And, they are what are calling the shots, not any sort of "soul".

The practical upshot is that I when I think of this notion I remind myself not to get too upset with myself for not living up to some sort of ideal. I do what I do because I am part of the Dao. When I remember I also remind myself to not get upset with others for what they do. They do what they do because that is what their part of the Dao is all about. And when I remember it, it try not to get upset about the future, because that too is just part of the Dao.

What this looks and feels like is the sort of fatalism that conventionally religious people have. "It's all in God's hands."   This attitude does allow people to feel better about the future and dissipates enormous amounts of pessimism. Unfortunately, if it is attached to the notion of "soul", "free will" and a supernatural deity, it brings all sorts of poison into the world. But if I cut them all away and just think of the Dao as the sum of all the universe, I can have the same sort of freedom.

Embrace the Dao!   Hold onto this One!   Fast the Mind!

Faith, or, Mind Fasting

2013-02-11T22:27:00.001-06:00

In my last post I explored the religious concept of "asceticism" and suggested one way of understanding it that could be of use for modern people, even atheists. I would like to suggest that another term, "Faith" can be of equal use if given a slightly different understanding.

Let me introduce this idea by suggesting that modern people find themselves in a strange sort of bind, one that probably never existed even 30 years ago. That is, modern education and media give people the illusion of an almost Olympian view. Part of this is the 24 hr news cycle that allows someone with cable television or access to the internet the ability to fuss about news all day long. It also allows someone who is a little more directed the ability to see endless blog postings and journal articles on almost any subject---and from almost every different perspective imaginable.

At the same time, people find themselves living in a huge complex world where we are more and more at the mercy of forces that we have no direct control over. Our technology is so complex that almost no one understands how some of our most commonly used machines (such as the computer I am writing this blog post with) operate. Our system of government is so huge, and the laws governing its operation so complex, that almost no one knows how the decisions that govern his or her life come about. Finally, almost everything we use comes from a complex globalized commercial system that not only means we don't how to make stuff, we don't know how to fix it, or even where it was made in the first place.

The net result is that we can see a lot more stuff going on than we used to while at the same time we feel a lot less control over out life.

Contrast this with the world I grew up in, only forty years ago.

At that time there were only two pipelines for information: newspapers and the CBC. A copy of the London Free Press showed up six days at week at the farm. The mail man also delivered copies of the Winnipeg Free Press and the Family Herald. In addition, we listened to the CBC radio news at noon. If we were interested, there was also a CBC television news at night, although I rarely remember seeing it. (Probably I had to go to bed before it came on.)

There are two things to remember about this. First, the newspapers and CBC were subject to Editorial control. That means a person who had a lot of experience in the news business had to make a decision every morning about which stories would or would not make it onto the page or in the newscast. Space and time was limited, so there was a genuine filtering-out process. Moreover, there was a belief that certain minimal standards of accuracy had to be met in order to keep the support of the customer.

Secondly, these media were delivered to my family at a set time. If my parents had wanted to learn more and immediately, it wouldn't have mattered. They had to wait until the newspaper was delivered or the signal was sent over the airwaves.

Both of these aspects of the news meant that people were able to keep a certain sense of balance and calm in their lives that does not exist with the plugged-in "news junkie" of today. First, people who are looking for evidence of a preconceived notion weren't able to seek it out. Editorial control stopped the positive feedback loop of "confirmation bias". As a result, there were no people living in "echo chambers". Secondly, because people had to wait between news delivery, there was an imposed period of time where people were able to spend time in reflection and contemplation of a world that had nothing to do with what the media was saying.

This last point deserves special emphasis.

Because the world was a simpler, smaller place people had the experience of having more direct control over their lives. In a small town, people had more influence over decision-making. In a simpler time, there were fewer regulations governing what someone could or could not do. (To cite one example, I just had a hot water tank changed in my home. You used to be able to turn your tank heat down in order to save gas and prevent burning yourself in the hot water. Now it seems that the government has found that the bacteria that causes Legionnaires Disease can grow in cooler hot water tanks, so plumbers have to install mixer valves and encourage people to keep their tanks set on "hi". One more complexity and one less thing the home owner can do for himself.) Rules and regulations fence us in more and more as the years go by, which gives everyone a sense of increased helplessness and impotency.

So paradoxically, while modern technology has given us the illusion of omniscience, the complex society that supports that technology repeatedly rubs our noses in the fact that we have precious little control over almost everything. We have the vision of a God and the power of a worm.

Cassandra taken into slavery

The ancient Greeks had a myth that dealt with this sort of situation. It involved Cassandra. She was supposedly the daughter of the king and queen of Troy and was so beautiful that Apollo fell in love with her. As a "gift" he gave her the power of prophecy. But because she rejected him, he cursed her by ensuring that no one would ever listen to her warnings. She is the personification of powerless knowledge. She knew that the Greeks were hiding in the Trojan horse and begged the Trojans not to bring the statue into the city. But they didn't listen. She lived to see all her family killed and ended up a slave in the household of the Greek hero Ajax.

Of course, the Greeks weren't the only people who understood this sort of situation. All through human history wise men and women have been able to see problems that they had no control over. Roman philosophers no doubt understood that rampant corruption and internal politics would inevitably weaken the army to the point where the barbarians would be able to sack the Empire. Men of science understood that the church was causing great harm by silencing and murdering men like Galileo and Bruno. No doubt many people of sensitivity have been consumed by helpless horror while watching holocausts happen to people around them---not just the Jews, but also American Indians, slaves, Armenians, and so on.

There is a famous prayer that directly accesses this issue. It is attributed to an American theologian, Reinhold Niebuhr, but he seems to have wondered if he had come across from some other source and forgotten where.

God, give me grace to accept with serenity
the things that cannot be changed,
Courage to change the things
which should be changed,
and the Wisdom to distinguish
the one from the other.
Living one day at a time,
Enjoying one moment at a time,
Accepting hardship as a pathway to peace,
Taking, as Jesus did,
This sinful world as it is,
Not as I would have it,
Trusting that You will make all things right,
If I surrender to Your will,
So that I may be reasonably happy in this life,
And supremely happy with You forever in the next.
Amen.

Reinhold Niebuhr

(Variations are often used in Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. It is also, I think, sometimes falsely attributed to St. Francis of Assisi.) A similar viewpoint has been offered again and again in human history. Consider the following which is supposed to come from a "Mother Goose" rhyme.

For every ailment under the sun
There is a remedy, or there is none;
If there be one, try to find it;
If there be none, never mind it.

And this 8th century Buddhist text:

If there’s a remedy when trouble strikes,
What reason is there for dejection?
And if there is no help for it,
What use is there in being glum?

(For further info, check out the Wikipedia article on the "Serenity Prayer".)

What I think we are dealing with is a somewhat more sophisticated version of the Christian ideal of "faith". But the faith in question isn't of the "turn off your brain and believe every stupid thing you are told" variety, but rather of the "this seems so horrible, but we need to believe that somehow God will somehow make it 'all right' in the end". If it were the former type of faith, then there would be no need at all for the serenity prayer, because people wouldn't get so concerned in the first place. It's the cognitive dissonance between feeling that God is both just and all powerful, yet there being horror in the world, that leads people to want to appeal to things like the Serenity Prayer in the first place.

I would suggest that for people of discernment the idea that "Trusting that You will make all things right" just doesn't "make the nut". I would suggest, however, that the version from Mother Goose and the Buddhist Saint might suffice, but only if they added in some extra bits. It is logically true that fretting over things you cannot change is simply not worth the effort. But just telling people that this is so is not sufficient to actually get them to stop fretting.

The Daoist sage Zhuangzi does offer a practical suggestion to how to deal with this problem, however. He suggests that we adopt a specific meditation technique known as mind fasting. He introduces this concept in Chapter Four of his book through the mouth of the sage Confucious.

Zhuangzi

Confucious said, "Make your will one! Don't listen with your ears, listen with your mind. No, don't listen with your mind, listen with your spirit. Listening stops with the ears, the mind stops with recognition, but spirit is empty and waits on all things. The Way gathers in emptiness alone. Emptiness is the fasting of the mind. (from Chapter four of the Zhuangzi. The Google Texts version.)

The point he is trying to make is that there is a way of controlling the sorts of things that your mind chooses to fixate upon. It is a learned skill, however, and only comes about if a person works at learning how to control what his mind does or does not choose to focus upon. This is just like the ascetic who chooses to do a food fast and control what he put into his mouth. In the same way, a sage learns how to control what he does or does not put into his conscious mind.

This takes two practical forms.

First, a person can choose to avoid looking at certain types of information that serve no useful purpose but instead cause worthless agitation. In the case of modern people, this can take the form of a "new fast". This involves refusing to look at websites, television or listen to radio that is part of the so-called "24 hr news cycle". If someone chooses to do this, I would suggest that they very quickly realize that almost all the news that they have routinely consumed in the past has almost no real importance. Indeed, most of it is trivial, sensational crap, much of which is irrelevant and or factually wrong.

Laozi makes a similar point in the Dao De Jing when he says:

Colors blind the eye
Sounds deafen the ear.
Flavors numb the taste.
Thoughts weaken the mind.
Desires wither the heart.

Secondly, beyond turning off the avalanche of mind churning crap, people can learn to pick and choose what it is that they decide to think about. This is the process some Daoists call "holding onto the One". This is a process of reminding yourself that you are alive, that you are a human being and that you have the ability to pick and choose what it is that you are thinking about. And moreover, that you choose to think about things that are of benefit for you, not things that cause you needless distress.

Please note, this is not the same thing as praying to a non-existent God that all things will be "made right" by some sort of miracle. It is instead, understanding how the human mind operates and refusing to allow it to run wild and make your life miserable. The Dao is the sum total of "how the world works", not some old guy in the clouds. But in many ways the end result is similar. It is possible to live a life of value and worth, a life that benefits your fellow man, but one that doesn't involve constant mental anguish, if you learn to control the mind through fasting.

The similarity comes from the fact that deciding to learn the kung fu of Mind Fasting or Holding onto the One, is very similar to praying to "God" to give you faith. On a practical level, they are both practices that you have to work at and which you get better doing with experience. On a theoretical level, however, there is a world of difference. The Dao as I have described it above, integrates perfectly with the modern worldview whereas the God of the Bible is an absurd holdover from the bronze age. In doing so, I am trying to separate the practical value that "faith" has offered people for generations from the nasty ways in which the term has been used by ecclesiastic authorities to violate and abuse.

Unfortunately, as long as faith is defined by submission to a non-existent God, the religion leaves believers wide open to manipulation by ecclesiastic authorities who abuse their trust. The Pope gets to decide what God does or does not want us to take "on faith" (simply because there really is no God who can step in and tell people directly that the Pope---or anyone else---is wrong.) This means that the emphasis is not on learning how to control how our minds work, but rather on what we do or do not choose to focus upon. The Daoist version, in contrast, is on learning how to control the mind and leaves what it chooses to focus upon up to the individual.

This is the difference between outside discipline and self-discipline. It is analogous to the difference between an army recruit who is chased through boot camp by a drill sergeant and ordered to exercise and eat a certain type of food, and, a martial artist who freely chooses to exercise and eat right. Unfortunately, for many people who would dramatically benefit from mind fasting, the church's attempts to impose their definition of faith on them in their youth has "poisoned the well" and keeps them from benefiting from this useful discipline. This is why so many people who could really benefit from developing a "faithful" approach to life recoil in horror from the suggestion. As a result, I would suggest for people who simply cannot accept the ideal of "faith" should instead be exposed to the concepts of "mind fasting" and "holding onto the One" instead.

Asceticism

2013-01-27T21:32:00.001-06:00

I've been thinking a lot about two issues that have enormous bearing on environmental sustainability. The more I think about them, the more I think that we can learn a lot about them by considering two old religious ideals that have pretty much died out as parts of our shared cultural inheritance. This blog post will be about "asceticism", the next one "surrender".

My wife and I obsess about why it is that so many people we know simply will not, indeed seem incapable of comprehending the possibility of, "doing without". I know people who are very aware of climate change, the necessity of everyone cutting their carbon footprint, who would be considered by most other people to be "radical environmentalists"---yet still jump on a jet plane for a vacation in Paris, Thailand or Iceland. It's as if the whole idea that someone should try to "live their values" is beyond their ability to comprehend. In order to understand this problem, I would suggest that it would be useful to consider a religious value that seems to have died out in modern society.

" Asceticism" is very similar to the Daoist principle of "kung fu", or, intense training to develop mastery of some ability. But the emphasis isn't on learning a particular skill so much as learning to control one's mind or passions through either doing without some normal want or need, or, insisting on doing some particular arduous task.

Simon Stylites

The first ascetic that I ever heard of was a fellow by the name of Simon Stylites. This was an early Christian monastic who retreated to the deserts of the Middle East (ie: he was a "desert father") in order to live a life of contemplation. He is famous for residing for many years on a pillar. I remember that the school teacher who mentioned him absolutely dripped condescension. Obviously, this guy was a poor, foolish person who threw away his life in pursuit of some silly superstition. (Or at least that was the lesson I learned in my childhood.)

An Anchor Hold

There were other Christian ascetics. For example, in medieval England it was not unknown for a church to have a resident "anchorite". These were people---both men and women---who had applied for and been granted the privilege to live in a cell (or "anchor hold") that was attached to the side of the church. There would be a hole in the wall near the altar called a "hagioscope" or "squint", through which the priest would be able to hand the bread and wine of the Eucharist to the anchorite. Often, there would also be a window or grate on the outside of the hold, through which the Anchorite would be able to give advice to members of the community who were seeking words of wisdom. Food and water would be passed in, a chamber pot out, but the anchorite was not supposed to ever leave the anchor hold. Anchorites took this vow seriously, sometimes to the point of remaining in a burning church or one that was being looted by pirates.

OK. So what has this got to do with flying to Thailand on a vacation?

The point I want to make is that at one time it was considered---very broadly speaking---a good thing to tame our desires in order to live in accordance with our values. In itself, living on top of a stone pillar or in a room attached to a church is absurd. But if you do it as a way of showing your contempt for the things "of this world", it is a heroic statement about the depth of your religious faith. It was inspiring to other people. Indeed, Simon initially started living on top of his pillar in order to avoid the mobs of people that went out to see and meet him. These people found his example to be inspiring, if not perhaps, something that they would emulate themselves.

In contrast, people in our society are taught (just like I was as a child) that this is weird, strange behaviour. We are taught to "enjoy" our creature comforts. That "doing without---just because" is weird, strange and even somewhat subversive. (When I was in university I lived without a television set. My family thought that this was so strange that they made a point of bringing me one----and ordering me not to give it away.)

Even more so, in some instances, doing without is seen as bad, immoral behaviour. When I was a teenager I was pretty much indifferent to my personal attire. I can remember applying for a position with a service club where I would be an exchange student in the USA. I found out that the reason I didn't get selected was because I didn't wear a set of "good shoes". As a matter of fact, what I wore---some Adidas sneakers---were the only shoes I owned. I can also remember my parents complaining about the people who lived on the local Indian reserve. They said that they knew many of the people made very good money working in the USA building skyscrapers, but they still lived in crappy houses. I wondered about this for years until it finally dawned on me the the Iroquois weren't materialistic like my parents----they just didn't care what their houses looked like.

Just another bad day in the Middle Ages

I think that it is easier for societies that were less materialistically "advanced" or "rich" than ours to understand that there is more to life than creature comfort. Indeed, I think that they had their noses rubbed into the fact on a very regular basis. They knew that famine, disease, war and God only knew what else were always around the corner conspiring to take away everything you owned and loved on a moment's notice. If the crops failed, you would watch your children starve. If the Viking's showed up, you could see your parents murdered and yourself sold into slavery. The plague could arrive and kill off most of your friends and family within a week.

Pretty brave guys, no?

Ultimately, all you could really call your own was your interior life. For the Six Nations people I grew up near, their courage was valued much more than their homes. This is why they make such good warriors before and ironworkers now. It was also why people of Middle Ages were inspired by Anchorites and Ascetics of all sorts. They saw in their example a way to transcend the horror that lurked behind everyday life through developing control over the appetites and passions of existence.

Of course, modern people only see kooks who were voluntarily living wretched lives. But I think it only looks that way from the vantage point of someone who has central heating, nice clothes and good food. If you were living with the livestock, had lice, and had to live on porridge most of the year---and worry about all Hell breaking loose at any moment---you might value the ascetics ability to "rise above" the material elements of life.

I think in a similar way people who really care about the fate of the earth and humanity because of things like climate change should be willing to manifest a little asceticism in their lives. If you really do care, then you should be willing to avoid unnecessary flying. If it means taking a few days to travel by train, then so be it. The discomfort of sleeping in a coach seat or waiting hours for a connection is not nearly as bad as being walled up in a cell or living on a stone pillar for the rest of your life. But it is showing the people around you that you really do care about Mother Nature, and you have enough control over your body that you can suffer a little bit for it.

Siddhartha, Tantricism, Environmentalism, Dao

2012-12-13T15:19:00.000-06:00

Herman Hesse

I just got finished reading Herman Hesse's book Siddhartha. For those of you who haven't read it, Siddhartha follows the life of a Brahmin (or religious caste member) who lives at the time of the historic Buddha. Siddhartha studies with his father to learn the religious lore of the Hindus, then sets out to join a band of ascetics (or Sadhu) to seek wisdom. Eventually he gives this up and meets with the Buddha. Instead of taking vows and becoming a monk, however, he decides to cast his study away and learn about "the world". He becomes enamored with a courtesan, a wealthy businessman and finds himself becoming more and more enmeshed in lust, greed, etc. Eventually, he becomes disgusted with this life and walks away to live "the simple life" as a ferryman. He gains real peace here, but eventually his old love, the courtesan, passes by with their son (whom he never knew about.) She dies from a snake bite, leaving the son with her father. He tries to be a good father, but they have very different ideas and the son runs away. Eventually Siddhartha realizes that the son had to leave him just as he left his father years ago. Realization ensues.

A Sadhu

Stated in bald terms, the plot doesn't seem any more insightful than any other. And indeed, one of the points that Hesse makes is that all paths can be banal or the road to realization---it depends on the individual. For Siddhartha, who was always a brilliant "outsider", it was easy to study philosophy, do austerities, and meditate. What was difficult was to understand ordinary people: their desires, loves and frustrations. Indeed, Hesse always describes the young Siddhartha as having a "mocking edge" in his voice. And the older one describes ordinary folks as "the childish ones". It is only after he fully enmeshes himself into sex, greed and love that he begins to understand these others and stops seeing them as "childish" but instead as part of the whole of humanity.

When I read this book it occurred to me that what Hesse was really writing was not, as it is often understood, either Buddhism or Hinduism, but rather Tantra. This is a medieval outgrowth of both Buddhism and Hinduism that suggests that it is important to embrace and understand the world around us instead of rejecting it. I suppose the best example of this Tantric attitude that I can think of comes from the Daoist popular novel Seven Taoist Masters. One figure decides that he is too consumed by lustful thoughts, so he creates a bunch of "fairy gold" out of pebbles and goes to live in a brothel. After doing so for a few years any obsessive interest he may have had in sex has been burnt out of him.

Another aspect of Tantra is the idea of the human Guru. The idea, expressed very well by Hesse, is that the teaching is pretty much irrelevant compared to how it is applied to day to day life. And you can only get a feel for how to live the life if you have experience with someone who does a good job. So Siddhartha meets the Buddha and is far more impressed by how the Buddha walks and interacts with people than with the specific doctrine he is teaching. Later on, he lives with an old "working class" ferry man who becomes his exemplar of how to live a realized life.

Unfortunately, to paraphrase Christopher Hitchens, "religion poisons everything---even enlightenment". And Tantric religion has often resulted in Guru slavery and sexual exploitation. That is, gurus stopped being people you choose to emulate because you can see they are superior human beings and instead became tyrants who order you to do whatever crazy thing comes into their minds. For example, "learning from the senses" becomes "sleep with me because it'll make you enlightened". The people who publish Down the Crooked path do a very good job of explaining the excesses of tantra.

What got me thinking about writing a blog about Siddhartha is something else, though. My wife and I are united in our environmentalism. We are also people who follow a non-religious Daoist path, although she is much more emotionally repulsed by religion than I am. I find it interesting to study and believe that there are useful things to learn from that study. She just finds it a disgusting mess of corruption and filth.

So be it, it's eerie how much we have in common otherwise.

But I have been thinking about Siddhartha and the "childish ones". I often find myself looking at the people around me, the ones who blithely continue living as if things like climate change do not exist and feel no personal responsibility for it. I've always found this totally and utterly mystifying. My wife and I both go through periods of profound concern, anger and even despair over the attitudes of the people we meet. It's as if they simply don't care.

I recognized myself in Hesse's book in Siddhartha when he looked on the merchants, working people and courtesans as "the childish ones". The book has got me thinking. Did Hesse understand something about the human heart that I have missed? Am I missing out on a critical insight because I have never really felt what it means to be a direct participant in life instead of an observer? Maybe. Certainly, being married has really changed some of my attitudes towards life.

And what is that insight that Siddhartha came to? It was the basic Hindu/Buddhist/Daoist idea that we make a mistake when we see a person as an individual. This applies both to the idea that there is an atomistic soul that exists from birth to death-----Siddhartha at 5 is not the same man he is at 50. (Buddhists call this idea anatta.) Moreover, humanity, biota, the entire universe, are all parts of a big process. The metaphor that is used in the novel is a big river. Stand on a bank and the river never moves, but the water flows by and disappears. He's talking about what scientists would call a "homeostatic process". Our bodies exist through this----old cells die and disappear, new ones come, but I the body still exists. The flame on a candle is also a homeostatic process----the wax melts, burns off, but the flame continues.

Water Cycle

Human society is a homeostatic process. The environment is filled with homeostatic processes: the carbon cycle, the water cycle, etc. The President retires, another one is elected to office, and so on. A part of wisdom comes from understanding the big picture and accepting that all of us are eventually replaced. In Hesse's book, this is the wisdom of the Buddha.

Carbon Cycle

I often hear others talk about about this sort of thing by sprinkling in the phrase "I don't give a damn". I don't give a damn if I die. I don't give a damn about the future. I don't give a damn about---. I always feel really sad and hurt when I hear this. Now I think I know why. That phrase "I don't give a damn" means two things to me. First, I think it is usually not true. People do give a great deal about the situation but it hurts them so much to admit it that they are in denial about it. Secondly, it can also mean that they are so angry with people's behaviour (i.e. the "childish ones" of Hesse's novel) that they cannot feel any emotional connection with them.

I think Hesse understood something important. His character Siddhartha grew to identify with the "childish ones" through experiencing their lives. He also learned to love them through his son. At that point, he most certainly did give a damn, for the first time in his life. But it hurt terribly to do so. But by accepting the hurt and learning to get through it, he was able to see the wisdom of the River/Dao. He could begin to love people and still see them as parts of a greater, homeostatic process. You can see the river and still love the individual drops of water. And if you allow yourself to do both, I would argue that life becomes bearable again.

I hope that people who do see how badly we are screwing up the environment can learn to love all the people who seem totally oblivious to the harm that they are doing. And I hope that those people can come to see that their concern, and the actions they do, are part of the Dao----just like the actions of the people who are creating the problem in the first place. We are all drops of water in the river of life. The future may or may not come out the way we want, but that is the Dao's concern, not ours. And this is not something to be sad, angry or happy about. It is just the background of our lives.

The Kung Fu of Skepticism

2012-10-08T19:10:00.001-06:00

In my last post I laid out my concerns about Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs). Basically, I suggested that they are being developed as a means of propping up an inherently unsustainable agricultural model, one that I think will eventually collapse and be replaced by something that I called "Daoist Agriculture".

But in doing so, I avoided the question that raised the issue in the first place. That is, the book and movie titled "Genetic Roulette". I'm going to do something that I try not to do and which I usually criticize others for doing, I am going to pass judgement on something that I have only skimmed over and not actually seen in it's entirety. If someone thinks that I have been totally unfair, please mention it to me----but please cite an actual place in the book or movie so I can look them up. I tried to watch the movie, but after 20 minutes I ceased being able to take it seriously. Similarly, I glanced at the book and had the same response to it.

When I mentioned this response to my wife, who had suggested I watch the film in the first place, she complained that unless one is a scientist it is almost impossible to know whom to trust. This is a significant problem, so I thought I'd explain why it was that I don't trust this movie and the book that goes with it. In doing so, I'll illustrate some "rules of thumb" that I rely upon to try and navigate complex issues.

The first thing that I found disconcerting about the film was the way it shamelessly used the rhetoric of film-making to reinforce its message. It used ominous sounding background music a lot. The thing about emotional appeals like this is that it is very easy to "short-circuit" the part of our minds that is logical and reasonable. Once you by-pass people's rationality, you can often stampede them into accepting all sorts of dubious claims. That is why philosophers and scientists can often seem maddeningly unemotional when you talk to them. They have consciously chosen to develop one particular style of being that they have found is more reliable than others.

This was the first red flag.

Secondly, the movie introduced the issues in question through the use of rhetorical questions that I found extremely suspicious. As memory serves me (it is no longer possible to see the movie for free, and I refuse to pay for another viewing), the film starts out with a series of open-ended questions that suggest that things like obesity have been caused by eating GMOs.

When I saw this, I immediately thought about Occam's Razor. That is the rule of thumb that states that if you see more than one explanation for a phenomenon, you should opt for the simplest one. In the case of the growth of obesity in North America, it makes a lot more sense to suggest that it is a combination of the change in people's diets and the decline in physical activity that I have personally witnessed over the past 50 years, instead of GMOs.

That was the second red flag.

The third thing I noticed was the fact that a lot of medical doctors were being interviewed for this documentary, instead of research scientists. MDs are not scientists. In fact, the job of being an MD really should select for different types of people than that of scientists. That's because the role of the MD is to deal with the individual and the specific---this patient who has that particular disease. Instead, the job of a scientist is to look for the general trend and to try to remove as much as possible, the viewpoint given by one person. MDs are almost inevitably going to be basing their understanding on anecdotal evidence. And that can get you into a lot of trouble when you try to make broad generalizations. That's because human beings are so darned complex that there can be a huge number of variables at work when any given symptom manifests itself. For example, my joints are aching right now. Is it because I'm getting a cold? Because of the change in weather? Because of food I ate for lunch? To be totally honest, I don't have a clue, and truth be told, I don't think anyone else with the same sort of symptoms can tell either. That is why scientists go to enormous lengths to create double-blind experiments with as large a sample of the population as possible. The hope is that if you don't know who got what (ie "double blind") your personal bias ceases to be an issue. And if you have a lot of subjects, you can hope that all the other variables (food, weather, etc) will cancel themselves out in the final number count.

This was the third red flag.

Another thing that I was concerned about was the publisher that printed the book that the movie was based upon. I had never heard of "Yes! Books", and when I did a Google search I couldn't find it. That makes me a little concerned that the book might be self-published. If you look carefully on the back cover it says distributed by Chelsea Green Publishing. I simply cannot find any evidence that "Yes! Books" exists as a corporate entity that publishes anything except books by Jeffrey M. Smith.

This is an issue because publishing houses need to exercise caution when they publish books. First of all, because they are liable to lawsuits if the books make fraudulent or libelous claims. Secondly, because they can destroy their reputations if they put out a "stinker". This is why it is generally useful to take more seriously a book from a prestigious publisher than something that is self-published or comes from something like a "New Age" publisher.

Bjorn Lomborg

I admit that exceptions can happen, but when they do people often raise a fuss in response. A case in point comes from the notorious Skeptical Environmentalist which was published by one of the most prestigious English publishing houses: Cambridge University Press. This press was absolutely vilified by the scientific community by lending its name to one of the most notorious examples of "junk science" that has ever blighted public discourse. The author of this book, Bjorn Lomborg, has been cited for academic misconduct in this book by the body that governs Danish academics and the prestigious journal Scientific American actually devoted an entire issue to debunking the book.

This was the fourth red flag.

Jeffrey M. Smith

After seeing these other items, I decided it would be a good idea to do a Google search for the author, Jeffrey M. Smith. Low and behold, I came across this website. It appears that Mr. Smith has a history as a supporter of transcendental meditation and there are actually pictures of him "demonstrating" "yogic flying". Of course, it is possible that this was a "youthful folly" that he has left in the past. It is also true that people can have all sorts of eccentricities that have no effect on the soundness of the arguments they put forward. But as a general rule, people judge people by whether or not they appear to have a shown a sound grasp of reality in their previous life.

This sets out a fifth red flag.

The next stage of my investigation is to do another Google search, this one for "Criticism Genetic Roulette". And if you do that, you come back to a different part of the same site that produced the above picture. The site seems to refute every substantive claim made in the book and movie about GMOs being unsafe to eat. I quickly glanced at the arguments in support of a couple of these assertions (there is a TON of evidence cited on this website), and they seemed to be referring to legitimate, peer-reviewed scientific journals.

At this point, I have my sixth red flag.

I admit that something might come along and change my opinion, but until that happens I'm of the opinion my time is better spent doing something else. And any fears that I might have had that GMOs are poisoning our citizenry have been dissipated.

That is not to say that there is nothing of value in the book and movie. After all, a stopped clock is still correct twice a day. But IMHO, neither one has any credibility with me so I would never believe anything they say because they say it. If I believe any of the issues raised in either has any value, it is because of authorities I have seen outside of it, not because it is raised in the documentary.

And, as I pointed out in the previous post, I do have issues with GMOs. But the evidence I've seen has to do more with the social implications for farmers rather than anything else.

But I hope that the exercise of explaining why I don't trust Genetic Roulette will help readers walk the minefield of public policy. To recapitulate, the six tests I put this book and movie through involved answering six questions:

Is the book or movie trying to manipulate our emotions instead of talking to our reason?
Is it trying to suggest a cause for a problem that is more easily explained by a mundane reason?
Are they citing authorities who are outside of their field of expertise?
Is the publisher reputable or is the publisher a company with either no track record or a bad one?
Find out what you can about the author. Is he someone you can trust?
Look to see if anyone has raised any questions about the book. Is that person more or less trustworthy than the author?

What I have gone through in the above is a type of "kung fu". As I've mentioned before, kung fu is not martial arts, but martial arts can be kung fu, which is nothing more than proficiency gained through diligent practice. Practicing the kung fu of skepticism means that you have made a decision to look at as much of the world through a specific lense that will give you a greater chance of separating truth from fiction. As my wife's question about understanding things without being a scientist implies, science is a skeptical kung fu, one involves very careful evaluation of all statements in a given field. But ordinary people can develop the sorts of rules of thumb that I've used above to separate truth from what Jon Stewart calls "Bullshit Mountain". In fact, the internet makes it a lot easier to identify baloney because of Google searches and the ease with which someone can post evidence that undermines misleading information. In addition, there are several really good sites devoted to helping people identify baloney. Here're a few:

Snopes: An excellent site that debunks urban legends. In fact, it's fun to just browse it.

Quackwatch: This site is devoted to debunking fraudulent medical claims.

Science Based Medicine: Another site debunking fraudulent medical claims.

Skeptical Inquirer: This is great magazine published by the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI).
Skeptoid: Oops. Forgot to add this great and very entertaining resource. Sign up for his weekly podcasts---you'll be glad you did!

Ancient Daoists were able to survive in the wilderness because they understood the way of nature. But people are part of nature, and human civilization is yet another manifestation of the Dao. If we live in a technological civilization we need to understand the Dao of science and technology if we are going "ride the dragon" and "fly with the phoenix". The kung fu of skepticism is a key skill that all Daoists must learn.

The Dao of Agriculture

2012-10-03T19:33:00.002-06:00

My wife recently saw a movie that had her all in a flurry about Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs), it's title is "Genetic Roulette" and it purports to show how dangerous genetically modified food is to eat. It started a very heated argument between the two of us. Since then I've been spending a lot of time thinking on the subject and thought I'd share my ideas with my readers.

Before I get too involved in all of this, let me state clearly what I think about GMOs. Like in most things, I always stand to be corrected if I see some evidence that supports changing my opinion. Having said that, I do not like GMOs, because I think that they are destructive to family farms and the environment. As I see it, there are currently two competing models of agriculture fighting for control of the food supply.

Masanobu Fukuoka

On one hand there are what I would call "Daoist" models that try to work with nature and mimic the systems were in play before human beings came on the scene. The great guru of this approach was Masanobu Fukuoka. He was trained as an agronomist but suffered a physical and mental collapse after the end of WWII. This resolved itself in an insight that people blind themselves to what is going on around them by thinking that they know more than they actually do. After wandering around Japan like a crazy person telling people that they didn't know anything, it occurred to him that he should put this insight into practice and use it to work a farm that he had inherited from his father. He set out to let the plants and trees on his farm to "just be" and see what happened. The results were disastrous, as the carefully pruned, mulched and fertilized orange trees were destroyed by insect pests.

He didn't give up, however. Instead, he realized that farming with nature is not the same thing as being a passive observer. So he carefully observed natural processes at work in nature and developed agricultural techniques that mimicked them. For example, he realized that the process of tilling the soil to plant seeds also made conditions ideal for weeds too. After experimentation, he found out that all a seed needs to germinate is a small coating of clay that mimics the effect of being buried in the soil. So he learned how to create little seed envelopes that covered each seed. Once he had these, he found he could simply broadcast the clay pellets onto last year's stubble and get consistent germination---but only of the crop he was planting, not the weeds.

Joel Salatin

This type of farming is not a specific technique, but rather a kungfu, which means the example of Fukuoka can inspire similar attitudes in others but cannot be copied and moved all over the world.

One North American who has used a similar attitude to create a very different system is Joel Salatin, who operates Polyface Farm. His system is not based on fruit and rice, like Fukuoka's, but instead works around livestock production, based on trying to recreate the plant and animal relationships in a prairie. To simplify, he carefully monitors his pastures to ensure that his cows graze the grass only enough to stimulate new, tender, nutritious growth but not long enough to harm the plants and select for tougher, less valuable types of grass. When this point is reached, he moves the cows onto another part of the farm----which mimics the way wild grazers constantly migrate to better pasture. After the cows have left, Salatin then moves in mobile chicken coups that bring in his flock of chickens. These birds eat the maggots in the cow patties left in the field but in the process also spread the manure evenly so no part of the pasture suffers from being smothered. This mimics the actions of the birds----like prairie chickens---who used to follow the herds of bison across the great plains. At this point, it is necessary to monitor the grass so it doesn't start to toughen up or "waste" energy on seed production before the cows are brought back into the field.

Using this principle of "working with nature" or, what I would call, "understanding the dao of the farm", both Salatin and Fukuoka were able to create farms that were more productive than their neighbours while using a fraction of the effort and outside agricultural inputs (e.g. fertilizer, pesticides, etc.) At the same time, they also found that they were increasing the value of the soil. In Salatin's case, he has transformed a farm with the worst soil in the county to one of the best.

Norman Borlaug

In contrast to this "Daoist farming", there is another, dominant type of farming---usually identified as the "Green Revolution", but which I would suggest is better described as "industrial farming". It is usually associated with the American agronomist Norman Borlaug. But I would argue that it owes just as much to industrialist thinkers like Henry Ford.

The important things to understand about industrial farming is that it has two key elements: dependence on fossil fuels, and, integration into a global industrial machine. And because of those two underlying issues, it invariably follows the dictates of international capitalism.

Fritz Haber

Modern industrial agriculture is based on the assumption that it is possible to cheaply purchase various fertilizers that are energy intensive to create and transport. Probably the most energy intensive of these is so-called "fixed nitrogen" which is created from nitrogen in the atmosphere. Traditionally, farms used to be limited to the amount of nitrogen that could be recycled through things like manures or fixed by plants such as legumes. But during the First World War a system for artificially fixing nitrogen was created by an chemist by the name of Fritz Haber. It uses a great deal of energy, because it is difficult to get nitrogen gas to bond with the other elements that make it useful for plants.

Green Revolution agriculture not only needs to bring intrinsically expensive inputs, like artificially-created fixed nitrogen, but it also has has to create international markets to ship crops and products all over the world. For example, another constituent of artificial fertilizer, potash, is only available to be mined in a very few places in the world. This means that an international potash trade needs to be created that will allow it to be shipped where it is needed.

Once we have these artificial inputs in hand, it became apparent that traditional varieties of crops couldn't maximize the potential from these inputs. That is because those breeds had been developed in an environment where these types of nutrients were not plentiful. This meant that once you start using the artificial fertilizer, you also eventually stop saving seeds and start buying them from international corporations.

And once you start purchasing these things from international corporations---like Canada's Potash Corp. and the USA's Monsanto---the farmer no longer can get away with selling his harvest to his neighbours. He needs hard currency and the best way to get that is to sell on the international market. And because there are inevitable fluctuations between the price he gets paid and fertilizer costs, it is inevitable that the farmer needs to go to a bank to borrow money to tide him over through hard times.
Once they get into the clutches of a bank, many farmers almost inevitably find themselves caught up in a debt spiral that ends up with them losing the land and being bought out by a neighbour.

The same process has occurred in India, Missouri and Ontario. It happened to my family farm---which had been owned by my ancestors since 1811. This is why small-scale, mixed family farms are becoming a rare thing. It is why when I ride the train to St. Louis to visit my wife Illinois appears to be one giant corn field.

So what's the problem?

The issue for me is that we are running out of cheap energy as we enter into Peak Oil . Measured in terms of output per input, industrial agriculture is grotesquely inefficient. It isn't that far-fetched to say that modern people eat oil. In fact, the only way in which industrial agriculture is "efficient" is in terms of output per man-hour of work. In terms of soil conservation, environmental sustainability and output per input, it is the worst, least efficient system. As the price of oil continues to ratchet up, this is going to get worse and worse. This will put more and more stress on farmers and consumers until eventually our farms start to fail catastrophically. My understanding is that this is already happening, as I have been told that the largest fraction of income for farms in Ontario comes from the off-farm job that farmers and their spouses use to subsidize their operation. I have also been told that the only farmers who are making money are small-scale producers, predominately organic farms. (I.e., the guys who are following some approximation of the Daoist system mentioned above.)

A cutworm and the damage it did.

As I see it, GMOs are sort of a "last gasp" technology which are attempting to prop-up the unsustainable industrial agricultural system. They do not benefit family farms, which have other mechanisms for dealing with the issues that GMOs address. To cite one example, a specific type of gene has been inserted into GMO corn that renders it resistant to various pests, including cutworm. On our farm cutworm was controlled through crop rotation and by cultivation. In mono-cultured areas---like that giant corn field called Illinois---the fields are not cultivated but instead follow "no-till" systems because it is the only way farmers can cultivate such huge fields with giant machines without suffering from severe erosion. As well, because the only thing being grown is corn, there are no crops that can be rotated with the corn to starve out the pests. (In our case, we used to grown mixed wheat and mixed oats, which we added to the pig feed.)

It turns out, however, that there seems to be evidence that GMO resistant cutworms are now emerging through natural selection. If this is true, and I cannot see why it won't eventually happen even if these reports turn out to be false, then industrial farmers will find themselves forced to find some other "magic bullet" to protect themselves from the effects of creating a system of farming that goes against every rule that Mother Nature has created for making a strong eco-system.

The important thing to realize about industrial agriculture is that once it has been created it is damned difficult to switch back to something that is closer to Daoist agriculture. The old infrastructure of barns, houses, fence rows, the small-sized equipment, etc, are all gone. Even worse, the old knowledge that informed farmers is totally gone too. This is really important, as farmers do a lot of things simply because their father did it that way without knowing why. To cite one example, when I was writing this blog post I mentioned the necessity of tillage to control cutworms. I didn't know it was important until I looked things up---I thought that crop rotation was the only thing needed. But if I was still on the land, I would still have been tilling the soil and watching the flocks of seagulls following the tractor, not knowing that they were eating the cutworms that I had unearthed with the discs or cultivators.

New farmers not only don't know a lot of the theory of how to farm, they don't even know how to do small-scale farming from a "monkey see, monkey do" perspective. This disconnect between the past and the future is going to cause huge problems when it becomes simply too expensive to do Industrial agriculture anymore. That's why it is so important to try and support Daoist agriculture whichever way we can. That's why I don't support GMOs, they just allow a dying dinosaur to live a little bit longer and cause even more chaos when it eventually collapses.

Please note, though, the above critique says nothing about GMOs being unhealthy to eat. But I've written enough already for more than one post. I'll save that discussion for later.

Addendum:

It became clear to me after responding to some comments that I had not made myself nowhere clear enough about the distinction between what I am calling "Daoist Farming", "Industrial Farming" and old-fashioned "Mixed Farms". I am not suggesting that our agricultural system needs to return to the way things were done a hundred years ago. That would result in mass starvation, amongst other things. But I would suggest that it will be easier to transition from old fashioned Mixed Farms to Daoist Farming than it will be to transition from Industrial Farms to Daoist Farming. Indeed, Daoist Farming is a much more sophisticated form of Mixed Farming. But the differences are still profound.

Another point I need to emphasize but didn't in the above post, while Daoist Farming is a type of organic agriculture, all organic agriculture is neither sustainable nor Daoist in nature. There is a type of "big organic" agriculture right now that is dependent on inputs that simply cannot be sustainably provided. For example, kelp is used as a feed additive in some organic dairy systems---there simply isn't enough kelp around to do this universally. In addition, some types of big organic use expensive transportation nets, exploit cheap farm labour, etc.

There is nothing like a head-to-head competition between Industrial and Daoist agriculture: one is huge, the other microscopic. But I would suggest that in the long run both environmental issues and peak oil make the universal adoption of Daoist agriculture inevitable. And the key scientific discipline guiding agriculture during the transition will not be genetic engineering but rather restoration ecology. The business model that will make big bucks for the future will not be holding patents on specific life forms, but rather in offering consulting services for farms that need to be totally changed from the ground (literally) up. I'm not sure that any farmer will be able to afford to pay for these services, so I see a bright future for open-source farming, too. I do not predict a sudden collapse of our agricultural system so much as a general increase in stress as farmers flail around desperately as them attempt to get out of the bind they find themselves in. Biotec firms will offer "silver bullets", but I suggest that they will at best only work for a short period of time and at worst bring their own new set of problems. The result will be enormous interest in new ways of raising, processing and distributing food. The new, emerging techniques will be spread over the internet, which will speed up the transition far faster that it would have otherwise.

In the interim, I think it is good idea for anyone who can to learn how to grow a few veggies for themselves and to start shopping at the local farmer's market. Resilience is a key survival mechanism during times of rapid change.

The Dao and Wicked Problems

2012-09-16T23:23:00.000-06:00

My wife and I have been having discussions lately around a set of different questions that all have one thing in common, they are what I believe are known as "wicked problems". I'm no expert on these things, but the more I think about them, the more I think that Daoism and Daoists may have a special insight into these problems and have something like a way of coping with them that other folks might find useful. Consider what follows to me more wild speculation than a fact-based discussion.

People have thought about these sorts of things since the 1970s and have come up with a list of things that describe a "wicked problem".

The problem is not understood until after the formulation of a solution.
Wicked problems have no stopping rule.
Solutions to wicked problems are not right or wrong.
Every wicked problem is essentially novel and unique.
Every solution to a wicked problem is a 'one shot operation.'
Wicked problems have no given alternative solutions.

These points are somewhat spare, so let me illustrate them (at least insofar as I understand them) with examples.

The problem is not understood until after the formulation of a solution.

This is to say that wicked problems do not allow us the luxury of waiting until we understand everything before we have to take action. This may be because of simple practical considerations, such as being locked in the room with a ticking time bomb---we have to defuse it before it goes off, whether we know enough to confidently know which wire to cut or not. Or it might be that we simply cannot know the answer until we attempt a solution---we won't know whether or not we can safely remove the bomb's outer casing until we do so and see if it is attached to a tumbler switch.

Wicked problems have no stopping rule.

A "stopping rule" is some limit that controls how far a problem can go. If a person with a gambling problem goes to Las Vegas and is only allowed to wager the money in his pocket, the "stopping rule" is that once he has lost that money, he cannot lose any more. But if he can use a credit card, or borrow against his house, or, even worse, go to a loan shark for money, the lack of a "stopping rule" means that he can end destroying his life and bankrupting his family.

Solutions to wicked problems are not right or wrong.

It isn't immediately obvious that a solution is "right" or "wrong" for a wicked problem. Indeed, some solutions might be quite acceptable for some people, but not for others. Over-population could be solved by government-enforced family planning (e.g. as in China), or, enhancing the role of women in all world societies. Each of these might theoretically work, but every one would have very sizable opposition from elements of society. If you are part of that opposition, the problem seems "wrong". If the opposition is strong enough, then the solution isn't really a solution after all, because it will prove unfeasible in actual practice.

Every wicked problem is essentially novel and unique.
and
Every solution to a wicked problem is a 'one shot operation.'

Wicked problems are the ones that are so big that they tend to be pretty much unique. Think about things like the environmental crisis, political reform, etc. Because each of these problems comes with its own set of complex issues, there is no set of problems that can be solved with a generic solution. This means that each of them has to be solved on its own terms. So unlike demolition experts who once they've defused one bomb can be sure that the same technique will work with all future examples of the same model, a wicked problem bomb will always be totally unique every time they face it. Moreover, there is not even any reason to suppose that the same sappers would be involved in defusing the next bomb anyway. This means that wicked problems never allow people to gain any experience, self-confidence or authority with which to deal with them.

Wicked problems have no given alternative solutions.

Many simple problems come with a limited set of alternatives. In the classic short-story, you only choose from two doors----each of which has behind it either a lady or a tiger. But in a wicked problem you usually have a very large---if not infinite---number of solutions, or, ultimately none proposed at all. (This latter case leaves you to your own devices, which, in a way, is also an implied large number, as you have to investigate and try to find on your own. The number being limited by your own knowledge and imagination.) It isn't a question of cutting the red wire or the blue, but rather of seeing a tangled mass of wires on the bomb and not having a clue of which does what.

As I see it, a great many wicked problems confront us both as members of the human race and as individuals.

The environmental crisis, for example, is a wicked problem because it easily fills all the criteria listed above. Moreover, it not only presents a wicked problem for the human race as-a-whole, it also presents a wicked problem for any individual who is concerned and wants to "do their bit" to try and become an agent for solving the problem.

Consider, for example, the point of where someone should draw the line on being an exemplar of sustainability. We can try to have as small a footprint as possible on the earth. But the act of doing so will inevitably result in diminishing our ability to have any influence on the rest of the human race. If you try too hard, you run the very real risk of being seen as a "nutcase" by the other people you meet. And this not only will result in their ignoring whatever it is you have to say to them, it could also "damage the brand" to the point where they dismiss all environmental concerns as being "kooky". Even if you avoid this problem and become an exemplar of environmental issues, you run into the fact that all the avenues that a person has in our society to have some sort of influence on society-as-a-whole come at some sort of ecological price. (For example, the server farms that support the internet use a great deal of electricity, and, my laptop uses rare-earth metals that are mined under horrible conditions. So even this blog post comes at the expense of Mother nature.)

Even more mundane problems have wicked tendencies.

For example, consider the issue of trying to eat a healthy, balanced diet in harmony with nature while trying to keep within a tight budget and please family members who may not have similar dietary concerns. Or, think about how one develops an exercise regime that deals with health concerns that come from a person's individual history. In both cases we don't know enough to even begin to have some sort of simple and easy solution to the complexity.

All sorts of people will offer simple solutions to wicked problems, but IMHO these are pretty much useless. With regard to the environment, people will suggest that you support a specific political party, purchase some sort of enviro-product, etc. On the individual level, there are fads such as drinking wheat-grass juice or doing "hot" yoga.

These sorts of things miss the point that wicked problems are invariably the result of systemic crises and cannot be solved by any single remedy. Indeed, because the crisis is systemic, any given remedy that is offered may actually make things worse rather than better. Wheat-grass might give you the runs and ruin your food budget. Hot yoga might make your bad back worse. Manufacturing the battery on your electric car may poison the water table. And voting for the Green Party might split the vote and result in the Conservatives getting elected.

The grim fact is that you simply do not know what the results of your actions will be, yet by the mere fact of being alive, you have to act. That is the essence of a wicked problem.

Traditionally people didn't find themselves confronted by so many problems because they simply didn't have all that much choice in the first place. Government was controlled by "higher ups", so none of the fretting we do about politics existed. Food was just what our people always ate and we cooked the way our parents, grandparents, etc, always cooked it. Again, exercise usually consisted of work. If it didn't, it usually involved some sort of ritual game or martial exercise that again had been handed down from eons past.

The modern age is very good at sticking people with uninformed choices. We can choose between different political parties in democratic elections, but things are so darn complicated that only fools think that they understand what's going on. The same thing with food, exercise, etc. The free market gives us a myriad of options, but this leaves us wandering in a sea of ignorance that our grandparents would not have even known existed.

When I first started thinking about all of this stuff, it occurred to me that the reason why I have been so attracted to Chinese culture---and Daoism in particular---is because it offers the promise of a complete system that integrates an understanding of how society works, physical exercise, food, and aesthetics all bound together. This means that once I decided that I was a "Daoist", I had the beginnings of an integrated vision of how to spend my life. This was very relaxing after spending a life feeling like I'd cast adrift on the cultural vortex that capitalism made of Western civilization.

More to the point, I think that Daoism actually offers a way of looking at and dealing with wicked problems. Mind you, I don't think it offers anything like a solution. Instead, it suggests that we look at the world around us as a complex whole, or "Dao" instead of trying to break it up into individual bits. And it doesn't give us anything like an algorithm for solving problems. Instead, it suggests that a lot of problems simply need to dealt with through our gut instinct. And in the process of making those instinctive decisions, we need to "let go" of any hope of understanding or solving the problems that confront us. Instead, we need to accept that we are simply leaves flowing down the river of life.

The War in Man's Soul

2012-08-18T12:07:00.000-06:00

I've recently read a fascinating anthropology book about the creation of monarchies as a mode of human organization, and, got married. The two aren't related, of course, but the former got me thinking about the big picture and the latter introduced me to a lot of new human relationships, which helped me understand the theory better.

Eli Sagan's book, At the Dawn of Tyranny, argues that human societies develop oppressive monarchies in order to break down the instinctive bonds that connect people into kinship---or family-based---societies. The argument is that it requires a truly ferocious government in order to get people to start thinking about it first instead of parents, cousins, siblings, aunts and uncles, etc. And until people start thinking that way, the "rules" get bent so often in favour of what the Chinese would call "filial piety" that it is impossible to run anything larger than an tribe or small village.

The kings in these emerging tyrannies are able to overcome people's commitment to kinship because they are bloodthirsty tyrants who practice large-scale human sacrifice, fight brutal wars, and, break up families through migration. Sagan argues that this situation is a transitional phase, though, as once the state is firmly established, more "institutional" monarchies emerge who's job is to protect the existing state of affairs by creating a more benevolent style of leadership that gains the support of the population through religious indoctrination rather than fear. (As I've mentioned before the "God in the Sky" looks an awful lot like the King on his throne.) Kinship societies do not seem to believe in an Abrahamic God but instead seem to follow the Daoist model of an impersonal force like the Dao plus a multitude of nature spirits.

Getting married shortly after reading this book allowed me the luxury of seeing how kinship actually works. My wife's family is far smaller than mine, but it is more closely knit. She lives with and takes care of her mother, who has health issues. In addition, once the wedding was announced, her sister and brother-in-law moved Heaven-and-Earth to attend the ceremony. As well, much to my surprise, a couple of my closest friends also made the thousand mile trip to another country to attend. (Indeed, they absolutely insisted on attending.) Family matters!

When I crossed the border, however, I ran afoul of the Tyranny that Sagan was writing about. I have a bad habit of telling the truth to people and when the "Homeland Security" guard asked me where we were going to live after getting married I foolishly started a rambling account of how we were going to have to figure that out. He cut me off and acted like I'd just spit in his face and called his mother a whore. I got sent to an office to cool my heels for an hour and another person (who didn't seem to have woken up on the wrong side of the bed) told me that while he believed me when I said I was going back to Canada, I'd better bring a whole portfolio of documents next time I come (it appears that a passport simply isn't enough anymore.)

In retrospect, it strikes me that that guard with the attitude problem was just doing his bit to reinforce the point that the state is more important than family. I'm just glad that I don't live in the sort of state that Sagan describes, or else he might have broken my arms and legs and left me at the side of the river for a crocodile to eat. (One of the numerous unpleasant things that used to happen in the country that existed where modern Uganda now sits.)

Having digested this bit of anthropological insight, it occurred to me today that there is more than just a war between family and state going on in our souls. There is also a deep war within that involves a conflict between the household and the economy.

This conflict manifests itself in things like the way the family home has transitioned from being both a source of production and consumption to becoming just a place of consumption. In my short lifetime I have seen people stop growing their own food and then stop cooking it. With the younger generation I increasingly see people who no longer know how to sew their own clothes or do household renovation and construction. In all of these transitions, people have become less and less independent of the economy. As I see it, this is a very similar process to what has happened when the early monarchies fought against kinship as a means of social organization.

My wife is getting back on her feet after a very long spell of significant ill health. One thing that she is trying to figure out is just how much she can do to make money without threatening her recovery. This is a difficult concept as the demands of the workforce don't really allow a lot of "slack" for people with subtle problems. She is a very hardworking, intelligent, creative person. But she finds it very hard to follow the rhythms and schedules of a complex organization. She needs to be able to work when it suits her instead of when it suits someone else.

As near as I can see it, this is a purely modern phenomenon. I grew up on a farm, and in the old family farm system individuals had a great deal of personal autonomy which allowed them to set up their daily work pretty much as they saw fit. Of course, agriculturalists have to work in harmony with nature, but that is really different from having to follow the dictates of the time clock and the moods of a boss (or a border guard.) I can sympathize totally with my new bride, because I remember all the struggles I've had in my life trying to accommodate myself to the basic unreality of the workplace. (In my case I've managed to find work where I had a maximum amount of autonomy----mainly by working night shifts and odd "generalist", "minder" type jobs.)

It seems to me that anyone who tries to live in harmony with nature instead of human society (and nature includes things like the promptings of our hearts) is going to find herself in the same sort of dilemma that faces my new bride.

I suspect that is disconnect with the modern world is what fuels a lot of the "back to the land" impulse that has been around as long as I have been alive. For most people this manifests itself in wanting to move to the countryside, which remains only a pipe dream for most folks. Personally, I don't find this dream terribly appealing because my experience in the countryside has taught me that in order to live outside of a city you have to either be independently wealthy of drive long distances in order to find employment. As someone who cares about the environment, I do not see how this is helping save the planet. Moreover, I don't see how locking yourself into long commutes will bring anyone much peace of mind.

IMHO, the "Hacker" movement is a much more positive development. This involves people who refuse to be mere passive consumers of technology and instead want to learn how to modify and create. One example is the "Ifixit" website that allows people to share information and access tools and parts of expensive, high-tech gizmos and work around the "planned obsolescence" that is built into things like IPhones. Another are the co-operative "Hacker Space" workshops that are sprouting like mushrooms all over North America. One last example are the "urban sharecroppers" who will grow large vegetable gardens in suburban lots and sell the results in Community Shared Agriculture programs and farmer's markets.

I'm close to retirement so hopefully I will be able to move in with my American wife once I stop having to go to work. (How's that for alienation----my work forces me to live 1,000 miles from my wife!) In her case, she thinks that the best option is to try and opt out of the money economy as much as possible by being very frugal and self-sufficient in an urban setting. To that end, I've been doing some of the "heavy lifting" of setting up a garden for her and showing her how to do some of the food preservation techniques I learned in my childhood. Hopefully she will eventually be able to find some sort of work that doesn't harm her health. In the meantime, saving money on the food bill through an intensive garden is a good way to augment the income. (It was certainly a key component of my family's support when I was young.)

It is hard to live in a cesspool without getting dirty, but it is possible to lesson the disconnect between our hearts and the world around us. But the first step is understanding that the conflict exists in the first place. One of the many thousands of things I love about my wife is the fact that she sees the problem. Most people do not.

Why Hypocrisy Should be a "Sin"

2012-07-27T19:41:00.000-06:00

In my last post I dealt with my suspicion that "conservative", especially people of religious bent, do not see hypocrisy as being nearly as bad a thing as "liberals" do. Since I posted it, I've done a bit more looking around and it seems like a lot of people blogging from the conservative point of view agree with my analysis. For example, take a look at this blog post, entitled "Hypocrisy, the Seven Deadly Sins, and the Left" . The author pretty much makes my case, but from the point of view of a conservative Christian. Take a look at the following quotes.

I am suggesting, then, that hatred of religion is at the root of the Left's excessive and unbalanced animus against hypocrisy.

---in our culture, dominated as it is by liberals and leftists, most of the Seven Deadly Sins are not reckoned sins at all. Given that sin is a religious concept, there cannot be sins for those who deem religion buncombe from start to finish. But one can believe in vice without believing in sin. I think it is safe to say that most Americans today do not consider any of the Seven Deadly Sins to be vices, with the possible exception of sloth interpreted as laziness rather than as acedia. Take gluttony. Americans are by and large gluttons as one can observe by going into any public place. And yet how many speak of gluttony as a vice as opposed to an 'eating disorder' to be treated by stomach stapling, etc? This is a fit topic for a separate post.

This is an interesting question, "Do liberals no longer believe in 'sin'? Or 'vice'?"

First, it's important to try and understand the difference. It would appear, from a quick Google search, that the core concept of "sin" has to do with the relationship between a person and a commandment of God. A "sin" occurs when someone does something God has told her not to do.

Two interesting points.

First of all, what happens when someone's sense of "right and wrong" conflicts with what God has told him to do? In the Bible the best example comes from the story of Abraham and Isaac. For those of you who don't know the story, God asked Abraham to murder his only son as a sacrifice. Abraham sets out to do the deed and God stops just before the deed is done and says "Just fool'n".

What would have happened if Abraham had told God the following "I don't care if you are Jehovah. I don't care if you will torture me for all eternity for saying this. But I will not kill my own son. Such a deed would be perverse and evil." In saying so, Abraham would at the same time be committing a sin, and, acting in a moral manner.

Lest this seem a weird, hypothetical example, consider the bind that religion puts many parents of gays into. They may very well genuinely love their children, but at the same time, God's commandment tells them to treat them as if they are pariahs who's instincts are the result of demonic influences. Again, the moral thing to do (e.g. try to understand your child and love them as you would have others love you) conflicts with the dutiful thing to do (e.g. cast them from your home and disown them.)

The second issue that arises comes from the question of how someone actually decides what is and is not a commandment of God. As I see it, there are four avenues for learning God's will. Each of them, IMHO, has significant "deal breakers".

First of all, people say that the will of God is revealed in holy scripture, like the Bible. The problem with that is that if you make the effort to look at scriptures in a disciplined manner, it becomes obvious that they are the result of human activity----with all the contradictions and confusion that that entails. Once you start saying that you read the books in some sort of metaphorical manner and allow for the frailties of the human authors, the authority that says that this is "the word of God" quickly dissipates.

Even if you are the most adamant Biblical literalist, the fact remains that the book is filled with stuff that no one actually believes is the word of God and needs to be followed to the letter. Check out the following image.

It's not totally obvious, but this is a screenshot of a fellow who went to the trouble of tattooing the following quote on his arm: Leviticus 18:22 “‘Do not have sexual relations with a man as one does with a woman; that is detestable." What makes the picture funny is the fact that this fellow probably didn't read further in the book and come across this text: Leviticus 19:28 "'Do not cut your bodies for the dead or put tattoo marks on yourselves. I am the LORD."

If all religious believers don't follow ALL of the commandments of God, but instead pick and choose due to some other criteria, then how is it that they are following the commandments of God instead of that other criteria?

If we aren't following the revealed scripture as the voice of God, what are we following? Is it the tradition of whatever denomination we find ourselves in? If so, why your tradition instead of another's? And, if you look at the history and internal politics of any religious body you will invariably find that the tradition mutates and changes over time. Does this mean that the law of God changes over time? If it was a sin to eat meat on Fridays in 1912, why isn't it still a sin in 2012?

If the rules change, then what is the status of someone who works within the church to change the rules? Is an activist who is pushing for the ordination of women a sinner up until he convinces the synod to make the change and then after that a righteous believer? Is the only criterion for sin whether or not you are successful in convincing the church hierarchy to adopt your point of view?

One final point of view would be to say that our conscience is the "voice of God". But if that is so, then what about when different people say that their conscience tells them different things? And what exactly is a "conscience"? If I change my mind about something, does that mean that God has changed his mind about something? Or does it simply mean that I now look at the problem in a different light?

After working through the above, it seems clear to me that I certainly do not "believe" in "sin". First of all, because the term refers to the will of God---and I don't see any valid evidence for the existence of said God. Secondly, even if I did believe in the existence of God, I don't see any valid way of divining exactly what his will really is. Finally, I don't really believe that moral issues should be settled by appeals to authority anyway. They don't work in math or physics, so I don't see why they should work in ethics either. If we do accept this point-of-view, isn't uncomfortably like the Nazi "I was just following orders" defense?

But does that mean that I no longer believe in "vice"?

This is an equally subtle thing to think about. The author quoted above writes that Americans no longer consider gluttony a vice but instead see it as an "eating disorder". He even suggests that the remedy is not longer an appeal to morality but rather "stomach stapling".

I think that this is a significant over-simplification. First of all, liberals do not lightly dismiss the concept of personal responsibility. Instead, there has been a great deal of thought aimed at who is responsible for social issues like the current wave of over-eating. But instead of simply placing all the blame on the individual, which is the attitude involved in the Church teaching about the Seven Deadly Sins, commentators have raised a whole host of complexities. For example, how much of this epidemic is as a result of marketing strategies aimed at encouraging people to eat too much?

It's all very well to complain about poor people's greed when it comes to eating. But this is the first society in human history where anyone but the wealthy has had the option to become overweight. It seems simply mentally lazy (e.g. slothful) to just put the blame on the individual instead of trying to understand the entirety of the issue.

I think the dividing line comes over free will. Paradoxically, the theist wants to believe that all people have a radical form of free will that doesn't allow for any significant social or biological influence over people's ability to choose one course of action over another. But they take away all of this freedom by introducing the idea of "sin" that reduces the entirety of this choice to whether or not one will freely submit to the absurd (in the sense of without rhyme or reason) direction of an unauthenticated authority. As I've pointed out above, there really isn't any reason why one particular definition of "God" should be followed versus any other, so you end up having to believe whatever religious authority you happen to come across in your life.

In contrast, the liberal has very little belief in free will. He knows from scientific study that for all of our sense of freedom, we are tightly constrained by our biological instincts and social conditioning. But in the midst of that knowledge, he is still willing to allow people to use their intellect to steal as much freedom as they can from the authorities around them by using the tools of inductive and deductive logic.

And what exactly is happening when someone indulges in hypocrisy?

I would suggest that what they are doing is experiencing some cognitive dissonance. In the examples from my previous posts, the anti-abortion crusaders were coming up against some personal experience that should have undermined their previous assumptions about life. But instead of taking this as a "learning moment" where they could seriously rethink the underpinnings of their moral code, they chose to simply do the mental equivalent of shoving their fingers in their ears while humming loudly.

From the conservative point of view this is a simple "the mind is willing, but the flesh is weak" moment with very little ultimate consequence. For the liberal, though, this is the fleeting opportunity for the person in question to exert real free will. Until reality smacked them in the face, they probably couldn't be expected to understand how reality diverges from what they have been told. But because they refused to take the opportunity to think things through and change their minds, they threw away their opportunity to be free.

The reason liberals believe hypocrisy is the ultimate "sin" is because it is the throwing away of the few opportunities we have to grow as human beings. It is also the process of denying that aspect of ourselves that makes ourselves so unique----the ability to learn and grow.

Is Hypocrisy a Sin?

2012-07-22T19:31:00.001-06:00

I recently read a blog post that reignited something that I've been thinking about for quite a while.

In a nutshell, Frank Bruni, writes about meeting someone from his college days who has gone through a tremendous transformation from rampaging Roman Catholic to agnostic. The interesting "kicker" for the piece is that this fellow is a medical doctor who has performed abortions for years because of his experience dealing with women.

The part that is of particular relevance to me is a passage where this fellow told Bruni about his experience performing an abortion for an extremely vocal anti-abortion crusader.

He shared a story about one of the loudest abortion foes he ever encountered, a woman who stood year in and year out on a ladder, so that her head would be above other protesters’ as she shouted “murderer” at him and other doctors and “whore” at every woman who walked into the clinic.

One day she was missing. “I thought, ‘I hope she’s O.K.,’ ” he recalled. He walked into an examining room to find her there. She needed an abortion and had come to him because, she explained, he was a familiar face. After the procedure, she assured him she wasn’t like all those other women: loose, unprincipled.

She told him: “I don’t have the money for a baby right now. And my relationship isn’t where it should be.”

“Nothing like life,” he responded, “to teach you a little more.”

A week later, she was back on her ladder.

This isn't the only time that I've heard about anti-abortion crusaders going in for an abortion. Here's a page about a study about anti-choice women who have come for abortions offering similar anecdotes. And here are some of the quotes:

"In 1990, in the Boston area, Operation Rescue and other groups were regularly blockading the clinics, and many of us went every Saturday morning for months to help women and staff get in. As a result, we knew many of the 'antis' by face. One morning, a woman who had been a regular 'sidewalk counselor' went into the clinic with a young woman who looked like she was 16-17, and obviously her daughter. When the mother came out about an hour later, I had to go up and ask her if her daughter's situation had caused her to change her mind. 'I don't expect you to understand my daughter's situation!' she angrily replied. The following Saturday, she was back, pleading with women entering the clinic not to 'murder their babies.'" (Clinic escort, Massachusetts)

"We saw a woman recently who after four attempts and many hours of counseling both at the hospital and our clinic, finally, calmly and uneventfully, had her abortion. Four months later, she called me on Christmas Eve to tell me that she was not and never was pro-choice and that we failed to recognize that she was clinically depressed at the time of her abortion. The purpose of her call was to chastise me for not sending her off to the psych unit instead of the procedure room." (Clinic Administrator, Alberta)

"My first encounter with this phenomenon came when I was doing a 2-week follow-up at a family planning clinic. The woman's anti-choice values spoke indirectly through her expression and body language. She told me that she had been offended by the other women in the abortion clinic waiting room because they were using abortion as a form of birth control, but her condom had broken so she had no choice! I had real difficulty not pointing out that she did have a choice, and she had made it! Just like the other women in the waiting room." (Physician, Ontario)

"The sister of a Dutch bishop in Limburg once visited the abortion clinic in Beek where I used to work in the seventies. After entering the full waiting room she said to me, 'My dear Lord, what are all those young girls doing here?' 'Same as you', I replied. 'Dirty little dames,' she said." (Physician, The Netherlands)

Usually I find that people who hear about this sort of thing have some sort of negative emotional reaction towards hypocrisy and leave it there. But I have the sneaking suspicion that something very important is happening here. I wonder if people who fall on the "conservative" line of thinking might simply not consider hypocrisy an actual sin.

I have wondered for quite a while if the divide between people often comes from people holding different sets of moral values. I first noticed this with regard to a controversy in my home town involving the mayor. This woman, who was a neo-conservative absolutely loathed the small and large "g" greens who dominated city council before and after her term of office. She got caught absolutely red-handed plagiarizing a speech that she delivered at some municipal function. I remember that many of my friends were absolutely furious about it, but I noticed that most of her supporters seemed to be genuinely surprised that anyone cared one way or the other.

I live in a university town and most of my friends are intellectuals of one stripe or another. In contrast, most of the people who supported this past mayor were involved in business. I came to the conclusion that for writers, teachers and scientists, there probably is no greater crime than that of stealing the ideas of someone else, because this is the capital by which they make a living and define their standing in the community. In contrast, for business people words and ideas are just tools for encouraging people to purchase their products. In contrast, business people often think that levying any sort of taxation at all is a tremendous sin---perhaps this is because money (or capital) is their stock-in-trade. Many intellectuals similarly cannot fathom this view that taxation is inherently sinful---since as long as they get value for the money, they consider it just the price of civilization.

Thinking about this example has got me thinking about the abortion one.

People who are pro-choice usually look at the examples I quoted above and see them as examples of complete moral bankruptcy. But, I would suggest that is because people who are "liberal" in the original sense of the word put an enormous value on the concept of intellectual courage and curiosity. Conservatives in general, and religious conservatives in particular, do not greatly value either of these qualities. Instead, they value submission to authority and conformity.

I know that Christianity makes a great pretence about helping the poor, etc. But if you look at the actual behaviour of the hierarchy of most denominations---especially conservative ones---it becomes obvious that over-riding teaching of the church is "Shut up and do what you are told!" And the theology of the most rabidly anti-abortion denominations often seems to boil down to some sort of cosmic fascist state. You must do as the great Fuhrer in the sky demands or else you will be sent to the eternal Auschwitz after your death.

Please note that when an institution is all about submission to authority, actual behaviour is of less importance than the attitude. Rebels who reject the idea that they should be submitting to authority are far, far more dangerous to the status quo than criminals who, for one reason or another, end up breaking the rules. (This is why political crimes are punished more severely than all others in totalitarian societies.)

If we understand this point, then it becomes obvious what is going on when someone who is a loud and vocal opponent of abortion has one. The actual abortion itself is not nearly as bad as the fact that some people refuse to accept that the process is evil or immoral. Abortion activists are ultimately protesting that women and doctors are putting themselves ahead of the revealed teachings of the church and making their own decisions about what is or is not a "sin". After all, according to church teaching all people sin and the only route for salvation is through the intercession of grace. Having an abortion might be worse than stealing a candy bar, but ultimately the Hitler in the Sky considers them both to be worth a ticket to the eternal concentration camp.

Hypocrisy is an homage that vice renders to virtue. ~François, Duc De La Rochefoucauld, Maximes, 1678

The quotation above makes the same point. If we simply understand that the word "virtue" means not some sort of universal or commonly understood truth, but rather the dogma of the institution you support (either the Roman Catholic church or the Republican party, for example), then "Hypocrisy is the homage that people pay to authority." If you will not be a hypocrite, then you will invariably be a rebel. And rebels are far more dangerous to authoritarian institutions than people who merely transgress the rules.

Looked at from this way, a lot of conservative behaviour makes a great deal of sense. When anti-homosexual pastors and politicians get caught hiring gay prostitutes, their willingness to be furtive instead of rebellious means that they still support the hierarchy. Similarly, when conservatives rail against government spending but wallow in the pork barrel for their constituency, the hypocrisy means that they are "team players" instead of dangerous "socialists" who want to throttle business.

I don't know where this insight leads me, but I have the feeling that it could be harnessed to improve the way people promote a better way of looking at the world.

For one thing. A lot of people think that it is just enough to point out the hypocrisy and expect people to change. But that doesn't happen because hypocrisy simply isn't a sin for conservatives. That woman who got the abortion and then went back up on the stepladder to protest was a dutiful daughter of the church who suffers from original sin. The real sinners are the "rebel angels" who think that they know better than the church about what is, and is not a sin. Rubbing this woman or her fellow believers noses in their hypocrisy will not change their minds.

If we want to change people's attitudes about things like abortion, on the other hand, I think we need to go deeper than the issue itself. Instead, we have to try to do two things.

Ideally, we should be teaching people to be "liberal" in the original sense of the word. That is, we should be teaching everyone who will listen that they should be intellectually courageous and curious. They should follow ideas where they go instead of being afraid of the implications. The social consequence of this is that we need to develop institutions in society that encourage this sort of behaviour. It isn't just the church that discourages critical thinking, our schools, the workplace, the bureaucracy, etc, all thrive on the model of "shut up and do what you are told". Of course, none of this can change overnight, but until we understand the problem, it is impossible come up with a solution.

It is impractical to expect all citizens to become Socrates, though. I would suggest, therefore, that we should also be developing role models and authorities who can counter-balance the authorities that conservatives lean upon. People of good will often have the mistaken belief if we reject the authority of the Pope to pronounce on moral issues that no one should be able to do so. But this misses the point that we appeal to authority all the time in life---doctors, mechanics, engineers, plumbers, accountants, etc. Why should moral issues be any different?

The difference is that a plausible moral authority should be willing to defend her position using logical argument instead of an appeal to force. The problem isn't that the Pope sets himself up as a moral authority, but rather that he is a bogus authority who's ultimate argument is "if you don't knuckle under, I'm going to kick you out of the church", and "God is going to torture you forever after you die". In contrast, it might be practically impossible to work through all the complex reasoning that a philosopher goes through to justify a position (after all, how many people do you know who would make the effort to read a monstrous blog post like this one?), but if someone wanted to, the option is open. We trust our mechanic to do the right thing, but if we wanted to, we know we could do enough research to understand why it is he says he has to do the things he says he needs to do in order to get the engine on your car working.

When I was a child my mother used to tell me to do things and when I asked "why", her response was to whack me and say "because". The difference in attitude could be as simple as her saying instead, "there's a good reason, but I simply do not have the time to explain it to you right now", or even, "I don't really know how to explain it, but I do believe that this is the best course of action and I have a responsibility to give you direction until you get old enough and have enough experience and knowledge to be able to make choices for yourself." You don't have to be Einstein to make this substitution. In fact, it could just be a rote sentence that everyone in our society ends of saying without really understanding. But the distinction is one that discourages empty submission to authority and hypocrisy, as such I think that we should try it.

Environmental Vow 22: Is Practical Philosophy Religion? Spirituality?

2012-06-14T14:45:00.000-06:00

This raises an interesting question, though. If Christianity felt itself threatened by what I’ve called “practical philosophy”, was it because it is yet another religion? Is it perhaps what people call “spirituality”? Or is it something else altogether? I don’t believe that these are trivial questions, because it highlights a problem that I have found in my own personal pursuit of Daoism.

First of all, it is useful to come up with a definition of “religion”. The term generally refers to a complex belief system and how it operates within a human culture. To a great extent, it deals with how a group of people, either at one time or over a long period of history, relate to one another. The religion of Roman Catholicism, for example, refers to a large group of people who currently live all over the Earth, and also, who have lived from the time of the end of the Western Roman Empire up until the present day. It includes a body of writings and traditions that govern the behaviour of individual followers of the religion, as well as a large institution that is hierarchically organized from the Pope in Rome to the altar boy in the parish church.

In contrast, “spirituality”, involves the interior life of an individual. It comes from a person trying to make sense of the experiences of his or her life. These experiences can arise from random events, from disciplined meditation practice, or they can be the insights and observations that the individual has gleaned from reading texts and/or interacting with other, perhaps more experienced practitioners. It can be totally idiosyncratic and is sometimes at odds with the teachings and practice of a religion. Or it can be completely in tune with these traditions and institutions.

Practical philosophy is often described as being from a specific “school”, such as Daoism, Stoicism, Cynicism, and so on. But, I would argue, these schools are significantly different from religions for several reasons.

First of all, adherence to a specific school of practical philosophy is a free choice based upon a personal decision that this specific worldview makes the most sense to the individual. No one is born into something like Stoicism or Cynicism in the same way that someone is born into a Catholic or Muslim family. In effect, the different tenants of a school of practical philosophy are descriptive instead of being prescriptive or credal. People who know about such things will often talk to someone and make a decision that a person is a “a Stoic” or “a Cynic”# based on the way they look at the world. In contrast, people are born and/or baptised as Catholics and they are trained/forced to learn to adhere to a specific definition of what it means to be a Roman Catholic.

Secondly, practical philosophy is taught through the exercise of reason. This takes place in two ways, deductively and inductively. The former is the process whereby someone comes to a conclusion through a logical reasoning.

For example, let’s look closely at the quotation I mentioned before from Epicurus:

Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?

What the philosopher is telling us to do is to think through what exactly it means to say that some particular being is both omnipotent and good. If a being has both qualities, then why, for example, do children still suffer? If there is a reason why this has to be and there is nothing he can do about it, then what does it mean to say that the individual in question is “omnipotent”? If, on the other hand, he is able to stop innocent children from suffering and he simply chooses not to do so, what does it mean to say that he is “good”? In either case, we would be using the words “omnipotent” and “good”, respectively, in some sort of weird way that meant that we are not using the words as everyone else does. And if we aren’t using these words in any sort of understandable way, what have we actually learned about what we are calling “God” when we describe him as being both “omnipotent” and “good”? If saying that God is “omnipotent” and/or “good” really doesn’t mean much of anything at all, then does the word “God” itself mean anything? If not, then why believe in him?

Inductive reasoning comes from looking at the world you inhabit and attempting to find evidence in favour of one point of view as opposed to another. Take this example of a pithy Stoic saying by Epictetus: "Freedom is secured not by the fulfilling of men's desires, but by the removal of desire." This is a very different sort of thing in that it is making a statement of fact that cannot be either proved or disproved through logical inference. Instead, the person who hears or sees this statement is expected to think about their personal life experiences and the people they have met, and try and decide if this statement is in accordance with his or her experience or not. He might think about the time as a child he desperately wanted some sort of present from his parents, yet found that once he had it, it turned out that it wasn’t all that nice and that he pretty much immediately wanted something else. He might think the same thing about the promotion he wanted at work or the woman he desired as a lover.

One important thing that should be understood about the deductive and inductive methods employed by practical philosophy is that neither one is a source of authoritative, revealed “Truth” with a capital “T”. Instead, what the insight and wisdom that comes from this process is accumulated piece by piece as different people in a culture communicate and discuss their insights. Eventually, a consensus emerges about what is and is not a good way of understanding the world around us. In contrast, religious teachings are invariably “revealed” by the authority of religious prophets and sacred texts. This is not to say that innovation and change doesn’t happen within religious traditions, but rather that those traditions will not admit that there is a process of innovation and change because to do so would weaken their authority in the eyes of believers.

To cite one example, consider the case of celibacy in the clergy. In the New Testament most of the key figures were married and the only unambiguous statement on the matter is as follows: “A bishop then must be blameless, the husband of one wife---” (1 Timothy, 3:2). Various branches of the Roman Catholic church allowed marriage, until the assertion of Papal Authority in the high Middle Ages. To this day, the Orthodox Church of Greece and Eastern Europe, which is every bit as old as the Roman Catholic church, allows its clergy to marry. Knowledge of these facts are not widely promoted within the Catholic body, but instead, the clear suggestion is that celibacy is something that “comes from God” instead of being the result of historical political struggles within the Church power structure for practical reasons (i.e. to stop the priesthood from becoming an inherited position and to allow the Church to reassign a parish held by a priest on his death.)

The value of hiding behind the coat-tails of God comes from the fact that decisions that are made by man can be undone by man. But if a political decision can be effectively sold as coming straight from God himself, any attempt to change a specific state of affairs ceases to be ordinary political activity and instead becomes an act of blasphemy. This means that people who are unhappy with any specific element of the church either “suck it up” and accept that “God is mysterious”, or, leave the church altogether because they’ve “lost their faith”. This second option is only recently available to people, as in times past this option would have led to being tortured to death as a “heretic”. This gives whomever is in charge an enormous increase in their power.

Add together a lot of these different politically-arrived at decisions that hide behind the coat-tails of God, and you have what is known as a “creed”, or statement of faith for a religion.

Since many readers probably haven’t seen a creed, here is the “Nicene Creed”. It was the result of a lot of wrangling and compromise at a conference (or “Council”) that was convened by the Roman Emperor Constantine the First.

We believe in one God,
the Father, the Almighty,
maker of heaven and earth,
of all that is, seen and unseen.
We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ,
the only Son of God,
eternally begotten of the Father,
God from God, Light from Light,
true God from true God,
begotten, not made,
of one Being with the Father;
through him all things were made.
For us and for our salvation
he came down from heaven,
was incarnate of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary
and became truly human.
For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate;
he suffered death and was buried.
On the third day he rose again
in accordance with the Scriptures;
he ascended into heaven
and is seated at the right hand of the Father.
He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead,
and his kingdom will have no end.
We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life,
who proceeds from the Father and the Son,
who with the Father and the Son is worshiped and glorified,
who has spoken through the prophets.
We believe in one holy catholic and apostolic Church.
We acknowledge one baptism for the forgiveness of sins.
We look for the resurrection of the dead,
and the life of the world to come. Amen

English Language Liturgical Consultation (ELLC)

The importance of a Creed is as a yardstick or dividing line between heresy and orthodoxy. As such, it is a tool for asserting dominance and control by an ecclesiastic authority over the rank-and-file membership of a religious group. This particular creed was developed as a method for differentiating the official or orthodox church from the so-called “Arian heresy”, which taught that Jesus was not originally a part of God, but was instead created as a divine creation of God.# As such, it was intended as deadly serious and had the effect of consigning many men and women to very painful deaths. Not only was it intended to separate out heretics from orthodox believers, it serves as a form of thought control. Orthodox believers who fall under the sway of a creed, are expected to live in an Orwellian world where they must learn to conform their thoughts to an official version of reality instead of following their ideas where they may lead them.

Practical philosophy is very different. It involves thinking things through and following your insights where they lead you. There is no physical compulsion involved. If for some reason you simply cannot accept a specific idea, you are free to go your own way. And people often do, which is why there are so many schools of practical philosophy. There are many different religions and sects, too. But they usually had to fight wars in order to gain the freedom to practice their religions. In contrast, schools of philosophy have debates. And success doesn’t come from winning battles and killing anyone who disagrees with you, but rather by having your ideas survive from generation to generation. The existence of different schools of philosophy isn’t seen as proof of the devil’s ability to confuse people, but rather that life is very complex, people have very different life experience, and people know very little. As a result, even though people have gained hard-fought insights we know too little to assume that any of use really know any sort of “ultimate Truth”. In contrast, even though religious believers will often make statements of humility towards the vastness of their God, they act as if they have a “lock” on absolute Truth.

So, if practical philosophy isn’t a religion, could it be a form of “spirituality”?

It might be, but it depends on how you define the term. As commonly used, “spirituality” refers to the individual, interior experience. Often it is associated with strongly emotional experiences that can be called “mystical”, but at the very least are deeply meaningful to the individual. This puts the realm of the spiritual at odds with the religious, in that as I explained above, the religious realm tends to deal with creeds and institutions. I am willing to admit that the inductive and deductive reasoning that practical philosophy follows is ultimately grounded in the intuitions of individual people. As such, both have some similarity to other experiences of human beings that are meaning-filled.

This might seem like a strange statement to people who assume that logic has some sort of priority over other intuitions in the realm of human experience. But it simply is the case that the validity of statements such as “A cannot equal not A”, or “Socrates is a man, all men are mammals, therefore Socrates is a mammal” ultimately comes down to an intuition that a great many other people also share.# And it is also the case that some people simply seem to be oblivious to logic. For example, I have met people who argue that the Bible is totally without error and literally true. When asked how they came to that opinion, they will argue that it says so in the Bible. When I point out that this is circular reasoning, they do not seem to be able to understand the point I am making.#

Where what I am calling practical philosophy diverges from spirituality is that ultimately it is a collective process. People who make decisions about the world not only think their ideas through using the process of inductive and deductive reasoning, they also express these ideas to others and enter into a dialogue about both their truthfulness and their meaning. Authority figures in religious institutions also express their ideas to others, but they do not enter into a dialogue. Instead, they use force to impose their viewpoint on others. People who are following a spiritual path may not have the option of imposing their views on others, but they are not entering into a dialogue with others either.

A dialogue is a very specific sort of relationship between people. It is based on a willingness by two people to entire into a conversation where each is willing to discard their previous beliefs if the other person can come up with a better argument. The attitude that is brought to bear in a true dialogue makes it very different from some other things that may bear superficial similarity----such as political debates or court trials. In these cases the parties involve may use inductive and deductive logic, but these are just two elements of a much larger arsenal of rhetoric that are designed to sway audiences to support their position. People debating outside the “community of the dialogue”, routinely try to confuse people with complex and misleading arguments, appeal to their prejudice and feel that they have no responsibility to admit an error in reasoning when it is pointed out to them. No political debate ends with one candidate saying about the other “He’s made the better argument and shown me the flaws in my thinking----vote for him instead of me.” It is, however, sometimes the case that a dialogue does end with the following sort of statements by one side “You’ve got me there. You are right.” or “I hadn’t thought about that point. It does make my side of the issue seem wrong, doesn’t it?”

The dividing line over whether or not someone is willing to admit error and move on has tremendous social implications. It allows practical philosophy to be accumulative. That is to say, as human society moves through history, people are able to slowly accumulate more and more knowledge about the world around us, and build up on the work of previous generations. This is most obvious in the realm of science and technology where experimentation can disprove a given hypothesis. But even in the realm of something more nebulous, like philosophy, it is also true. Almost all of the arguments that I have used in this essay originated in the minds of other people, which I have found out by reading the books that have been written on various subjects. Because each and everyone of these arguments has been subjected to a rigorous debate whether or not they “make sense”, there has been a collective “sifting out” of the ones that are found to be false, and, a “polishing up” of others so that we end up with the very best explanations.

This essay is standing on the shoulders of giants. And that is the big difference between practical philosophy and spirituality. Because philosophy allows itself to enter into the community of the dialogue, and submit to rigorous appraisal based on both inductive and deductive reasoning, it offers the hope of slowly adding to the sum total of humanity’s wisdom.

In contrast, when I talk to a great many people who hold “spiritual beliefs”, I find instead a tremendous unwillingness to submit their “insights” to any sort of rigorous analysis. They either get angry that anyone would question them, or, they simply assume an air of moral superiority and refuse to communicate at all. Often an assertion is made that it is just “too ineffable to describe”. But the person who makes these sorts of statements almost invariably use these experiences to make further claims that certainly do require some public discussion, such as, for example, that God exists.

Oddly enough, several philosophers have expressed that they too have had various uncanny, perhaps “mystical” experiences (for example, Socrates’ “Daemon voice” and Descartes “three dreams”.)# But the difference between the philosophical point of view and the spiritual is that the philosopher doesn’t simply assume that nothing relevant can be said about the experience, but instead tries to figure out exactly what the experience meant. In effect, I am asserting the when a spiritual person says that they are having an “ineffable” mystical experience, they simply aren’t trying very hard to explain exactly what the experience was like or to understand what it signifies.

I would also suggest that there is a very strong reason why many people would want to refrain from carefully exploring their spiritual experiences, one that bears close resemblance to institutional religions development of creeds. If someone has an experience that is “ineffable”, it means that the person who has had it has attained some level of spiritual authority gives them a greater status than someone else who has not had it. It stops people flat in their tracks when you can say “Well, if you’d had the experience yourself, you’d know I am right.” An appeal to a special type of authority, one that by definition cannot be scrutinized for authenticity or relevance is one of the easiest ways to opt out of the “community of the dialogue”.

Fatalism, Liezi and Politics

2012-06-13T14:38:00.000-06:00

I've been thinking a lot about "fatalism" lately. Primarily, this is because my significant other got me thinking about determinism---as revealed in my previous post. But in the process of writing that previous post, I started rereading a part of the Liezi, namely Chapter 6, which A. C. Graham titles "Endeavour and Destiny". This in turn, has become something of a literary "brain worm" that I cannot get out of my head.

I think that this is because I am deeply consumed by the "Fate of the Earth", and how human society seems incapable of dealing with substantive problems that arise from it. Here in Canada the Conservative government in Ottawa has tabled an omnibus budget bill that pretty much seeks to pass years worth of changes all in one fell swoop. This is a totally unprecedented action and an insane abuse of our Parliamentary tradition. It really is the case that the Prime Minister has so concentrated power over his caucus that he has reduced them to trained seals who bark at his command.

Things seem hardly better in the USA. There big money has taken over the political process to the point where all sorts of special interests have gained a veto over legislation, appointments and other elements of good governance. The result isn't some sort of conspiratorial government, however. That's because all they have gained is a veto----they actually cannot put forward any agenda themselves either. The result is paralysis.

Much the same sort of thing seems to be happening in Europe. It is obvious to all and sundry that the EU has to develop some sort of supra-national regulation framework in order to deal with the present monetary crisis. Yet the various parties seem in capable of "pulling together" to get the job done.

As an outsider who wishes for better and who has devoted a great deal of energy into politics, it seems that there literally isn't anything that anyone can do to make the world a better place. Instead, it appears that we are suffering from a specific type of "fate" and any power we have to change the world is simply an illusion.

This is a pretty startling thing for a modern person to espouse. Yet, if you read ancient wisdom literature, the idea of a "fate" predetermined by forces outside of our control is pretty common.

"Death and life depend on destiny, riches and poverty depend on the times." He who resents being cut off in his prime does not know destiny. He who resents poverty and distress does not know the times. To meet death unafraid, to live in distress without caring, is to know destiny and accept what time brings. (Liezi, A.C. Graham, p-132, Columbia Morningside Edition, 1990)

It's always seemed to me that this attitude is incompatible with living in a modern, industrial democracy. After all, if we are going to pursue science, democracy and the extension of human rights, people need to have some sort of belief in their ability to "do something" based on their personal effort.

This is the idea that since we are governed by fate anyway, why bother? For example, if you are sick you know that you are either going to get better or not, what is the point of asking for a doctor? Actually, this particular example exists in the Liezi. The argument seems fallacious to modern readers, but up until the middle of the 19th century you probably were better off not seeing a doctor, because their treatments usually caused more harm than good.

Even if modern medicine had not improved greatly since Liezi's time, the argument would still not really be terribly hard on fatalism. It can be argued that just as someone is "fated" to either get well or not, in the same way, you could be argued that people are fated to either be left alone or have a doctor inflicted upon them. I recall, for example, that Mother Teresa begged her nuns to let her die in peace without heroic medical intervention, yet they refused to listen and ordered the doctors to do their ~~worst~~ best for her final hours of life.

Indeed, the greatest fear of fatalism for modern people is that it becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy. People don't try because they think the results are set from the beginning, and not trying ensures that one set of negative results will result. To this extent, fatalism is a pernicious evil. But that, I think is not the point that Liezi is trying to make.

Previous to the quote I cited above, he contrasts a bunch of characters whom he names as "Artful", "Hothead", "Sleepy", "Wide Awake", "Tricky", "Simple", "Tactless", "Fawning", "Underhand", "Frank", "Tongue-tied", "Browbeat", "Cheeky", "Stolid", "Daring" and "Timid". Note that most of these names refer to types of behaviour. These are not people who chose to do nothing because fate had decreed all outcomes. The point is that they acted in harmony with their inner nature, which is why Liezi says of all of them: "These various attitudes are outwardly very different, yet all these men travelled on the Way in the direction destined for them." (p.131)

The point isn't what these people did, it's the attitude that they brought to their actions. They were willing to accept that no matter how hard they try to do things, ultimately their fate is decided by forces outside of their control. This attitude allows people to avoid two very significant pitfalls of politics.

The first of these is the idea that we have to be oh-so-clever in our calculations when it comes to things like voting. I used to see this all the time when I was running for political office. People would come to me and say "Oh I love your platform and agree 100% with everything you say. But I simply cannot vote for you because you have no chance of winning and it would just be a 'wasted' vote." ("The Simpsons" lampooned this in "Citizen Kang" in "TreeHouse of Horror: VII". When Homer reveals that Bob Doe and Bill Clinton have been replaced by aliens, most people refuse to vote for a third party candidate because that would be a "wasted vote".) The problem is, of course, that if you always vote for the "lessor of two evils", you always end up voting for an "evil". It also means that whatever party you vote for usually ends up ignoring you when in office because you have "nowhere else to go".

If voters simply "follow their heart" and vote for what they think is the best candidate no matter what, they stop having to do this sort of thing. It not only makes people feel better, I believe it ultimately frees up the political system from the various perversions that come from thinking of votes as being "wasted". This is something like Gandhi's ideal of "living the world you want to see".

The second problem with this sort of thinking refers to the way people in politics live their lives. A lot of people involved "in the process" tie themselves up in knots trying to be all things to all people and by trying to give 120% of their energy. This is based on the idea that when things go "wrong" it is always their "fault". The fact of the matter, though, is that in politics the effort you make only rarely has all that much effect. Sometimes people get elected in landslides who had no hope at all of being elected. Other times people who have every reason to believe that they would be returned to office easily get trounced. The problem is that it rarely is "up to you".

In both cases, a simple awareness of how important fate is to the project you are pursuing will take a great deal of the personal pressure that people impose upon themselves. A similar attitude can help throughout most of life. That job you always wanted may simply not be there for you no matter how hard you try. No matter how much you work at helping your child succeed, he might just end up being a lump with no discernible ambition. If the time isn't right, no amount of work can make a business succeed.

Accept your fate and live a happier life. Not bad advice, if you ask me

Freedom and Destiny

2012-05-19T12:56:00.003-06:00

It was a beautiful sunny May day in my hometown and I was doing a little grocery shopping. Walking back home with my two full bags I noticed the young girls trotting around in their frilly dresses, showing off their shaved legs, painted toenails and "cruel" shoes. A thought flitted through my mind "the genes controlling those women want to get replicated". Then it occurred to me that the genetic material sets up the behaviour but the way it is expressed is culturally mediated. Go to a different culture---Punjabi, Hindi, or Chinese, and you'd have different shoe styles, different types of clothing---salwar kameez, saris, perhaps, or, a cheongsam. But the same genetic "push" would still be at work.

My genes are so hot to replicate!!!!

A moment later, my memory generated a random thought about something I'd read on-line earlier and I was feeling anger towards some dorky politicians. (Our government recently decided to defund the Round-Table on Industry and the Environment because it has repeatedly recommended the use of carbon pricing to combat climate change and the Conservatives don't even believe in what they refer to as "so-called" climate change.) This sort of thing makes me spitting mad and brings up all sorts of dark emotions aimed at various people.

At this point it occurred to me that I was responding to a cultural cue in much the same way as those girls were with regard to shaving their legs, painting their toenails and wearing a frilly dress. That is, there is some sort of genetic "push" working in me and my culture is manifesting it through me as anger towards the leadership of the country. Perhaps it is the constant "push" by inferior males to assert control over the dominant ones.

The Prime Minister and I

I don't know how far I can push the idea of genetics, though. I suspect that there is a point where we become predominately if not exclusively cultural creations. (I wonder if I was angry at the Prime Minister specifically because I was walking by pretty girls? Maybe one of them would sleep with me if I beat him senseless in front of her. Somehow I doubt it.)

After thinking of women as culturally mediated gene replication units, and myself as manifesting culturally mediated "beta male" aggression towards political "alpha males", I began to ruminate about how much of our interior life is dominated by culture. As luck would have it, at this time I passed a young mason who had just finished floating and brooming a sidewalk. He was wearing a hard hat that he had put on backwards. No doubt this has something to do with "hip hop" culture. I don't understand exactly what it is, but I do find it rare for young males to wear a hats the "right" way anymore. And now that I think of it, I can't see any objective reason why someone finishing a sidewalk needs to wear a helmet anyway. What is going to fall down on his head? The helmet's orientation is a signal that they guy is "hip", and the helmet's very existence is a signal that he is a tradesman.

Later on, I was walking down the street and I saw a "tough" guy walking on the sidewalk ahead of me. He was short, skinny, had a significant tan (a street person?), quite a few tattoos, and a very significant scowl on his face. He got to the corner just as the "walk" signal changed to "stop" and stomped on across the corner. I thought that he was "daring" car drivers to try and hit him. But then it occurred to me that he might be so "scattered" that he was oblivious to the traffic signal. It also occurred to me that if someone complained about his behaviour, he would probably get very angry and aggressive, maybe even violent. After a moment's reflection, however, it occurred to me that instead of just being a "dick" he might actually be someone who has been pretty badly jerked around by life and who has never learned even the basic skills necessary to get along with others. Instead, life may have taught him that the best way to survive is to have a volcanic temper so people will leave you alone instead of attempting to prey upon you. An instant later, it occurred to me that if he was or wasn't manifesting any of these behaviours in his life, the way I was reading them "into" him simply because of his appearance showed I was certainly in the grip of some significant cultural conditioning. (I'll never know if I was right or not in my "read", but that that doesn't invalidate the fact that my reaction was culturally programmed.)

The reason why I'm indulging in all this "stream of consciousness" stuff is because I've been having a conversation with my fiancee about the nature of "free will". She got all interested in this because of a talk she heard by Sam Harris on the subject. I originally didn't find the talk quite so interesting, because I've

been aware of the incoherence of the concept of "free will" since studying it at university. But I did find it exciting that at the very end Sam was making the connection between our understanding of free will and our legal system. This isn't a terribly subtle thing to figure out, but it does seem to have evaded popular discourse up until now.

The problem is that our legal system is based on the assumption that there are these independent, totally autonomous beings known as "people" who freely choose to do one act as opposed to another. People who freely choose to break the law are "criminals" and people who freely choose to follow the law are "good citizens". Harris, and I, would argue that this way of looking at the world is at odds with everything we know about how the human mind operates.

First of all, there is the inductive or scientific argument. That is as follows. It might be that people choose to act in a certain way because they are constrained by either their biology or conditioning. If it is a question of brain chemistry or childhood trauma that caused the behaviour, then how is it free? Let me give two examples that seem to indicate that this in fact could be the case.

Sometimes people who have brain trauma or take certain types of drugs exhibit wild mood swings, and sometimes these swings result in violent behaviour. Indeed, there is a body of opinion that the US soldier who murdered many Afghan civilians recently did so because he had suffered from brain trauma, post-traumatic stress disorder and a specific type of anti-malaria drug that is specifically contra-indicated for people who have suffered concussions because it has been shown in the past to lead to mood changes and violent behaviour.

Secondly, people who have had a history of savage abuse sometimes have a very hard time controlling their anger, which leads them to do terrible things. I read once about a robber in New York City, for example, who held up a convenience store and totally gratuitously turned around and shot the clerk dead while on the way out. During the trial there was no doubt at all about who did the shooting, as the whole thing was on video tape. The jury was howling for the perpetrator's death. But during the sentencing hearing a lawyer introduced evidence about the childhood of the shooter. As a child he had literally spend years locked into a tiny cage in the basement of his parent's home. Once the jury found out how badly the person had been abused, they were more than willing to sentence him to life imprisonment.

If people do extreme things because of some sort of morbidity in the brain, or, because their childhood conditioning predisposes them to act that way, how can we labour under the illusion that they freely "chose" to act that way? And if we can allow that people's freedom is constrained in these, extreme, circumstance, then doesn't it make sense that less severe behaviour may be the result of less severe, but equally important, conditions? Maybe people shoplift because their brain chemistry gives them some sort of specific predisposition to such a thing (poor impulse control---ever heard of manic/depression?) And maybe being around adults who routinely "push the envelope" and "take risks" reduces the anxiety that a child feels when thinking about doing something risky. If this is the case, then it would seem that there is far from a "level playing field" when it comes to making those sorts of snap decisions that can result in someone's life going down hill pretty fast.

The second set of arguments against free will are deductive or philosophical in nature. That is to say, if the idea that underlies our understanding is contradictory or incoherent, then we should be willing to entertain doubt that we are saying anything of value when we use it. Certainly, we should rethink any laws or policies that our society enacts on the assumption of free will.

It would seem that if when we talk about "free will" we are saying that there is some sort of "live" choice involved. That is to say, that a person who chooses to either do "a" or "b" really could choose one or the other. But if the person chooses to follow course "a", we are left with the question "did he choose to choose to follow course 'a'"? If he did, then did he "choose to choose to choose to follow 'a'"?

This might sound like a silly, semantic argument, but what is being raised is the issue of "causation". That is when I "choose to choose", I'm saying that the way our minds work would assume that we have to have a reason to do something, a "why" we choose to do something. But once we start asking why, we end up in an infinite regress---something like the old lady in the nursery rhyme who swallowed a fly. You cannot explain anything with an infinite regress, because all you are doing is pushing the reason for doing something off into the deep, dark past.

Let me flesh this out with an example. I have chosen to write this blog entry on the subject of free will. But the reason I did is as a result of a whole range of other choices, such as, for example, proposing to my fiancee who put this particular bug in my ear a couple weeks ago. (One of the several thousand things I love about her is the fact that we have these intense conversations about stuff like this.) And the ideas that I am raising are a result of things like the books I have read and the instruction I received at university. And, in turn, I choose to read some books as opposed to others, and to study philosophy at university instead of tool and die making at college.

In other words, if we look at our "free" choices they tend to be the result of a chains of previous choices that are also the result of earlier choices. Each of these previous decisions was also the result of historical happenstances too----courses that were offered in one semester, books that were on sale in a second-hand store, random conversations at parties, etc. The point is that it is hard to reconcile the idea of radical choice with chains of causation.

If, on the other hand, we suggest that decisions are made without the influence of causation, we have another problem. Suppose that we do make decisions "just because". By removing the "reasons" for doing something, the only way we can explain why we do anything at all seems to be random chance. And if we do things totally at random, it is hard to see how this is any freer than simply doing things because we have to. This is because "freedom" seems to include some element of meaning. Personal freedom includes the concept of personal volition, and it is hard to see how people choose one action over another if they do it totally at random.

The deductive argument leaves people stuck with two, equally unappealing positions. They either have to admit that every choice they make is constrained by an infinite number of earlier choices, or, else that their freedom consists of not much more than throwing the dice and accepting what comes up. The inescapable result is that there seems to be at least some element of inevitability in our behaviour.

As Harris rightly points out, if we accept that there seem to be at least severe limitations on people's ability to freely choose one course of action over another in any given situation, then this makes a mockery of the whole concept of "guilt" or "innocence". This, in turn, wreaks havoc with the notion of "justice". How can we call someone "guilty" if we admit that if he had had a different set of circumstances leading up to him "choosing" to commit a crime, he would have chosen differently? Similarly, how can we say that a punishment is "just" if we admit that it appears that the person being judged seems to have been pretty much doomed to commit the act. Punishment just seems like a gratuitous act added onto an already tragic chain of events.

"Tori" Stafford

I've been thinking especially hard about this issue since there has recently been a court trial that involves an especially sad crime. In my home town, across the street from my little brother's house there was a family that included a very cute little girl. Her name was Victoria Stafford, but the media instantly shortened her name to "Tori". As you can see, she was impossibly cute. (I feel a little ashamed perpetuating this disgusting exercise in sentimentality, but I'm hoping that the point of this essay will justify adding my bit to the mountain of vile exploitation.) One day she disappeared on her way home from school.

Terri-Lynne McClintic

Michael Rafferty

At first the police put their spotlight on her parents but eventually some video camera footage was found of little Victoria being led off by a stranger in a "puffy" down jacket. Eventually this led to the arrest of a woman by the name of Terri-Lynne McClintic. She, in turn, led the police to Victoria's body and a man by the name of Michael Rafferty.

From what I've seen in the press, it seems to be that McClintic is a woman who is totally devoid of any self-esteem who seems to believe that she is totally doomed. As the medieval Catholics would say, she is consumed with "despair", which was considered the worst of the deadly sins because once you are in the grip of it, you give up even trying to be a good person. Rafferty, on the other hand, seems to be someone who is consumed with sexual desire and who has been damaged by learning how easy it is for a good-looking man to manipulate women. This strikes me as a tremendously toxic mix as it connects a woman who is willing to be used as a tool with man who is able and willing to use her to pursue perverted desires.

The trial is over now, both Rafferty and McClintic have been sentenced to life sentences. What really creeps me out is the way the media has been falling over itself to report people's "jubilation" that "justice has been served". This sickens me. Stafford is still dead, and two other people's lives have been totally ruined. I feel absolutely no sense that anything worthwhile has happened. One of the few takes I have on this trial that does make some sense to me came from a crime reporter from the Globe and Mail. He calls Rafferty an "empty, hollow psychopath".

I'm not a psychiatrist and neither is the reporter who made that statement. But from what I can tell from the Wikipedia article on "psychopathy" , there seems to be a genetic trait that results in people becoming predators on the rest of society because, among other things, they get bored really easily, tend to aggression and violence, are very good at manipulating people, and, are not be afraid of getting caught if they break the law. Most importantly, they don't have any sort of internal moral compass. That is to say, they know in some sort of theoretical sense that torturing little girls to death in order to get your rocks off is a bad thing, but they don't feel any sort of emotional revulsion at the actual act of doing so.

This last point is important, because the legal definition of "insane" doesn't apply to this situation. An "insane" person has to be someone who is so out of their heads that they didn't even understand what was happening. One Canadian example that occurred recently involved a fellow on a Greyhound bus who was convinced that a fellow passenger was a demon sent from Hell, so he cut his head off in front of a busload of horrified onlookers. The killer was declared insane, didn't stand trial and was sent to a mental hospital instead. (He is now on medication and has responded so well to treatment that he has recently been granted day parole.)

But I find this distinction pretty hard to accept. It seems to me that a person's emotional response to a given situation is pretty tightly wound up with whether or not someone really does understand whether it is "right" or "wrong". It seems pretty obvious to me that ethical statements are always emotive (i.e. "emotional") in nature, otherwise they simply wouldn't be "ought" statements but would instead be "is" ones. (This is the classic definition of the difference between moral statements and statements of facts.)

Moreover, there seems to be a genetic component to psychopathy. Scientists seem to have discovered different hormonal and brain physiology qualities between psychopaths and the general public. Moreover, there is an evolutionary explanation for the existence of psychopathy. Male psychopaths have an enhanced ability to reproduce in human society because their lack of empathy and ability to manipulate allows them to seduce a great number of women and spread their genes throughout the population without having to worry about supporting the children.

Sadly, there is no way to treat psychopaths. At one time talk therapy was tried, but it proved to be counter productive in that all that happened was that the patients learned how to be even more manipulative in their dealings with others. And one of the symptoms of psychopathy is an immunity to punishment----jail or even the death penalty are simply not credible threats. But just because we cannot help them, doesn't mean that we need to exult in their being found guilty. They are products of forces over-which they have no more control than the forces that shape our lives. It is just that they are dangerous. As Sam Harris would argue, we don't feel hatred against hurricanes or tornadoes, but we do take steps to protect ourselves from them. In a similar way, we need to lock up criminals to protect ourselves, but we don't need to think that we are in any sense "superior" to them.

So what has all of this to do with Daoism? A fair amount, oddly enough.

I've been scanning through A. C. Graham's translation of the Liezi and as luck would have it, I read chapter 6, "Endeavour and Destiny". As Graham points out in the introduction, the authors of the Liezi are arguing for a fatalistic worldview. This position is in contrast with the Mohists who felt that virtue was rewarded by Heaven, and the Confucians who felt that while Heaven was often indifferent to people's behaviour, we are still able to decide to do good. The Liezi's point of view is that whatever controls our fate is completely and utterly indifferent to our well-being, so there is no hope of good being rewarded. Moreover, the book argues that people's reactions come from their innate nature, which is unchangeable.

In the case that I have mentioned above, it is certainly the case the little Victoria Stafford could not have done any sort of evil thing that would justify her awful fate. With regard to McClintic and Rafferty, Liezi would argue that they never really did have any chance to avoid their behaviour. She was doomed to be putty in someone else's hands, and, Rafferty was doomed play out his anti-social tendencies.

The only response that Liezi suggests is for people to understand that they are doomed to their fate and to accept it graciously. In one of the examples, two men are contrasted: Pei-kung-tzu and Hsi-men-tsu. The latter has the "golden touch" and prospers in everything he does. The former has the opposite effect, everything he tries to do fails. Eventually, this Pei-kung-tzu becomes bitter and asks why their fates are so different. The sage Master Tung-kuo argues that the only real difference is luck and nothing else.

The effect that this has on Pei-kung-tzu is profound, however. As Liezi says

When Pei-kung-tzu got home, the coarse wool he wore was as warm as the fur of fox or badger, the broad beans served to him were as tasty as rice or millet, the shelter of his thatched hut was as shady as a wide hall, the wicker work cart on which he rode was as handsome as an ornamented carriage. He was content for the rest of his life, and no longer knew which was honoured and which was despised, the other man or himself. (p124)

For the Daoist, the only real control that we have over life is how we mentally react to it.

Oddly enough, I would argue that that isn't exactly true. How we react to the teachings of Daoism is also a function of who we are, which is determined by fate. Master Tung-kuo understood this point, for he said of Pei-kung-tzu he was "a man to whom you need to speak only once is easily awakened."

So like those pretty girls I saw on the street, and like Michael Rafferty, I too am controlled by my fate. I am doomed to pass on these little nuggets of wisdom that have come down to us from ages past. This isn't merely "fancy speaking". I have been absolutely obsessed by this blog post for about a week. To me, thinking and writing about these sorts of things are as important as food and sleep. I'm just glad that this is such a harmless obsession---there are far more horrible ones.

Environmental Vow 21: Practical Philosophy

2012-04-29T16:23:00.000-06:00

A Positive Alternative:

I’ve rejected a variety of alternatives that some people have put forward in order fill the void left by the decline in old-school religious faith and patriotism. But I have yet to make any sort of suggestion of a viable alternative. This is the point where I unveil what keeps me, personally going. I am fully aware that there are elements of my personal belief system that are more than a little “dodgy”. Where these problems come up, I will attempt to spell out the conceptual issues. Using the ideals that motivate my existence as an example, I will then develop some generic parameters that will help others come up with their own personal solutions to the problems I am attempting to deal with in this essay.

Secular Daoism:

Years ago through an extraordinary series of unusual happenstances, I was initiated into a Daoist lineage. This involved a martial arts club, a man who was very young and impressionable (myself), a couple Chinese immigrants with zero English language, and, a few other immigrants who’s ability as translators were abysmal. Over several decades of trying to wrestle with the issues that I have raised in the preceding parts of this essay, I found myself increasingly identifying myself with the Chinese religious tradition known as “Daoism”. As I expanded and deepened my understanding of this faith I found that I was not pursuing it as anything like what an “orthodox” Chinese religious Daoist would understand the term as meaning, but instead what a Westerner who had benefited from both the Protestant Reformation and the Enlightenment would understand it as meaning. In addition, I found out that there are a fair number of other Westerners would similarly call themselves “Daoists”, but without understanding how different their worldview is from its Chinese counterpart.

It is quite difficult to exactly define what is or isn’t Daoism, which has led to a great deal of wrangling both between individual scholars, and, between scholars and practitioners. Traditionally, the term has been associated with a small number of core texts: the Dao De Jing, the Zhuangzi, and, the Liezi. There are a great many other texts in the Daoist canon, but these (along with the Nei-yeh, which I will discuss further on), are a sort of “absolute basic” library that the religion is based upon.

The first complexity that people have to understand is that all three of these texts seem to have been created before there was a religion called “Daoism”. Indeed, the scholarly consensus seems to be that if the authors of any of these books met folks who called them a “Daoist” they wouldn’t know what people were talking about.

Orthodox religious Daoists have tended to associate these three books with three different historicial personages: Laozi, Zhuangzi and Liezi. In contrast, modern scholars tend to believe that these texts are the result of an oral “wisdom tradition” that existed for a long time and which resulted in some editor writing down poems, pithy sayings and gnomic stories that he had heard from others. In turn, the books were then changed by editors over many years as different people came out with improved “editions” until finally an “approved” version was codified by a single specific person. At that point, the process of mutation stopped and we end up with the versions we have now.

Again, what these books are about is another complex question. Probably the best way to characterize them is to say that they are about finding the practical “rules of thumb” of life that allow someone to live with a minimum amount of friction both with other people and the world in general. Some of these rules can be summarized as follows:#

Our understanding is limited, so limited that we often don’t even understand how limited. As a result, it is important to be humble in our assumptions about how the world operates.
It is generally a good idea to avoid unnecessary effort----more harm is done by doing too much than by doing not enough.
The world operates by various laws or general principles. Someone who understands these laws and principles can accomplish a great deal by working in harmony with them.
Conversely, people who try to do things by fighting against these laws, tend to fail.
A great deal of the ability that comes from working with these principles and laws comes spontaneously from within the individual who often cannot explain why he does what he or she does, or why it works.
Having said that, the way to develop these spontaneous abilities usually seems to come from sustained, dedicated practice.
While sometimes violence is necessary, it is inherently a bad thing.
Emptiness and passivity are of at least equal value---if not more---than substance and action.
What passes for conventional wisdom is of very little value when it comes to making important life choices.

These general principles can be applied to just about every element of human existence, from warfare to gardening. As a result, people from all strata of society from different times believe that they have learned important life lessons from studying these books. In effect, they are representatives of a type of literature that was very important in the ancient Western world, but which has since died out: practical philosophy.

People often find it hard to believe, but at one time philosophy was considered a very practical field of endeavour. It was practical because it dealt with the very important issue of how people were supposed to live their lives. To give someone a flavour of this sort of practical wisdom, consider the following quotations from the School of Stoicism:

"Nothing has such power to broaden the mind as the ability to investigate systematically and truly all that comes under thy observation in life." Marcus Aurelius
"Anything in any way beautiful derives its beauty from itself and asks nothing beyond itself. Praise is no part of it, for nothing is made worse or better by praise." Marcus Aurelius
"Cling tooth and nail to the following rule: Not to give in to adversity, never to trust prosperity, and always to take full note of fortune's habit of behaving just as she pleases, treating her as if she were actually going to do everything it is in her power to do. Whatever you have been expecting for some time comes as less of a shock." Seneca
A consciousness of wrongdoing is the first step to salvation…you have to catch yourself doing it before you can correct it. Seneca
"Freedom is secured not by the fulfilling of men's desires, but by the removal of desire." Epictetus
"Man is disturbed not by things, but by the views he takes of them." Epictetus
"That which Fortune has not given, she cannot take away." Seneca the Younger
"Virtue is nothing else than right reason." Seneca the Younger

The reason why most people haven’t heard about this sort of philosophy is because it was persecuted and pretty much stamped out by the early Christian Church. After the first Roman Emperor, Constantine, converted to Christianity, there was a period of transition that pretty much ended in the reign of Emperor Theodosius, who issued an edict closing all philosophical schools and pagan Temples across the Empire. There seems to be some scholarly debate# about whether or not the Library of Alexandria was destroyed at the same time, but the general consensus seems to be that the transition to Christian orthodoxy seems to have been a time when there was a great deal of persecution (either formal or informal) against both the schools of philosophy and paganism.

It isn’t hard to understand why. These ancient schools tended to elevate reason above authority, which would have been seen as a tremendous affront to the authority of both the Church hierarchy and the revealed doctrine of Christianity itself. Beyond that, there were schools that went to the point of actually arguing quite cogently against the existence of any God at all:

Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?
- Epicurus [341–270 B.C.

Obviously, an overtly atheistic philosophy would be anathema to Christianity. But just as unnerving for early Christians was evidence that the Gospels had been directly influenced by the philosophical school known as Cynicism.

Consider, if you will, the following parallels between Cynic philosophers and quotations from the Gospels.#

It is like a grain of mustard seed, which a man took, and cast into his garden; and it grew, and waxed a great tree; and the fowls of the air lodged in the branches of it. (Luke 13:19)
However small a seed is, once it's sown in suitable ground, its potential unfolds, and from something tiny it spreads out to its maximum size... I'd say brief precepts and seeds have much in common. Great results come from small beginnings. (Seneca)
And whosoever doth not bear his cross, and come after me, cannot be my disciple. (Luke 14:27/Matthew 10:38)
If you want to be crucified, just wait. The cross will come. If it seems reasonable to comply, and the circumstances are right, then it's to be carried through, and your integrity maintained. (Epictetus)
But woe unto you that are rich! for ye have received your consolation. (Luke 6:24/Matthew 6:2)
The King, said Diogenes, was the most wretched person there was, surrounded by all that gold, yet afraid of poverty. (Dio 6.34)
Blessed be ye poor: for yours is the kingdom of God. (Luke 6:20/Matthew 5:3)
Only the person who has despised wealth is worthy of God. (Seneca EM XVIII 13)
And fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul. (Matthew 10:28/Luke 12:5)
What tyrant or thief or court can frighten anyone who does not care about his body or its possessions? (Epictetus)
Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you. If someone slaps you on the cheek, offer the other as well... Love your enemies, and do good, and lend expecting nothing in return. (Luke 6:27-29/Matthew 5:39-44)
A rather nice part of being a Cynic comes when you have to be beaten like an ass, and throughout the beating you have to love those who are beating you as though you were father or brother to them. (Epictetus III xxii 54)
How shall I defend myself against my enemy? By being good and kind towards him, replied Diogenes. (Gnomologium Vaticanum 187)
Someone gets angry with you. Challenge him with kindness in return. Enmity immediately tumbles away when one side lets it fall. (Seneca, de ira II xxxiv 5)
It's a pitiably small-minded person who gives bite for bite. (Seneca, de ira 11 xxxiv 1)
Socrates said, Follow these instructions, if you are willing to listen to me at all, so that you may live happily, letting yourself look a fool to others. Let anyone who wants to, offer you insult and injury... If you want to live happily, a good man in all sincerity, let all and sundry despise you. (Seneca EM LXXI 7)

The danger that Cynicism poses to Christianity comes from the fact that it is obvious to anyone who is exposed to it that the Jesus of the Gospels seems to have come out of a tradition that was extant before his birth. If so, then it becomes very hard to believe that Christ is in some sense a divine messenger with a startlingly unique message. Remove the claim that Jesus is in some non-metaphorical but actually literal sense a “son of God”, and he becomes one person amongst many who have taught in the town squares of the Roman Empire. And if Christ ceases to be divine, then the divine authority of the Christian clergy disappears too----and with it all of their temporal power. It is obvious that the cynics---above all other schools of practical philosophy---had to be erased from the popular knowledge of Christendom.

Since practical philosophy inevitably leads to at least questioning of orthodoxy and at “worst” atheism, it has suffered De facto persecution insofar as atheism itself has been persecuted. And it is only very recently indeed that many people have been able to openly proclaim their atheistic beliefs.# Indeed, it is currently the case that seven US state constitutions ban atheists from holding public office#. More tellingly, it is considered “political suicide” for any politician to openly proclaim his or her atheism. This is supported by a 2006 poll that suggests that as many as 50% of American voters would not vote for an atheist---no matter how eminently qualified---for the position of President. In fact because of this pressure, only one member of the US Congress, Pete Stark, has ever openly proclaimed himself an atheist. Add to this the pressure one can receive from family, friends, colleagues, etc, and it becomes obvious that there is a significant price to pay for openly expressing anything like an atheist point of view.

In the face of this still very real, but receding, climate it makes sense that practical philosophy as a genre of literature is only recently coming back into people’s consciousness. The Christian is a jealous God. And his followers are all too willing to punish anyone who tries to usurp His role in dictating what is and is not a moral way of life.

The Symbolic Life

2012-04-17T14:48:00.001-06:00

I've been having a long conversation with my fiancee about an idea that has been stuck in my head for years. She suggested that I do a blog post about it in order to put it down on paper and see what other folks think about it.

I first thought about the way people's lives can become symbols that result in societal change as a result of doing some pretty intensive research about Mohandas Gandhi for a course I was teaching called "The Activist Toolbox". One of the things that really struck me about the guy was the way every aspect of his life seemed to be geared towards projecting a specific image.

Most people have seen pictures of Gandhi spinning yarn. What they don't know is that this was an act of political theatre designed to mobilize the people of India to support home rule.

When the English first took over India, it had a thriving textiles industry based on handicraft production. Ordinary people spun yarn during their spare time. In turn, Cloth was woven from it by agricultural labour during the rainy season when no work could be done on the fields. Under the exploitative system created by the English, both yarn and cloth was being created by English factories which out-competed with the work done by these men. As a result, they were being driven into utter destitution. (Gandhi refers to the poor of India as "the skeletons".) Gandhi believed that the answer to this rural poverty was for people to go back to spinning their own yarn and sell it to the rural poor, and then buy the cloth for their clothing. The cloth is known as "kadhi". Gandhi was dead serious about this idea----to the point where when he was president of the Congress Party of India he once devoted an entire forty minute talk to silently spinning cloth.

Spinning cloth to help the poor was one part of this project, but I suspect that it wasn't the most important. The British Empire was a tremendous "wealth pump" that sucked money out of India and into the home country. One of the ways it did this was through enforcing an empire-wide "free trade" zone that meant that existing (English) businesses always had a competitive advantage against emerging (colonial) ones. This meant that money was constantly bleeding out of India to buy cheap cloth from England. And this constant flow of capital out of the country meant that there was no money to invest in Indian factories for not only cloth making, but anything else. This kept India undeveloped and poor. (At the same time, America had strong import duties against England that allowed an indigenous industrial base to be built. This decision to create a trade wall was one of the reasons for the American Civil War---the South wanted to have free trade with England so it could sell its cotton there and buy cheap goods; the North wanted trade barriers that ensured that Southern cotton went to New England mills and the South bought its goods from there too.) The independence movement in India decided that one of the best ways to wean India off the Empire was to convince large numbers of people no longer buy English cloth. To that end, the Congress Party organized demonstrations where people burned their English clothing and pledged to only wear Indian-made cloth.

For an entire generation in 20th century India, khadi was the only mode of clothing

This happy convergence of poor and upper class concerns over cloth allowed the Congress Party to create an important symbol for independence. People who supported independence could identify each other through their clothing of choice. When people complained that this cloth was too expensive (because it was hand made), Gandhi decided to wear only a Dhoti to show that even the poor could take a visible part in the independence movement. The importance of cloth to the independence of India is shown by the law that says that the only cloth that an Indian flag may be made from is khadi.

A side of Gandhi people rarely see!

Wearing a dhoti made of khadi wasn't the first time that Gandhi tried to make a point through his clothing. Earlier in his life he was a supporter of the British Empire. He felt that if Indians made a sincere effort to adopt the British worldview that they would eventually become "citizens of the empire" and have the same rights as Englishmen. To that end, he traveled to London and studied to become a lawyer. In the process, he studied how to dress and act like a proper English gentleman. Part of this involved adopting English clothes.

Not only did Gandhi attempt to make himself into a model Englishman, he also demanded that his wife and children did too. In My Experiments with Truth he writes, if memory serves me right, that they complained bitterly about this. For example, the socks and shoes made their feet sweat and smell bad, but he was convinced that it was necessary. This was part of an entire agenda that also included things like working to recruit Indians to serve in the British Army during various wars. Eventually, it was his experience in South Africa that convinced him that Indians could never be equal partners in the Imperial system so the only option was home rule. At that point he decided to give up his Westernized clothing and adopt Indian dress.

No dhoti, but a turban!

I've made a big deal about Gandhi and khadi because it is a clear example of how the symbolic can work in social transformation. It isn't as if symbols don't regularly exist in our society, but they are so deeply embedded in it that people usually have a hard time seeing them. It's like a fish not being aware of water or us not thinking about the air. They surround us, yet they are invisible.

USA (Basic black!)

When you start thinking about people living as symbolic representations of specific social values, they seem to be everywhere. Consider, for example, a judge presiding over a trial. Let's look at some of the robes used by judges around the world.

Canadian Supreme Court Judge

French Supreme Court

Why exactly do judges wear robes? The more formal robes of the Canadian and French judges hearken back to the court robes worn by the aristocracy. These were worn not just because the gentry were rich and wanted to show off. They were designed to show the status of the individual and thereby assert dominance in a very stratified and class dominated society. The founding fathers of the USA wanted to break from the aristocratic idea. But they didn't discard the use of robes altogether, because they still wanted judges to project a sense of "gravitas" and authority, so American judges tend to wear simple, black gowns.

Another example of "life as symbol" comes from the way people exhibit sexual dimorphism. In animals this sort of differentiation between the sexes comes from "locked in" genetic characteristics. In human beings the same process is at work, but it is mediated culturally. In contrast to mallard ducks, female humans tend towards showy display and men tend to be drab.

This dimorphism is certainly on display weekend nights in my home town where it is not uncommon to see hordes of very drunk young women wearing flimsy dresses that barely extend beyond the crotch and tottering on stiletto heels. The reproductive drive is genetic, but the form that the sexual display takes is culturally mediated. And as a culturally-mediated phenomenon, it has led to the use of clothing as a symbolic tool in social transformation.

A scene from a "slut walk"

A couple years ago a police officer in Ontario made a stupid comment to the effect that fewer women would get raped if they didn't tend to dress like "sluts" when they go out at night. This so outraged the community that women pretty much spontaneously started to organized "slut walks" all over the world in an attempt to pound it into the heads of authorities that women have the right to dress as they please and to mock the idea that rape is caused by how women dress.

I've offered all of these examples as a means of explaining why it is that I think that it would be a tremendously useful tool for environmentalists if people were willing to take on the task of becoming "living symbols" in the same way that supporters of Indian independence, judges and "sluts" do. There are already a fair number of people who are willing to undertake a significant personal commitment in order to help build a sustainable society. For example, there is a group called "the compact" who have decided to refuse to purchase any new capital goods for a set period of time. Here's a blog by a woman who has made it her goal to try and live her life totally without the use of plastic. Here's a website that allows people to make public declarations about how they are going to help "green the planet".

My suggestion is that the environmental movement should do something like the Indians did and develop some sort of symbolic representation of their beliefs in order to identify to all and sundry exactly how they feel about Mother Nature. It could be a piece of clothing, a symbolic piece of jewelry, a tattoo, or maybe just a symbol that everyone could adapt as they see fit. But to wear it would be to express to everyone that sees them that the bearer is serious about sustainability and they are living their life in specific ways in order to promote it.

I'm not about to make any suggestions about what this sort of symbol would look like, simply because if it is to mean anything and have any sort of legitimacy, the process of creating it will have to be one that involves a great many people.

I would suggest, however, that if the symbol was going to accomplish anything, it will have to be understood that anyone who takes it on has taken a pledge that identifies a "bare minimum" necessary to honestly wear it. If the token just because "aspirational" instead of identifying a serious commitment, it won't be anything more than the various ribbons people are supposed to wear in order to show support for things like curing breast cancer or supporting the troops. I think that the symbol should be like the uniform of a Marine----something that is not worn lightly and really means something.

Again, I won't suggest what the pledge should entail, as anything that people will adhere to must be the result of a collective process. If people are involved in creating something, they "own it" in a way that they do not if it is just an option to accept or reject lightly. In my conversation with my fiancee, for example, I suggested that pledging to have no children should be one element. She responded by suggesting that the pledge be to only have one child, which would bring the population down and allow these people to continue to exert direct influence on future generations through their children. I countered by suggesting that people who choose to remain childless will not only help with over-population, but they will also free up time in their life that they can use for activist work. (I don't have an answer to this particular issue, but I think that our short talk illustrates the sort of informed discussion that would need to go into creating a pledge list that people would be willing to commit themselves to following.)

I'm tossing out the idea on the Internet now. What do readers think? Do you see some value in environmentalists consciously living their lives as symbols? If so, what form could the symbol take? And what sort of pledge do you think people should have to take in order to be able to wear it?

Environmental Vow Part 20: The Role of Narratives

2012-04-12T21:36:00.000-06:00

Unfortunately, the “flip flopping, broken promises, and perceived hypocrisy that are an inevitable bi-product of this endless round of patronage, coalition building and fundraising results in a deep cynicism amongst the over-whelming majority of voters. And cynicism is absolutely caustic towards any attempt at self-motivation. If the political system cannot even get people to go out and vote, how can we hope that it will ever convince people to make significant personal sacrifice in order to deal with environmental issues?

The Role of Narratives

It is important, however, to not become totally fixated on the role of money or patronage in politics. There are primary and secondary causes to many events. In the case of politics, a politician may gain the support of a patron or a donor and use that to gain more power in the community of voters, but he also has to find some way to gain the support of that donor or patron in the first place. The way this is usually achieved is through the development of some sort of narrative that cements a relationship between the two.

A “narrative” is a story about the world that neatly encapsulates a broad range of very complex and poorly understood issues together and provides handy and immediate answers to almost all questions. These can be small “conceptual rules of thumb” such as “all people on welfare are lazy bums”, or, “small businesses create most of the jobs in an economy”, “everything gives you cancer if you give enough of it to rats”, or, “the world’s problems could all be solved if the rich paid their fair share”.

Politicians also create narratives to explain who they are to the voters. In Canada three Prime Ministers were very successful at composing narratives that they used to encourage voters to develop loyalty to their “brand”. Pierre Trudeau invented himself as a “devil-may-care” intellectual, in part through media stunts such as his famous May 7th, 1977 pirouette that he did in front of photographers but behind the Queen at a G7 conference in London England. Another example is Jean Chretien who, although being a very successful corporate lawyer constantly styled himself as the “little guy from Shawinigan. Brian Mulroney, another successful corporate lawyer, “rebranded” himself after losing his first bid for the Conservative party nomination by buying a used car, a cheap suit and describing himself as being “the son of an electrician from Baie-Comeau”. In the USA, Barack Obama did much the same thing through his successful campaign that implied that just as it seemed to many Americans impossible to elect a black man president, yet it still could happen, so too it is possible for the country to solve the huge problems facing it (i.e. “the audacity of hope”.)

If the narratives diverge enough from one another, they become ideologies, and politics becomes radical. The communist ideology is a narrative that talks about professional revolutionaries, inexorable laws of history and class warfare. Nazi ideology talked about the clash of races, the mystical identity of a “folk”, the need for an absolute leader or “Fuhrer”, and the need of “living space” for a Master race. The difference between a narrative and an ideology, IMHO, is that an ideology doesn’t believe in the ability of different narratives to co-exist in a given society. It might be that ideologically-driven parties might co-exist for a while as political parties in a democracy# but this is only a temporary truce brought about by relative weakness. Once any of these groups gains enough power, the “gloves come off” and politics starts to “come from the barrel of a gun”, as Mao once remarked.

In a functioning liberal democracy, however, the narratives are not so extreme that there can be no room for compromise between the two. Indeed, in some societies there seems to be very little to separate the different narratives from one to another. That is why in some political systems successful politicians are able to “cross the floor” and go from one party to another without destroying their careers. In other systems, the divide between parties becomes so poisonous that every single decision of government becomes a opportunity to “score points” and inflict as much damage as possible on the other side. Ideally, a democratic systems exists between these two opposites. Enough divergence so that voters have more to choose from than just “tweedle-dee versus tweedle-dum”, but not so much that there is never any room for compromise on any issue.

The Importance of “Walking the Talk”

Politicians have to be careful about narratives, however. They can also turn against them if the public believes that they are not living up to what is expected. Pierre Trudeau and Jean Chretien were able to preserve their “brand” until the day they retired, but Brian Mulroney ended up being crucified because of the dissonance that the public believed it saw between his portrayal of himself as a humble “boy from Baie-Comeau” and what they perceived as “ly’n Brian”’s lavish lifestyle while Prime Minister. Trudeau was able to date celebrities and live an extravagant life as a playboy, but that didn’t clash with the narrative he’d constructed about himself, so it was acceptable. Mulroney didn’t have that luxury because he’d put so much energy into explaining his humble origins to voters. Time will only tell if Obama’s “audacity of hope” will survive all the compromises with the establishment that he has made since gaining office.

If narratives are so important to electing politicians, perhaps it would be possible for a mainstream politician to be able to craft some sort of narrative around environmental issues that would allow them to “ride a green wave” into office. Unfortunately, I fear that there is a significant problem with environmental issues that make it a special case, one that makes it almost impossible for a politician to mobilize a campaign around.

To understand this issue, consider the case of Al Gore. His documentary “An Inconvenient Truth” came out in 2006 and talked about climate change as a moral imperative, which was a new thing in mainstream circles. Unfortunately, in 2007 it was revealed that Al Gore’s home was a monstrous energy pig that consumed a little under $29,000 worth of energy per year. In Gore’s defense it has been argued that the building is large, houses two home-based businesses, and that the cost of electricity and natural gas is inflated because it uses more-expensive “green” sources. But the fact is that a great many “ordinary folks” have home businesses and use environmentally-friendly energy sources without blasting through anything like this amount of money. It is pretty clear that Mr. Gore doesn’t really “walk the talk”. If he does see global warming as an ethical issue, then he should view himself as an immoral, evil man. Otherwise, he is not much more than yet another hypocritical politician spinning a narrative in order to build popular support. The revelations about his lavish lifestyle pretty much undid most of the good of his documentary.

There is a very important point here. When someone tries to cast their politics in terms of morality, it is absolutely imperative to make sure that she at least tries to live according to the ethical values that she is suggesting everyone else should live up to. If she does not, she not only undercuts public support for her individual leadership, she also undercuts the ethical ideal being espoused and the very idea that ethical considerations should be considered at all. Hypocrisy leads to cynicism, and cynicism leads to disengagement from whatever process that is view as being dominated by hypocrisy. Since politics is dominated by hypocrisy, is there any wonder that larger and larger fractions of the body politic refuse to vote?

The problem for Mr. Gore, however, is that even if he did live a more modest, eco-friendly lifestyle, he’d probably have to live a life with a much larger carbon foot-print than most people simply in order to be able to “play the game” on the scale necessary to be able to do things like promote his documentary. Film makers, distributors, donors, government panels, etc, all expect people to jet all over the planet and have a large home to entertain important guests. People who live in modest, energy efficient homes, refuse to drive a car, take the train, and refuse to fly simply cannot get the “ear” of important people. Yet at the same time, it is impossible for ordinary folks to take seriously any enviro-prophet who doesn’t seem to even try to live in harmony with nature. In effect, even if Gore were not a hypocrite, he would still be on the horns of a dilemma. On the one hand, he could never have gained the power and authority in society to be able to organize and promote something like “An Inconvenient Truth” without “living large”, but on the other, what he has to do to build his “brand” up to the point where he would have the power and fame to promote his documentary dramatically undermines the message.

This leaves the environmental politician with a really big dilemma. What sort of narrative can he or she create that will defend him or her from the charge of hypocrisy while at the same time retaining the visibility necessary to exert real influence on society?

Infantile Spirituality

2012-03-28T14:49:00.001-06:00

In my last post I gave voice to some concerns that have been rumbling in my heart for several years. As I thought about what I'd written and about the comments that readers sent to me, something deeper struck me that I thought I'd share as well.

I've been a "Leftie" most of my life. More to the point, I'm really a "bleeding heart" or what Maggie Thatcher would call a "wet". I get emotionally-engaged with people who suffer. This needn't be someone right in front of me, I get very upset when I consider the plight of people I've never even met. Indeed, I get upset when I contemplate hypothetical situations---starving, poor, oppressed people, injustice of any sort.

This has led me down some interesting rabbit holes in my life. At one time I actually tried to live the life that Jesus suggests we should----I gave a lot of money to the poor, I would invite homeless people in to live with me, etc. I learned after a while that if people do choose to live like Jesus said they should they will end up being "eaten alive" by the poor and needy---just like he was. (Remember all the crowd scenes from the Gospels?) Not wanting to end up on a literal cross, I decided to do what everyone else does, and set my boundaries a lot wider.

When I analyze my feelings when confronted by injustice I notice two things. First, I feel a lot of empathy in that I always end up imagining myself in the situation I see the other person. Secondly, I feel a great deal of anger and outrage. Sometimes I move to a third stage, which is fear that the world is a nasty, cruel, place that is indifferent to the suffering of individuals.

The more I think about it, the more I think that the first two reactions are attempts to divert my attention from the last one. It's better to feel sorrow for others and anger against whomever is harming them than contemplate that it is just happenstance---perhaps temporary---that I am not in the same boat. I notice this fact time and time again when I find out that the world is just not a "warm and fuzzy place". It was this outrage that fueled just about everything that I have ever done in politics. And that outrage ultimately kept me from facing up to the idea that life is inherently tough and I am going to die, probably after a lot of pain.

The path we walk as individuals is ultimately like a mine field. We never really know if the next time we put our foot down it may end in an explosion that may injure, maim or kill us. Our job can disappear, we can get sick, an accident may befall us, or the people we love can suffer similar problems, etc, etc.

Paradoxically, people involved in progressive politics tend to spend a great deal of their life successfully ignoring this fact. Of course, it is true that collectively people can do a great deal to make life less precarious if they work together. We can have universal healthcare, pensions, unemployment insurance, etc, but this never seems to be be enough to totally eradicate suffering from the world. No matter how much we try to make the world a better place, others are constantly trying to undo that work; and ultimately we, and everyone we love, are going to die. Even the Jesus of Gospels admits this fact, "The poor you will always have with you, but you will not always have me" (Matthew 26:11).

This grim reality surrounds us like a bad smell. But we aren't conscious of the stink all the time. Sometimes we forget about it and get "caught up" in some experience that allows us to forget all about the "fallen" nature of the world and our own mortality. This is where the other side of religion kicks in, the spiritual path of mysticism.

As one Buddhist monk once explained it to me, activism is like trying to deal with the problems of walking on a stony road by covering it with carpet. As he explained it, learning to tame the passions through meditation was like putting on a pair of shoes. Obviously, it is a lot easier to wear shoes than to cover the entire earth with deep pile shag.

When we forget about the precarious nature of human existence it is possible to feel a sense of "oneness" with the world. We walk through a forest on a sunny, nice day and all seems well. We embrace our lover and life seems good. When I think about it, just about every good experience that I have had in my life involved feeling "at one" with what I was doing. In contrast, the quickest way to remove that feeling is for me to remember that I am an individual human being who is at best a participant in life, but more often a mere observer. The trick, therefore, is to find some way to control the mind in order to maximize the time you spend in "oneness" and minimize the time you spend in alienated contemplation.

When I was a young man I spent a decade of my life trying to understand religious experiences. I did a master's degree in philosophy on the subject and spent a lot of time trying out various flavours of religious practice. I had a great many different experiences that could be described as "mystical", but ultimately found myself on the "outside" of all of these traditions. What I believe I learned from this period of experimentation was that all the people I met in these groups ultimately lacked the sense of critical rigor that I was bringing to the subject.

Recently, it has occurred to me that this sense of "connection" that people seek in mystical practice and which I sought through my experimentation comes from our earliest experience in our mothers' arms. Certainly some psychologists maintain that the first important part of human maturation comes when the child begins to differentiate his or herself from her mother. And the more I think about it, I wonder how much of my religious and political sensibility comes down to not much more than trying to recreate that early sense of comfort.

And the more I think about it, the more I wonder if the cultural matrix that supports the religious life is overtly aimed at trying to recreate that childhood experience. Certainly Christianity is rife with examples that seem to support this idea. Priests are called "father". I understand that the Aramaic word that Jesus is shown using to refer to "God", abba, translates rather literally as "daddy". Consider the veneration of "Mother" Teresa. Other religions encourage a similar sort of infantile veneration. In my case the teacher in my school of religious Daoism was similarly treated with parent-like veneration and in response he treated all his students like wayward children. (To cite one example, I can remember him sleeping on the floor of the lobby connecting the male and female dorms at our retreat centre so he could keep tabs of the adults so they didn't sneak off for illicit sexual trysts.)

If I accept that the ritual forms and hierarchical organization of religious institutions are designed to create an infantile sense of "oneness", I should also consider whether spiritual practice is also designed to create a similar state. Consider the following Wikipedia synopsis of the spiritual teachings of a Carmelite Nun, Bernadette Roberts:

The ego, matured through life experience and spiritual practice, falls away to reveal the unitive state, the oneness or wholeness of the self in unity with God, a state characterized by the feelings of love and subtle ecstasy. This was the end of the Christian journey — or so Roberts initially believed — and from this point we can see where Roberts travels beyond the limits of doctrinal Christianity. The Self, the mature human in a state of union with God, also falls away. This is the import of Roberts' work. So what does this mean and what is left when there is no-self? Fundamentally the unitive state is still a form of dualism — Self and God — it means that an idea or archetype of God is still captured by the psyche. Fundamentally this unitive state is nondualistic - in which the self and God are One, not two - "I and my Father are One," one without a second, without even the concept of one. Roberts experiences the falling away of the idea of God simultaneously with the experience of the falling away of self — when there is no self, there is no God. For someone wholly devoted to the spiritual life and to God, to discover that there is no God, not one iota of subtle conception of God left to grasp at or attach to, was a particularly horrendous and terrible experience and is described in detail in "the experience of no-self". The experience is of a raw, pure and unadulterated reality without the imposition of concepts and ideas. Gradually this state, this initial loss, cleared to become a profound understanding of reality itself. In place of "unity" with God comes identity with God — a state she calls seeing with God's own eyes. But neither the ego-based sense nor the spiritualized self is "God". Instead, God is Reality itself, of which the human person is a single cell

After all, what could the experience of a newborn child be, but one of a total lack of "self" and total "unity" with your mother?

The spiritual practices followed by these religious groups seem to be pretty good at helping people feel better about themselves. Buddhists, Daoists, Christians, etc, who do regular spiritual practice look to the eye as being calmer, happier people. But the price, in my personal experience, is a sort of "flattening" of their critical faculties. Those calmer, happier people seem to very often prone to being taken advantage of by their spiritual teachers---financially, sexually, etc. The sexual abuse scandals that have rocked the Catholic church and Buddhist sangha both reveal that followers of both faiths are so dis-empowered that they are willing to allow their religious authority figures to do things to them that they would never allow anyone else to do.

Nor do deeply spiritual people seem to be terribly good citizens. They rarely seem to be on the "right side" of history. It is Marxists, trade unionists, secular humanist types who fight for human rights---bye-and-large---not the deeply spiritual. (I first noticed this when I was involved in a battle to save a Jesuit retreat centre. It wasn't the Catholics who did all the heavy lifting, but rather people outside of the tradition. Indeed, the woman who ran the retreat centre was opposed to the lawsuit and the Catholic school board forbade its employees from getting involved in any way shape or form.)

This doesn't really make any sense if the goal of religious practice is to become a better human being. But if, instead, the real goal of spirituality is to recreate the experience of a baby in its mother's arms, then it fits perfectly.

What then do I suggest we should be seeking instead?

I'm not sure I know. But I can take a stab at making some suggestions.

First of all, I think that a more "mature" sort of life should be based on attempting to deepen our ethical grounding. Consider the following "thought experiment": Would you do the "right thing" if it meant that you would end up going to Hell? If not, then are you living an ethical life? Or are you just trying to be a "good boy" in order to get a lollipop? This isn't a hypothetical question. How many people in ages past had doubts about the value of burning "witches" and heretics, yet "went along" because they were afraid of being damned as a heretic himself? How many people in the Evangelical or Roman Catholic churches today have doubts about discriminating against gays but don't speak up for the same reason?

In other words, is virtue your own reward? If it isn't, why not?

Secondly, instead of having "oneness" as an ideal is it possible to develop another? What about clarity? Or dignity? Or wisdom? I admit that I find it hard to fill the gap left by wanting to feel like the world is a warm, comforting place that looks out for my best interests. But ultimately my conscious mind has to accept that this is simply not true. And at that point I find that I can have flashes of something that is like a sense of calm acceptance based on a gimlet-eyed appreciation of the true nature of existence. What is more important? Seeing the truth, or having a warm and pleasant lie? Again, this sounds a lot like "virtue is its own reward".

Finally (at least for this blog post), instead of trying to find some ultimate "Truth" that sets us free, perhaps it would be a better ideal to try and live a life that adds a grain's worth of truth to our society's collective store. The great value of scientific research is that it is cumulative. Why can't we have as our ultimate ideal the idea that we are participants in a great cultural enterprise aimed at trying to become collectively more wise rather than seeking some sort of personal salvation or enlightenment?

If we accept a different set of ideals, like the ones above, then it might be possible to construct a different sort of personal practice. This could be a practice that people can pursue in order to give meaning and stability to their lives, but which will not damage their critical faculties by encouraging infantile consciousness. The more I think about this sort of---for want of a better term---"spiritual practice", I cannot help thinking that this is like the Chinese ideal of "kung fu", which is key to the teaching of philosophical Daoism and which is best expressed in Zhuangi's description of craftsmanship.

The Seduction of Religion

2012-03-09T20:16:00.003-06:00

Over the years I've tried to stake out a position for myself as being somewhere in the middle between identifying myself as a "religious Daoist" and a "philosophical Daoist". To a large extent, this has been because I believed that there is a great potential for good in the existence of religious institutions. I have always admitted that in practise religious bodies rarely live up to this potential, but I have always thought that the isolated tremendous good that some individuals do shows just what could be done if religious organizations finally reformed themselves.

I no longer think that this is possible.

I've come to this conclusion because I've changed my opinion about what it means to be a religious "believer" and to live in a religious "congregation". By way of an explanation, I have to explain where my interest in religion comes from.

I was raised by a totally non-religious family. I don't mean that they were atheists who had consciously rejected the Christian church (or any other religion, for that matter.) Instead, they were people who simply didn't think about anything that would be considered "spiritual", "philosophical" or "high-fallutin". They were simple country folk who did not bend their minds towards anything except the daily grind for existence.

I learned from their example the wisdom of Socrates dictum "the unexamined life is not worth living". People who do not think "ultimate thoughts" end up with minds that are little more than jumbled-up attics filled with the rubbish that they have been exposed to during the random events of their life. People who do not develop the habit of self-introspection, and who have never learned to separate a good argument from a bad one ultimately have only one option: just "follow along and do what you are told". This makes you tremendously vulnerable to any sort of social disruption. It also takes away any sort of brakes over strong emotions. People who aren't terribly thoughtful tend to be "drama queens", which makes life incredibly miserable for anyone who has to live either with them or is at their mercy in any shape or form.

Living around very emotional, not terribly thoughtful people for most of my childhood awakened a strong urge to try and emulate the character "Spock" from Star Trek. The great thing about Spock was that he was not only committed to being logical, he obviously had real problems doing so. For example, he lost his marbles over sex, as in the episode where he dragged the crew to Vulcan and ended up fighting Kirk over a woman. As an adolescent boy, I certainly understood the conflict between instincts and rationality, and how no matter how much I tried not to, I would end up "losing it" in one of several ways that still bring waves of embarrassment and shame to this day. If Spock had really been the sort of "soul-less robot" that people referred to him in the television series, he wouldn't have had any appeal for viewers. It was the fact that he was a passionate man with real problems who still tried very hard to live up to a specific ideal that made him a hero to so many people.

And working through the logic of the situation (please, no pun intended), the series writers had to develop a rationale that would explain exactly where this character's "love of logic" came from. I their decisions through various episodes and movies ended up building up the edifice of a Vulcan "religion" based on logic. This makes a sort of sense in that it is only reasonable to assume that any sort of cultural norm requires some sort of institution to pass it on to future generations. In my own case, this is how I began to view religion, as an institutional framework for passing on the ethical and social teachings of some great teachers of the past.

Dominic Crossan

This is where I take my leave of Gene Roddenberry and enter the realm of religious scholars like Dominic Crossan, Karen Armstrong, Marcus Borg, and, the members of the Jesus Seminar.

Karen Armstrong

These voices of "progressive" Christianity were pretty important to me for many years. I read their books and wrestled mightily with the ideas that they presented. The Jesus that they discussed was a figure who manifested a very radical response to the problems manifest in Judea during the Roman Empire. He didn't identify himself as being a "God", but as an ordinary person. He didn't come completely from the Jewish tradition, but also incorporated aspects of Greek Cynic philosophy. The stories of the New Testament were not factual accounts of history, but rather archetypal stories that get people thinking about the forces around them. The Jesus of Christianity was someone who was very concerned about the poor and would be considered a "Leftie" or "Commie" today.

Marcus Borg

My problem was that I read these books and as a result created an artificial "air religion" that has never existed in real life. It was only when I met real, honest-to-God Christians that I realized that almost no one in any Church understand Jesus and religion the way these academics do. (Indeed, Dominic Crossan stopped being a priest so he could marry. Marcus Borg is now a philosophy professor instead of a theologian, and Karen Armstrong left her nunnery because it the discipline was impossible for her to bear.)

In actual fact, the vast majority of people who call themselves "Christians" do not read the Bible and wouldn't understand an archetype if it hit them over the head with a rotting carp. For them the story of Jesus's arrest, trial and crucifixion wasn't a story about how religious and civic institutions react to moral imperatives----i.e. angry leaders afraid of their position, and, spineless bureaucrats unwilling to overcome the mob----but rather that those damn Jews killed God. And the most important part of Christianity isn't "love your neighbour" and "help the poor and weak", but rather that of "don't have sex unless it is sanctioned by the church". If you really want to know who is the authentic interpretor of scriptural orthodoxy, it isn't a scholar like Crossan, it's a political leader, like the Pope .

As a result, the values of the institution are inexorably drawn towards points of view that strengthen the hold that the church has over the individual believer. Consider, if you will, a point that I have raised before in this blog: Mother Teresa versus Oscar Romero. Teresa supported an extremely conservative point of view that maximized the power of the Church and voiced the "party line" over the importance of regulating human sexuality (e.g. when she accepted the Nobel Peace Prize she said that the greatest threat to world peace was "abortion".) In contrast, Oscar Romero took the line that the church should be on the side of the poor and oppressed. His "prize" wasn't universal acclaim, television documentaries, etc----instead, he was gunned down while saying mass in a cathedral. Teresa was fast-tracked into sainthood, whereas Romero will probably never be made a saint---or at least won't until people totally forget exactly what it was that he got killed for. My read of the Bible says that Romero was by far the most in line with the teachings of Jesus, yet his life doesn't teach Catholics to "shut up and do what they are told", whereas Teresa's does---which is why she is a saint and he isn't.

Another example has to deal with the sex abuse scandals plaguing the church. People often fixate on the behaviour of individual priests and argue that celibacy is what is to blame. This is a misread of the facts. The problem isn't the individual offender----the odd person in all walks of life has problems controlling their sexual urges. The real issue is that the institution protects priests whereas other parts of society---such as school boards---are designed to protect the child. And priests are protected for the very real reason that if people start to see priests as ordinary humans instead of as exalted beings who are better than ordinary church goers, the whole religious hierarchy starts to fall apart. If a priest can't be trusted around the choir boys, then why should we accept their interpretation of the scripture? And if the priest is suspect, then what about the Bishop? Or the Pope?

Exactly the same sort of statements can be made about every church that I ever looked into. Each one ultimately has some sort of leadership that controls things, and theology invariably ends up warping itself to supporting the political structure.

Confronted by this fact, I investigated other religions, most notably Buddhism and Daoism. At first I found myself very attracted to both of them. Neither has the sort of centralized structure of Christian churches and both have a theology that has a greater emphasis on personal study and investigation---through things like meditation. But as I learned more about Buddhism, I found out that there are as many abuses by Dharma teachers as there are by Christian priests, many of which are documented in this excellent blog: "Down the Crooked Path". Daoism is too new in the West for many abuses to exist, but I certainly could see the potential during my involvement with the Taoist Tai Chi Association---which is why I left the group.

I went through a real phase of being upset about this state of affairs. I think that we do need a way of handing over values to future generations. Moreover, I feel that there is a real need to have institutions around that do good work for the poor and oppressed. Unfortunately, I have come to the conclusion that there simply is no way we could reform religious groups to be able to do this. Moreover, I think that I know why.

The first point to understand is that real charity is inherently anarchic. That is to say, people do not "just" become poor. Invariably they do so because there are institutions or patterns to their existence that force or encourage them to be poor. In a society with significant inequality, there are economic and political forces that keep a fraction of the population from redistributing wealth from the rich to the poor. These can be as simple and obvious as the rich paying off the police to "look the other way" when the nation's wealth is looted, or as subtle as lobbying Congress to write tax loopholes that allow someone to define their income in such a way that Warren Buffet pays taxes at a rate far less than his secretary. Either way, if we are genuinely attempting to help the poor, we are also going to be empowering them as well. And any institution that is engaged in really empowering the poor will not only be weakening the power of the leadership within that institution, they will also be encouraging other elements of that society to attack and weaken that institution within it. Church leaders---even with the best of intentions---always find themselves worrying about whether their actions are "prudent" enough to preserve the institution.

This is why whenever there is a movement towards making the lives of individual people better, it is inevitable that the overwhelming majority of organized religions will be opposed to it. The Church opposed trade unions, democracy, birth control, the end of slavery and just about everything else. That is why the leadership of most churches support reactionary political parties. It is also why when the relative influence of the Church gains ascendancy in a political party---as it currently does in the American Republican party---that party will invariably swing towards political extremism.

Not only does the structure of the church define whether or not it can honestly embrace the poor, it also means that it can never truly become a bearer of morality. To understand this point, however, we need to understand just exactly what morality consists in.

People of Conservative bent often complain bitterly against what they call "situational ethics" because they believe that once people are taught that they are able to "bend the rules" based on a specific situation, total chaos will inevitably result as people start to "make it up as they go along". As I see it, the problem with this analysis is that it reduces morality to doing what you are told. Moral behaviour is something very special, it is judging a specific behaviour based on a criteria that goes beyond mere utility and instead suggests that there is a code that someone is following because it is the right thing to do. Now the problem with reducing doing the right thing, to simply doing what you have been told comes from the fact that doing what you are told to do doesn't have a moral component. This is why the judges at Nuremburg refused to accept the "we were just following orders" defence offered up by the Nazi war criminals. Even under military discipline, it is believed that normal people have a moral sense that allows them to make a distinction between a lawful and an unlawful order. Indeed, Western military codes specifically make this distinction and suggest to soldiers that they have an obligation to ignore unlawful orders.

If a soldier is obligated to disobey an unjust order when he is under discipline during time of war, then surely an individual parishioner has an even greater obligation to ignore or disobey an unjust moral injunction laid upon him by the ecclesiastic hierarchy. If your Church says that homosexuals should be abused and discriminated against, that women should continue to be forced to carry pregnancies to birth even if the baby is unwanted and will cause great hardship, or, that women should never use birth control even if the resulting high number of children will be a catastrophe for both her family and nation----then the moral obligation to "do the right thing" would seem to suggest that people disobey the "unjust order".

This criticism of morality goes beyond the practical issue I raised earlier. Even if the Church were to miraculously stop being concerned about prudential issues such as whether a given teaching weakens the power of the institutional church, it still wouldn't be able to overcome the inherent problems that come from teaching morality as a set of eternal truths. That's because morality just isn't something that is revealed through some sort of objective discovery process. The revealed Ten Commandments simply do not have enough moral sophistication to cover all situations (which is why they and the other rules in Deuteronomy could never work as a legal code.) Instead, as people are confronted by a new situation, they have to analyse the key components and decide what they feel is the moral thing to do.

The point is that morality is not defined, it is discovered. And as such, we cannot teach people what the right thing to do is in each situation. What we can do, however, is teach people the right general way that they can approach an issue so that they can work out the best answer for themselves. Our legal system understands this point because it functions not just on the basis of regulations passed by politicians but also by having those laws modified through the rulings of case law.

The way to teach this discovery is through entering into a discussion or dialogue, either with others or within ourselves, in order to ascertain the which side of a given debate can marshal the best arguments in defence of their position. Again, unfortunately, any religious institution simply cannot allow for this sort of methodology because it will invariably undermine the authority of the institution. Church is not a grad seminar and parishioners simply cannot be allowed to debate scripture with the pastor, or else there soon will not be any authority left for either the local priest or the Pope in Rome. The same can be said about Buddhist monks and Daoist priests.

This leaves me on the horns of a dilemma that everyone with a religious bent has to face sooner or later. Will they learn to keep their mouth shut so they can carry on in the faith? Or will they take the harder, moral road and walk away from the church and stick it out on their own?

In a sense I made that decision a long time ago. I have called myself a "hermit" because I refused to make the compromises necessary to stay in a group. But between then and now I have kept a bit of a mental connection with the ideal of religious fraternity. Now I finally reject it. I think that if you really want to be a genuinely spiritual person you have to accept that each and every relationship you make has to be created on its own merits and cannot lean on the clap-trappery of church, robe, title or lineage. In the same way, every act of charity and benevolence has to justify itself. If you help the poor, do it because it genuinely helps the poor. Don't do it because Jesus said you should or because you are want to buy a place in heaven. (Certainly, don't do it because you think you can get a job out of it.)

Luckily the key texts of Daoism never really did have any sort of religious background. Instead, they were written by people who probably had never seen a religious Daoist in their life. (The Zhuangzi, Laozi and Liezi were written before the creation of an organized, Daoist religion.) This makes it easy to follow the teaching while ignoring the religion, as many people do. This includes me too from now on. Now I have to decide if I want to sell off my various statues, close down my altar and so on.

Decisions, decisions, decisions---.

Wearing Your Heart on Your Sleeve

2012-02-23T15:52:00.000-06:00

I follow several blogs dealing with the environment, peak oil and other issues of great importance to the future of the earth. One that I recently found is by a physicist who takes the time to work through all the numbers involved in specific issues. It's called (of course) "Do the Math" and I find it a tremendous breath of fresh air. What I do not find a similar breath, is the way my mind falls into old, worn-out ways of reacting to situations that routinely arise.

I was reading the "comments" section when I came across the following brilliant piece of analysis:

Mass transit is a non-starter until the crime problem is dealt with. If people are assaulted on the train or bus or thieves use it to spread to new territory, nobody will want it to come near their town.

I responded with an angry comment that the moderator graciously edited somewhat instead of simply deleting:

[edited the fangs out]
[Whoa, there!] Are you suggesting that everyone who currently uses public transit is either a criminal or so “beyond the pale” that they don’t care about all the thugs they ride to work with every day?
I had a half-dozen acquaintances die from auto accidents when I was in secondary school. This is far from an isolated experience for people who live in the country. I haven’t known anyone killed in a robbery. Why is it our society chooses to “swallow camels while choking on gnats”?
One of the great things about this blog is that the author really does try to “do the math” instead of making moronic statements based on emotion.

I can see that I am well on the path towards what always happens when I enter into a debate. I get so emotionally engaged with the subject that I can easily be egged into pissing off the moderator/voters/editors/whatever to the point where they eventually bare me from the group.

Emotional engagement is a good thing insofar as it gets people motivated to actually do something. It has gotten me to run for political office, organize community groups, do very risky things like suing Walmart, and so on. But it also makes me so angry that I tend to go off like an H-bomb whenever someone says something that I believe is so ignorant and hurtful that it simply could not be an honest mistake. In the above case, my blood boiled from the obvious assumption that the reader was working from----namely that the sort of people who use public transit consist of an "under-class", many of whom are undesirables that any sane person would want to keep physically outside of their community. One wonders if skin colour might be part of the equation----.

The problem with my emotions is that because I cannot control them any better than I do, I am always vulnerable to anyone who realizes that they can get me into trouble any time they want simply by making this sort of outrageous statement. Since most referees and audiences respond to the tone of a discussion more than the content, this means that anyone who can get me angry will almost always win the battle.

This "Achilles Heel" has plagued me all of my life. It is why I have never developed a career, even though I have gone through periods in my life when I really would have liked to be a "success" in some sort of conventional sense. (Actually, now I consider myself quite a considerable success, but that doesn't change the fact that I haven't always thought so.) It has certainly dramatically lowered my influence on society, because it means that a great many folks just dismiss me as some sort of weird person who has anger management problems.

I have some understanding about why it is I act like this. When I was young every authority figure in my life was either too dumb or too out-of-control for me to every assume that they were acting in my best interest or that their advice was worth following. I also spent a great deal of my life walking around being completely enraged by the idiocy that I had to put up with in my day-to-day life. Modern biology teaches that when a child develops in this sort of environment it becomes "hard wired" to be angry most of the time.

That pretty much describes me.

Conventional wisdom would dictate that having understood this point, I should be able to no longer be imprisoned by this behaviour. But the fact of the matter is that knowing that I am going to act like this is absolutely no preventative from doing it time and time again. The only real way of avoiding this sort of thing is to totally avoid spending any time in situations where I can meet people like the guy who wrote the original comment on the "Do the Math" blog. Being so emotionally engaged is why drives me to do things like take a train instead of an airplane to visit my fiance even though she lives 800 miles away (to lessen my carbon footprint.) But it also is why it is almost impossible for anyone to understand why I do so. It leaves me totally frustrated as a human being.

I wonder how often this sort of dilemma faced old-time Daoist recluses? Perhaps many of them were simply passionate people who couldn't control their emotions enough to keep a straight face when confronted by the vile, idiotic things they heard and saw in court. Some folks are never meant to hide their hearts.

Self-Discipline

2012-02-14T15:39:00.000-06:00

One of the concepts that people take for granted, but which I have always had a hard time understanding is that of "discipline". People tell people who eat too much or smoke that they should "learn to have self-discipline". The problem is that this concept is based on the idea that people always know the right thing to do, but do the opposite anyway.

My experience trying to stop smoking got me thinking about all of this. I was able to stop smoking over and over again, but each time I started again, it wasn't a case of my losing any sort of "hold" over myself, but rather a case of my becoming depressed and no longer seeing the reason why I should care if I smoked or not. There is a subtle issue here.

As I see it, most of the things we do in our life are habits. The person who exercises regularly doesn't have self-discipline, he just has a healthy habit of exercising regularly. Where discipline comes into play is when someone consciously chooses to change their habits so they stop, for example, slumping in front of a television all night and instead decide to spend the time exercising instead. The discipline comes into play for the month or so that it takes to create the habit that results in inertia carrying someone into doing exercise instead of watching "the Simpsons".

A key component of this self-discipline comes from keeping our "eye on the prize" so we don't get depressed and start thinking "what's the use" (as in my example of resuming smoking.) Another part comes from not allowing ourselves to be distracted to the point where we forget that we wanted to change ourselves and create a new habit. Even if I want to exercise, I might be halfway through a bag of potato chips and "Family Guy" before I remembered that today was the day I was going to start exercising.

As I see it, a key element of developing enough self-discipline in order to change our habits comes from reminding ourselves that we exist and have volition. In Daoist terms, I see that this is what various teachers meant when they said we need to "hold onto the One". My primary source of this comes from the Nei Yeh, but it is also something strongly suggested by the Celestial Master in the Taiping Jing. This is very similar to the Buddhist idea of "mindfulness", but I think it has a very different resonance in that the Buddhist ideal is that of passive watchfulness. The Buddhist image reminds me of someone sitting quietly and watching the world around them, whereas the Daoist one seems to me more of someone holding onto the "core" of their being so they can affirm themselves in a world of distractions. This makes sense to me as I see the goal of Buddhism to be Nirvana, which is a negative concept of letting go of bondage to the earth; whereas the goal of Daoism is to become a Xian (what I call a "realized man") or a being that is still very much engaged with the world around him, but is able to transcend many of his previous limitations.

The connection between "holding onto the One" and "self-discipline" also makes sense of the importance of "kung fu" in Daoist practice. It doesn't really matter where one puts their dedicated practice---whether it is writing poems, gardening, cooking, making quilts or doing taijiquan. The fact that you have to "hold onto the One" in order to achieve any sort of progress in the art means that you are also treading the path towards realization.

Environmental Vow 19: Politics 101

2012-01-02T08:59:00.000-06:00

Politics 101

Pithily stated, politics is the process whereby groups of people make collective decisions.

“Politics” permeates human society. People tend to fixate on the more obvious examples: municipal, provincial and federal governments. But every group of people has political elements. When a co-worker “sucks up” to the boss in order to get his own way, that is a political act. In the same way, when a CEO organizes a Christmas party for the staff, he is also performing a political act in that he is trying to score “brownie points” with employees in order to encourage loyalty to the organization. Of course, many of these sorts of things are totally unconscious. The boss might be a nice guy who is continuing a tradition and who genuinely wants to “do the right thing”. In the same way, the staff can just as well do the “extra bit” just because the boss really is a “swell guy”. People can also do very self-conscious things to each other. Bosses sometimes steal the credit that belongs to subordinates and workers will sometimes sabotage the efforts of others in order to keep them from getting a promotion in the hope that they will get it instead. Anyone who has worked in any sort of institution would describe this phenomenon as “office politics”. It happens just as often with people who jockey for a little better position at a “mac job” as it does with executives in the biggest corporation.

This is exactly what politics was like in the time of royal courts. Only instead of fry cooks and account managers trying to climb to the top over their co-workers, it involved courtiers with titles such as “groom of the royal bed chamber” or “Lord Chamberlain”. Each of these officials would have a staff of “hanger’s on” and “lackeys” who would also have their own individual political intrigues with one another to gain favour and influence with their “great man”. If the courtier was important enough, each of his hanger’s on would also have his own men, who would also have intrigues amongst themselves in order to gain favour. In the old monarchies the entire nation was held together by these nested layers of patronage. It was how all positions in the bureaucracy, the courts, the military, etc were filled. It was how the countryside was held together by the landed aristocracy and how cities functioned through their Councils. Smaller people gained help from bigger people by helping them with their big projects, and bigger people gained loyal supporters by helping them secure jobs, contracts, etc.

Political parties still operate in much the same way. There are specific “big men” in parties who have groups of supporters. If a big man gets enough supporters, he can become the head of the party. If the party is big enough and has enough supporters in the general public, then he becomes the head of the government.

Why Politicians are Hypocrites

There are differences, though. Patronage in royal systems is primarily about supporting individual people directly for help in return.# In contrast, modern society is a little more about supporting and promoting a specific “worldview”. This is where the “Liberty, Equality and Fraternity” stuff bleeds in. Most politicians are not totally “in the game” for money or power. Instead, they believe that they are promoting a specific way of looking at the world that they believe is “right”, “true” and “just”. They will often find themselves acting in what seem to be very duplicitous manners, but usually they see this in terms of “the ends justify the means”. For example, a conservative politician who personally believes in the right of women to make up their own minds about whether or not to have an abortion will often make noises about---and even vote for----making abortion illegal, but will justify this by thinking that if he doesn’t add the anti-choice vote to his core constituency he will never be able to win the election----which would be a catastrophe for the nation because it would result in “tax and spent liberals” taking over and destroying the economy.

Successful politicians realize that the only way to gain enough power to put through the changes that they would like to see in a political party, city, province, nation, union, NGO, etc, is by building a coalition to support them. But usually this involves supporting positions that the political “great man” may not like, but which he finds he can “live with”. Similarly, his political supporters have to make similar compromises in order to find a great man to work for if they want to have a patron who can help them climb the ladder of power. This is why politicians seem to “waffle” or “flip flop” on issues. The ones that want to win realize that they have to build a coalition of using people who have very strong opinions about conflicting issues. Their job is to seduce enough into supporting them to be able to gain power and hopefully do something.

Power doesn’t only come in the form of personal supporters. In jurisdictions without significant campaign finance laws, it also comes from the money that is needed to fund an election campaign. And again, politicians find that to be successful they need to cater to the ideals of people who have a great deal of disposable income. People often confuse a politician’s desire for money with personal greed because they don’t understand that the “system” usually demands that before a candidate can have any hope of being elected he or she will have to raise huge amounts of money for things like television advertisements. Again, this put enormous pressure on politicians to at the very least pay “lip service” to positions they don’t agree with, and at worst, vote in support of them.

Even in societies with strict campaign finance laws based on regulating funding sources, such as Canada where it is illegal for corporations to make donations and all money must be raised in the form of relatively small donations by individual citizens, the system still exerts enormous pressure on candidates who need money to win elections. When money is raised in small amounts from a large number of donors, whomever has control of the lists and can organize the “boiler rooms” needed to bring the money in will end up having enormous control over the careers of anyone who seeks public office. It might be an improvement to have candidates “beholding” to the party fundraisers than wealthy individuals or corporations, but either way it means that the representatives who are supposed to look after the public welfare will inevitably find themselves forced to service specific interests instead of the public good.

I’m not aware of any society where strict campaign finance laws significantly limit the amount of money that a candidate may spend, but if such a system were in place candidates would then find themselves beholding to whatever institutions or individuals are able to provide enough volunteers to build a viable campaign.#

The result of having to balance all these different and often conflicting points of view in order to build a coalition of supporters while at the same time appeasing large donors is that hypocrisy is pretty much essential to the political enterprise. It might be that if people were sufficiently deferential to their political leadership that they would elect governments imply on an assessment of the politician’s character and let them make all the decisions “as they think best”. But unfortunately, the trend in politics has been for a long time to increasingly expect our politicians to enunciate a specific program and stick to it once in office. Unfortunately, this sort of process would only work if there was a clear and coherent vision of where society should be going amongst the body politic. The fact of the matter, however, is that voters believe a great many things, many of which contradict each other and many are based on total ignorance of the true state of affairs. This situation means that the only politicians who have a hope of being elected to high office are those ones that have developed the ability to become convincing hypocrites who have learned to tell people what they want to hear instead of what they believe to be the truth.

Environmental Vow 18: Radical Politics and Activism

2011-12-26T10:30:00.001-06:00

Radical Politics and Activism

I suggested previously that there was a second motivating factor besides religious faith, namely patriotism. As I pointed out, however, the calamities of the 20th century pretty much debased that coin in the minds of most thoughtful people. It is possible to stretch the definition of “patriotism” to embrace more than just “king and country”, though. What if people build their lives around support for some set of noble ideals, such as “Liberty, Equality and Fraternity”?

Over the last three hundred years or so millions have built their lives around this sort of thing. Indeed, there are a great many people today who are involved in this form of politics that is specifically focused on environmental issues, namely small and large “g” greens. Surely something like a form of “eco-patriotism” offers some sort of locus for changing people's behaviour in order to deal with the coming eco-catastrophe. Unfortunately, I would argue that any sort of patriotism, not matter what its foundation, has found its coin just as debased as that of the old “king and country” type. Moreover, any attempt to deal with this legacy have made it particularly vulnerable to the “do your own thing” poison that has damaged so many other elements of our society.

The first issue that people have to wrestle with is the impact that Marxism and Fascism have had on the popular imagination and how they still profoundly affect the thoughts of people who aspire to a radical form of environmental politics. Radical politics was the primary guiding force for a great deal of social transformation during the 20th century. People find it hard to believe right now, but up until the Second World War, there were very active Communist parties throughout the Western world----even in the United States and Canada. There were also various flavours of Nationalist, Fascist, Socialist parties with vast followings that had huge impact on the day-to-day life of many people. Since the demise of the Fascist powers and the collapse of the Soviet Union, all this activity seems to be passe, if not down right incomprehensible.

The problem is that these grand experiments in using politics to reconfigure society all ended very badly. Fascism in Germany, Italy and Japan, and Communism in Russia all culminated in dictatorships that either left their nations as occupied piles of rubble despised by the rest of the world, or couldn't even guarantee that their citizens would be able to find any soap when they went shopping. All of them created police states and committed crimes against humanity. These terrible past examples have created a “brand” so poisoned that anyone involved in any sort of radical or activist politics immediately risks being labeled a “Communist” or “Nazi”.

At first glance, this would strike most greens as being profoundly unfair.# I would suggest, however, that there is a grain of truth to these accusations. The point is that once one steps outside of “social convention” in politics, the unconscious popular sentiment is that we risk opening a Pandora’s box or stepping onto the slippery slope. This is because what holds society together is the fact that the overwhelming majority of citizens hold onto pretty much the same worldview and honour a set of conventions about what issues are and are not “on the table”, and, what does or does not represent a “reasonable” demand for change. Once one leaps over these unspoken boundaries to suggest, for example, things like an end to economic growth, the radical redistribution of wealth, or, mandatory birth control, this fragile consensus risks being shredded.

Policy planks like these three, if they seriously have any hope of being implemented, would radicalize opposition to the point of violence between different factions of society. At this point, political differences cease to be settled through stylized political activity (i.e. voting) and instead get worked out with guns. That is politics the way the Nazis and Bolsheviks did it. So while it is unfair to call the pacifist Green candidate a “Nazi” or “Communist”, the “kook” heckler does actually have something of a legitimate point. If political goals become radical for large numbers of people, the citizenry will become polarized, and if taken far enough, it is inevitable that the means of politics will become violent.

The popular imagination understands this on some sort of inarticulate level, which is why most people have a horror of radical solutions. Instead, most ordinary folks want to see change that comes in incremental or evolutionary steps instead of being through radical or revolutionary programs. This inclination flows from two springs. First, there is the idea that “revolutions devour their own children”. That is to say, that once society gets turned upside down the social forces that sweep away the old order sooner or later get turned on the revolutionaries themselves. The examples of the terror of the French revolution and the purge of the old revolutionaries from the Soviet Union and China come to mind. Secondly, there is a feeling that when the revolutions devour their children, the people who end up on top seem to be the same sorts of people who were in power before. The cliche for this process comes from the 1960’s rock band the Who, who coined the phrase “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss”. Absolutist monarchs in France, Russia and China all ended up being replaced by absolutist dictators, namely Napoleon, Stalin and Mao. Ordinary folks might have some sympathy of the ideals espoused by radical activists, but they generally have grave suspicions about what would happen if these particular people ever got any real power.

A lot of people who are attracted to one type of green politics or another will find my position hard to accept. But I think, however, that if they really work at trying to understand what politics really is, they will find the above assertions make a great deal of sense because one situation follows from the other almost like a geometric deduction.

Fear, or, Entitlement?

2011-12-08T14:32:00.001-06:00

I try not to follow politics all that much, but there's been a lot of weird stuff happening in politics land lately, and it can't help but get me thinking. For one thing, there's been a lot of strange stuff coming down the pipeline about gay bullying at schools. There's been a rash of teenage suicides by gay teens at Ontario schools, so a lot of authority figures have been making "It gets better" videos for YouTube. Here's one from the Premier of Ontario.

This is actually more than just a platitude. The Premier is passing new rules that force all Ontario schools to agree to support "gay straight alliance" groups if students want to start them up. This has many religious people up in arms, because they say that it infringes on their rights.

Liberals have been tap-dancing around this issue, but the overwhelming fact of the matter is that this really does infringe on people's religious rights. If you look at a lot of religious groups, they do teach that we should hate gays and lesbians. Indeed, there are individual quotes in the Bible that suggest we should kill them.

"If a man lies with a male as with a women, both of them shall be put to death for their abominable deed; they have forfeited their lives." (Leviticus 20:13 NAB)

Of course, it also says in the same place that we should kill anyone who hits or curses their father, commits adultery, atheists, people who believe in other religions, etc. But the main thing is that the current, oral tradition of very large religious congregations teaches that we should ostracize, bully and abuse homosexuals and lesbians.

Is it any wonder that naive children act on these teachings of the church?

The question is, therefore, whether or not politicians should be going after church teachings and outlawing the ones that are causing real suffering to children?

This is not a straight forward question. Enlightened politicians, like the Premier, have an obligation to avoid letting the baser elements of society whip the public into a frenzy of hate. It isn't enough to be right, it's important to do the most you can to avoid harm. This means that when a politico is faced by an evil, manipulative scumbag that just might be able to mobilize the public if they throw around enough lies, falsehoods and innuendos,

they should be willing to consider bending a little in order to avoid a greater catastrophe.

The problem is, however, that if we pander too much to the religious bigots in order to deflate their attempts to mobilize the public, we run the risk of letting said bigots win half a loaf through just threatening to go for the whole one. And that in turn, raises the issue of whether the forces of darkness can eventually take over by forcing one compromise after another compromise out of the other side.

There are a lot issues raised by this 'cultural warfare', but two come to my mind which I think are both very important and very rarely raised.

The first one is the way liberals almost invariably let the bigots wrap themselves in the mantle of "morality". I personally don't think that it is moral to preach hatred and intolerance towards people because of their sexual orientation. I don't think hatred of any form is moral. I also think that it is very important to understand people who are different, even if we do not approve. I also believe that if people who are intolerant did try to understand the people that they don't approve of, they might find that their intolerance is totally unjustified. It may not be true that "to know all is to forgive all", but I do believe that "to know all is to forgive a great more than you would have before".

Not only do I think that intolerance is immoral, I also think that will-full ignorance is too. Indeed, I think that there is a great deal of will-full ignorance in our society. People who refuse to really look into important issues---such as global warming---and instead simply believe what is tremendously convenient to their worldview are being will-fully ignorant.

I understand that traditional religion doesn't consider hatred, intolerance or will-full ignorance as being immoral. But I think that if people of good will pushed ordinary folks on the issue, we'd find a great many citizens do think of them that way. The problem is, that most liberals are so committed to the language of moral relativism that they refuse to use this, the strongest weapon in their arsenal.

The second issue that comes to mind in this debate is the way bigoted people seem to be manifesting some sort of outrage against their loss of a certain type of privilege. The problem is that if you were a white, middle-class, heterosexual, Christian, male, you used to be "on top of the heap". This meant that you were the last laid off, the first hired, people laughed at your jokes even if they weren't funny, and you could force other people to adhere to a code of behaviour that you believed in even if it made no sense to them. Now things are a lot more egalitarian. And you know what? A lot of people don't particularly want there to be prayer in school because they are either atheist or non-Christians. People like Perry (or the Republican primary voters he is trying to suck up to in the above advertisement) don't like losing this privilege. Most of them are too insensitive to understand that there are people out their that don't want prayer in schools or discrimination against gays, others just don't care because they are right and those other people are wrong.

I think we need to understand how tremendously awful the world must seem to these people. Younger people often forget this stuff, but at the advanced age of 52, I can remember when blacks were still getting routinely lynched in the American South for being "uppity", the police in Toronto were still arresting gays for being "found ins" at bath houses, my sister was flat out told that she couldn't enroll in a horticultural schools "because they don't allow women to take any of the courses", abortion was illegal, etc. For the older, tea-party types that are so important to the Republican and Conservative parties, it must seem like the world has been taken over by Martians.

Understanding where these people are coming from is not the same thing as accepting their behaviour, though. We simply cannot allow these people to damage our society the way that they have been doing. What needs to be done, therefore, is the creation of a public discussion that changes the "terms of discussion" so they no longer get to wrap themselves in the mantle of "morality". People need to stand up to these folks and use their own language.

The above Youtube parody is a step in the right direction. Unfortunately, it can easily be dismissed as being "sacrilegious" by anyone who refuses to listen to what the actor is really saying. I do think, though, that people like Rick Perry and his supporters need to be "carpet bombed" by people who tell them that they don't think that picking one specific quote from the Old Testament then using it to preach hatred and discrimination really fits in with the over-all message of Christ as expressed in the New Testament.