artist's conception of ancient Greek soldiers in phalanx formation 

A serious problem with the idea of a society that is balanced, loving, peaceful, and prosperous is the problem of violence. A prosperous, orderly, just state will be envied by its neighbors, and thus it will be in danger of being attacked from without. Even within that state there will be some people who will try to get luxuries that they have not earned and to get those luxuries by either force or deceit. If we can arrive at a global system of governance at some time in the future, the outside invaders will cease to be a threat because every human on the planet will be a member of one cultural community. But the realizing of that dream is a long way off. And even then, any such state will still have people in its midst who will try to become wealthy in sociopathic ways. 

What can be done about the alien invaders and the criminals among us? Plato tackled this problem long ago. His solution is just a detailed, rational version of what most societies even in his time had been doing for centuries. (There is a link below to one of the online versions of "The Republic", Book II where these matters are discussed. *)  

We have to fund and train professionals who are skilled at individual and group forms of fighting and whose loyalty is to the community that they serve. Police and soldiers, in other words. Plato said that the community, via the state that the people set up, should pay for the training and maintenance of one professional force for both tasks. If these professionals are skilled at subduing and, if necessary, killing people who threaten the stability of the community, then logically, they should be available for those tasks whether the threats are from within or without. 

There is always a danger, however, that the kinds of people that can do the policing and soldiering may have too much of what Plato calls a "spirited nature". If we train police personnel and soldiers to not just be skilled in violence but focused and driven in their pursuit of targets, what are these people to do when there are no threats around? They can only sharpen their skills and hone their fighting edge for so long. Sooner or later, they are going to get restless. And then there will also be the ones who have already been to war and fought and killed. They will find life in an orderly community hard to adjust to. 

There are many examples of these kinds of characters in film and literature. Their stories dramatize, sometimes really well, the difficulties that restless and poorly adjusted soldiers and police personnel undergo when they are stuck in prolonged periods of inactivity or, harder yet, retirement. "The Great Santini" is about such an American. The character Al Neri in "The Godfather" is a former policeman fed up with the inefficiency and stupidity that he sees in the New York Police Department. Captain Willard in "Apocalypse Now" tried to go back to the US after one tour of duty in Viet Nam. He found he couldn't adjust. Paul, the protagonist in "All Quiet On the Western Front", knows that he and his comrades will not be able to handle civilian life if they do survive to go home. In the end, he has no idea what he is going to do. The book's ending even implies that he let a sniper get him because he didn't want to live anymore. After years of trying to adjust, Luke in "Cool Hand Luke" is destroyed by the guilt he feels over the things that he did in the war. That's what the movie is about.

                                    Paul Newman (and supporting cast) in "Cool Hand Luke" 

In Indian culture, "Such A Long Journey" focuses on a man who thought he was doing patriotic acts for his nation, and who finally realizes that he has been manipulated. Fortunately, he is resilient and it appears at the end of the story that he is going to survive by returning his focus to his family, where it probably should have been all along. In Canadian culture, the novel "Three Day Road" is about two aboriginal Canadians, one who is destroyed by World War I, and one who makes it back to his former life, scarred but able to go on because of the love of his aunt. They have no one else in their family any more, but they do have each other, and she refuses to give up on him. Her love saves him in the end.   

Every generation of retired soldiers and police personnel in every land has contained thousands of glaring examples of people who could not adjust to civilian life. Every nation has in its culture works of film and literature that dramatize the plight of these psychologically ruined people. Some of the real people who have seen and done horrors do go back to civilian life successfully, which proves that the human psyche can be very resilient. But many others don't. The shame on the rest of us comes when we abandon the veterans and let them sink or swim on their own. They need help, but, by and large, they do not get it. That situation is very wrong. Perhaps, in future we can do better.  

Plato does deal with some of these problems. In "The Republic", Socrates and Glaucon discuss how it can be possible for a "spirited nature" to be combined with a "gentler nature". Socrates feels that there is real evidence that the two can coexist in one living being because he sees it in good dogs. The best dogs are gentle to the persons that they know and trust and vicious to strangers when they need to be. Surely, he implies, humans can have combinations of opposite qualities in their natures as well.  

But Socrates hasn't really settled the matter. There are still problems with his line of thought. In the first place, the specially trained dogs called "K9" dogs, that is ones trained by the police or military to attack on command, have for centuries been euthanized after they reach retirement in nearly every country that has such dogs. There is just too great a danger that they may fall into the wrong hands, and be used as subtle, lethal weapons. They can look harmless until they see an event or hear a command that triggers their attack response. Is there a similar danger in retired police or military personnel? I think the answer is yes. Even in our times, the mercenaries who fight all over the world in dirty little hidden wars are often disillusioned, idle professionals who have left official service, but who were originally trained in the West.    

In the second place, Socrates does not deal with the ultimate goals toward which these professionals should be trained. What general principles are to be used as guidelines in the running of the state? Those ideas, he says, are too complex for soldiers to be concerned with. The general principles that must be used as he sets up his ideal state are matters to be understood and adjusted only by his ruling class, the philosophers. 

Ordinary citizens should concern themselves only with doing their jobs well -- farming, healing the sick and injured, making shoes, and so on. Soldiers and police should concern themselves only with staying in peak physical and mental condition, ready to fight at any time. Only philosophers have the attributes of intelligence and education that will be needed to understand the principles behind these matters and to make decisions involving the weighing of gentle, loving natures and spirited, vigilant ones. The balances that need to be struck to keep the state moving forward vigorously, but safely, are too subtle for most of the population to grasp. In fact, Socrates (who is only a voice for Plato) even favors the policy of telling "noble lies" to all who are not philosophers if those lies are needed to give focus and determination to the whole state. Whatever else happens, the state must survive. That axiom is basic in "The Republic", even though Plato never articulates it openly. And in fairness to Plato, the same axiom appears to have been basic to all nations and the states they have set up all over the world for long as we have records or artifacts of human activity. 

The people have to be brainwashed and then distracted with "bread and circuses", as the Roman poet Juvenal put it. The police and military will be drawn from those among the general population who are best suited to do soldier's types of duties without question or critical insight. The state can't afford to contain a whole lot of citizens who analyze and question. If it does, it won't act decisively in a crisis. So the thinking goes, and not just in Plato. 

If you've been reading this blog, you will know that I bitterly disagree. The whole point of the smart and educated people in society ought to be to explain to everyone what is going on at the top levels of society and why. Smart, educated people using their gifts to manipulate others are the moral equivalent of strong, trained fighters using their skills to bully. Just as wrong for either of them to do it. I tell people every nuance of every problem that I see out there in the world because that is simple justice. I don't pose as being too good for the people. I was born, raised, and educated in a working class family and neighborhood, and I disagree diametrically with all who pose as being above the people. In the end, no one is. 

No more "exceptionalism" for Brits, French, Canadians, Americans, Chinese, Serbians, Catholics, Protestants, Hindus, Muslims, Plato's philosophers, or anyone else. The day of blind patriotism and noble lies has to end. Freedom and love, courage and wisdom don't need to be justified in that unquestioning way. These values can be justified logically to all by our showing how they connect to the roots of empirical reality. Moral realism, thoroughly understood, proves the simple good sense of pluralistic democracy. Freedom and love in balance maximize our chances of evolving and surviving over the long haul. In the end, there is no deeper or more worthy principle for any of us to aspire to. 

*http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/republic.3.ii.html    

                                                         the Golden Temple of Amritsar 

Today two interesting events coincided. In Canada, we marked the 30th anniversary of the Air India bombings, which are not widely known outside of Canada, but are hugely important here. This date coincided with the decision by the governor of South Carolina to have the Confederate flag removed from the state legislature. 

In Canada, as far as has been shown in court, the Air India bombings happened after a group of Sikh extremists based in Canada put bombs on two flights, one going to India, via Europe, and one going to Thailand, via Japan. The first bomb went off near the Irish coast, killing all 329 aboard, mostly Indo-Canadians going to visit relatives in India. The second partially malfunctioned and killed two baggage handlers in Japan as the package holding the bomb was being transferred between flights.  

None of the people who died in the Air India bombings had any personal connection to the crime that the extremists were angry about. Nor did the men in Japan. That crime had occurred in June of '84 when the Golden Temple in Amritsar was attacked by Indian Army troops. Sikh rebels had made it their last refuge during religiously based conflicts in the spring of 1984. The Indian Army cornered the last members of the movement there. When the soldiers took the temple, many artifacts in and near it were destroyed, including a library of sacred books. Indira Gandhi, the Indian Prime Minister of the time, was assassinated in Sept. of '84 by two members of her Sikh bodyguards. Then came the Air India bombings. 

So things go. Everywhere, it seems. 

Or maybe not. 

The RCMP investigation and the subsequent series of trials in Canada has dragged on for decades and to date has cost over $130 million. But about ten years after the bombing, I remember clearly one of the sons of a woman who was killed off the Irish coast saying that one good thing had come out of the disaster. He had felt a deep change come over the big majority of people in Canada who were not Indo-Canadian. Sometime in those years, people had stop shrugging off the deaths as "just a bunch of turbanned guys mad at one another" and stopped talking about "just a bunch of 'those' people dead". Canadians had come around to seeing the victims as human beings. Heart deep, the tragedy had truly become one for all Canadians. I had been struck by that very realization earlier that day. 

The connection between that event and the decision by the governor in South Carolina is vividly clear to me, but perhaps it could use some explaining. 

America is finally coming to terms with its prejudices. I feel it soul deep. The reason that Governor Nikki Haley can announce that the Confederate flag is coming down at the state capitol is the same as the reason that Walmart and Sears can announce that they will not sell any such flags or any products bearing their likeness anymore: the deep currents of decency and sense have reached critical mass all over the US, even in the South. Millions of white people are finally getting it. "Those people" are human beings. They complain about traffic and get itches in awkward places just like anyone else.  

And it's not as if people who want the Confederate flag taken down are belittling the courage of the millions of Southerners who fought in the Civil War or who supported the Confederate soldiers in that time. They were brave people. They fought with unbelievable courage. 

But they were wrong. Not in the sense that they were evil, but in the sense that they were mistaken. As were the Sikh extremists in more modern times in India and Canada. As have been many soldiers in many wars. And in fairness, as were many German and Japanese soldiers 75 years ago. They did love their homelands and their people. They did make truly noble sacrifices. They were just following a mistaken cause. 

The human race must move toward greater and greater pluralism if it is to survive. Not a uniform population of one kind of faces or a monotone chorus of one kind of voices. A rainbow of skin colors and cheekbone slants and a chorale of voices.

We live in a quantum universe. Trust me, this thought connects. The connection is crucial. 

In a quantum universe, any one of an array of possible futures may come about by any of millions of possible paths. Which will come true is, in part, shaped by the intelligent application of our skills and knowledge to reality here and now. We really do have free will. It isn't a sweet old-fashioned fairy tale told lovingly to children (as some scientists would have us believe). It's real. 

And in a world where so many disasters may be coming toward us, a society that contains a variety of people with a variety of talents increases our odds of finding someone in the population who has an answer for, hopefully, any crisis that arises. Freedom makes diversity; diversity makes us flexible, nimble, and strong.   

I know it's hard to hold that kind of population together. We are built, I believe, at the genetic level to be xenophobic. Scared of people who look different. We got that way after we ran out of meaningful predators hundreds of thousands of years ago. We evolved to become our own predators. We don't eat corpses, but we do, by war, cut what is obsolete, out of the cultural pool. At least, we used to. 

But we have to smarten up. We can't afford wars anymore. Our weapons have gotten too big. 

The answer? How do we choose among the many paths that the members of the human race are preaching about? We use our best wisdom, learned hard and slow by our ancestors. We argue, debate, and discuss. We make our cases and present our evidence and then we listen. Really listen. Then we choose for the healthy balances of wisdom and courage, and freedom and love, the bywords that must inform our choices. 

Most of all, we learn to love one another. It's love that makes us listen and care.  

I am certain that we're getting there. The change is damned slow, but it is happening. The world is a kinder place than it was when I was a kid. Only a bit kinder, but it is a noticeable bit. 

My remaining fear is obvious: with the hazards we are about to face, will we come together in time? 

Go home tonight and hug your kids. Insist one more time that they say "please" and "thank-you". But before you do, take one co-worker aside and thank her quietly for what you know she did well today. We can't ever really know what effect a kind word might have maybe even years down the road.    

   

                                     hugs outside Emanuel AME church, Saturday, June 20, 2015 

                                        Dred Scott

For today, I think I will begin to discuss the kinds of values and laws that a well-designed global society of the future might be built around.

But we first need to remind ourselves that values do underlie our laws and our laws do enable and shape our way of life. It was in the days when some human beings were not valued as truly human that laws could find a man like Dred Scott to be morally not considerable, not qualified to be a citizen, and devoid of rights in all US courts. The decision was reached in 1857 and was aimed, according to the Supreme Court justices who wrote it, at settling the slavery question once and for all. It had no such effect. The abolitionists in all states, but mostly in the North, became even more vocal and more disenchanted with the whole US system. The decision was, indirectly, one of the factors that contributed to the start of the US Civil War. It comes at the top of the list for nearly all historians of the worst Supreme Court decisions ever. (Wikipedia link below.)

Today we feel that it is so egregiously wrong that we find it difficult to believe anyone at the time could reason so illogically as to tell a man who could learn how to sue for his freedom in the courts, find a lawyer, and help to organize his own case that he was not morally considerable. But that is what the Supreme Court justices found. The reasons they gave are tangled and complicated, but in the end they are a gobbledygook amalgam that only manages to reach a glaring injustice. The majority of people even in those times could see this was so. Many just were tired of fuss and wanted the whole slavery question to go away. Thankfully, some were determined that this one particular form of madness, that had been endured from the time of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, had to be stopped. They hung in there, and eventually, after much pain, it was.

How this example connects to my particular philosophical view is via the consideration of what I would have done if I had been alive in those times. And even what I would have done if I had lived in the South versus what I would have done if I had lived in Massachusetts or Illinois.

It is fashionable today to say that if we had grown up in those states and times, any of us would have gone along with the status quo. My hope and belief is that a sense of decency coming from the core of each of us eventually can't stand to look at what is simply wrong. There certainly were people in those times who became abolitionists even though they had been raised in slave-owning families. I believe I would have been one of the abolitionists.

The largest point I wish to make today then is this: the most important duty that any of us has is to his or her own soul. Or conscience, if you like.

What's fashionable, what the public thinks, and what the received opinions are have all been wrong before, and will be again. In the end, I must answer to my conscience. You have to answer to yours.

I aim to die believing fully that I did my best to be decent, even when that was the least easy option before me.

In our time, this is probably going to mean that we have to give up many comforts so that we stop polluting this planet, in my humble opinion anyway.

I drive a hybrid, minimal miles. My wife and I compost and re-cycle almost all of our garbage. I live in a geo-thermal townhouse complex. But I know I am going to have to do more. We can't go on as we have been for so long.

Right is what it is.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dred_Scott

Tamara Holmes and son, Trenton, lay flowers outside of church in Charleston, S.C., USA 

One of the hardest balances to strike in a modern democracy is the balance between freedom and love. People who love one another want each other to be safe from criminals hidden among the members of the community and from foreign invaders who would force their way onto the territory of the democratic country if they could and then take from citizens their goods or their lives. 

The tricky part is what we face when we try to insure that honest citizens are protected while also allowing all people in the country to move about freely, assemble peacefully, and express their opinions when they wish to. 

What we want is for people to be able to go about their business secure in their persons and their property so that the whole community can flourish and grow, always aiming to keep drawing closer to the goal of creating a respectful community, with prosperity, dignity, and freedom for all. 

The hard part lies in detecting and neutralizing those among us who would by trickery or by force take things that they have not earned from the rightful owners of those things. We want to stop the thieves and con men. They are like leeches on the body of the community, sucking away its lifeblood and giving only more treachery in return. 

In the U.S., the murder on Wednesday night of 9 African-Americans attending a prayer meeting at a church in Charleston, South Carolina, dramatized once more what this love-freedom balance is about. That shooting has stunned the nation and the world yet again. When he spoke of the event, President Obama looked like a dad in the morgue identifying the body of a beloved child. Millions of us, right now, are thinking, "Surely to God, not again. This can't be happening again." But it is. 

The murder rate in the U.S. is four or five times the rates found in all other countries of the developed world. Those of us in other lands who admire and love America are in disbelief once again. This so decent nation surely should be able to solve this problem. Maybe not in a day or a year, but gradually and steadily in real numbers in the real world. Reduce the numbers of homicides down to levels like those found in Western Europe and Canada. Surely it should be possible to take reasonable legal, economic, and social measures that reduce those numbers. 

Unfortunately for the Americans, their constitution gives citizens a right to bear arms, a right that will likely not be restricted in any meaningful way for the foreseeable future, if ever. Also unfortunately, Americans have so far been unable to face the fact that the second amendment was written at a time and in a society that was very different from the way the world is now. Jefferson's original intention in the second amendment, i.e. of citizens keeping the government honest by their being armed, no longer makes sense. Ordinary people armed with sporting arms or even assault weapons would not be able to stop a tyrant, if such a person gained control of the U.S. Armed Forces, or even slow that tyrant down very much. The armed forces today are much more sophisticated, so much beyond the abilities of ordinary citizens in killing power, intelligence gathering, and in fact every other activity involved in doing organized, sustained violence to human beings, that citizen resistance against a modern army in the hands of a dictator seems almost a pathetic concept. If the U.S. Marines really did come to occupy an American town, the local people wouldn't slow them down for anything more than a few days.

Instead, the net effect of the second amendment in this time has been to make it absurdly easy for people to settle disputes or even just give vent to impulsive anger by means of their guns. 

And still that immovable second amendment defies those who are so weary of the killing. 

Or is it immovable? 

I am no lawyer and no expert on U.S. constitutional law. However, it seems to me that if local governments in some states are permitted to ban or severely restrict automatic weapons, multi-shot magazines, and so on - which they are - then there is the thin edge of the wedge that peace-loving people need to begin to make real progress toward stopping the madness. 

Groups of people who really don't want guns roaming about in their communities and too easily falling into the hands of incapable people might be able to band together and create towns and cities of their own. They then could pass laws which require all citizens inside the common space to travel unarmed, or perhaps be allowed to transport sporting arms from a locked cabinet in their homes into the wilds where they can be used legitimately to hunt game, where the law permits. Then the spaces in which firearms are truly controlled could be expanded as new people who just wanted to raise their families in peace chose to move into the safer towns. 

These kinds of towns and cities would be living examples of a balance of citizens' rights and the rights of society, a balance of freedom and love created by the nuanced intervention of wisdom. 

A law banning anyone other than officers of local, state, and federal agencies from carrying guns would be enforceable and fair. Cameras and guards on the entrances to airports, malls, etc. already exist. To build safer towns, we would only need to expand on already existing practices. And hunters who just wanted to shoot some ducks or a deer on the weekend would still be fully able to do so. In a few years, even the carrying of machetes, nunchakus, and so on would be under control. Restraint as a way of life would permeate the thoughts of the people.  

Essentially, this strategy is the one that was used by lawmen in the 1800's to clean up the Old West. Many brave and capable lawmen existed then. They were pretty tough hombres. And effective ones. If it could work for them, in those far more violent and lawless times, the strategy could work for us here and now. Calm, reasoned debate. Compromise. Local pockets of sanity, growing larger with each year that passes.

It could be done.            

                                                   Bass Reeves, lawman of the Old West 

                              Cady Stanton 

                                         Mohandas K. Gandhi 

                                                                    Nelson Mandela 

                           Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. 

I meet people regularly who will quietly, but firmly, tell me that writing a moral code for the whole human race, a code that will bring about a society that will work, and also that we can make stick in human minds so that people really do live by it -- that project is a daydream. It will never be a reality, they insist to me, and they smile wryly like they are telling a harsh truth, reluctantly, to a naive child. 

I've seen some hard times in life. I'm 65 years old, 65 years of acquiring experience in this world, and I was no fool to begin with. 

Yes, I believe we can keep our eyes fixed on the virtues of courage, wisdom, freedom, and love and use these stars to navigate through the "reefs of greed" and the "squalls of hate" (Leonard Cohen), and find our way to a world of peace, prosperity, and love. Our vague, confused, and contradictory moral codes are what stand in our way, and these can be rewritten. Only with a lot of work and some pain, I admit, but the barriers can be overcome and the dream realized. 

Think of Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King, Cady Stanton, and Susan Anthony. How long they worked, how much they suffered, and how much they sacrificed to make real changes in society happen. It can be done. 

America is coming to the end of the second term of an African-American president, the first African-American to win that high office, and America is poised to elect her first woman president. Did Barack Obama live up to every hope that his supporters had for him back in 2008? No. But he has done a lot of good. I am convinced that he will be seen by history as a great man. Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln -- read and see how often they failed and how they were vilified in their own lifetimes. And Hilary, if she makes it (I think she will) will also be a great president. These realities would have been literally unthinkable just a few decades ago. 

We are becoming a kinder, wiser species. India became independent in 1947. The Civil Rights Act was passed in the U.S. in 1964. Apartheid ended in 1994. Even the USSR came to an end without a world war. People of my generation sometimes still can't believe it. 

I will not listen to those who smile cynically and shake their heads. They're the dreamers, not me. They seem to think we can cruise on the values and mores of the past, as we work at ignoring the wrongs in the world, and that all the problems will somehow take care of themselves. That really is puerile dreaming. 

History says otherwise. Those who shrug off their social responsibilities are nearly always the same ones who can hear you describe the horrors of tyrant states in the past and then say, "Yes, yes, but it can't happen here." Oh. Yes. It. Can. 

Democracy has always been hard work. Engage in the debate over a global moral code. That is what the prime value of freedom means. No code has any chance of being accepted by the children of the future unless the large majority of us now find consensus and commit to it, and we will only do that if we have a part in writing it. Freedom means responsibility. 

Keep thinking of John Peters Humphrey and the Universal Declaration On Human Rights.

And never give up. It is fascists who call on their citizens to sacrifice mightily in a crisis. Democracy asks that we work hard to see it realized, extended, and protected every day, and especially in the times when it would be easy for us to be smug and lazy. Those easy times contain the opportunities for progress that we must seize on and work with if we are to enhance the odds of our species' future coming to success and not disaster. 

"When I despair, I remember that all through history the ways of truth and love have always won. There have been tyrants, and murderers, and for a time they can seem invincible, but in the end they always fall. Always. Think of it."      (Gandhi) 

                                                  John Peters Humphrey 

    

A global human society that would be both peaceful and prosperous is not that hard imagine. We have real life instances of codes that many people in many lands can understand, and by and large follow, in many sectors of our lives already. Think of how universal the sign that forbids smoking is.  

Think of how universal the mores of automobile driving have become. Yes, there are cities in which I would be afraid to drive, but even then, there would only be some parts of those cities that would be too hectic for me and only at times of heavy traffic congestion. Yes, there are some major driving laws and mores followed in one group of cultures that are not followed in others. But the differences are only a few, and customs like, for example, driving on the left-hand side of the road are not that hard to get used to. A few hours to get accustomed to the change, and then the odd mistake that you quickly catch yourself making. I've experienced this exact adjustment when I went to New Zealand. 

And there are so many driving mores that coincide. Don't cut other people off when changing lanes. Follow at a safe distance. Don't pass over a solid center line. And so on. Even many road signs are universal. 

For the most part, people drive cars to get from one location to another more quickly than they could if they were walking. A few of the drivers on the road are simply driving around to fill up their idle time, but such a practice, in the first place, costs too much (gas is fairly expensive everywhere) and in the second place, puts pollutants into the atmosphere for no good reason whatsoever. But, in short, we're there because of practical, widely-shared reasons.  

My point is that when people all must share a resource, in the driving case, the highways system of that country, they can readily work out a set of regulations that everyone is expected to obey when using that shared resource because it is in the interest of all of them to do so. Sometimes, you're in a hurry. But you don't drive through crowded streets like a maniac because it is contrary to your own interests over the long haul to do so. You'll very like get a ticket or get in an accident, and then whatever you were rushing to will really have to wait. And you might even get killed. Definitely, not a desirable outcome. 

Emergency vehicles like fire trucks and ambulances can race through city streets when going to a fire or other emergency, but they must turn on their sirens when doing so. The system, most of the time, works, and even the exceptions to the normal driving customs can be accommodated. 

This metaphor is telling us in unequivocal terms that if we could come up with a basic set of values and mores on which the large majority of people on earth could agree, we really could live together in prosperity and peace, and even preserve the ecosystems of our planet while doing so. The earth is our most precious common resource. We can learn to live together on it. And the kids who grew up after the mores fell into place would occasionally wonder, "What was so hard about just simply making sense." Cultural codes, once they are in place, seem as automatic as breathing.  

One day, a teacher in a school somewhere in the world will be working on a history project with a class made up of all kinds of students. The students will be looking at old forms that students back in the twentieth century had to fill out at school. They will find a space on one form which reads: "Racial/Ethnic Origin". A child will say to the teacher, "What was this for?" and the teacher will say, "I don't know." 

We just have to believe.  

                                                                      wind farm in China 

Values and virtues can reach into the highest levels of real modern societies. Here is an example of an effective international project which is doing practical things to reduce green house gas emissions. Wisdom, in the form of engineering know-how, and love, in the form of good will, have combined to create an inspiring string of wind power plants all over the world. Wisdom and love in balance have led to the creation, manufacture, and distribution of a technology that has gone from improbable pipe dream to thriving reality. The parent company is a Chinese company called "Goldwind", and it makes wind turbines which use a technology called "permanent magnetic direct drive" (PMDD). (There's a link to the website below.) 

I am no engineer, but I am deeply impressed with the simplicity and elegance of this company's innovative wind turbine design. Even I get it. A brilliant breakthrough in design and an inspiring example of international cooperation in production and marketing. 

This could be a game changer in the sense that it may cause electric power generated from wind to become our main cure for fossil fuel addiction. But even more importantly, the cooperation of Chinese, developing world, and Western companies on the production and marketing of these dynamos may serve as a model for all kinds of future projects. 

The creative and cooperative forces that make, sell, and install Goldwind turbines give me reason to hope that, as big as our environmental problems may be, we also have some big resources locked up in the human community with which to fight them. 

We're not whipped yet. 

http://www.goldwindamerica.com/project_profiles/uilk-wind-farm/

                             

I am deeply committed to the idea of free will. Unlike many people in science and many more in ordinary walks of life, I really do think we are free. 

We are not free in the sense that we can jump from a cliff and fly away, or do anything similar that is beyond the limits of the human body. I also don't believe that we can, as some wide-eyed optimists say, be anything we want to be. That is absurd. But we are free in the sense that we can alter the courses of events at our level of resolution in the universe, the level of what J.L. Austin, the philosopher, called "medium-sized, dry goods". We can't influence the movements of the sun and the stars, and we can have only very limited, tiny effects on things at the atomic level. But we can do actions that increase or decrease the odds of events happening at our level of resolution. Almost always, each of us tries to influence those events so that they lead on to paths that result in more health and happiness and less illness and misery, for us and our loved ones. Our ability to do that kind of influencing has been rising since we set out on the path that can properly be called "human" more that a million years ago. 

In the philosophical view of the universe, it is quantum theory that opens up the door to freedom. The old view of science, from Newton and Laplace till the twentieth century, was that human beings were stuck in fixed sequences of events that had been preordained by the positions and speeds of particles going back to the start of the universe. If we could somehow know the positions and speeds of all of the particles in the universe, and also know all of the scientific laws by which these particles interact, then we would be able to predict all of the future and retrodict all of the past for every entity that the universe contains. In the Newtonian view, this makes perfect sense. No human brain could hold that many bits of data, but at least in principle, the future in this model is fixed.  

But quantum theory breaks the back of classical determinism. Under quantum theory's model of reality, events at the sub-atomic level, the tiny events that determine all events at higher levels, happen in probabilistic ways, not single chain, cause-effect ones. In that view of reality, there is room for humans not to make any future they can imagine, but to conceive and do actions that alter the probabilities of at least some of the various futures that might unfold so that the ones that contain a little more health for us become more likely and the ones that contain pain for us become a little less likely. And it is worth noting here that building our knowledge of the laws of the universe enables us to get better and better at spotting the opportunities for effective action on our part. In short, we pursue science because the better we get at it, the freer we become.

What does this mean for everyday life? We have every right to expect responsible action from our fellow human beings in most of the areas of living. The way a car maneuvers through traffic is the fault of the driver, not the car. If you insist on smoking tobacco, I will argue to you strongly that you are increasing your risk of one day getting cancer or having an early heart attack and draining our public health care system of resources that could have been spent on a person who got sick or hurt through no fault of her own. You are responsible, to a high degree, for your own health. 

But far more importantly, human freedom means that in most situations I respect your right to be yourself, to choose whatever paths in life you wish, as long as your choices do not directly infringe on the freedom of someone else. And you have a right to say with absolute moral conviction, "Leave me alone. When I want your help, I'll ask for it. I am a free citizen, just like you are. If my wearing my clothes backwards, or keeping my hair long, or whistling while I walk, or eating raw fish on my porch is bothering you, too bad."

The kinds of behavior that actually pose a health hazard to the community as a whole can rightfully be regulated by the community as a whole. But it is immoral for any laws to persecute an individual for living in some way that the rest of the community feels uncomfortable about if that way of living is not demonstrably harming anyone else. Muslim women who want to wear a head scarf in the West are not harming anyone when they do, and therefore, their dress code is no one else's business. The facial veil is another matter because it might enable thieves to evade being identified, but that can probably be handled too if women who want to wear a veil agree to have iris scans so they can be positively identified when they go to a government office, an airport, or a bank. 

Conversely, women in Muslim countries who go about unscarfed and unveiled are not harming anyone. They have a moral right to say, "Hands off my life. I'm not hurting you and therefore, I have a right to go my own way. If you don't like it, close your door, and let me get back to my day." 

Men and women both have a right to go and live in the wilderness if they want to. Or make their living selling old bottle caps, or live on the beach and eat kelp and clams for the rest of their lives. Or keep searching for a perpetual motion machine that they plan to then take out patents for and sell to buyers everywhere. Scientists will tell them that the idea of a perpetual motion machine is absurd by the laws of physics, but they have a right to search for one if they want to. 

What society gains by extending to its citizens as much freedom as it possibly can, within the dictates of physical safety for the community as a whole, is creativity. Invention. While most of the dreamers who chase wild ideas do wind up broke. a few come up with some invention that changes life for all of us. A wise nation loves its eccentrics, even though they do make some people nervous. We have ancient instincts that push us toward fear of the different. Xenophobia. But the whole march toward democracy has been toward a more and more diverse population. And the pluralistic societies around the world work. They are dynamic and productive. In fact, some of their most creative people flew in the face of conventional wisdom and struck out very young on their own paths in life. 

Steve Jobs, Brad Pitt, Bill Gates, and Oprah Winfrey all quit college to strike out on their own. Jim Carrey, Al Pacino, and Walt Disney quit in high school, while in earlier times, Thomas Edison and Abraham Lincoln had almost no formal schooling. 

The point is that being different than the conventional is not necessarily an indicator of very much of anything. Every individual human being has a right to go his or her own way. And society gains by being tolerant. Talent and merit are more and more the qualifications which must drive a society's system when irrelevant qualities, like class, race, sex, ethnic origin, and so on are thrown out. 

It is also worth stating here that a free society is not somehow automatically a weak society. A free society can contain large numbers of citizens who really love their homeland, even though it contains lots of people that they don't understand. It is not only uniform societies in which citizens are pushed or even forced to conform that can fight. If the twentieth century, with all of its horrors, taught us anything, it taught us that. Democracies take a while to reach consensus, and longer yet to get mad. But when they do, look out.  

Let me live where I have every right to say to anyone, "I'm not hurting you so leave me alone. This is a free country. Go your own way and I will go mine." That isn't just pleasant-sounding idealism. It is a way of relating to others and to the world that makes a whole society that works. Better than any of the competing ways human beings have ever found. 

Be yourself. To the limits of your energy. Pursue your dreams, however ridiculous they may seem to everyone else around you. You are doing your fellow human beings the biggest favor when that is exactly how you live. Vaccines for smallpox and polio weren't found by charity workers looking to ease human suffering. They were found by curious, free human minds, just being themselves. 

        

Morgayne

High in the mountains far, far from my home,

I stood upon a barren peak alone,

The dawning of the twenty-first of June,

And as foretold by lore in ancient runes,

A ray fell on the valley floor and showed the outline of a door,

Etched faintly in the surface of the stone.

The amulet I'd carried through the wars

Hung round my neck, upon a leather cord,

And yes, it fit the niche cut in the stone,

And yes, the door swung open on its own,

And then, within, by torchlight glare, I read the scrolls enclosèd there,

The key to all the myths we've ever known.

You ask of Truth to ask no change of you,

The one thing that the Truth can never do,

And so we now must go our separate ways,

There's nothing more that I'm allowed say.

But this one meme I can explain:  Your kind must always learn by pain.

Some kinds die out so others can renew.

So many signs you still ignore; she's crying from her very core.

The sweetest flower the cosmos ever grew. 

Today feels like a good day on which to speak of balance. I've been leading up to it for weeks. 

If there is a virtue that informs all of the others, it must be balance. A balance of courage and wisdom motivates us toward hard work. The athlete that loves to compete and really wants to win studies his sport, his competition, and his own body, and then forms a well-designed training schedule which is filled mostly with hard work. So also the armies that want to win, and the entrepreneurs. In the end, it is the work that they remember the most vividly, and with a quiet sense of satisfaction, no matter how many times they won or lost or how many people knew their names. 

Love in balance with wisdom produces honesty. If we love people, we treat them as we would like to be treated ourselves. And which of us wants to be lied to? I recognize in no one a moral right to guide my life. And that's what lying amounts to. If my butt looks grotesque in these gym shorts, then tell me so. If I can't take what you deem to be the truth, then it is time I grew up and did learn to hear it. I can disagree with you. I can wear them anyway because they're comfortable, and the hell with the way they look to other people. But I value that you tell me what you really think. I can't learn and grow by our relationship as two independent human beings if we have any other policy between us.

And the balance of love and freedom is respect. The respectful balance produces a pluralistic society, one in which different kinds of people all live together and get along. The balance of courage and freedom is self-esteem. Not vanity, but true pride. Knowing you're worthy as an individual and believing that you can do things, set goals and realize them, and live day by day decently. 

In short, even at the highest levels of organization, the whole of society, the whole picture of the human race, the whole living community of the earth, and the particles of the universe, balance is the virtue that rules all of the others. The tao, if you like, which is the idea of balance that made sense to millions in the East for thousands of years, and informed all that they did, from peasants to emperors.   

The scary thing for us in this twenty first century is that we can look back and see that for centuries, balance has been achieved in the human community of the earth by war. We have been our own predators for a long time. We don't eat corpses. Cannibalism has been considered taboo in almost all societies for a long time. But we do cut out the obsolete parts of our total cultural pool by war, and we have done so for a long time. Note also that no conqueror justifies his conquests by saying to his followers, "Those other people are weak. They deserve to be wiped out because they're weak." The rationale is always that the others are evil, savage, sub-human, and that we must get them before they get us because it's obvious that our two societies cannot coexist. So we fight, one side defeats the other, and the losers are re-programmed by the winners to a different culture and a different way of life. The contest is cultural, not racial, and the outcome leads to one culture taking in more territory and members as the other shrinks. 

Now the full picture is more nuanced than the above description captures. Vanquished cultures only rarely disappear altogether, and even when their adherents bow to another culture, the people hardly ever lose their cultural identity - language, artistic traditions, education system, laws, and so on - entirely. But the picture given above of balance in the human community is good enough for the purposes of this post. The ways of extending the idea of balance in real life can be worked out by each reader for him or herself. 

What scares us today is that on the global scale we can't afford to use war as the means of finding balance and determining which cultures should rise and which should fade anymore. Our weapons have gotten too big. The logical question that comes next is, "How do we replace war?" War kept humanity strong for eons. It was ugly, but it served a larger purpose. If we try to eliminate war, will we simply get weaker and sicker, generation after generation, until our cultural vigor fizzles out and we become like the deer on the island where there are no predators? Such cases have occurred in our records of natural history. Populations that have no survival pressures applied to them at all do keep getting weaker. Then when a challenge like a new microbe comes into the population, they die out in one generation to the last individual. 

But I maintain on this page that we can use our intelligence and do better. We can replace war and still remain vigorous and even become more so. And we can learn to live in harmony with nature.  

Sport is a simple, clear example of an activity that aims to do exactly that - replace war in a socially manageable way. There are rules. There is a referee. Sportsmanship as a value to be aimed at guides the players to strive to win not just within the letter of the laws of the game, but the spirit of those laws. Fair play for the love of the game. Yes, rules differ from sport to sport as mores differ from society to society. But excellent wrestlers in another context can be excellent rugby players, or basketball players, or chess players or actors or public speakers, for that matter. 

The managing of the human competitive instincts that we have had programmed into us by nature for centuries will be complex, but that managing is not impossible. The moral crisis that we now face because we have used our brains to make such terrible weapons is demanding of us that we learn to not use those weapons. 

We are going to have to learn to intelligently redirect our darkest instincts into useful and productive activities. Sport, business, the arts, science. And the danger that some frustrated maniac will push that nuclear weapons button is always there. But who ever told you life could be made completely safe? Find that fool and kick his ass. 

What we can do is work very hard for whole lifetimes to get people to think about morals, to take responsibility for their actions and words and strive every day to make a better world. A respectful, wise, courageous one. And most of all, to teach the kids that there is inherent worth in every other human being, no matter that person's race, religion, gender, or abilities. 

Tough, smart, motivated, decent kids. Ones who will look back at us and smile, thinking that we were well-intentioned, but so feeble and naive. Of course, life can be managed and enjoyed. Why did our grandparents find that so difficult? 

Mutualistic relationships exist in nature by the millions, just as much as predator-prey ones do. The crucial difference between us and the rest of the animal world is that we can manage our relationships intelligently. We can learn to employ more and more nuance in our dealings with nature and with each other. If we have the smarts to make terrible weapons, we also have the smarts not to use them. 

A better world. Hard. Not impossible. And with the internet working for us, getting a little more believable every day.      

                                          Mutualism: plover cleaning teeth of Nile crocodile 

                                                       fish cleaning sea turtle's shell of parasites 

This is probably as good a time as any to extend my theory of cultural evolution into areas that are really controversial. So let's consider why belief in a moral code is practical and, in fact, is vital if a nation is going to get strong and stay strong. Keep in mind all through this discussion that the kind of moral code that I am speaking of is composed of values that inform and guide the big majority of the actions of every individual citizen, even when no one is watching and there is no direct reward in it for the individual living by the code. 

Virtues like courage, wisdom, freedom, and love are not just vague, nice-sounding terms. Living by a balance of courage and wisdom, for example, drives the believer to the same old tedious pattern that we are all wearily aware of, namely hard work. But people who generally accept that life is built around toil make a strong, vigorous, dynamic society. Thus, those people survive, and their way of life goes on and spreads. There have been societies of people who by luck have found their way into environments where the living was easy and who then chose to live pretty much that way. But sooner or later they always came into contact with people from more driven cultures, and the easy going then became easy prey. 

Not a nice picture, but in this blog I have to put truth before political correctness. Colonialism was mostly pretty ugly for those who were not the colonizers, but it worked in the sense that it gave powerful nations, mostly European in the last few centuries. huge new areas of land with resources to exploit, making those nations even more powerful. This was not justice, but it was reality. The Europeans now are trying to right the injustices in most parts of their former empires, but it's taking a lot of time and money. Shocking whole peoples - militarily, politically, economically, and culturally - takes a long time to repair. But we are getting there. Justice is a higher value for most people in most societies than are power or profit. 

It is also worth noting here that corruption has pretty much nothing to do with race. Some of the worst and best of government officials are white, or black, or Asian, or aboriginal. The countries of the former Soviet Union, whose populations are almost entirely white, currently have worse cultures of bribery and corruption than the better ones in Asia and Africa. 

And we can examine some other values as well. For example, love combined with wisdom yields honesty. If you really love people, you don't lie to them. When you can see the old way of life of a whole people is obsolete, that it doesn't work anymore, and that it probably never will again, you have to tell them what you really think. For example, the buffalo are gone. They aren't coming back, therefore, the way of life built around the buffalo is over. Someone needs to say that bluntly for all to hear before we can make any progress toward righting the wrongs done to the plains tribes of North America. 

In fairness, the same teller should be part of the program which helps those tribes to write a new cultural code for their people, one that will enable them to keep the parts of their old culture that are still viable (e.g. sports, public speaking, dance, the fine arts, and especially their spiritual belief system) while also writing new roles for themselves in the larger society and then educating their kids to fill those roles. 

But now, let's look at an even larger view of human culture in order to see how values yield survival. For example, consider the role that honesty has in history's strongest societies. 

The single biggest hurdle that countries and tribes all over the world have to overcome as they try to build what is called an "economy of scale" is corruption. Bribes and kickbacks paid to government officers and in the private sector drain the economy like parasites. The monies involved in the shady, corrupt exchanges do not represent any real "wealth" in the economy. No goods or services are being produced, or bought, or sold in such exchanges. As a result, the corrupt country's currency keeps sinking in value. The country's economy has fewer and fewer real goods or services present in it. 

Aid monies sent into the country dwindle away and fizzle out. Few to no new facilities, goods, or jobs come out of the aid monies. They mostly end up being spent by crooked government officials to buy foreign goods. Thus, those aid monies exit the needy country's economy having done little to no good. Or they end up in foreign bank accounts, secreted away by corrupt ministers and their families and friends with an eye to the day when they will leave public service and retire rich. Buildings, roads, and bridges collapse because they are built by engineers who bought their degrees and in reality can't do long division. Doctors trained in little more than skipping class ease no pain and cure no disease. And the list of ills goes on.

The people in these poorer, developing world countries often had ways of life in which the family and the tribe were the limits of one's culture. Inside these smaller populations, most people were hard workers and honest citizens. It was only when nation states with huge territories and populations began to emerge in these areas of the world that temptation grew too strong and disconnection between one's crimes and their consequences became too easy to slip into. Which is all only to say that the larger a political entity becomes, the more its officials must be programmed to live by moral values. And even then, the efficiency of the system can decay if it is not constantly policed. China had an excellent, merit-driven civil service for centuries, but it fell into decay when the nation had things too easy for too long.   

I offer all of this explication simply to show that values or virtues, if you prefer that term, really do cause more idealistic and disciplined cultures to grow and ones that are less so to shrink. Note again that it is not enough for values to be recited by the general run of the population. The values must be lived if they are to make an economy of scale possible. 

Whether people have to believe in a deity of some sort to be really virtuous or whether, alternatively, they can acquire the habits of honesty, hard work, etc. without having to believe that God is watching is a subject worthy of another discussion on another day. But this much is clear: economies of scale are impossible in countries where hard work is thought of as what you do when you have no other choice and honesty is for chumps. A country where such is the general attitude will stay poor. An economy of scale is not possible in a country until its people have a realistic moral code programmed into them, and those morals are believed and lived.   

For patient readers, two posts in one day. Why not? 

We need to touch on one more religious tradition in this set of essays on world religions and their import for the realist model of human cultural evolution. 

China is the world's most populous nation, and has been for a long time. At least in part, Chinese values have enabled the people to build a huge nation. Geography, accidents of history, and resources figure in the calculation too. But cultural programming is the big determiner of a nation's success. 

"China has a massive population but lacks in technological sophistication and standard of living," you might reply. These claims are misleading and only partly true. The average person in China had a better standard of living than the average person in Europe right into the late nineteenth century. Our much vaunted Western technology did not begin to trickle its benefits down to the masses until nearly 1900. In Victorian times, the squalor in Britain's slums was of a kind that would sicken us. And we must not forget that this technology, childishly handled, made possible the horrors of the twentieth century, beginning with World War I in 1914. 

So what worked in China? In large measure, the values of Confucianism. Confucius and his later interpreters instructed people to care deeply about their character, to set virtues before themselves as standards to be lived up to in every action and word every day. The most prominent of these were what we would call "compassion" and "self-discipline". The result of these virtues being practiced by millions was a hard-working, law-abiding population, which made a productive, stable community, province, and state. 

Let us also not forget that though many Chinese for centuries lived poor, uncreative, unimaginative lives, China also had some amazing innovations. Paper, gunpowder, the compass, silk, tea, porcelain -- all of these, the West was a long time in matching. Or stealing. On the other hand, some of the Chinese, when they first fought Western troops in the 1800's, withdrew into bases that were well-fortified on two sides. Combat had become ritualistic. The enemy was supposed to attack the side that could be defended. In that way, there would be a fair, sporting contest. To attack on the unfortified side was considered in bad taste. Western troops, of course, found such ideas silly. China had been cut off from the rest of the world for too long, I think. 

In addition, women were almost entirely subjugated to men, in Confucian thought, and in the real China, for centuries. The most desirable even had their feet crushed and deformed so that they would walk at a teetering gait that was considered modest and attractive. Poorer women, unfortunately for them in this system, were stuck with "big feet". Ugly. In China, then.   

But in total, I can't help but think, as I watch documentaries on China now, first, of how hard the people can work and, second, how angry they are with the West. Still? Oh, yes. The friendliness, I fear, is, in most of them, about one millimeter thick. And they have reason to be angry. Westerners, especially the British, funded and armed Chinese organized crime leaders, and through the Chinese mafia, pumped opium into the Chinese nation, as they pumped silver and gold out. When the Chinese governments of the times tried to fight back, the were beaten pretty harshly in the Opium Wars and subsequent conflicts. The anger has been passed down through the generations. Yes, they're mad. So would you be if it had been your people. (Think of how many Irish are still mad about the Potato Famine.) And the Chinese are coming on now, my friends. Buying up and exploiting the resources of all other nations -- Africa, South East Asia, Australia, Europe, even the Americas. 1.3 billion. That's a lot of heads to be awakened and fitted with a terrible purpose. 

How many aircraft carriers are they building? How long have they had nuclear weapons? You look it up. But otherwise, have a nice day.  

I've just come back from an "Imagine No Religion" conference in Richmond. Speakers included Richard Dawkins, Lawrence Krauss, Matt Dillahunty, and lots of others. No Sam Harris though. I think he is becoming something of an embarrassment to the atheist/secularist movement. Anyway, here is why Sam is now persona non grata.

And by the way, it's worth saying: to the moral realism question, the people in Richmond had zero answers. I asked, in front of the mike, and on the sidelines. They don't even get the question. They're drifting on the values and habits of their childhood. Not good enough, folks. Not in these times.

Ah, well. Rant over. Here's an article on silly Sam. I admire in him the fact that he at least tried to tackle the moral realism question. Unsuccessfully, but at least he tried (in "The Moral Landscape").

But he is silly Sam in too many other ways.

http://www.salon.com/2013/01/10/why_does_anyone_take_sam_harris_seriously/

Siddhartha's Song

So subtle to discern Art leading Life

Suspend the Beauty, Truth, and Love mirage

Just up ahead

So near you'll surely grasp

Make nympho-fans, undress, back-stage ...on fire

Or grey-haired bankers nod wise, patient heads

the knowing, stoic mothers nobly bear

Ah, heroes all!

O Genius!

So pounce and seize the muse.

Compose your plays and songs to right the world

But to what melody?

And toward whose "right"?

The vision that informs the sad, still eyes

That now see lies in truths and truths in lies

(All sides of every rainbowed gem deceive.)

Will now believe that he should just believe.

In what? What does it matter what? Believe.

A spiral can converge eternally.

O chanting Eastern mystics lead me home!

I am prepared to sit and chat with Death.

A single sigh for my abandoned life

Is not too much to ask or in bad taste

Is it?