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Another harsh post, readers. 

I often have to work at being patient when people begin to speak of their latest New Age faith or philosophy or self-help regimen. Jargon. Rituals. Gurus. These are the trappings of a way of going backward. Many of them get traction today because they are anti-science, anti-Western, and anti-establishment, and not ...the latest poison term ...Eurocentric. For God's sake, don't be Eurocentric. 

God bless Barack Obama for going to Africa, to Kenya, the country of his father's birth and heritage, so that what he had to say would carry ten times the weight of anything that, for example, I might say, and then saying, without mincing words: 




“Every country and every culture has traditions that are unique and help make that country what it is, but just because something is part of your past doesn’t make it right; it doesn’t mean it defines your future,” Obama said, citing the recent debate in America over the Confederate flag. 

“Around the world there is a tradition of oppressing women and treating them differently and not giving them the same opportunities, and husbands beating their wives, and children not being sent to school. Those are traditions. Treating women and girls as second-class citizens. Those are bad traditions. They need to change.”





This speech went largely unnoticed by the mainstream media in the West, but it seems to me it is huge in terms of the philosophical issues it tackles. He is saying that moral relativism is wrong. It doesn't work. People everywhere have to stop using it as an excuse for staying mired in the practices that they find comfortable, and this is especially true when reasoning and evidence can be given which show those practices are cruel, stupid, and unnecessary. 

I am a Western, scientistic kind of thinker through and through. I believe that we can show with reasoning and evidence - evidence found in the history of every country and civilization of which we have any records - that the values called "courage" and "wisdom" and "freedom" and "love" keep rising as a society's levels of civilization, culture, and affluence keep rising. This is not a lucky coincidence. There is a system of cultural evolution operating among the human societies of the earth. The study of that system is a science that we have only begun to understand. 

But the larger view - the one that says the scientific method can be applied by us to all other phenomena, including ourselves, and that it is in that direction of improving our knowledge that our salvation lies - that larger view I subscribe to absolutely.  

On this matter of moral realism, I have written at length in other posts on this blog. 

Today, I will speak of one of the implications of this position, which is that whatever else we do, we can't start seeking our salvation or redemption by going backward. Stopping scientific research. Refusing to vaccinate our kids. Rejecting genetically modified foods outright. I am in favor of our doing more research on these technologies and on others that are controversial. For example, GMO's make me especially nervous. I worry that we may be losing biodiversity, and it is one of the four main pillars on which our planet's ecosystem rests, the others being air, water, and soil. I worry that one of our genetically modified crops or several of them acting in conjunction may cause the ecosystems of the earth to evolve a virus or fungus that will wipe out some of the current species of the earth completely before we can even begin to find an answer to it. We have to proceed with great caution when we insert new life forms into an ecosystem.  

But to turn away from the achievements of the West to anything, however vague and unproven, that is non-Western simply because it is non-Western seems like madness to me. The scientific advances of the West have created so many helpful technologies including the ones that have enabled you and I to communicate as we are right now. 

Yes, we are going to have to find alternatives to war - values, mores, and comprehensive ways of running economies that keep us vigorous but not militaristic. Yes, we are going to have to find energy alternatives and end our use of fossil fuels. But no, we can't do those things by getting seven billion people to go back to burning wood in caves. 

There are many similar issues that I could discuss, but I think the point is clear. We can't go back. We have to go on - more carefully than we have in the recent past, with more sensitivity to systems, living and non-living, biological and cultural, but this will be hard, not impossible.
  
A song that captures my antipathy for all forms of mystery, bafflegab, and pseudo-science is the one that I give a link to below. It was actually written about a personal love relationship that fell apart, but it describes a man who was very skillful at mystery-making. It also contains some of the most intensely honest, un-cliche lines ever written in any language, and it was written by someone who knew that mystery-making, famous fellow the best of anyone in his life. Her indictment is as damning as an indictment of a human being can be.  



Now you're telling me you're not nostalgic. 
Then, give me another word for it. 
You were so good with words, 
And at keeping things vague. 

'Cause I need some of that vagueness now, it's all come back too clearly, 
Yes, I loved you dearly, 
And if you're offering me diamonds and rust, 
I've already paid. 

                                        Joan Baez (writing about her long term relationship with Bob Dylan)


<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2MSwBM_CbyY>

Today is a good day, I think, to talk about one of the heroes of our time. I believe that Barack Obama will one day be looked back on as one of America's greatest presidents. I can support that view with a great deal of hard evidence. 

In the first place, he is an African-American who became president of the United States. That already is an accomplishment. It wouldn't be a special feat if we lived in a just world, but we don't. In this real world, there is still a lot of suspicion and prejudice between people of different races, ethnic groups, religious groups, and so on. It is just hard for a black man to reach that high office. Whites are the majority in America and many of them hate him. 

This point deserves a bit of digression which will turn out to be relevant to my thesis. 

Xenophobia is built into our natures because it leads to wars and war for centuries was the means by which our species stayed vigorous. We are the only species that survives by culture, by knowledge being transmitted from generation to generation, in other words. Other species evolve genetically. The weak and defective die young, do not breed, and do not transmit their genes to future generations of their species. Nature red in tooth and claw is what keeps all other species strong. 

But we get our living out of the environment by subtle tricks of behavior that get us nutrition, warmth, protection from predators, and so on. These are learned tricks; most of the time, we learn them from our parents and the other mentors of our tribe as we are growing up. Only once in a long while do we devise a new trick of our own. We have been evolving in this cultural way for more than 4,000 years and perhaps as many as 50,000. It's a good way to evolve. It's nimble and resilient. We dominate this planet like no other species ever has. In fact, we had to become our own predators and that is why war became a way of life for our species. Stronger cultures swallowed up weaker ones and war kept the whole species strong.  

But our weapons have gotten too big. We now have the capacity to drive the few thousand of our species who might survive a full nuclear exchange to cave lifestyles in a single afternoon. There is even a good chance that by two years after that war, there would be no humans left on our planet. Therefore, "Mankind must put an end to war or war will put an end to mankind" (from one of John Kennedy's speeches to the UN). 

There are people all over the world, including in America, who think the only way to world peace is by one culture completely dominating all others. Such a vision of the future could never work. We need competition between different ways of life. The competition, if it is kept inside the limits of the marketplaces of the world, keeps us growing, changing and evolving. It is also worth noting in passing that any living thing that is not evolving is dying. "Life goes not backward, nor tarries with yesterday" (Kahlil Gibran). We have to evolve or die. 

The dilemma that we are in now is that we have gotten used to war as our way of life and yet we cannot practice war anymore. It can be solved by a moral code which allows us to compete, to stay vigorous, and yet to refrain from full military conflict. This is difficult but not impossible. We are reasoning creatures. Staying on our old warlike course is, in the most basic terms, unreasonable. We really only need to get that truth in order to save ourselves. 

So we have to create a code of human behavior, a moral code, that we can, in large majority, accept and adhere to. There will be delinquents, but they can be handled by a moral code that is translated into a legal code that people really believe in because it has shown that it really works. The courts in the West do, mostly, mete out justice. Again, it is worth noting in passing that this basic need for a legal code that does get justice most of the time for most citizens who have to appeal to it is the key to making a society, perhaps a world society, that works. Judges, lawyers, and policemen being fair will be the key to our survival over the long haul.  

All of this preamble is only leading up to my saying again more emphatically that I really love the current US president, Barack Obama. 

He has searched from the beginning of his first term in office to find the rational solution to every pressing matter that has confronted his administration. He believes in a balance of courage and wisdom, freedom and love.  

Are there tyrants in the world? Of course. Can they be dethroned without a war? Well, if their own people abandon them, yes they can. Can we persuade their people to abandon them? George Bush and his advisers never considered that option. They chose to lie to the American people about the so-called "weapons of mass destruction" that Saddam Hussein was supposedly building in Iraq. America and Britain just had to invade in the face of this "existential threat to the West". Later evidence proved there were no wmd's, and the reports of their existence were all lies. People who could prove that Bush and Blair had knowingly lied to their own populations were even killed for knowing too much. (Dr. David Kelly in Britain)    

Contrast that scenario with Obama's handling of the Arab Spring. A whole slew of tyrant regimes were overthrown by the West's making information available to the peoples of the states living under those tyrants. Not one American life was lost in the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi in Libya. More than 8,000 American lives and a trillion dollars ($1,000,000,000,000) in funds were lost in Iraq. And for what? A new regime that is continuously unstable because its leaders are full of spite for other groups in their state that they see as enemies. Iraqi Sunnis (the minority) and Iraqi Shia killing each other as they have for centuries. Libya today is still far from being a stable state, but its internal problems and the problems it causes for the rest of the world pale into insignificance beside what ISIS and its allies are doing in the former Syria and Iraq, that madhouse created by Bush and his cronies. In the meantime, Libya is making progress. Democracy just takes time. 

This way will very likely work in Iran as well. A treaty which limits Iran's nuclear ambitions to peaceful programs and in return lifts the sanctions of the major nations of the world, of which America is only one, lets the Iranians save face while it also opens them up to the ideas, goods, and mores of the West. With the rates of information flow available to the young of Iran, I believe that the old guard, the ayatollahs and their supporters, are doomed to extinction. Young people in Iran mostly don't think that the US is the "great Satan" anymore. The hand held out by a treaty written in a spirit of friendship and respect is powerful confirmation of their belief that they can be citizens of the world, just like people in the West. They can even keep their religion if they want to. The laws of the Western countries guarantee them freedom of religion even if they move to Michigan, Bristol, or Toronto. And those laws, for the most part, work. 

In short, Obama's way can work. Reason and respect can work. They just take time. But Bush's way of war and humiliation does not. The hatreds just deepen and go on and on.

Add to this picture the fact that Obama got health care for all Americans. The plan is far from perfect, but now that it's in place, amendments can be made. The first hurdle has been successfully overcome. 

I could go on and on, about immigration, gun control, women's rights and many other matters, but I think my main point is clear. Barack Obama is trying the way of decency and sense, at home and abroad. Courage carefully balanced with judgement; freedom balanced with love. He is trying to do what John Lennon said: "give peace a chance". 

War may be good for some businesses, but it is terrible for most. They lose assets without a dime of compensation. War may be good for some military people. Career officers who can't move up in a peacetime force, but can in a wartime one. But war is terrible for most ordinary soldiers. They die horribly or come home maimed to a country that does not want to care for them now that their time of military usefulness has passed. Then they watch the schools that their children must be sent to deteriorate. And for centuries, the poorly educated kids that came out of those schools in every part of the world got sent off to another war. 

But in these times of the internet, at least one of Karl Marx's predictions is coming true. When people get informed, they realize that they don't have to put up with this madness. In our times, blind obedience is no longer necessary or even possible. People are becoming too well informed for the tyrants to manipulate anymore. Even the wealthy and powerful know that. 

All of this, I believe, Barack Obama knows. And he knows the upside too. Give people a chance and they will, usually, do the sensible thing, which, it turns out, is usually the right thing. 

God bless Barack Obama. I don't know for certain whether he is aware of all of the subtleties of cultural anthropology and history, but he is acting like a manager of world affairs who is. He even went so far as to say recently in Kenya that traditional cultural mores can't be used anymore as justification for the mistreatment of women and girls. This was a very daring statement, it seems to me, because it is addressed to people all over the world who hide behind their culture and the values it espouses even when those values are clearly wrong. 

It also is clear evidence that he does understand the nuances of anthropology and history. He is gently but firmly telling not just Kenyans but the whole world: "We have to change. Ourselves. Our ways of thinking. Americans. Russians. Indians. Chinese. Christians. Muslims. Jews. All. Even you and I." 

He's trying to give humanity a better future. He gets it. 

                                                 President Obama in Kenya (July 2015)

                                        Orlando Bloom as Balian in "Kingdom of Heaven" 

I keep trying to frame my thoughts on moral realism in slightly different language and to support my argument with different examples taken from life and art so that some people who do not get the main point in one post may get that same point when it is presented in different form in a later post. 

So what is that main point? Let's give the argument another, fresh form. 

The words we use to name our values really only name patterns in human behavior, patterns that we believe are valuable to remember, to give prominence to in our thoughts, and to use to guide our own behavior, first, in our daily lives, and second, in the special circumstances of a crisis. For example, we learn the concept that we call "courage" because our ancestors discovered the concept and then taught it to their children eons ago. And the whole community in those ancient times developed this concept because living while trying to be courageous, and teaching children to do the same, caused more people in that society to survive and pass the concept on to their children. A courageous society grows. An indolent one shrivels and dies out. 

Our ancestors also simultaneously learned the concept that they called "wisdom" because experience taught them that courage alone could do a lot of damage. Aspiring to be courageous and nothing else gets young people killed in risky behavior and gang fights. Courage guided by judgement/wisdom gets good results for the whole society over the long haul. 


                                          Frodo and Gandalf in "The Lord of the Rings" 

These values were closely linked in the minds of our early ancestors in myths. The hero who goes on a purifying journey and takes on enormous challenges always has a teacher. As I've said before, Jason and Achilles must have Chiron, Arthur must have Merlin, Dorothy has Glinda, and Luke Skywalker has Yoda. Frodo needs Gandalf. These myths embed the courage/wisdom balance.  

Freedom and love are more recent discoveries in the values-concepts domain, but they have certainly become important to us. Democracy is a kind of religion in the modern Western belief system and lawyers and newspaper reporters are its priests. "All The President's Men", "To Kill A Mockingbird" and so many other titles dramatize our belief in the values of democracy. It is useful, by the way, to catch that these books and movies would have seemed like much ado about nothing to many of our ancestors. Freedom and love, and the democracy they create, are recent concept acquisitions and we have only been programmed to feel emotional about them in comparatively recent times.

In more primal forms, Mel Gibson loves playing William Wallace, and audiences love watching him do it. Wallace just has to cry out "freedom" even as the English torture him to death. Orlando Bloom was the engaging hero Balian in "Kingdom of Heaven", a movie that was praised in both Western and Islamic countries. He sought to create a kingdom of the soul, a kingdom of conscience, and the mutual understanding and respect that he eventually finds with Salah ad-Din saves the lives of thousands of his followers. 

Ayn Rand has had an impassioned following for decades, and her novels argue that free people are not equal and equal people are not free. Freedom must reign. Her heroes don't just espouse the value of individual freedom, they revel in it. They are creative geniuses who care next to nothing for anything other than the free pursuit of their own talents and entrepreneurial projects. 

Which brings us to some more nuanced thoughts we have to deal with when we look to balance the concept/value we call "freedom" with some other value that will keep the unrestrained pursuit of freedom from turning our society into a wrangling set of mutually hostile vested interest groups that deteriorates into a collection of constantly warring gangs. Freedom run amok is just as destructive to a society as courage is, and just as much in need of a moderating value to keep it on track. 

That moderating virtue is love. Love your neighbors and you will respect their rights to be themselves and to pursue their dreams in any way that does not directly harm you. We can even be in the same line of work and compete fairly in the marketplace and may the best team win. Love teaches us all of that and all of that makes our whole larger society strong.     

My larger point today is that if you see the good sense of teaching values concepts to young people and thus shaping their patterns of behavior so that our whole culture grows larger in numbers and territory by growing greater in courage, wisdom, freedom, and love, then you are, in a profound sense, a religious person. You have a kind of faith. You believe in things that you can't see and you stand by them in times when the events happening around you don't seem to be favoring people who support those values and it would be much easier just to do what's expedient. Give in. Join the Nazis. Sneak around and burn your rival's warehouse. Lie behind your friends' backs. Take the bribe. Cheat on your spouse. But when you truly have values, you don't do those things. Millions like you make your society efficient, affluent, and strong.  

What is even more important to see is that this belief in the realness, the physical realness, of values and in the visible effects that they have on the patterns of behavior of whole societies - this belief has the potential to unite our world. The most determined of atheists and the most devout of religious believers, if they can agree on these minimum essential beliefs, can learn to live together in peace. We can build that better future that you used to dream of when you were a child. 

It is that simple. Or in the words of Salah ad-Din in the film "Kingdom of Heaven", it is nothing and it is everything.  



 
                            Ghassan Massoud as Salah ad-Din in "Kingdom of Heaven"

                                           

                                        Jim Holtz, teacher 



I have to depart from my usual weighty topics today, readers. A dear friend has just died. I am feeling very sad tonight, and in no state to discuss Philosophy, Anthropology, or History. 

I'll try not to get this personal again for a long time. But I have to be personal today. I can't think of anything else. He was a very special man. 

I've decided to post testimonials from a few of his former students, as a way to commemorate his passing, but also as a way to show those of you who visit here and who are teachers, or who may be thinking of becoming teachers, how much what you do matters. You will have many discouraging days, but never forget how important teachers are. You link together the only real, enduring resources that any society has, namely knowledge and children. When that link begins to fail, that society is on its way out. 

Anyway, here are a few of many testimonials I've gathered about Jim. Feel free, if you are a teacher, to imagine that they are spoken to you.   

from Jamie

Mr. Holtz, I'm sorry to hear of the battle you are going through right now. I can't imagine how challenging this is for you and for your family. I just wanted to let you know that not a day goes by that I haven't benefited from your teachings. You gave me a space to feel truly comfortable in myself. To explore, to challenge, to trust, and it's something that I'm sharing with my three year old son as he grows. I wish you the deepest peace you can find and for your family, also. You are in my prayers and I am sending you all my love. 

Jamie

from Kristal 

Mr. Holtz, Thank you for always believing in me and nurturing my love for the performing arts. I appreciated your insight and guidance and your class was my favorite. You didn't just treat us as students, but as people, when you invited us into your home for apple cider after the show. I still think of you often and credit you for giving me the confidence to stand up and be vulnerable in front of my peers. I have carried that confidence with me in my life and for that I am so grateful. Love from "one of your little aphids" forever. –

 

Kristal

from Corey 

Dear Jim, 

I was saddened to hear of your fight against cancer, and I hope this note can offer some comfort. I have nothing but fond memories of you as a teacher at George Elliot--your acting class was for me not just a chance to act out, but to be myself and learn to be comfortable in front of others (something that didn't then come easy). Indeed, one of my fondest memories of high school was playing the lead in “Get Smart”, and taking your direction on not trying to do an imitation of Don Adams' voice, but my own version of it (probably because my imitation was terrible). Perhaps your most important lesson, though, was not just how to act, but how to act more like you--someone entirely comfortable within his own skin, erudite and always a gentleman. These are lessons that I have internalized and made use of in my chosen career (university professor), and I'm sure I'm not alone. I hope it brings you comfort to know the important and lasting impact you've had on the lives of those you've taught. 

All my best, 

Corey 

from Christy 

I can't believe I've been out of high school 27 years. Crazy! But those memories are so clear and you figure in those memories so strongly! And not just in memories. I can honestly say that you played a huge role in my formation. I'm so happy I took Drama. It helped so much with my confidence in everything from acting to job interviews to just thinking on my feet. Thank you, Mr. Holtz! Thank you for going above and beyond as a teacher. You even took Karen and I sailing! 

Love,

 Christy 

from Katharine 

Jim's teaching inspired confidence and his classes were some of the most memorable, even long after graduation. He spoke to his students like adults and never patronized us, he encouraged interesting discussions in his English classes, and his guidance helped me overcome my fear of public speaking. His Drama classes fostered creativity and were so much fun, I always looked forward to them. I send my best wishes and support to his family during this difficult time.

Katharine

from Muriel

What Mr. Holtz Meant To Me!

I don’t know if I appreciated at the time how much work and effort it would have been to head up a Drama department and put on plays with a limited budget. I do know that I loved it. It was a highlight of my high school experience.

I have always loved reading stories, but the chance to bring them to the stage meant that I was engaged in active storytelling in ways that I hadn’t known that I could do. It gave me confidence, self-value, and new skills of expression.

Being in plays allowed me to be excited about a project and to use my imagination. I could be creative. I was passionate. I was free to be all these other parts of myself. It gave me new insights into what was important to me and what I was capable of doing.

Jim created a space where it was safe to do this. I could trust him implicitly with my ideas, which is a rare gift for a teenager. He was patient, kind, and supportive with us all, even when rules were challenged (by others!). It was always a thrill when he would demonstrate his acting ability. I loved his humour and the ways he inspired us to try more. I admired him as a teacher, and I am so grateful that he has been in my life. He made a lifelong difference for me.

Thanks Jim

Muriel 

from Eiko 

Dear Mr. Holtz,

I was so sorry to hear about your illness. I am sending you good thoughts and thinking of you often. Dwight is keeping me updated on how you are doing.

I don’t know if I ever told you what a huge impression you had on me, or how much I enjoyed being your student. I always said that you were the hardest English teacher I ever had, in high school or university (everything was a cake walk after Grade 12). And I like to tell people about how we had no classroom, and had to squat in the drafting room and sometimes at the Burger Baron.

But of course it was Drama that was my favourite. You saw something in me that I didn’t know was there, and playing Ruth in “Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds” changed me forever. You helped me become who I am, and I will always be grateful for that. Being up on that stage, cigarette smoke clouding around me, Nanny doddering in the background; it’s one of my very fondest memories. I think a part of me is still there, sitting next to Beatrice. “Apples! Pears! Cucum…bers!” Thank you, thank you, thank you, for not letting me be Tillie. Anyway, I thought you should know. Thank you so much, for everything.

           Fondly,

             Eiko 

from Neil 

I was blessed to have two high school teachers - Dwight Wendell and Jim Holtz - that taught me to be curious and to live a moral life. A moral life requires difficult choices, but delivers meaningful rewards and relationships. A curious life is one of joyful discovery and wide-eyed admiration of the wonders of life but life-long learning also demands a willingness to change and take action, to make ourselves and our world a better place for everyone.

I have two favourite memories of my time as Jim's student. The first was Jim's frank discussion to our English Lit class about how he came to Canada as a draft dodger. I appreciated his trust in me and my classmates to share a painful time from his private life in hopes that we took away a deeper appreciation of the power of governments and the power of individuals. The second was something straight out of “The Graduate”. "Learn Mandarin," Jim stressed to me late in my Grade 12 year, after I had found out I had been accepted into Carleton University's journalism school. "China will change the world in your lifetime." Just like the guy telling Dustin Hoffman's overwhelmed character in “The Graduate”, “One word: plastics. Think about it." Jim was right about Mandarin and China.

I didn't take Jim's advice, and I have no regrets for that because Jim also taught me to walk my own path, to improvise not only in his Drama class, but with both the opportunities and the obstacles life brings. Times in Jim's Drama and English classes are some of my fondest high school recollections. It was my pleasure and my privilege to be one of his students and to experience his gentle wisdom and his sharp wit.

Neil

from Karen 

In high school, I had a habit of writing song lyrics on the chalk board before classes, which mostly annoyed my various teachers, who would have to erase them when class started. Mr. Holtz on the other hand, found it totally appropriate for his English Literature class. He asked me to write a number of poetry quotes of my choosing on large sheets of paper, leaving room for future writing, and post them around the classroom. He could see when students had unutilized potential, or perhaps just needed some attention, and do something about it. 

He wanted us to think for ourselves, to think about literature and what it was for. He wasn't just teaching the curriculum. He challenged me, asking directly, “What is art? Why should anyone care?” Rather than selecting a short play for us to perform at the district drama festival in 1988, Mr. Holtz wrote the play himself. It was titled, “Why Might We Be.” The play depicted the friendship between three teenaged girls, who didn't fit in because they were exceptionally intelligent, talented, and just a little eccentric. The play is about dance, music, math, feminism, and literature. I'm not sure, but I may even still have a copy of it in a box somewhere. I think “Why Might We Be” was mostly written with his daughter in mind, who is the same age as I am. 

I was a teenager, so of course I goofed around and dropped lines and generally didn't take it as seriously as I should have. But, as a creative soul who also felt peerless and odd, I can't begin to say how much this play meant to me. 

Mr. Holtz: he got it.

Karen 

from Jannelle 

Dear Mr. Holtz,

Janelle here. Needless to say, it’s been awhile. I thought I’d write you a letter to tell you all the sentimental things I never told you.

I graduated from GESS in 1997. Sometimes it feels like a life time ago, but my memory is long, and things are seldom as far away as they seem. I had you for English in Grade 9, and for Drama all through high school. I’m not sure how much of me you remember, students come and go (as do teachers), and the years have a bad habit of blurring and blending, but I’d like to take a moment to let you know that you were so significant.

You used to call us your “little aphids.” Acting class was in the cafeteria. And we spent hours there! Experimenting, exploring, learning, reading and re-reading lines. We auditioned there, we rehearsed there, we created there. We found our voices in that cafeteria, and a part of ourselves that we couldn’t find in any other class. Granted, we were an eclectic bunch, and we tried your patience more than once, but we all belonged there. You included. And it bonded us, didn’t it? That sense of belonging. That feeling that we were all part of something bigger and better and beautiful. Oh, to belong to the stage! And you. You were exactly what an acting teacher should be. Quirky and creative and fun. You were what held us all together, running around, calling us “aphids”, pushing us to find our creative side, ignoring the fact that this was all taking place in a crappy cafeteria with a creaky wooden stage.

You gave to us. There’s no other way to say it. You gave and you gave and you gave. You gave us your time and energy, working with us for hours outside of school, helping us learn our parts and block out our plays. You gave us your patience and your humor, your enthusiasm and vision. You gave us characters to create, roles to devour, exercises to expand on. You gave us a safe place, where we could be ourselves, where we could make mistakes and act and learn and grow. You gave us our cues when we forgot our lines.  You gave us your passion when we tired. You gave us your encouragement when we were frustrated. And then, when the time was right, when the lines were memorized and the staging was blocked and the costumes were made, we took to the stage and you gave us the most valuable thing of all. You gave us your applause. (And some pretty awesome cast parties.)  : 0 )

It takes a lot to put on a play. And you did it. Over and over and over. And I don’t know that I ever properly thanked you for all that you gave us in that cafeteria.  For me, acting was the best part of high school. And I can’t even imagine what high school would have been like without acting. And I don’t want to think about what acting would have been like without you. So thank you. For giving us a home.

But there’s more. Because you gave me more.

You encouraged me to be creative, to think outside the box, to really extend myself. And then you gave me the space to do it. You let me do my own thing, let me take my own slant on assignments, let me find my own way and take my own risks. You let me write. You created opportunities for me, countless opportunities, even after I graduated. Even after I graduated, you still gave. And we had candid conversations, you and I, about this, about that, about all the important things that have nothing to do with classrooms or curriculum. You taught me so much, about who I wanted to be, about who I could be, and it all happened during a time in my life when I was just beginning to understand what that meant, and the gravity of what that meant.

It’s so hard to put into words what exactly it is that you did for me. I respected you so much. I valued so deeply everything you had to say. You were one of the ‘cool’ teachers. And you were on my side. You rooted for me, you supported me, you believed in me. But more importantly, you helped me begin to navigate and negotiate the uncertain waters of who I wanted to be in this world.

You were not just my teacher. You were my mentor. And you were my friend. And you never hesitated, even after I graduated, to give me guidance, direction, and advice. Please know that your guidance was valued, your direction was appreciated, and your advice was trusted. And sound. You mattered. In my life, you mattered.

At graduation, I won an award. You gave me a beautiful speech and presented me with a trophy. The trophy was nice. It was big. But you also gave me something else. During our last acting class together, you gave me a video of all the performances I had done over the years. The trophy went back to the school, for another student to claim.

But the video? I still have the video. I will always have the video. And I can’t help but feel that that the video is the real trophy anyway.

Time moves forward. Curtains have to close, but only so they can open again. I have an eight year old daughter. She has her sights set on Broadway. And so it continues.....

I came to see you a couple years after graduation. I was unsure of what direction to take academically. I was tossing around the idea of graduate school. You were so encouraging. I received my Master of Arts in English with a specialization in Creative Writing from the University of Calgary in Spring, 2008.

And in the winter of 2013, I went to Toronto to pitch my children’s book, “Winter and the Secret of Santa”, to the Dragons of CBC’s Dragon’s Den. The episode aired December, 2013. And through the whole experience, from first audition to final taping, I am happy to announce that my theatrical flair is still intact. Yup. I still got it.

It was always my intention to send you a copy of my book, because I knew exactly what the inscription would be. Please imagine the following, hand-written, on the inside cover:

To Mr. Holtz,

I guess you always knew I was a 

true Puck at heart, because these 

lines have never left me:

If we shadows have offended, 

think but this and all is mended:

That we have but slumbered here, 

while these visions did appear.

And this weak and idle theme, 

no more yielding, but a dream.

Consider this an encore.

With love, respect, and applause,

(And a glass of wine held high)

Janelle 

The reasoning that supports the view that moral values connect us to physical reality is difficult. Explaining that reasoning once again is what my last two posts were devoted to. But the reasoning that I then follow to argue that it is rational to believe in a kind of a deity in this universe probably still seems to many of my readers to be drawing too large a conclusion from too little evidence. 

But let's have another try at reaching that conclusion, anyway. 

If we accept that moral values are our names for patterns of behavior that enable us as whole societies to handle the giant, general qualities of physical reality, then I maintain that when we continue along that reasoning path, the theistic conclusion comes up before us as a choice. And it is rational to choose to believe in God. 

Let's briefly review. Over millions of people and thousands of years, courage and wisdom, in balance, are the human response to entropy. Freedom and love, taken together, are our response to uncertainty. These values cause us to behave determinedly while being clever, and creatively while being kind. Societies that are better at those balancing acts outlast more intolerant, ignorant rivals. If we accept this picture of the universe and our place in it, then the universe starts looking like it has some kind of consciousness of its own. It favors the good. 

Now if we add quantum entanglement and the universal awareness that it implies, the cases for believing in a deity and not believing in a deity get to be pretty nearly even in weight. 

Finally, we see ourselves and our ability to choose as mere parts of the overall calculation. We see that the societies in which people believe in their values, and are willing to fight to defend those values if need be, are the societies that go on. The decent and reasonable over and over defeat the devious and obdurate. Of course they do. Higher levels of decency give us more diverse communities. Pluralistic societies are resourceful societies. 

Consider some examples. 

The Japanese naval codes were broken early on in WWII, but the Japanese never broke the American code because it was Navajo. None of the few thousand Navajo in the whole world ever sold out to the Japanese, and as a result the American code in the South Pacific war was never broken. 

The Brits had the master code-breaker, Alan Turing. He was a homosexual. After the war, his sexual preference was even seen as something to persecute. But in Germany, homosexuality was a death sentence from 1931 on if you were caught. Did the Germans have a Turing who stayed out of sight or even hated Nazism and worked for the Allies? We don't know, but I think the point is clear. A diverse society is resourceful in ways a more homogeneous one can't ever be. 

The Japanese soldiers and sailors were told that Americans were incapable of discipline and sacrifice. They were stunned when they saw the willingness of the Americans to die for their cause. The navy torpedo bombers in the Battle of Midway, in particular. They kept trying hopelessly for hours. They all died. But they ran the Japanese Zeroes that were shooting them down out of fuel. Then, while the Zeroes were refueling on the decks of the carriers Soryu, Hiryu, Akagi, and Kaga, a flight of American dive bombers caught them by surprise. All four carriers were burning in under ten minutes, and that ten minutes made the Battle of Midway the turning point in the Pacific War. 

The first giant step in the building of the atomic bomb was organized and overseen by Enrico Fermi, who had left Europe to escape the Nazis because his wife was Jewish. Many of the scientists who built the bomb in the desert in New Mexico also were Jews who had left Europe for the same reasons. America got the bomb in early 1945. No other country did until well after the war was over. Did the two American uses of the bomb end the war with fewer lives lost on all sides? It's still debatable, but Truman and nearly all of his generals certainly thought so.  

It's not that more homogeneous populations in more regimented states don't have courage or wisdom. But they don't have as much of wisdom because they are so homogeneous. They don't have as many different kinds of people. And their unquestionable courage at that point is not going to be enough. The longer the war goes on, the greater are the odds that they are going to lose. The more regimented states won't, in the end, even have as much population. People come to a democracy from all over the earth because they believe that it will give them a chance in life to build their fortunes in ways their countries of origin did not make available. 

Yes, democracies are slow to anger and to act, but when they do find resolution, look out. 

Now to that picture which shows that the universe is stacked ever so subtly in favor of courage and wisdom and of freedom and love, add the evidence of physics which says that the universe feels itself all over, all at once, all of the time. Quantum entanglement.  

Finally, add the confidence you have when you see all of the evidence and conclude that decency for whole populations is just smart gambling in the long haul. In other words, millions of people like you choosing to believe in values that, in the short-term, they cannot see make a society that has better odds of surviving and passing on its values to its kids. Even your choosing is part of the calculation. Your choosing to believe in decency and sense shows you have a kind of faith. Even if you don't like calling it by that name, that's what it is.  

Add it all up. You come to the theistic total. 

Or to put the matter another way, if you believe values are not just fantasies and they do connect to physical, empirical reality, and you believe that quantum entanglement is not an illusion or a mistake, and you try to live a decent life day by day, choice by choice, I don't much care whether you ever say you believe in God. By the visible evidence, which is all that science cares about, you already do. 

You're missing the therapeutic value of meditation and communion with that conscious universe, but choosing to leave that element out of your life is your choice.  

Alright, God is a hard case sometimes. Has to be. Adults know that. A vast, subtle universe cannot be pulled into shape instant by instant except by a balance of forces. As a result, there have to be the same odds for tragedy as there are for triumph. 

But I'll repeat it one last time: if you try your best to live intelligently and decently, and you keep on trying even when it would be easier to take an impulsive or cynical route, you may say you absolutely do not believe in God. But in reality ... oh yes. You secretly do. 

                                                             Hermann Hesse 

"We are sun and moon, dear friend; we are sea and land. It is not our purpose to become each other; it is to recognize each other, to learn to see the other and honor him for what he is: each the other's opposite and complement."

                       Mustafa Kemal Ataturk 

"My people are going to learn the principles of democracy the dictates of truth and the teachings of science. Superstition must go. Let them worship as they will, every man can follow his own conscience provided it does not interfere with sane reason or bid him act against the liberty of his fellow men." 

My apologies, readers, if my last post seemed confusing. It's hard for me to explain a view of reality that is so different in character from the one held by so many moderns, the moral relativist one. I am a moral realist, through and through. Moral relativism, I believe, if we don't outgrow it, is going to get us all killed. But one more try and I'll move on. 

We humans evolve culturally, not genetically. We've stagnated genetically for probably 50,000 years. If anything, we've gotten weaker over the last 2000 generations. We save people who would certainly have died young in Neolithic times and these people with various conditions and injuries then live to breed, which in primitive times would not have happened. The gene pool is getting less fit, but so what? The pool of memes, the pool of ideas that drive our behaviour patterns, is getting more fit. In short, we have embarked on a course of cultural evolution, something no other species has ever done, and that strategy, so far, is working. We have come to dominate the earth in ways no other single species has ever come close to. 

We pass collections of ideas and mores down to our young generation after generation, and the ideas and mores that work keep multiplying because they equip the tribes that carry them to multiply. Good culture is culture that causes its carriers to survive and flourish. Weak cultures, by and large, die out, via natural disaster sometimes, but more often via war. 

A harsh view, but on the other hand, maybe gentler ideas called "morals" have survival value. They must, come to think of it. Look at how many modern tribes contain various versions of them. 

In fact, they do. Courage and wisdom are very general moral values that have multiplied as memes in nearly all of the cultures of the world because they make us behave in ways that effectively answer a most basic quality of the real universe, namely entropy. Courage drives us, as whole tribes, into the downward flow of the physical matter of the universe and wisdom enables us to steer.

Everything in physical nature, atoms and molecules, tends to fall apart. Metals corrode. Stars burn out. Living things die. But in life forms, programming drives us to swim into the current and around the obstacles. In most life forms, it's mostly genetic programming, but in humans it's mostly cultural imprinting. And the most general principles that we learn from our parents and mentors are the ones that must inform our behavior in the most general way if we are to survive and pass our values on to our kids. Courage and wisdom, in balance, guide our patterns of behavior in ways that cause us to survive because in the giant picture those behavior patterns are meeting the basic adversity of life. 

The other major quality of reality that must be dealt with is uncertainty. We have only begun to understand what this means in physics. Quantum uncertainty is as much a quality of reality as entropy is. But entropy we have understood for a long time. We have formulas in physics that describe it. Uncertainty has only been a seriously considered concept since Bohr and Heisenberg figured it out in the 1920's. But it is a fact. I believe that. There is no single fixed future for the universe as Newton and Laplace pictured it. Bohr and Heisenberg overthrow that whole worldview. We flow into a future that is not only difficult, as influenced by entropy, but also crazy and hazardous as influenced by quantum uncertainty. 

Life isn't just hard, it's hazardous. Luckily it is hazardous in probabilistic ways, not random ones. So in the most vigorous societies, we have learned over many generations to live by the values we call "freedom" and "love". Living by freedom gives us a community of variously skilled and talented people, not a uniform, homogeneous population. Love enables us all to live together in the same town and get along. We end up with a pluralistic population, and it is more fit than a uniform  population could ever be because when the uncertain universe throws a surprise at us, as it does every so often, a society with a lot of different kinds of people in it has better odds of having someone in town who knows what we can do to get us out of the crisis. 

Courage and wisdom, freedom and love. They cause us to behave in ways that, over millions of people and thousands of years, enable us to survive. And that's why values are real. They have real consequences. It's just that those consequences take a long time to become visible in the patterns of human history.    

A couple of posts on moral realism and on how that model connects to the concept of a deity are in order, I think, to remind readers and myself why this blog is called "The Science God". 

First, why do I believe in moral realism, in 500 words? Let's look objectively at humans.  

All words are labels for sets of sense data or sets of sets of sense data. Words of greater and greater generality remain in a language over the long haul only if they name general patterns of phenomena that the speakers of that language have found are useful to recognize in their struggle to survive. Our most general words are the ones that have evolved in our language to name virtues like courage, wisdom, freedom, love, diligence, honesty, and so on.

We developed the terms “courage” and “wisdom”, for example, because they are useful. Generation after generation, we impressed these terms on our young because the patterns of behavior that the terms describe, when the two terms are used in tandem, guide people to respond to one of the most pervasive qualities of the physical universe itself, namely entropy. Courage drives us, wisdom steers.

In human terms, entropy simply means things are always driven by a tendency to fall apart. All life, to survive, must move against the entropy of reality all of the time. Other living things have qualities like courage and wisdom written into their dna. Humans are the only species that has discovered a more nimble modus operandi. Culture. Courage and wisdom, taught to the young in our culture, shape our behavior, socially then individually, over millennia, in ways that answer entropy.

The other matched pair of values that I have been able to discover to this point in my life is freedom-love. These two values steer us toward patterns of behavior that respond, again over the long haul, to quantum uncertainty. Life is not just hard, it’s sometimes crazy. In the giant social picture, freedom and brotherly love balance each other in a manner analogous to the way courage and wisdom balance each other. Used in tandem, freedom and love steer us to patterns of behavior that maximize our odds of survival because they give us a pluralistic nation, the only real way we can insure against the hazardous quality of reality. Freedom causes us to be varied individuals, love causes us to accept others even when they're very different from us. When disaster comes, a pluralistic society has higher odds of finding an answer to that unforeseen event than a more homogeneous society ever could.  

If we work hard enough to promulgate and explicate these values to all of humanity, they will guide us to a balance of love and freedom that works for our whole species. But in any case, values do work, and they have worked for a long time, because they connect us to physical reality. Used in tandem, freedom and love are the human answer to the pervasive uncertainty of reality.

The emotions that these terms sometimes stir and the blind loyalty they evoke are useful in survival terms, but they are no guide to truth. Only the evolutionary usefulness of the values is.

When the concepts called "moral values" are followed through their intermediate behavioral steps into reality, we see they work as parts of a cultural program for long term survival. Therefore, moral values are observable, testable, replicable, etc. Moral values are real in the exact empiricist sense of the term.