Artist's portrayal of a brown-skinned Jesus 

               (credit: https://medium.com/the-stories/a-gentle-reminder-that-                                   jesus-was-a-brown-middle-eastern-refugee-who-would-not-have-voted-for-                              donald-trump 3aec4eaf1620)

                                        A Hopeful Christmas

Thank you for dropping by. I have one small announcement: the chamber of commerce has asked me to remind you that there are only twenty-two shopping days left till Christmas. (Just kidding. I enjoy Christmas shopping like I enjoy drinking bleach.)        

        But it’s the meaning of this season, Christmas, that I want to write about today. And I promise to be more serious for the rest of this post.  

What conclusions do we come to if we apply a moral realist model to the cultural phenomenon called “Christmas”? What do I see in the beliefs and customs that surround this man who probably lived from about 4 B.C. to about 36 A.D.? I think more deeply about this question at Christmas time, as most of us do. In this Covid 19 year, even more so.

Like many thinkers in Western culture, I get fed up with how commercial Christmas has become. This year consumer spending will likely be dampened down, or maybe just in-person shopping will be. Maybe Jeff Bezos, the tycoon of the online shopping world, will double his already unimaginable wealth by the new year.  

The ads sometimes start before Remembrance Day, and I find that hard to take. The men and women who fought in the wars that the nations of the world got drawn into in the last century or so deserve a special time that is set aside just for them. November 11 is supposed to be that day. The rest of us ought to be setting aside time for them and showing respect, gratitude. Greedy merchants crowding into that time by advertising their Christmas junk infuriate me. I make a quiet vow when I see Christmas ads anytime before November 12 to be sure that I do not buy whatever it is those ads are trying to sell – ever again.

I don’t like the commercialism that has poisoned Christmas, but I add to that, gluttony and drunkenness. We eat too much food and drink too many kinds of alcohol that we don’t need or even like.

Can anything save me from disillusionment in the Christmas season? Yes. I couldn’t have said that for many years, but I can today. Ten years ago, I figured something out.  

The way of humans on this world for the most part has been to take as much as they can as often as they can. In our era, the philosophy of greed has even begun to threaten what once was taken for granted, namely the ecosystem of this planet. Perhaps in what I have to say today, I can give some hope to those of you who are beginning to despair at the indifference of our leaders toward environmental issues. But my main focus will not be on environmental issues because they weren’t issues in Jesus’ time. His main gift to the human race was something else.

The worst consequence of human greed for many centuries of our history on this planet has been the crime that we do to each other, i.e. war. When earthquakes or hurricanes hit another land, we grieve for the people there, we send help, and we do what we can. But basically, we can handle natural disasters. The horrors people do to each other are in a different category altogether. A child can tell you that we have more than enough resources on this planet to feed, clothe, and shelter everyone in comfort. Our leaders’ sending us to war is not about making sure that people have enough to live in dignity. Wars are about vain people gaining face. Realizing that truth is what makes us feel so disillusioned with our own species.  

And let me not mince words or be vague here. Historians estimate that of the horrors that have happened to people because of the aggression of other people, more than ninety percent have been caused by governments, not by criminals. Wars and concentration camps, mostly. Mafia thugs are disgusting human beings, but they are small fry compared to the Hitlers and Stalins of the world. And the Shaka Zulus, the Genghis Khans, the Caesars, the Alexanders, and the Joshuas.

Where, then, does Jesus fit in?

War had been ugly and pointless for centuries before Jesus ever came on the scene. Everything any war ever actually accomplished in real world terms could have been accomplished without any bloodshed at all, if the people involved had agreed to debate the issues openly, negotiate, and compromise. He saw that. And then, he extrapolated and saw much further. He saw even in 30 A.D. that humanity was on a course of self-destruction.

The ways of greed, politics, and war and the improvements in our military technologies can be thought of as lines on a graph of time. As the two lines climb forward across the graph – as our greed and our technology both keep growing - we watch in horror. The lines are gradually converging. We know that inevitably one day the lines will touch. There we will finally make a weapon capable of wiping out the whole human race at the same time as the sea of politics casts up a leader who will use it. There is a kind of paralyzing, mathematical certainty to this graph. Even to Jesus, two thousand years ago, it looked as if we were doomed to someday destroy ourselves. He saw this desperate situation taking shape even in his own time.

But then he put into his world a new way of seeing ourselves. He left us this: love one another as I have loved you. If you remember nothing else that I told you, remember this: love one another as I have loved you. You can do this. You really can. Just love your neighbor. Then, all the good you can imagine will follow.  

In the middle of the Roman Empire, Jesus’ time was a time when war and the way of life that it forced people into were considered obvious. Almost every person in that empire would have thought debating the matter was childish. If you had begun to argue that war might not be necessary, they would have told you, “Oh, grow up!” Many would have looked at you like you had just grown donkey ears. The main thing they prayed to their gods for was victory in battle.

All the recently conquered peoples in the Roman Empire contained rebels who were eager to get even with the Roman conquerors. This was true especially of the Jews, the people among whom Jesus had been born and grown to manhood. They had many secret groups plotting sabotage and assassination all the time. Jesus grew up in the middle of all of this.

In this social milieu of jealousy, hate, and violence, people paid to go to arenas all over the Empire and watch men kill each other, right there in front of their eyes, a few meters away.  

Then Jesus came along and said: “It doesn’t have to be this way. If a man hits you on one cheek, turn the other to him. If he grabs your jacket, give him your shirt. If he forces you to walk a mile with him, walk three.” And he lived his values, all the way to his death. Others had said similar things, but Jesus, by the actions of his life and by the dramatic character of his death, caused people to listen and remember.

       

                                      Artist's portrayal of Jigonhsasee

                          (credit: https://alchetron.com/Jigonhsasee

Since those times, heroes all through history, even modern ones like Wilberforce, Gandhi, Mandela and King, have shown by real-world example that with enough courage, the way of non-violence really can work. The rest of the Christians have mostly been less sincere in observing Jesus’ simple rule, but we have still gotten gradually kinder every century since Roman times. The horrible “games” of Jesus’ time were abolished in about 300 A.D.. In more modern times, no one goes to bear-baiting anymore and people who secretly support dog fights, once their secret is discovered, are hounded from our midst, sentenced to jail time, as unfit to live with. Even then, if they sincerely ask for forgiveness, they can be forgiven. Jesus taught us that too. (Michael Vick comes to mind here.)

At first, the Romans didn’t consider Jesus’ ideas important. In fact, they thought his ideas were stupid. But well after he was gone, his cult – and a “cult” is what it was to the Romans – kept growing. There was something about it that tugged at human emotions. Worst of all, it began to steal some of the Romans' own sons and daughters right in Rome. Many converts were young people, even teenagers, fed-up with the materialistic, hedonistic emptiness of their parents’ way of life.

The Roman Empire is long gone, as are many others too numerous to list; Jesus’ words are still here. Love your neighbor.            

So, for me, was he divine? Was he the son of God the churches claim he was? No. Or, to be exact, he simply had a lot more of a quality that all of us have, the spiritual quality, the capacity to believe in things not seen.

But what matters much more is that he put into the mix of ideas being passed back and forth by the human race, the simple idea that we can solve our differences without fighting one another. Thus, he injected a new variable into the equations of human history. If we can learn to love our neighbors, we may make it through the era of greed and war and finally grow up. Emerge as a new kind of species, a differently programmed species that no longer needs to keep itself fit by programming its members to be their own cultural predators, that toughen their cultures by war.

Before him, our destroying ourselves was a mathematical certainty. Now there is that tantalizing little ‘maybe’. Maybe ...we can learn to truly love our neighbors.

For me, seeing the truth of that one big principle is more than enough to keep me from cynicism at Christmas time. Christmas, for me, is the time of year when I celebrate the fact that this gentle man entered into the flow of human history in the most warlike society that, up to his time, had ever existed, and changed – everything.

So what if some lying, greedy politicians won this round? My struggle against them will go on. They can’t stop that as long as there is breath in my body. I have free will and a truth to live by. The rest is up to me.  

Let materialism and greed fill the shopping malls to the roof with junk. They can’t discourage me. I believe in something real that is beyond all of that. We keep trying; we win some and we lose some; the struggle goes on. But there’s hope now. Before this one guy, as I see human history, anyway, there was none.

Merry Christmas, lads and lassies. Enjoy your family and friends.

 

 

 

Quote by Marianne Williamson (often attributed to Nelson Mandela):

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant or talented? Actually, who are you not to be? Your playing small doesn't serve the world. There's nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the spiritual glory that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone. As we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our very presence liberates others.

                                    Christopher Hitchens (credit: Wikipedia)

 September 1, 1939

W. H. Auden - 1907-1973September 1, 1939

I sit in one of the dives On Fifty-second Street Uncertain and afraid As the clever hopes expire Of a low dishonest decade: Waves of anger and fear Circulate over the bright And darkened lands of the earth, Obsessing our private lives; The unmentionable odor of death Offends the September night.

Accurate scholarship can Unearth the whole offence From Luther until now That has driven a culture mad, Find what occurred at Linz, What huge imago made A psychopathic god: I and the public know What all schoolchildren learn, Those to whom evil is done Do evil in return.

W. H. Auden (credit: Wikipedia)

_______________________________________________________________________

Above are the first few lines of a poem by W. H. Auden that has haunted me since I first heard it quoted (by Christopher Hitchens, I believe it was. He and Auden were good friends). The poem was written, as the title says, in New York on the day the world went to war for the second time in under a generation.

And I agree with what Auden implies in this excerpt: the people of Germany were so hurt and mad after World War One, and how the treaty that was supposed to settle it punished Germany, that they stored up an enormous hate from the time of that treaty (1919) on. Hitler was not an evil genius. He was evil, but his rise to power was not mainly due to his political genius, nor to adverse economic conditions. His rise was made possible by the climate of anger and hate created in Germany by the Treaty of Versailles, which really did cause great suffering in Germany.

So I watch the t.v. coverage of Trump supporters' demonstrations and I feel a chill so cold it leaves me speechless.

The images that haunt at that moment aren't of World War Two. They are of the U.S. Civil War. The worst war by far that the U.S. has ever been involved in. World War Two took a bit over 300,000 American lives. The Civil War took more than double that many.

Could we train the population to gracious winning and losing? To winners' saying, "You worked this latest election hard, opponents of mine, but you lost. But there will be other elections. And I still respect your right to speak your mind, as long as you are not promoting violence in your listeners. Dissent within non-violent boundaries is the concept that democracy is built on."

The Civil War haunts me because we humans seem -- in the main population at least -- to be unable to get what Auden is saying and sink it in so that we live by it.

As is the case in the U.S. these days. Right and Left hate each other with such a vehemence that their democracy with its noble ideas -- and they are noble -- is barely holding on. The country is teetering on the brink of civil war.

Why? I believe the roots of the current political situation lie in the refusal by too many U.S. citizens to learn and take to heart what Auden says in this poem. "Those to whom evil is done, do evil in return." In other words, the current victors in most of the U.S. political scene, and especially in the presidential contest, the left-leaning majority of citizens, are too obviously eager to tell the current "losers" on the right "nyah, nyah". The vocabulary involved is more erudite, but the essence of the message is still "nyah, nyah". "Hah, hah. Who's crying now?" And so on.

And so ...the followers of the right burn. But they also store up their anger and use it to drive their political activities. Will these include violence in the near future? I don't know. But I guess, and fear.

I fear the motives on both sides that lie behind these venomous exchanges. It's vindictiveness on both sides, it's ugly on both sides.

America, America. As your neighbors, we Canadians fear for you. Citizens of the American Left, my point today is this: mockery does not serve the long term interests of your country. Democrats, you won. Be gracious winners, no matter how provocative the actions of your opponents have been. You must. What's riding on your showing that higher level of behavior is simply ...everything.

Remembrance Day, 2020

I got that Nov. 11 was a serious day when I was in grade 3. It was so still for those minutes. Even at a school assembly of kids. In those times – the 1950s – many had dads who had been in WWII. Maybe, that was why we fell so quiet.

But in any case, I knew that this was serious. I’ve obsessed over it for 60+ years.

Some say there is no way to spare future generations from this horror. I just can’t believe that. So I write. I think I see a way to end this madness, but it’s not likely to draw much attention in my lifetime. However, I can’t afford to think about that. The idea will be out there. For me, that is enough. 

We must make a curriculum for the world's schools that teaches all the children of our species to respect all of the other children of that species. Find your motive kids, to exhort yourself to be your personal best, by competing with yourself, not others.  Or at least, competing within the rules. There's always a referee in the ring or on the field. Obey that person's commands. Honor the ideals of the game. 

To those who think I am a Romantic aiming for solutions that will never be real, I say: “You haven’t considered the alternative”.

You see in every land in every era, war was always just a generation away, even for the lucky ones. War. A human constant in every society, every era.

What has changed is the level of destructiveness of our wars. That level keeps going up. WWIII? The next one that is all out? If we let it come, it will likely end us.

So? So we go back to re-considering my proposal. A peace curriculum for all students, spiraling upward in challenge level as the grades go up.

For today’s post, I’ll let that flat statement be enough.

But, I will say to friends who are veterans of real combat:

“I know you went through horror that I have not known and now never will. I had a weekend in 1969 during which I thought very hard about going down to Montana and joining the US Army. I’d bought the ‘Domino Theory’. Things my dad had said about the madness of war finally tilted me away from that choice. (Thanks, Pop.)

“But even though I know your worst mental images are not of things you saw but of things you did – by your own hands – I still like you. You were innocents. You went off to fight, maybe die, for ideals that turned out to be lies. But that willingness, so dedicated, that alone holds me in awe.

“It’s Remembrance Day. For those who saw and did the real thing, stand proud. Just your being there gives us all material for thought. Thank you for your service. Now let’s get to work on eradicating the roots of why you had to do that brutal job.”

 

         

         Thompson's gazelle (credit: Wikipedia)

Democracies and Their Ways

A key term in our understanding all living things is the term “ecosystem”.  It is our word for any entity made of millions of living things that are sometimes competing, sometimes cooperating, but nevertheless, in the scientific view of them, forming a single thing that has an existence of its own, greater than that of any of its parts. Any part in an ecosystem is expendable; any one of the parts can die, cease to exist, break up into dead pieces, while the larger entity, the ecosystem, goes on.

The whole system is constantly in a state of vigorous interactions, all balancing and counter-balancing each other. It appears to stay roughly the same, but internally, it is always changing. In fact, some parts dying so that others can take over their protoplasm, i.e. eat them, is sad for the individual living thing, but good for the ecosystem. Gazelles eat grass; lions eat gazelles. Please note that the lions tend – most often – to kill the gazelles that are hurt, sick, slow, or stupid. A fawn that prances just out of a lion’s reach is likely going to die young. The lion seems sleepy, but he is only seeming so. The lioness is hiding in the grass 5 meters away. “Dance a bit closer, little fool. My cubs are hungry.”

                                                     Lioness (credit: Wikipedia) 

Thus, the weak, slow, and stupid are cut off from reproducing. The stronger, faster, more prudent have more grass to eat so they live to pass on the genes for strength, speed, and prudence to more fawns. The lions benefit the gazelle herd and the whole system over the long term. Internal pressures inside dynamic balances are what make an ecosystem.

Over millennia, all species that survive, reproduce, and evolve into new forms of themselves are members of ecosystems. No individual and no one species ever exists in isolation. They interact and, mostly are made stronger over the long haul, by living in complex relationships with others, especially other species.

In our larger understanding of our world and ourselves, these ideas of balance and ecosystem are vital.

Another area our understanding of our world in which the ecosystem idea is useful is in our study of ourselves.

People’s daily decisions, habits, and values are mostly shaped by the ways in which they are programmed by elders of their cultures when they are young. These too evolve for whole variety of reasons. Men’s hair has been fashionable long, short, shaved off, dyed, etc., all in my lifetime. And now? Any of the above. 

What we need to see next is that a human society is a kind of ecosystem. A tribe or nation contains many different kinds of people, all performing different roles within the overall community. Farmers, ranchers, and fishers provide the basic nourishment that the tribe must have in order to live. Lumberjacks and factory workers provide the materials for building shelters, which any tribe that seeks to grow its numbers must have to keep its people from the elements. Tradesmen use the textiles and lumber to make and maintain the food, clothes, and shelters that enable the tribe to grow and spread. Teachers don’t make physical things, but human ones: citizens that seek to work together to solve their disputes via the rule of the nation’s laws. All of these trade services, and the roles, get much subtler.

A human nation is not an ecosystem if we demand of anything labeled with that term that it contain individual organisms killing and eating each other all the time. Nations – or more accurately, democracies – are designed to avoid routine destruction of some of their components. In truth, to prevent such killing. 

But a nation is an ecosystem in the sense that it contains a lot of very different members who interact and sometimes compete with, and sometimes support, each other’s functions. Workers work for owners of the means of production in order to get things that the workers want. Owners hire workers and agree in advance to pay them in specific terms. Owners seek to hire workers because the owners own large enough factories or tracts of land that they know they can’t do all the work themselves. Even early in our natural history, the spear-maker trading with the hunter and her medicine woman allowed for individuals to get more skillful at their crafts until they were medicine women or spear-makers full time. By sharing labor, and trade, tribes became larger and more efficient.

The point is that a society or nation can be seen as an ecosystem. The ecosystem view of society yields many useful insights into how we humans work.

We can even draw further analogies between natural ecosystems and human ones. In a natural ecosystem, we see the real actors in the drama as being not the material plants, animals, and micro-organisms. Not even species. The action is being guided by the genetic codes behind these species. These change as the soils and climates around them change. Shift the climate toward less rain in an area, and trees die out; grasses spread; grazers flourish; some tree dwellers adapt by gradually updating their gene codes, and some die out. Ancestors of humans had to move out of life in trees or die out. Some tribes survived by changing their ways of life. Found different foods. Learned to dig for edible roots. Some did not.

Once in a while, a very drastic climate change can even cause a whole family of living things to go extinct. Dinosaurs, millions of them in thousands of species, did not have the complexity and depth of programming to cope with the meteor that hit the earth 66 million years ago. They all died.

                   Giant meteor striking Earth (credit: Frederik, via Wikipedia) 

Now, what is the point of this post today?

The codes that ultimately guide and run human societies are the sets of memes - ideas, beliefs, values - that the society is founded on. Teach kids at home and in school to value and practice 'will' and 'power', and you'll create an oppressive nation. Teach them to value and practice compassion and wisdom, and you will live in a cooperative, respectful one. And ...if these two clash, in the long haul, the society of mutual respect will win. Why? Because it will contain more members, and more varied, resourceful ones within its population as well. 

The design of democracy is the most glaring example we have of the ecosystem idea being put into practice in real human societies. Autocratic societies attempt to rid themselves of variety in their populations and fix their society’s vision on creating one acceptable kind of citizen. Uniformity. It’s reassuring in the short term, but my prediction is that in real history and politics, such a society will never be as dynamic or vigorous as its rival that promotes individual liberty.

The founders of the American nation especially clearly had the ecosystem idea in mind when they purposely created a nation in which English, Dutch, Spanish, and French, Protestants and Catholics, etc. all lived together, worked at their own crafts as they wished to, and got along. All of these groups had hated and killed each other in the centuries leading up to 1776.

The U.S. Constitution is designed to push people to live together under the rule of law, trade, resolve disputes in courts, and generally get along.

African and native people were being left out to start with, but evolution is always messy. There is no moment and no one fossil that shows us exactly when eohippus became mesohippus. But, the change is very clearly discernible over the long haul.

And the basic idea of a social ecosystem, under a democratic rule of law, works. In fact, it is so visionary that we marvel to this day at the way those framers of the constitution designed it. It even provides, in its legislative branches, for the updating of laws that are clearly not working anymore. Jefferson knew that slavery was wrong. He just also believed that it wasn’t going to get righted in his lifetime by the few who thought as he did. John and Abigail Adams never accepted that position and died still speaking out against it. One human being can’t – ethically – own another. Period. No deals, no exceptions. And the branch in charge of social evolution, i.e. changing the laws, is updating that code and has been for centuries. It’s far from righted, but change is gradually occurring.

Churchill in his less-than-perfect democracy summed the matter up by saying: “Democracy is the worst form of government …except for all the others.”  

             

                                                   Churchill (credit: Wikipedia) 

So I want to encourage readers facing upcoming elections in several parts of the world and especially in the U.S. to calm down and reason coolly. The U.S. democracy is still vigorous. The framers of the U.S. constitution may not have been able to explain what an ecosystem in a pond does, but they obviously had an understanding of how systems work informing the design that they ended up with as they wrote that famous document: many different entities at many levels of the government, all intended to create balance. The legislative, judicial, and executive bodies are all still in place and functioning vigorously. Legal lines separating areas of governance in which states’ rights take precedence over federal ones, and when the reverse is the case, are still being, by most, respected. The whole giant struggle is largely still being fought within the rules.

Best of all, it is very important for us to keep our eyes firmly fixed on the ideals that inform all democracies: rule of law, not of individuals or cliques; provision for updating antiquated laws by peaceful means, not by violence.

If violence in the streets becomes commonplace and widespread, martial law restricts citizens to their homes at most hours of their week, courts, legislatures are shut down, and dissenters start to disappear, then we can start to panic.

But that hasn’t happened yet.

So? We go back to rational dialogue, evidence-based reasoning, persuasion of our opponents that some of their views are wrong. Because that’s what democracy was designed to do in the first place. Give as many citizens as possible decent, respect-filled lives, and allow them to seek redress of grievances and changes of the law by dialogue rather than fighting.

The rule of law matters most when it is hardest to maintain. And us? We’re still okay. Read what Lincoln had to endure. We aren’t nearly that stressed yet.

In the shadow of the mushroom cloud, still have a reasonable day.  

 

U.S. President Donald Trump (credit: Sheila Craighead, via Wikipedia)

Schadenfreude

Some days a topic which invites comment and posting just leaps out at us. In the milieu of the last two days, the word “schadenfreude” has elicited that in me. Schadenfreude is a German word that means “the pleasure one derives from seeing an enemy suffer”.

I never liked it. The feeling may be very human, in the sense that it seems to come naturally to all human beings. However, to me, it seems very clear that being a responsible, adult citizen of a democracy requires that I don’t indulge in every impulse that passes through me, even if it is very human to do so, and even if I see that many others do give in to it.

Let me explain a little.

I loved a girl back when I was a teenager of 19 and she was 16. We were crazy in love for a year or so, and yes, we did all the things that lovers do, including horizontal, heavy breathing exercises. For reasons that I don’t need to go into, her parents hated me. Reasons involving religious differences and their general, conformist natures. What the neighbors thought did matter to them. I was a wild, long-haired, rock musician in a band that played live gigs. The situation set up like a fated tragedy, and it ended in one.

For a lot of reasons, she committed suicide when she was 17. Tried once and did not succeed, mainly because I knew she was home alone, and when I found the place dark, I broke in and found her. Near death. Fill in the details yourself. They were that bad, at least.

A few weeks later, when the row had died down, she succeeded. I was working out of town at the time. Trying to act "normal". The work had been long planned. I was trusting that her parents would see that she got good, professional help. They got her a psychic.

My rage was infinite for the first few minutes when I learned the news. But I suddenly knew, even at 20, that I did not wish for her folks to suffer one moment longer than they already had. Blame is a myth made up by Pride.

I have had an aching empathy for the families of any suicide, and the victims too, of course, but especially in the case of the suicide of a child, since that time. And then, it gradually grew into empathy for all suffering. I don’t care how much you hate your enemies, it is wrong to wish them real suffering. The world contains enough of that without any of us secretly wishing to augment it.

That hard experience changed me.

    

 

                                                Bernie Madoff (credit: The Guardian) 

By the time 2010 came around, I had known a number of moments of rage at the Wasters of Wall Street. And the very worst example of investment industry greed, I thought then, and still think now, was Bernie Madoff.

He had built an investment company which had about $55,000,000,000 US in assets. Other people’s money. And the crash of 2008 had put pressures on it that had finally caused it to break wide open. It was all a Ponzi scheme.

His duped victims included Stephen Spielberg, Kevin Bacon, Zsa Zsa Gabor, John Malkovich, and many others. Most, however, were smaller investors and many of them had risked everything they had with Madoff. Many lost their whole savings. Their hopes of retirement. And for many of these, the losses could not be shrugged off as they could for the wealthy, multi-millionaires. Millions of small investors were left flat broke. 

But then, shortly after Madoff was arrested, his son, Mark, committed suicide. And Mark was no teenager. But apparently he could not live with what he had been a major part of: the fraud his father had perpetrated.

I shrank inside when I heard that news. And examined myself very hard inside. But I found that I simply had not wished such misery on Madoff. No matter what he had done, mostly to fairly ordinary people like me (though not to me personally, thank Heaven) he did not deserve the internal torment I knew he was going to go through. A long prison term, yes. His son’s suicide. Never.

And I knew, somewhere over the long years, I had sunk it in. In the life-sized view of ourselves, schadenfreude is just sick. It’s wrong. It may come naturally out of our atavistic impulses, but so do rape and murder. We can train them out of ourselves. We really can. In fact, that’s what being a civilized human being means. Unlike the Romans, we today do not go to a sporting contest hoping to see some excellent killings. Times change. People change. Slowly, but …sometimes, even for the better.

                                                   (credit: historycollection.com) 

What does all of this have to do with the last two days?

I know inside the deepest parts of my own conscience, I do not want to see the current president of the U.S. sicken and die of Covid 19. I want him to run in a free and fair, democratic election. I want him and his party to lose so badly that they are all but wiped out as a political party by the voters. For a decade. Then, I want to see him face arrest, trial, and prosecution. He has broken the law. He deserves that kind of punishment. But not death by Covid. Death will come soon enough. 

Schadenfreude, when it gets what it thinks it wants, solves nothing. Helps nothing. In fact, that feeling, if it gets what it thinks it wants, ends in making circumstances worse than they were before the event that called that feeling up in the first place.

In the shadow of the mushroom cloud, nevertheless, have a decent day.

                       

                           Daniel Defoe (author of "A Journal of the Plague Year")

                                   (about the Black Death in London in the 1660s) 

                                 (https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/12755437)                                     

The System

I worked with a colleague years ago who used to tell me, every week or so: “Dwight, always be sincere, whether you mean it or not.” He was trying to use irony to get me to lighten my tone. In those days, and today, I too often slip into strident intensity, and that only puts readers or listeners off.

This is true for many others besides myself and true more now than it was 30 plus years ago when I was working with the friend I just mentioned. Right now, in the Western nations, we desperately need to return to rational discourse: reasoning based on observable evidence, presented in a calm, clear way. Facts that all can see – then what we think the facts mean and why.

So let’s have a frank, calm discussion about what is going on in our currently strident, frantic world. And, in that spirit, let’s begin with basic concepts. Like the crucial concept of an ecosystem.

An ecosystem contains many parts that are all interacting all of the time, now competing, now cooperating. But these interactions enable the whole system to adapt to shocks from outside and restore its internal balances over and over again. The parts do not exist as separate, unrelated entities. Any one of them getting enhanced or damaged affects all the others.

Now, let’s consider some of the ecosystems of this earth. Like, for example, the ecosystems that surrounded and contained farms in Canada when I was a kid.

When I was a kid in the early 1950s, DDT was often hailed as a miracle remedy for the insect pests that plagued us. DDT killed insects that transmitted diseases from human to human and insects that destroyed food crops. It was a modern miracle.

                       

                                      Colorado Beetle (one of the pests killed by DDT) 

                                                         (Wikimedia Commons) 

But by 1972, it was being banned in almost all countries of the developed world. Why? Because long term, in-depth studies had shown that its overall effects on whole ecosystems were catastrophic. And that’s not strident talk; it’s simple fact. DDT put chemicals into the food chains of all kinds of environments at the dead insect level. The dead bugs didn’t just disappear. Amphibians, lizards, birds, etc. ate them. Then birds of prey ate the bug eaters. The chemicals concentrated as they went up the food chain, and soon hawks and owls in the affected areas were laying unusable eggs. The DDT residues absorbed into the bodies of the birds caused them to lay eggs with shells so thin that they crushed under the weight of the bird trying to sit on them in the nest. The hawks and owls died off and then, way down the ecosystem, the rodent populations went crazy. There were no owls to kill the gophers. It turned out that farmers who used DDT on their crops, in the long run, were harming their own operations. On farms in British Columbia, for example, gophers multiplied till they ate so many tree roots in some orchards that, in a season, they sometimes killed every tree.

                       

                                                       Gray Owl (Wikimedia Commons) 

Similar things happened with phosphate-containing detergents being used for a while by householders just trying to get their clothes clean. Phosphates get clothes clean and are “biodegradable”. Which is good, right? No. In fact, they feed living things in river systems that receive the effluents from towns and cities. In fact, phosphates are much too friendly to algae. The algae in many river systems bloomed out of control, used up all the oxygen in the water, and left suffocated fish floating belly up.

But, hooray for Science. Scientists figured these puzzles out and showed us how to solve them. Today, we have some pesticides still, but they are nothing like as toxic as DDT was and are much better targeted. (Herbicides, on the other hand, are another discussion entirely.) Today’s pesticides often aim to kill only one insect species and only in ways that will not cause harm further down the food chain. And getting clothes clean can be done without phosphate detergents.

In all these situations and many others, the concept of an ecosystem is crucial to our understanding of what went wrong and how to fix it. All of the parts are connected and in balance; any shock to one part of the system affects them all.  

What is my point? My point is that once we fully grasp the idea of an ecosystem, we see that a society is an ecosystem. As Robert Palmer said back in the 70s, “it takes every kind of people to make what life’s about.” A society is an ecosystem.

We need farmers and fishers. They get from the larger ecosystem, the food that the rest of us have to have. We need scientists to show them how to do that efficiently and not get sick or hurt themselves in the process. We need medical people to heal them when they do get sick or hurt in their interactions with their environmental ecosystem. We need entrepreneurs to devise new projects. Then, by picking the best of the new products that the entrepreneurs create, a society can change and evolve, which it always must do. Life can’t stand still, not even the life in a very large ecosystem with thousands of species and millions of individual living things in it. The system must grow and adapt as conditions in its environment change, which they always do. 

We need teachers to teach all of the above the knowledge and skills that they need to fill their roles well. And yes, we need bankers and brokers to steer the surpluses society produces into those new enterprises that are the most likely to create even more surpluses and cause the whole system to produce generous quantities of goods and services that real folk can use to stay happy, healthy, and productive. Bankers, if they do their work well, ought to cause capital to flow, in a timely way, to the places in which it can do the most good.

Please also note here that it’s open markets for all goods and services that make this bounty happen. When a state brings in centralized planning to manage the nation’s economy, the result is that the planned economy is not as efficient as a market-based system. Citizens when they step into their consumer roles are merciless. In the market, companies must sell or go broke. Sell at least some of their wares to a public that freely chooses to buy them, for a price that will pay for the costs of their production, plus a little, or go broke.

And no, the banks won’t lend you any more money. If they did, then they’d go broke. People who save their money in a bank don’t want to see their savings get smaller. A bank is not a charity.   Cruel as it can be for a small business just starting up, the market system works for the millions. It yields more goods more efficiently than its centrally planned rivals can. And we have lots of evidence to support this view. East and West Germany. North and South Korea. And many other smaller-scale experiments.

But to say all these things about market-based economies is only to repeat that a society is an ecosystem. 

However, in spite of all the above, the whole ecosystem can go under. If, for example, the economy drastically slows down for some reason, and thousands or even millions lose their jobs, the nation’s leaders can’t ignore the sufferings of workers. If workers and their kids are truly suffering, they will grow increasingly angry, and they will begin to destroy the means of production – the farms and factories where they were working just a few weeks before. And if this trend is not remedied, the whole system will dissolve into chaos. Then, workers will come for the incompetent leaders and they will come with murder in their hearts. My starving kids trump your law and order. Thus, if leaders really are wise and insightful, they set out the manage the whole social ecosystem -- not just the workers, not just the owners, not just the bankers -- and keep it in balance

So let me reiterate. Bankers, business people, owners – none of these exist in a way that is somehow independent of the others. Society is an ecosystem. All of the parts connect to, and depend on, all of the others.

A real ecosystem contains thousands of species, all interacting in subtle complex ways. A scientist can give her or his whole life to understanding just one small part of it. A spoonful of healthy soil contains up to 50,000 species of living things and up to 7,000,000,000 individual organisms. Its ecosystems are enormously complex. The same is true of a modern, complex society. And like an ecosystem, a whole society has to always grow or die out. Evolve or go extinct. Life does not tarry with yesterday.

In the largest view, at this point we see that good leaders of society need to be unselfish and wise enough to write and update laws that make the system work smoothly, so that the diligent and sensible rise and the lazy and quarrelsome are granted enough to get by, while the few who simply try to take from others, by force or trickery, what they have not earned, are apprehended and locked up. 

A really effective leader has to understand the concept of an ecosystem. All of this seems obvious and platitudinous to most people today. But it’s not.

The larger point is that real life – in the natural world for a solitary individual, and even more in the social world for a typical citizen in a complex society – means ceaseless labor and vigilance. Watching behind oneself and to left and right, and ahead, above, and below all the time. Deciding when to ignore events, when to defend against them, and when to cooperate with them. Understanding that we live in ecosystems means seeing not only that life is complex and hard, but also why it is so. The ecosystem concept, once grasped, gives us that, and that is no minor insight. For young people, we can say: “Yes, life is harder than it looks, but here’s why.”

The overall worldview held by a person who understands what an ecosystem is and how such systems work, and who relates every human action to the larger social system, is going to be a much more reliable guide for its holder than the worldview held by the person who does not understand ecosystems.

Business people, academics, workers on farms and in factories, even military people, have to learn to work together within the system. Otherwise, in not that long really, no one is going to work at anything. All will be fighting, day by day and even hour by hour, for their lives.

Thus, in all things, we are going to have to accept in our complex world today that Science must rule Economics. The ecosystem concept that we get from Science shows past all doubt that our social ecosystem, when it is working well, can get very powerful and can create decent lives for billions, but it still, always, runs inside the natural world. An economy is not a living planet. The economy has to respect the planet’s larger ecosystems, or that economy, and all who are unable to think outside of it, will die.  

The most frightening aspect of our current situation in 2020 is that some current world leaders, including the current U.S. president, do not grasp that. Some problems can’t be fixed by a “deal maker”.

The latest instance of a natural shock to our economic system is Covid 19. But this virus is not a surprise suddenly dropped into our society. Epidemiologists knew we were going to get a virus like this one at least as far back as 2015. New viruses emerge regularly out of the normal churning processes of the earth’s ecosystem. Unfortunately for Donald Trump and his supporters, a virus does not know or care about "the market". Nor for Science, for that matter. It just is. It does what it does, and if we don’t respect and accommodate it, it will simply kill more and more of us until we do.

The bottom line for these times is that the American leader who didn’t do his job of protecting the long-term health of the nation, using knowledge based in scientific facts, not quarterly balance sheets, should be removed from office.

But it is worth noting here that Donald Trump is not what one can properly call “evil”. He is not “wrong” in the sense of being against justice and compassion for others. That he lives by the economic view is the deep meaning revealed by his much quoted remark about the virus, “It is what it is”. Losing some human lives is like having some bad employees who steal from your warehouse. It is one of the costs of doing business. He really thinks that he has to ignore the virus if it threatens the country’s economy because unbridled capitalism is the kindest way to go for the long term health of the whole nation.

He is not evil. But he is “wrong” in the more important sense of being mistaken. If he ignores the realities of the natural world, he soon won't have a nation to serve. Compared to thieving employees, a virus is a whole other kind of threat. It threatens the nation's very existence. And that is not just strident talk. 

                          

                                          Covid 19 patients in Brooklyn hospital 

                                                        (credit: New York Times) 

The fourth horseman of the apocalypse is pestilence. Covid 19 is just one more pestilence. The ecosystem of the earth keeps turning out new ones all the time. Pandemics come around every few years as surely as summer turns to fall. Unfortunately, this latest one has become, in the minds of too many of the anti-science sector of our population, a personal attack on them. Which does not matter to the virus. And it gets the final word.

Thus, the response to Trump and his ilk is not venom or rage. It is explanations of models and facts based on sound science. Told calmly, but firmly, over and over. Told even when the telling seems to be unheard and to stir no response. 

Will we change his mind? That is so unlikely as to be considered, for all normal purposes, impossible. But the likelihood that we can change the minds of some people who are staying quiet and, so far, just watching and listening, is real and substantial. If they are to be swayed, it won’t be by strident intensity. It will be by calm, consistent, evidence-based reasoning.

Most of all, no matter what may occur on November 3, even if I can’t make my opponents think like me, by standing my ground and making the rational case, I can sustain my own courage, clarity, and compassion.

I speak the truth, first and foremost, not to get my opponents to become more like me, but to keep me from becoming like them.

In the shadow of the mushroom cloud, nevertheless, have a thoughtful day.