I have not winced, nor cried aloud       

                                             Kathleen Quinlan 

                                  (actress who played Deb in movie of 

                               "I Never Promised You A Rose Garden") 

                                           (credit: Wikipedia) 

                        

Here’s a post that gets its point from a work of literature. Art is safer to talk about than real life. After all, a novel is fiction, right?

One of the great novels of the last century is called “I Never Promised You A Rose Garden”. It is about a period during the life of a teenaged girl named “Deb”, who suffers a serious mental illness and ends up in an asylum for nearly three years. She does get better, due partly to her family’s support, but even more to some brilliant and compassionate work by her psychiatrist whose name is "Dr. Hannah Fried". 

It’s a brilliant novel and deserves to be rated as one of the best ten or so American novels ever written. Written by a woman about a woman being healed by a woman, with the love and support of her mom, who’s also – how gratifying! – a woman. Which is all beside the point.

It’s a brilliant novel, period, regardless of which gender, class, or race it focuses on. Universal, which seems to be rated of little importance these days. But all drivel aside, my post today focuses on one scene from that novel.

Deb’s story happens during World War Two. A lot of the men are far away fighting the Japanese and the Germans, which means that jobs are hard to fill. Some of the staff in Deb’s hospital are very caring and professional, but some definitely are not. In better times, they would not even have been there. They hate the job and hate the insane, who can be pretty trying at times, which is only what one would expect.

In one scene in the novel, the strongest woman on Deb’s ward, who has in the past done serious, physical injury to other patients and to staff, has been tied down on a gurney in a wet sheet pack, a measure which was used to calm violent patients. The point is that Helene, the patient in question, is helpless, and she is in a separate room off the main hallway of the ward. Almost soundproof. 3 a.m. There are two patients in there in wet sheet packs on this night, the other being Deb.

A seriously neurotic attendant named ‘Ellis’ is on duty for midnight shift. He has come in to check their pulses to see whether they have calmed down enough to be allowed to go to sleep in their beds. He is indifferent to Deb, but he despises Helene. It soon shows. When he turns her head to get easier access to her carotid pulse, he emphasizes his power over Helene with some unnecessary roughness. She is not to be toyed with, even strapped down helpless. She curses at him. He slaps her. She spits at him. He slaps her again.

Slap. Spit. Slap. Spit. Fist.

As Deb watches, helpless, humiliated, ashamed, he punches Helene ten or a dozen times hard, while she, of course, can’t do anything but spit at him. She spits blood, then blood and chips of teeth. She gives up when she is almost beaten unconscious. He takes her pulse, picks up his clipboard, writes something, and leaves.

The scene is ugly and infuriating. Even more for Deb, it is humiliating. She must witness this ugliness and see Helene broken by violence at the hands of a dysfunctional male who never should have been in such a position of power. She feels secretly ashamed that she didn’t scream, which was, of course, because she was scared. Helene would not cry out because of her own “hard girl” code. So in the end, what gets done about the matter is nothing.

My point today, by a bit of a lateral leap, is that we are witnessing in these times, the social parallel of Helene’s suffering. People – or we should say, whole peoples, whole tribes – in some dire circumstances, become just as tough, just as determined as Helene to endure no matter what. Right into the grave.

The Palestinians have become that. They have suffered for seventy years. Robbed, beaten, humiliated, starved, killed. Abandoned even by other Arab states. They didn’t get the kind of despairing, numb, cynical, and hard they are now in a decade or even a generation. It took years and years. But they’re there now.

The Israelis could kill ninety nine percent of the people in Gaza and the West Bank. The remaining one percent – under fifty thousand – would keep spitting blood and chips of teeth. From all over the earth.  

Deb got better. A good doctor. A supportive family, both due, at least in part, to their having money. She went back to the world.

Did Helene ever get better? The book does not say. She might have. Or she might have died there. She just gets dropped out of the story.

Her character no longer shapes or informs the narrative.

But Deb’s story is all fiction anyway. Who cares?  

                                     Gaza: digging for bodies

                         (credit: Associate Press website: Nov. 17, 2023) 

               (https://apnews.com/article/israel-palestinians-gaza-buried-                           rubble-airstrikes-89c0e8d0934d573d94d2fbfeba44d933)

                                   Do You Like This Stuff?

Today, I’m offering a post that is not part of the piece I’m currently working on. A small departure. I feel driven to air some thoughts on the mess in the Middle East that’s flaring out of control now in 2024. Again.

I have thought for many years that one indicator of when I am getting closer to the truth on a subject is seen when I’m infuriating parties on every side. In short, too often, I know I’m getting closer to the truth the more I piss people off.

But damn the torpedoes, full steam ahead. Truth doesn’t need the approval of anyone, no matter how important they seem in the “corrupted currents of this world [where] Offense’s gilded hand may shove by justice”. (Hamlet)

What you’re saying is making people mad? Good!

So?

What have Bettin’ Yahoo and his ilk demonstrated over the last few months? That fanaticism leads to the most painful of ironies: you become the thing you thought, at the outset, that you hated. He has made Israel into a genocidal state. There isn’t one rationalization that he and his cabinet have given for their actions in Gaza over the past 11 months that hasn’t been used many times before, including by the Nazis. He has become the monster that he said he set out to destroy.

To preserve their culture, the people in Gaza have died in numbers at least thirty times those of the Israelis just in the last year. And finally, those Gazans are showing signs of collapsing? Hah! Not one bit. If anything, their resolve is hardening. Yahoo is learning he can’t “make Israel secure” by inflicting pain. No one can. In fact, the more suffering his troops heap onto the people of Gaza, the more determined the people of Gaza become.

To Israelis, that patch of dirt is land promised to them by Yahweh in the Torah in – what they see as – the beginning of time. To Palestinians, that land has been theirs for just as long. They are the descendants of the Philistines of the Bible.

Archeology says they’re both wrong. There were other tribes on that land before both Israelis and Palestinians. Which matters to – apparently – no one.

The Bible, the Torah, the Koran, the Gita – all the “holy” texts – are not legal documents. But to the fanatics of a hundred faiths, “man’s law” is irrelevant. Each has its book and its fanatics. Its "law". 

Let’s review a few more of the arguments.

Balfour promised that land to the early Zionists of modern times in 1917. Answer: The land was not his or his country’s to promise.

The Jews of Europe were the victims of the worst crime in history: the Holocaust. The world owed the Jews a land of their own. Answer: If we even entertain that possibility, we immediately must concede that those same Jews, mostly of Europe, have far more right to a piece of central Europe than they do to Palestine. The Germans and Poles were the nations that most miserably failed the Jews in every moral sense. Maybe, what was East Germany should have become the Jewish Homeland.

Furthermore, the Palestinian people had zero to do with the Holocaust. In fact, every recognized nation of those World War Two times was far guiltier in the matter of the Holocaust than the Palestinians, including all the free nations of the West.

The Jews were a people without a land who found a land without a people? Utterly false. There were people already there. Thousands of them. Yes, they lived in a technology well behind that of the West. No, that did not give anyone in the West or anywhere else the right to say they could be evicted from homes and lands their families had occupied for centuries.

The first people in modern times who called themselves ‘Israelis’ fought for and won that land against massive odds at the founding of Israel. So what? That ethic would endorse Nazism. Violence makes you right, say the Nazis. Winners write the history texts. Yes, they often do, but no, that does not make them right. Genghis Khan was a scary guy. His conquests still awe us. But no one wants him back. He became a monster. Like Hitler.

On the other other hand, (in logic, we have a lot of hands), the early Israelis did want to live together with their Arab neighbors and get along. It was Arabs who said “No deal. Get out!”

The Jews truly had suffered beyond any people ever during the Holocaust. They have a moral right to a homeland. If as a people they have resolved to trust no nation to look after them ever again, who can blame them? Six million - probably a low estimate - dead. Never again. 

I could go on, but the point is that all this is explainable by Social Science and none of it has to be this way.

Every tribe, not just Jews and Arabs, has its own culture. Every culture teaches its young when they are most impressionable that their way of life is the one truly human way. Almost always as well, the programming tells them that the divine power that their people have always believed in is real and has endorsed one way of life above all others.

I say such programming is all lies.

What the universe favors over the long generations and centuries is pluralism. A lot of different kinds of people, different in gender choices, creeds, skin tones, cheekbones, abilities, disabilities, and so on. A social ecosystem in which human rights protecting every minority and every individual are enforced by a democratic rule of law.

As long as you don’t try to force your way of life onto anyone else, you’re okay by me.

Unfortunately, there are a lot more tribes than just the Israelis and the Arabs who have the way of life and who are patiently, so patiently, waiting for the rest of the human species to see the light.

(We say we are God’s chosen people because we are. Why can’t you get that?)

The Jews, much of the West, in fact is actually saying, in simple modern terms, to the Arabs, “Get over it.”

The Arabs, in fact much of the Developing World, are actually saying, in simple modern terms, “What part of ‘no’ don’t you understand?”

Oh, the patience of them all! The righteous anger!

But if Sociology is telling us that every tribe thinks its way of life is normal, natural, human, and right, does Sociology say that our warring and our eventually annihilating our species is an inevitability? Not quite.

Send your kids, all of them, to well-funded, well run, quality public schools in which no one faith group dictates what every child will study. The curriculum must be secular; a separation of church and state, for the schools are an arm of the state, which should be faith neutral.

If the first wave of modern Israeli education had put all the kids on that dirt into such schools, quietly endorsed science, not German science, art, not European art, history, not Islamic history, music, not Jewish music, and so on – if parents then had had the will and the vision to say ‘We shall raise citizens of the world, not good little Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Christians, Hindus … or any others of the sects that put their holy books’ authority above the human rights of every citizen, we wouldn’t be in this mess right now.

Furthermore, as long as we allow schools in which such ‘higher authorities’ are being endorsed and taught, the suffering we’re seeing now will go on.

So I’ll ask again: if you want your kids to go to schools that endorse and teach some holy texts of some ancient tribe over science, world literature, and history, then do you like this stuff? Screaming kids, screaming parents, ripped limbs, shattered bones, and slumped dead bodies being dug out of rubble? Do you like this stuff?

If you choose any form of religious schooling for your children, this is what you ultimately are choosing. In the actions that speak so much louder than words, you are endorsing endless conflict. Maybe, the end of our species in not too long from now.

Do you like this stuff? 

          Elementary school in Meah She'arim, Israel    March 27, 2012 

                                (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

               Palestinian school in Fallujah, Iraq (March 20, 2005) 

                              (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

A Defense of Moral Realism: Introduction: Part 2

     U.S. Navy plane flying over Soviet missile cargo ship bound for Cuba

                                          (credit: Wikipedia) 

To continue on from my last post then, I will say that at about the time I was learning the steps in the scientific method, I also developed an obsession with a second matter: the moral side of human life. Events in the world caused me to feel deeply that we’re facing one problem that is clearly the most desperate that we need to solve.

The deepest question is not one like “Can we cure this flu?” or “Can we eradicate this moth?” The deepest question is not: “Can we?”, it is: “Should we?” “Would this act be right?” In short, the problem to which we should be devoting our best science is “What is right?” For us. 

My Science 9 teacher also taught us, a few weeks later, about atomic theory and the nuclear weapons that several nations in the world already had in 1963. And I understood how science had led us to these too. They filled me with dread.  

A year before the scientific method lesson, I’d seen terror in the faces of adults around me – my parents, teachers, even adults in stores I visited. October ‘62. Humanity hovered on the brink of nuclear war. Few of the adults understood how atom bombs worked, but they knew if those bombs were used, they would cause unimaginable destruction, maybe even an end to all life on earth. By smart human agency and some luck, we came through that crisis. But only just.

Over a year later, I got another massive shock. Just after my scientific method lesson, President Kennedy was assassinated. Two days later, his alleged assassin was also assassinated.

These two events – the Cuban Missile Crisis and JFK’s assassination – led me to conclude that the adults of my world had little understanding of, or control over, what was going on in international events. At the very least, if our leaders were doing their best, then the model of human social behavior that they were using was inadequate.

It’s terrifying for a boy to see fear in the eyes of adults he’s been trusting all his life. But I had also learned this amazing method, this thinking tool, that I could use to solve any problem, and I felt the way out of the mess of the modern world – nuclear arms proliferation, ecosystem collapse, overpopulation – was in front of us. Science. All we have to do is use it on ourselves. I believed that then and I believe it now. There is hope for us if we follow science well. Even History, Sociology, and Anthropology – our human tribal ways – could be understood by science.

So, I set a challenge for myself: use the scientific method to discover why we humans act the way we do, and if that much could be solved, then use the model developed via this line of research to hypothesize how we could act to reduce the odds of our destroying ourselves. If an effective model of human group behavior can be found, this model could guide us to a universal moral code. A code that is science-based and that tells us how we should treat each other. We could use it to redesign our societies so that we dramatically improve our survival odds.   

What follows in the rest of this essay is what I have been able to conclude so far from my studies of the humanities and social sciences and of people in my everyday life. My hope is that some young persons will pursue this project, develop the model of history that I present here, make a strong case for their version of that model, and then persuade enough of their brothers and sisters of its accuracy to form a critical mass: a group of people resolute and skilled enough to update the operating system of this pale blue dot.

That operating system, of course, is the human species. Us.

And here, to end this Introduction, I’ll address one last group, namely people who say this whole project, this reprogramming of the nations of the world with a new moral code, even if we could articulate a one, is just too huge. They have lives, and those lives are so stuffed with worries as to be barely bearable as it is. They’re worn out just holding on.

My reply is: “Look around. There is no one else. We save us, or we’re done. That’s the bottom line.” 

                   President Kennedy and cabinet meeting (Oct. 29, '62) 

                                                 (credit: Wikipedia) 

A Defense of Moral Realism: Introduction 

Part 1 

 Science is our hope and yes, I really believe that 

                                                                                 Svend Hansen 

                                teacher, principal, school board member,                                             

                                        Edmonton, Alberta  

                            (credit: Edmonton Public Schools) 

In grade 9, I had a really good Science teacher. He loved Science, he loved kids, and he loved getting the two together, which is all a good teacher really ever has to do. On a cool fall day in Edmonton in 1963, he taught my Science 9 class a basic lesson: the scientific method – what it says, how it works, and why it gets the amazing results that it does. I’m sure that I have embellished the picture in the years since that day, but basically, I recall clearly that on that day I got the scientific method, which is to say I understood it, and it filled me with hope.

I saw that prior to the arrival of science in my society, when people had had a question about some events in their lives – a question for which they had no stock answers – they had consulted wise women and men who were supposed to be able to give them answers. But often the answer was: “Because the gods decreed it that way. Our lot in life is to accept their decrees, not question them.”  In fact, people generally believed that the profound truths of the universe were beyond reason and evidence, too complex for almost any humans to grasp.

They believed a few special people could see those truths by revelation, a rare state of mind that was a gift that could not be attained by reason or discipline.

Lesser truths – about how to deliver babies or keep goats healthy or similar practical matters – could come to some minds via years of apprenticeship under a master of midwifery or goat husbandry or whatever. But even the masters’ knowledge had come via masters of previous generations. In other words, most of the tribe’s knowledge was passed down like habits – older people training younger ones in the knowledge and skills that the tribe had accumulated slowly over generations, mostly by trial and error, not reason and not revelation.  

Without revelation, humans could grasp only these lesser truths. What right and wrong are and why the cosmos exist weren’t matters for ordinary folk to understand. Instead, those things were learned as dogma and accepted without logical explanation or question. Some of each tribe’s knowledge was justified by something like science – by reasoning and evidence, in other words – but much more was justified by religious belief, with many ideas justified by bits of both. All of these then made up the total conscious wisdom of the tribe.

And many of every tribe’s ways weren’t conscious and weren’t justified at all; they were customs so ingrained that no one raised in the tribe noticed them.

Each tribe accumulated knowledge gradually over generations, and even then, a tribe’s total stock of knowledge was small when compared to its ignorance.

The scientific method changes this picture. With the scientific method – what Bacon called the “Novum Organum” – people could go beyond explanations like “we’ve always done it that way” or “the gods decreed it that way.” People could choose to respond to a problem that they wanted to solve by first, studying it closely, then forming a hypothesis about why it was the way it was, i.e., an explanation based on reasoning and evidence and pointing to possible causes and effects for why events might be unfolding in the ways that they did.

Then, if I were the seeker of understanding in this picture, I could imagine an experiment by which I could test to see whether my hypothesis worked: that is, I could imagine future circumstances in which – if my explanation of what was going on was correct – I’d be able to predict what was going to happen next. Most of the time, most hypotheses turned out to be wrong. But the seekers kept trying, and once in a while they hit on a bit of knowledge that was amazingly useful. They found a new way of looking at the world that worked so well that it gave them new power to direct the events of their lives.

How to make fire or how to make wheels were ideas of this breakthrough type, but we’ll probably never know who first had those ideas. On the other hand, we’re fairly certain it was Archimedes, a Greek scientist who lived and worked over 2200 years ago, who figured out how things can float in water. Anything wholly or partly immersed in a liquid will be buoyed up by a force equal to the weight of the liquid that it displaces. If the water displaced weighs more than the thing being immersed, the thing will float. This was a very useful insight because it enabled people who built ships to design the hulls of those ships with great skill. By doing more testing, Greek shipbuilders learned to make fast, efficient warships and cargo ships. Then, shipbuilding became very profitable in Ancient Greece.

It is useful to note here that any hypothesis that can’t be tested in this physically observable way is not science. Science has no interest in untestable hypotheses.  

Note that future circumstances about which I am making my prediction might be ones I can set up at will. For example, if I hypothesize that using a longer lever will increase the load that I can move, then when I get a longer lever under this boulder I’m straining to remove from my field, I should be able to move that boulder with the same force I had applied to my end of the first lever that didn’t work just a few minutes ago.

Similarly, if I have by coincidence found a new chemical substance that I think will kill coddling moths, I can spray it into an enclosed chamber of a few cubic meters of air set up in my lab, one in which I have already trapped a dozen or so adult coddling moths crawling about on a small apple tree. If all the coddling moths die in the space of a few hours, then I will be able to conclude, tentatively, that I have found a new pesticide which kills coddling moths.

But it is also worth noting here that there are some hypotheses for which I can’t set up test conditions. Hypotheses in astronomy are clear examples of ones that I can’t test in a lab whenever I want to. I can’t summon up a comet anytime I please; I can’t check at will whether comets reflect more blue light than yellow light. But comets large enough for me to study through my telescope do pass by the earth every few years. I can test my hypothesis if I just show a little patience and wait for the next one.

In either case, when the phenomenon that I am interested in happens, if I am a serious scientist, I will observe changes to the physical properties of the things I am studying. I will carefully record all of my observations or data, and after the events I’m watching are done, I will study my data to see whether the outcome that I predicted would happen, did in fact happen as I said it would.

Sometimes, the prediction comes true in obvious ways, as when the coddling moths in the chamber all die. Whether the pesticide I’ve found is safe for other species is another question, but these moths are dead. With the longer lever, I can move the stone I could not move before. Hypotheses can be confirmed.  

Sometimes the predictions made by scientists doing the experiment come true visibly, even dramatically. But often in our era, the results of research are only observable via instruments (microscopes, telescopes, etc.), and even then, only over very long or very short timespans. Scientists today often use instruments to cause a change to happen, then use more instruments to record data as they happen. They save the recorded data and study them, and do calculations with them, after the experiment is done.

Let’s reiterate that in all cases – ones of large phenomenon or very tiny ones, very fast or very slow ones – in order for a hypothesis to be considered scientific, it must be observably testable. The experiment is set up so that the observations will clearly either confirm or disconfirm the hypothesis. I’ll see the results I predicted either clearly happen or clearly fail to happen.

Often, what we find out is that we ought to be trying to steer nature with much more care and nuance than we have been doing. For example, my moth-killing pesticide may also cause birds in my area to die; this may allow other pests to breed rampantly. Meanwhile, by more experiments I may learn that there are other species in the orchard that control coddling moths without upsetting the natural balances there.

Today, everything we know about nature is leading us to the conclusion that we can affect natural balances, but we must learn to do so carefully if we don’t want to cause side-effects that will be unpleasant for us. Thus, instead of using a pesticide, I may choose to breed predator species that eat coddling moth eggs. Then, if I release large numbers of these predators into my orchard, I may be able to wipe out coddling moths in my whole area. And no toxic chemicals will need to go into the orchard at all.

It is also useful to say here that most humans are hypothesis-makers. We like to try to figure things out, imagine possible explanations for events happening around us. We have curious minds.

What a mind is exactly can be hard to define. So I am going to postulate for the purposes of this essay that all living things have at least a primitive mind. I say this because research is telling us that even protozoa like amoeba can learn new rules and change their behaviors when their worlds change. Thus, I am going to describe, not define, what a mind is by saying it is a trait possessed by any organism that is able to recognize patterns in events and then come to avoid those events that will cause it damage or to pursue ones that hold opportunity.

All living things can do this. How exactly they do – how living things learn and know – we so far can’t characterize in simpler terms. But we see their actions.

But why should we have to give simpler definitions? All realms of knowledge begin from definitions of a few basic terms that are considered self-evident and necessary if that field of knowledge is to be explained. Terms like “point” or “line” in Geometry; “mass” and “force” in Physics. Etc.

So let’s propose for this essay’s sake that mind is a quality any entity has if it can learn from experience to change its ways of behaving so as to avoid hazards and pursue opportunities relevant to its own well-being. 

What the scientific method did for our more curious ancestors – when they kept it in mind – is that it gave them a systematic series of steps to follow, steps that would lead them to more and more models and theories that worked better and better for predicting results of recognized patterns in events. Such models then enabled them to steer events in nature or steer around them and, consequently, to live healthier, safer, more satisfying lives.

The overall conclusion to be drawn from this discussion of the scientific method, however, is that it offers us a path toward better and better understanding of the things in our universe. I got that at thirteen years old. I could see, via many examples, that the scientific method works. It gives us more and more control over nature, and thus, over our lives.

For all of my years since that day, I have believed that, given some time, science can solve every problem we humans encounter. Sometimes, it does not give us exact laws that enable us to make exact predictions. Instead, in many fields, a new theory only gives statistical laws that may be used to predict the odds of some event occurring. But statistical laws are still science, not superstition.  

For example, a theory of how hurricanes occur won’t enable scientists to stop a hurricane from making landfall or even say how many there will be in the next three months. But once a hurricane is developing in the open ocean, the theory may enable the scientists to say, day by day, that the odds that a hurricane will hit the coast are growing to near certainty. They can even predict where it will hit a day before it does so. Then, people can be warned to get out of its way.

No cancer research can yet say for sure which of us will get cancer, but research can tell us that our odds of getting cancer drop by over half if we quit smoking.  

In addition, note that if testing shows a theory sometimes leads us to predictions that don’t work, the next step is not to halt research on that theory. The next step is to test the theory further by experiments designed to reveal why it is only working some of the time. Scientific testing – if it truly fits the term “scientific” – always points the way to more and better science.

Science is not now and never will be complete. It’s always telling us to think and test more precisely. Form new models and theories; test them in subtler ways. We’re never done with any problem in science, but our theories and our ways of testing them get more and more nuanced and focused.

Thus, at 13, I found a love for science. Thank you, Mister Hansen. You may be long gone, but you gave me a gift that has put wonder in me to this day. 

            Francis Bacon, father of the scientific method

                           (credit: Wikipedia)       

 

                                                      Benjamin Netanyahu 

                              (credit: Arbeitsbesuch Israel via Wikimedia Commons) 

Historical Traffic

The movie “Traffic” is one of the most interesting films ever made. It told two stories, woven into one another, showing two perspectives on the war on drugs. One story is about a teenaged girl in the U.S. in the 90s, who is the daughter of a judge. The judge, at the beginning of the story, is a hardliner, on the bench and in his life away from court. A disciple of the Reagans’ “just say no” doctrine.

The second story follows a kingpin of the drug cartels, and his beautiful, shrewd wife. Along the way, we see other players: Drug Enforcement Administration agents and a disillusioned Mexican cop, who sees all sides of the drug trade and its consequences, but still keeps trying to bring some order and decency to his job and his world. A decent guy in a corrupt place and time.

The story stuck in my head. It was brilliant because all the ingredients of a good film were there – story, directing, acting, editing – all of it, but more important was the fact that it taught me something profound. In the end, the judge and his wife get humbled by the struggle of their daughter with her addiction. She’s still their little girl, bright and lovable, but – oh, my – how all their lives change. Lost weekends. Near brushes with death. Rehab. The judge, at a group therapy session near the end of the film, says to the facilitator, that he and his wife are “just here to listen”. The mighty get brought low, but along the way they become human.

In the meantime, in the larger drug war ravaging both sides of the border, one gang wins, another loses – for the time being – and the DEA get used. They are pawns in the cartels’ game.

And the Mexican cop? He has to watch his partner get murdered in front of his face. Along the way, he does get a small consolation: he manages to wrangle out of one of the ugly deals he is forced into, some electricity for his town so that the kids there can play baseball in the evenings, and maybe stay out of gang life.

Another personal, human touch.

In the overall view, lies, murder, and greed are all there on every side. And the plot is so convoluted that audiences are left wondering what happened.

It hit me clearly at the end that I would be days sorting this story out, but a few things were for sure: the demand for coke in the U.S. is bottomless; the majority of the people of Mexico are victims, not beneficiaries of the U.S. suburbs’ joy of coke; and the DEA guys in their meetings and machinations, most of the time, haven’t clue what’s really going on.

But why? Why are American laws and enforcement efforts so futile so much of the time? I thought I saw it in the face of the Mexican policeman played by Benicio del Toro. He knows what has happened. The DEA got outwitted and manipulated by the Juarez cartel. The U.S. cops got played. The ultimate reason for that is that they grossly underestimated their adversaries. Always, a bad flaw to suffer from. They didn’t get that Mexicans could be just as smart as they are. And, for me, that is the story’s point.

What does all of this have to do with now? Just this: a parallel situation is, in my opinion, developing in the Middle East. Parallel?! Yes. Look at it.

What got the Jews of Europe into a position of power at the end of WWII was not the Rothschilds’ wealth or the Elders of Zion or any such nonsense. What gave them the strength that they’re squandering like found money now was a wave of world opinion. The nations forming the UN felt real sympathy for the Jews as the truth about the Nazi camps began to come out. After the war, an unbelievable figure. Six million people. The evidence, the documents, and the witnesses were all there. Six million. And that could very well be a low estimate. How could such a thing happen? Those poor people! They had world sympathy. They parlayed it into a land of their own. They’re losing that sympathy now.

And the Arabs? Too many in the West forget that their culture is also thousands of years old. They can be just as skillful as any other players out there at what is called “The Great Game”. Money, politics, diplomacy. Power. War. “War is the continuation of politics by other means.” (von Clausewitz)

Hamas leaders had seen demonstrated before their eyes for three generations that they’d never match the Israelis in high-tech weapons. They were as brave as the Israelis. But the Palestinian leaders learned the hard way that courage is not enough. In the global picture, over the long haul of centuries, what changes outcomes is having the support of powerful allies. World opinion. Bibi has lost it now. Maybe past all recovery. One shaky ally left. If the next U.S. president says, “Enough is enough!!” (DT would love to say that.), what then? The loss of all world support? Maybe even for centuries?

So what does a film about drug cartels have to do with today’s politics? Nothing and everything. The Israelis are being played now. Hamas leaders foresaw this endgame. They have one asset, and they are using it. They have thousands of people who are willing to die for a cause. A laughable way to try to win a war, you say? Not if you play the long game. It has worked before, and we don’t have to look far to find an example. Bibi is being played. He’s easy to manipulate. He thinks all Palestinians are idiots. His idea of the long game is staying out of jail.  

But you have a nice day, anyway. This stuff all involves people who have been killing one another for millennia, and it’s all far away. It can’t happen here.

T

                                                      actor Benicio del Toro 

                                    (credit: Gage Skidmore, via Wikimedia Commons)

                                  

                                                                   African Jesus  

                            (credit: Virginia Benedicte; public domain) 

                                           A Hopeful Christmas

Good day. Thank you for dropping by. I have one small announcement: the Chamber of Commerce has asked me to remind you that there are only a few 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 view 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 33 A.D.? What are we celebrating? What did he stand for? I think more deeply about this question at Christmas time, as most of us do. 

Like many thinkers in Western culture, I get fed up with how commercial Christmas has become. 

The ads sometimes start before Remembrance Day. I find that very 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 set aside time for them, showing respect and 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 from Nov. 1 to Nov. 12 to be sure that I do not buy whatever it is those ads are trying to sell – ever again. And in general, we give and receive too much stuff that we don’t need or even like. (“Hello, Little Gift. How long till you’re in the landfill?”)

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 also don’t need or even like.

        Landfill dump (credit: Cezary, via Wikimedia Commons) 

Can anything save me from total disillusionment during the Christmas season? Yes. I couldn’t have said that for many years, but I can today. Ten years or so 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 and fast 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 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 biggest crime, the one that we do to each other. 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 fact is what makes us feel so disillusioned with our own species, especially during the Christmas season of "peace on earth, goodwill to men".  

And let me not mince words 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 genocides. 

Mafia thugs are disgusting human beings, but they are small fry compared to the Hitlers and Stalins of the world. The Shakas, the Genghis Khans, the Caesars, the Alexanders, the Pol Pots, and the Joshuas. The war madness has infected every culture on earth.

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 accomplished 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. He also saw that the war technologies were improving all the time. Even in 30 A.D., he could see that humanity was on a path of improving weapons till it ended in disaster. Humans appeared to him, even then, to be headed for self-destruction.

The ways of greed, politics, and war and the improvements in our military technologies can be represented by 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. 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. Bigger and bigger weapons, more and more greed. He saw this desperate situation taking shape even in his own time.

But he saw further, and he put into his own time a new way of seeing ourselves. A new worldview. 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 ways 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!” Most would have looked at you like you had just grown donkey ears. The main thing they all prayed to their gods for was victory in battle.

All the recently conquered peoples in the Roman Empire in Jesus' day contained rebels who were eager to get even with the Roman conquerors. This was especially true 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. 

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. Bloody corpses dragged away at the end. Their worldview was built on the assumption of violence.  

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.

Beside that message, everything else he said and everything else that was ever said about him pales to insignificance. 

Since those times, heroes all through history, even modern ones like Gandhi, Mandela, and King, have shown by real-world example that with enough courage, the way of non-violence really can work. Christians have mostly been less sincere in observing Jesus’ simple rule, but they 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, as they did 400 years ago, and people who secretly attend dog fights, once their secret is discovered, are hounded from our midst and quarantined in jails, as unfit to live with. Even then, if they ask sincerely for forgiveness, they can still be forgiven. Jesus gave us that too.

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, in spite of hard efforts on the Romans' part to stamp it out. There was something about it that tugged at human emotions. Worst of all, it began to steal some of the sons and daughters of citizens all over the empire, even right in Rome. Many of these converts were teenagers, fed-up with the materialistic, hedonistic emptiness of their parents’ way of life.

The Roman Empire is long gone, as are many other empires. Too many to list. Jesus’ words are still here. Love your neighbor.            

So, for me, was he divine? Was he the son of God that the churches claim he was? No, not to me. 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, and live by, 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 killing 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, sensible species, a differently programmed species that no longer needs to keep itself fit by programming its young to be their own predators. In short, maybe, we can stop trying to toughen ourselves by war. We can find another way. Learn to keep ourselves strong by individual hard work and self-discipline instead of by killing one another. 

Before him, our destroying ourselves was a mathematical certainty. Then, he inserted a little ‘maybe’. Maybe, we really can learn to 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. He showed us a different way, and he gave us hope. 

So what if some lying, greedy politicians won this latest round of elections? 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 roofs with glittering plastic 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 families and friends.

                            

                                          Nelson Mandela at 19 

                                            (credit: Wikipedia) 

Quote by Marianne Williamson (often used by 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.