Taoist Qigong training 


I write to spread my ideas about moral realism. I don't get a lot of comments back, but a few. One point that is buried, I believe, in the doubts that my critics have expressed is their belief that I am trying to combine things that do not combine. Social justice and capitalism. Military preparedness and peace-seeking diplomacy. Feeding the billions and caring for the ecosystems of this planet. 

My response to these kinds of queries is the same in every case. Balance is what the universe is made of. Balances of opposing forces, ever-shifting. We are situated among such forces in every aspect of our lives. Matter. Ecosystems. Work, education, health care, personal relationships, etc. Our learning, by hard experience, to sort the entities and forces operating in all of these is what makes us human. Reason applied to experience and then the learning passed on to the next generation. Culture. 

Yes, it's complicated. Yes, a basic state of anxiety is normal to the human condition. These are the price of our being free in a way that no other species we have found is free. Free to act in informed ways that will alter the odds of our future going wrong. Learning/culture is the human response to quantum uncertainty. Nations gradually learning personal responsibility for every individual adult citizen and then gradually gaining freedom - this is the highest common factor among the the billions who make up the human species today. Every time you feel tempted to curse the anxieties in your life, maybe remind yourself: would you really want a life that contained no dilemmas, no choice? 

Nations that put regimes in place which reduce citizens' choices to none or almost none, however harmonious in the short term, do not come to happy ends. History has shown us that over and over. No autocracy or oligarchy or theocracy has ever had leaders that smart. Reality keeps unfolding in ways that we can't perfectly foresee or make provision for. The best wisdom, the most effective system of governance, is the one that uses the wisdom and experience of all of its citizens and extends citizenship to all of its rational adults. 

Centrally planned economies, for example, can't compete with market-driven ones. Over whole economies and over decades, committees don't have the experience or clarity of vision that millions of shareholders do. And to follow this thought, while keeping balance in mind, we can ask: "But why then would the successful people in business care about the millions who aren't good at entrepreneurship and investing?" Why? Because history tells us that to callously let them suffer and die is - in the long term - merely stupid. Aristocrats, theocrats, and autocrats over and over have been murdered by enraged people who have seen their children die. So you fund the public schools and the health care system, you pay living wages, and you accept that these are the price of the civil order that enables your market and its working in the first place. It's just good business to create a population that believes in its nation's way of life and that contains minimal numbers of corrupt officials and sociopathic criminals.

And elected governments? I think Lincoln said it best. "You can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time." Or Churchill (though there is some dispute over whether he said this first). "Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all of the others." 

So? We work. We debate. We find consensus. Or at least, compromise. And we get on with it. We just don't resort to violence, or at least not until our lives are literally at stake. And if you're reading these words, dear reader, I hope it is because you really are fed up with the hurting and obstinacy of the last fifty centuries. You want to do better. You want to be one who puts her/his energies toward reducing the odds that the madness will come again. You believe in human exceptionalism. We can get out of the pattern that has for so long run and ruined our lives.  

America, for example, is, in the eyes of many of its citizens, an exception to the usual rules of History. But that is because humanity is proving, in these times, that it is an exception to the usual rules of Biology. We are the species that no longer needs carnivores to stay healthy. We have schools. We have markets. We are finally ready to stop being our own carnivores. And in this process, America is leading the way. It's mission will be done when it is just one more nation-citizen in a world that contains several hundred nation-provinces, all of them running under democratic regimes. 

America has, for lots of reasons, the leading system right now, the one that is the most vigorous. But America will not conquer the world. It doesn't want to. The values of democracy, adapted in ways that work for each nation, will conquer the world. I really believe that. The process, fortunately or unfortunately, depending on your temperament, will only require of thinking people who study history and culture, every ounce of strength they have. But democracy has always been so. It asks of us ...everything. Each of us finding her/his own best way to contribute to the world and then working at it with both passion and discipline. Dynamic taoism. Balance. 

To re-phrase Kennedy's words just a bit: "Ask not what your world can do for you; ask what you can do for your world." 

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




                    

                                                                                   John Kennedy