Susan Sontag said, “10 percent of any population is cruel,
no matter what, and 10 percent is merciful, no matter what, and the remaining
80 percent can be moved in either direction.” She did not do sociological
research to back up the numbers, but the numbers are not important, no one fits
neatly into those three categories. It’s up to us to observe what is true in
the relationships we have and within ourselves.
There is data on what she says, see Jonathan Haidt’s The
Righteous Mind for example. When Robert Sapolsky studied Bonobos, he
chronicled what you would expect, a male hierarchy dominated through violence
and intimidation. When most of those males died from eating human garbage, the
females imposed a new order. They welcomed new young males into the group, but
only if they followed the rules of mercy and compassion. Cruelty and mercy were
in the minds of all of them in varying degrees and environmental pressures
helped one or the other manifest.
There is a Cherokee story of two wolves that live within a
person. First, they should get that checked out, that is way too many wolves
living in you. One wolf is evil, anger, envy, regret, the other is good, joy,
peace, humility, compassion. They fight, and this fight is going on within
every person on earth. The question of which will win is answered with, “The
one you feed.” Unlike Hollywood movies, the story doesn’t end with one wolf
winning. The wolves are always there and always wanting to be fed.
Another version of the story ends with, “If you feed them
right, they both win.” If you are familiar with the Star Trek character Captain
Kirk, you might remember a few episodes where he spoke well of his evil side
and how it motivated him. In a transporter accident, he was split into two
people, with one of “wolves” in each. The evil wolf was easily identified and
subdued and quarantined. The good wolf was able to hide his thoughts for a
while but was unable to make difficult decisions or be a strong leader.
Richard Carrier refers to this as the bell curve of our
tendencies, “I claim every human being possesses both potentials, but not to
any universally fixed degree. I would claim some are born with less or more of
an innate tendency either way (probably matching a bell curve pattern within
the population as a whole), but that every human can cultivate one potential
more than another well beyond their biological tendencies (provided they
actually do so, and by a method that actually works: and there are methods that
work, and methods that don't--and working methods include the active, i.e.
self-development, and passive, i.e. parental and societal influence and
upbringing).”
Any of this would be difficult or impossible to study in an
ethical manner. Malidoma Some, who was born into a tribal society in Africa in
the middle of the 20th century and was educated at the Sorbonne in France, told
me that he knew of tribes that had lost most of their men to wars and it took a
generation or more to reinstate a culture of proper development for the youth.
We couldn’t design a study to track that. In the current Western culture,
language about the deficiencies of certain ethnic groups has been purged from
academia, but data is collected and presented that claims to show how much
better people do when raised with a mother and father in the household. I find
these to be coded in a way to put a veil of scientific reasoning over the
prejudice. It also demonstrates that there are underlying values that we share,
despite our differences about how to pass on those values and encourage them in
others.
From some of what I’ve said here, one might think there is a
system, something that we would have discovered by now to put in a book, create
a curriculum, or maybe a funny meme on facebook. I’m not leading up to that, or
avoiding presenting it, because I don’t know of one. What I have is a system
that will help us improve the system. I can’t say that work will ever be
completed.
One of the barriers is the lure of easy answers. They are
easy to write-up, easy to make them appealing, easy to swallow, comforting to
join with others who agree with them, easy. They can persist for centuries,
paradoxically enforced by violence while claiming it’s necessary to keep the
peace. Recent studies have shown that it is the community support that is more
important than the book or philosophy that them together, that is, an atheist
with a strong group of friends thrives as well as a member of church.
I think a big part of why this system for creating a moral
system is not taught is the way we teach history, and this includes Sunday
School. We teach dates and names for great people, usually men who come along
with something new and lead others into the new world they create. There are
really geniuses and breakthroughs, but they only come from what came before.
Great ideas don’t spring into a mind spontaneously, they are nurtured from the
fertile soil of a healthy community. We have yet to come up with one big list
of what is right, and the list will change as nature changes, and we are part
of nature.
The belief that there is an end, a singularity we are all
moving toward, a cosmic truth that will one day be revealed, keeps us fighting
over who has the best version of it. We spend more time fighting over the
latest list rather than reflecting on how to improve the lists. The list gives
us something to rally around and distracts us from keeping our minds open to what
others are saying or doing.
“Morality binds and blinds. It binds us into ideological
teams that fight each other as though the fate of the world depended on our
side winning each battle. It blinds us to the fact that each team is composed
of good people who have something important to say.”
Francis Schaeffer is sometimes considered the progenitor of
the Evangelical movement in the second half of the 20th century. In
his seminal work “How Then Shall We Live”, he begins by looking at failed
civilizations and philosophies over thousands of years. Without very much
background or logical connection, something Click and Clack the Tappet Brothers
might call “unencumbered by the thought process”, he concludes therefore, that
there must be an ultimate truth, a source of wisdom beyond human ability and that
must be the God of the Christian Bible.
This offer of an answer to the questions of how to live, to
me, is not different than the offerings of a populist leader who does not
acknowledge the input of the people they are leading. They are the opposite of
the leader who says, “it was a team effort”, when asked how they succeeded.
Examples of that form of cooperative leadership at high levels are hard to
find. Democracy is an attempt to formalize it at a national level but we’re
still experimenting. Mythology passed down to Indigenous cultures might contain
lessons.
One of those is the Seventh Generation Principle. It comes
to the modern Western world from the Iroquois Confederacy of tribes around what
is now Lake Ontario in pre-Columbian North America. Some of their ideas
inspired the United States Constitution but the idea of considering the impact
of decisions on future generations was dumped, overridden by the culture of
Capitalism and short-term gains.
Early diaries of European explorers of North American speak
of settled areas that had been abandoned. Germ theory had not yet been
discovered, so we can forgive them for not understanding where everyone went.
Later however, this was forgotten or more likely changed to the story of how
those Europeans “tamed” the wilderness. The practices of forest management and
hunting that preserved species didn’t result in walled cities and wide roads,
so for centuries European methods have been considered superior. The impending
failure of those methods is finally drawing that consideration into question.
Spiritual practices are difficult to understand from the outside,
so I hesitate to comment on them. I will stick to less controversial
statements. Connection to the land and a reverence for nature is easily
recognized in writing and stories. Some tribes use the term “two-spirit” or
something similar to describe a person with masculine and feminine gender
identities. This is something that is rarely honored in other cultures the way
N.A. culture has. Also, in my recent interactions with American Natives alive
today, I have heard expressions of belief that are unlike other beliefs that
have a hierarchical system, with the most powerful gods leading and demanding
worship. There seems to be more of a recognition that the stories are symbolic,
but this could be just my interpretation.
Overall, my estimation is these ideas and practices were
lost and subjugated when Empires with more effective weapons and battle
techniques took control of large areas of the map. That changed not only who
was in control but how values of how best to survive were passed on. Reflecting
on how much better off we are than the previous generation or our younger
selves was replaced by what general could best the previous ones or what
innovator could create technology to make last year’s model obsolete.
These ideas are not exclusive to Native American but I am
most familiar with them. I’m sure similar ideas could be found in other parts
of the world and in more philosophies. Now that we have connected the globe and
have a better vision of history, including pre-written history, it is time we
incorporate all that knowledge and experience into a global sense of morality.
Religions that have been at war with each other for as long as they have
existed now gesture and speak in platitudes of how we are all praying to the
same God or that their God points to the same beliefs as the others. There is
even recognition lately of moral systems that have nothing to do with Gods at
all. Is it possible to bring all this together and at least talk about the
common ground?
This is a bit a tangent from the main theme of how to create
a moral system, but I sometimes feel Carrier spends too much time critiquing
the people who call themselves moral leaders and not so much on where we could
be looking for real leadership.
There was a new Bill and Ted excellent Adventure movie this year, gotta give a nod to that. It was about the fulfillment of their original mission, to bring the whole world together with their music, which keeps seeming to happen and then not happen in each of the movies. I've followed a similar pattern through the years. You could review last year's New Year's post for example.
In February, I almost got a local chapter of Braver Angels off the ground, then, that thing that 2020 will be most remembered for happened. Braver Angels has continued online, so that's good, but getting people together in living rooms has not been happening so much.
The article marks this year as the year that we will probably stop referencing the "Reagan legacy" and start using "Trump legacy". Before Reagan, we were very much under the influence of the "Roosevelt legacy", The New Deal. Today, we have people who are confused about all of this, who are afraid of "socialism" but don't want "the government" to take away Medicare or Social Security. The details of this battle between the social safety net and big business are in the article.
It also describes how racism has been used as a weapon in this battle. That legacy goes back to the Civil War and the years that followed; Reconstruction. It mixes our identity as strong individuals who have high morals and ethics with a focus on vague enemies, like "communism" or "terrorists". It leverages these tools and uses legal maneuvers to selectively apply votes so it appears to be democratic and patriotic. It draws lines, and sets up each side to believe they are the "real" America. I'm using tons of scare quotes because all of these definitions are in flux. Photo: Deconstructing Reconstruction
Many genies have been released from their bottles lately and they don't like being put back in. They will continue to impress us with their magic tricks. But as everyone knows, you have to be very careful what you wish for because genies can be so literal in their interpretations of your words and the trick is then played on you.
As the article notes, we are at a point where millions of people are openly asking for votes to not be counted and questioning the entire system and willing to overturn the results of our duly run democratic process. It is not logical, but it is the inevitable result of playing on people's righteous belief in their ideology.
There are scenarios where the same righteousness could have resulted in a Left Wing disaster. But don't confuse the danger of government that is too liberal with the reality of one that was captured by and run by conservative big business. Both can lead to oligarchy; rule by a rich elite. The "liberal" and "conservative" labels lose their meaning when you look at who makes the rules, that is, the ones with the gold.
I recently listened to a discussion with Coleman Hughes and Douglas Murray on Coleman’s podcast. At times I had trouble figuring out what world they live in. These are not small players and they covered many major talking points, so if someone can explain this to me, maybe I’ll find out what I’m missing. The title is “The Intersectional Crackup with Douglas Murray“, but intersectionality is far from the only topic.
If you aren’t familiar with the term “Intersectional”, it covers the interconnected nature of the categorizations that people fall into. As we began to address centuries old oppression, we addressed them separately, such as women’s issues or rights for people of African descent. Intersectionality recognizes the dynamics when a person is a member of more than one of those groups. It sounds simple when you look at the definition but it gets convoluted when people want to make it so, like in this podcast.
The podcast starts with a commercial, so you can skip that.
Hughes seems to head into an important discussion about leading a meaningful life at about 4 minutes in but he keeps the discussion to how difficult that is in a world of identity politics. He says the current culture has taken on a “religious” like form. From then on he focuses on how not to build a sense of self.
Murray’s first answer to Coleman’s opening question is to agree about the religion shaped hole in society. You can trace this back to Nietzsche, who famously said “God is Dead” and less famously said, “and we killed him”. He (Nietzsche) then went on to speculate what people will use to fill the missing answers and moral judgments provided by religion. Murray says the “intersectionalists” use guilt, atonement and heresy, just as religions have. He does not see a discussion about purpose. He denigrates youth on both the left and right. The conservatives don’t have a “how”. The Left does, but he rambles about some sort of “abdication” by adults that I don’t get.
He says he could give his views on how people found meaning in the past, but then he is vague. He says “literature” without naming much. He says this is a failure of atheists. I have seen him interact with atheists, so I can’t figure out why he doesn’t see them doing this. It was the atheist thinkers and writers, past and present where I did find meaning and purpose. The only purpose I can glean from religion is “read the scriptures, pray, and if you don’t find purpose, you did it wrong.” Anything specific, anything meaningful, can be found in a non-religious source from writers contemporary to those sources. The non-religious ones are usually not only better, but they don’t require you to memorize any names of prophets or their movements. You just need to work through the ideas.
Around this time in the podcast, 10 minutes or so, both of them have started using the term
https://www.facebook.com/WeStayWoke/
“woke culture”. This is the latest term that began with a positive meaning but is used in a derogatory manner. I understand why to some extent. Some people are actually aware and paying attention, thus “woke”, and some are pretending to care about the issues of the day but are really not well informed. Hughes and Murray are going after the latter group.
Coleman then says something I couldn’t be sure I heard correctly it was so strange. He said, “If you are Right Wing, you can’t be unapologetically Christian”. I think he’s saying Right Wing Christians feel they have to hold back on expressing their religion because it is associated with oppression of the past. In the podcast, or any of the other times I’ve heard these two speak, I have not heard any awareness of a liberal version of Christianity. It is a wing of Christianity that has been growing for decades, with roots that go back to the 13th century and early Christian humanists.
Hughes however grew up with what seems to be a narrow-minded sect of liberals that saw themselves as a rebel force, as he says, a ‘resistance’, ala Star Wars. Instead of finding the many more nuanced messages and movements in the country, he has become ‘anti’ to whatever that was.
After the 13 minute mark, Murray pushes this even farther, saying these recent Left ideologies are not based on intellect. Occasionally, he does hit on something worthwhile. He notes that when a group of any kind presents a prepackaged system, it can gain followers, but there is a downside. He cites the Catholic Church and how Ireland, once a Catholic stronghold has lately been divorcing itself from that. I would say something simplistic, like Murray just hasn’t found a Liberal group that he likes, but that’s his job, to seek out and evaluate groups. So something else is going on here.
Hughes makes a similar worthwhile statement, then messes it up. He says he is not comfortable with the idea of “my country, right or wrong”, but then ponders why all those brown people are coming here. He figures if they are coming here, we must be doing something right, and apparently doesn’t figure much beyond that. It does not occur to either one of them that they are coming here for the promises in our Constitution. They come here for the education system we subsidize, the business assistance, the protection of rights, the things they don’t have in their country. The things Liberal politicians vote for and fight for.
Instead, at about 21 minutes, they launch into how amazed they are that we still get excited when another barrier is broken, like a black woman becoming Vice President. Hughes says Obama broke the final barrier and that should have “changed the model”. I’m not sure what that means, but he does not give the slightest nod to what happened to the culture during the Obama years.
Another good point from Murray is that young people, or anyone else, should not “hack into history”, looking for something wrong. Instead we should try to “reconcile” who we are to that past. But he sets up a straw man to knock down. He says people then ask him, “what about injustice”. He accepts there are struggles but dismisses them, giving no examples of one that was fought and won. He does not make a case for why it’s time to put discussions of racism, inequity, or misogyny to rest. He alludes to “rivers of thought” that we should attempt to navigate, but never says what those are. And I’ll repeat that this is not the first or only Douglas Murray I’ve listened to.
At 27 minutes, he makes a comment that he doesn’t want there to be “types” of books or studies, there shouldn’t be “women’s books” for example. He backs this up by citing Bayard Rustin, a strategist for Martin Luther King Jr who was against the rise of Black Studies in Universities. It seemed like segregation, just what the White people wanted. He jokes at something he apparently has heard, that people say there are no gay writers in the canon.
I don’t know who Murray is talking about because he rarely gives quotes or names. Of course
Getty images
there are gay people who wrote books, ancient to current, because there were always gay people. The problem is, many of them hid it, or if they didn’t, the next generation erased it. It’s harder to erase history now, it is not “written by the winners” as it once was. This is an unusual time, when people of all stripes are gaining positions of power, crossing borders easily, working across cultural barriers. The only thing I can make of this is Hughes and Murray don’t want that. They play on the fact that they are each members of a category that has experienced disadvantages, Hughes is black, Murray is gay. They take their own example and claim that it proves these problems are behind us. They see none of the history of changes in norms, they never compare our time to any empire of the past that came close to the level of inclusivity we are experiencing. I can only speculate, but my guess is they see a zero sum game, and they are on the winning the side, so they want change to stop to reduce the risk of losing what they have.
It gets worse but the details are just a different flavor of the same theme. At 36 minutes, Murray calls the Left’s ideas “simple”, saying it’s easy to understand and the Left makes it more complex. The man has a platform as big as just about anyone, but I can’t find this simple message he says he knows.
I’ll give Murray credit for one more item, on the topic of cancel culture. If you’ve seen it, you know what I mean. It’s when someone who has found fame, position, and hopefully even has said something worth saying but, then says something off the mark. Some group, large enough to get an audience, amplifies that mistake and calls for resignation or demotion or some other form of cancelling. This puts a damper on anyone who is even thinking about speaking up. It takes our open forums where ideas are incubated and encouraged and turns them into echo chambers where everyone fears offending the next fringe group. Murray speculates that this behavior might bring down the “woke” system. I think it might already be happening.
After that he has a couple doozies. The one that tops them all was “we don’t need people to come along and pretend to us that we are things we’re not.” It’s at 52 minutes and 45 seconds. I agree that there are people who call themselves Liberal but don’t bring with it all of the liberal values that go with that label. They bring a set of standards that may not match the values and ideas that got us to the current enlightened era we are enjoying. We should all be vigilant of that. I don’t know how Murray misses that people in history who “pretend to us that we are things we’re not”, are the same types of people he is speaking against. Back in time, they were priests and princes and town constables and local sheriffs. Now they are bloggers and influencers and talk show radio hosts.
What’s missing is, we have to base our decisions to “call out” problems on the values that built our free and open society. “Calling out” is not the problem, it’s what you call out. We can discuss the “how”, but don’t let that bury the “what”.
Deb Haaland. Secretary of Interior Nominee
These two might be tired of people identifying themselves with a traditionally oppressed group. For myself, I am far from tired of hearing about barriers being broken. A Native American in the position of Interior Secretary for instance, is quite meaningful and worth noting. But these guys, now that it’s not just straight white guys getting everything, want to say, “oh yeah, that’s what we all wanted the whole time, see it’s fine, don’t say anything about it now and it will all go away forever”. They are getting paid by the system as it is, and they aren’t interested in why they are despite their intersectionality. Easier to denigrate anyone who does question it or blame them if they have not received their piece of the pie.
What I’m hearing here is that they feel very much the same way that large groups of people have felt in the past. Blacks felt marginalized, and in the South with voter suppression and everywhere with housing red lining, they were. Women were harassed at work and it was portrayed in sitcoms as a joke. I understand that men like this are not treated as special as men were just a generation ago, and that probably feels like they have lost something. But the people they are talking about are not asking to be treated specially, just equally.
I’d like to cover just one more term, “identity politics”. The way Hughes and Coleman are using it here, they are pointing to the people that claim that say you have to be a member of a certain group to understand that group’s plight. They are complaining about people that are asking for something extra based purely on their membership in some group, identified by skin color, sexual orientation, or similar traits. I agree with this for the most part. It should be that equality is just that, equal. I think human beings are capable of empathizing with others and understanding the needs of others, without actually experiencing all possible circumstances.
Hughes and Coleman aren’t limiting their solutions to just this narrow issue however. They are expanding it to claim that no policy should consider any type of identifying characteristics. When evaluating history, they ignore the basis of nations, wars, religions, hiring practices, and budgeting that was the norm until the middle of the last century. There were no black senators. Women could not get high paying jobs or leadership positions. Girls did not have sports programs. These facts matter. People who are born in a system that gives them privileges will rarely change the rules to reduce the privileges. Change requires legislation that identifies those traits that were used to identify those who were barred from those privileges in the past.
So, I’m a blogger, so I guess I should do this. It’s about change, about lots of changes through history and what that means to us now. I might seem a bit annoyed. If you want to get a teenager to read this, preferably one who doesn’t want to, they might get the proper tone of voice for it.
Everybody is talking about change. Of course we will change. Hasn’t every President run on that platform for the last 50 years? Make America Whatever or Hopey Changey, I don’t care. Throw the bums out. That’s a desire for change. But there is always tension, against the fear. Too much rapid change to greater rights for more people and a move toward socialism resulted in populism, on the left and the right. I have watched the constant battle between the dawning of the Age of Aquarius and the good old traditions since I was born in 1960. Look at what’s happened in the last 100 years since the 1918 flu pandemic. That’s in your parents’ or grandparents’ lifetime if you are older, so hopefully you talked to them. If you are younger, hopefully you know someone in the next generation up. They might have an old recording or at least some pictures.
They went through:
Nuclear weapons
Invention of vaccines
1918 flu
World War I (1914 to 1918)
Despite the pace of change having increased in the recent centuries, we haven’t developed new ways to cope with it. I don’t have much to suggest for that, but for me, getting some perspective on how much has happened, how far we have come in a short time, and how it has always been the people pushing leaders to change. That has helped me understand it.
My Public Education history spent too much on the days before the Revolution in this country, that’s my opinion. I always wanted to get to the World Wars and why those happened.
It was a major change in how the world worked. Before then, we were a world of royal families. Generals road on horses with colorful uniforms and battles lasted for a few days. With the arms buildup of the late 19th century, a result of the industrial revolution, these in-bred idiots who had no idea how to live in a time of electronic communication and world travel, put a match to the powder keg they built. To defend against heavy artillery, they created trench warfare, to breakthrough that they invented tanks, and on and on.
Going back through the 19th century further you had:
The Industrial Revolution, steam engines, mechanics, oil. Horses were no longer the best source of power, but we still use the term “horsepower”.
Darwin published the Origin of Species in 1859.
Michael Faraday, who died in 1867, advanced our understanding of electromagnetism. That’s kind of important to whatever device you are reading this on.
Pause for a moment on this guy. He discovered the mysterious energy floating around that we could use to move things and to communicate across miles. Click to see David Tong giving a lecture in the same hall where Faraday gave his. Tong is talking about the newly understood forces of quantum physics, that we now understand are the fundamental forces behind all things. He’s giving that lecture in the same hall, with the same desk, that Faraday did. It’s like we just figured out stone tools yesterday, and now we all have scalpels in our medicine cabinets.
While Faraday was alive, we were finally throwing off the last myths about race and changing laws so we could no longer justify slavery. There are still slaves in the world, I know, but most people know that’s wrong now. What will be commonly thought of as wrong by end of your lifetime?
Change takes a little longer in the centuries before that, but let me connect just a few more things. Once the empires that grew out of ancient history started bumping into each other and “discovering” each other, we started accumulating our knowledge, sharing it actually, but not always in a nice way. You might have heard of Thomas Aquinas, who tried to reconcile the Catholic religion with Greek philosophy. He had a little help from the Muslims by the way. Not too long after that, we had Protestant kingdoms, so there was a lot of fighting with the Catholics.
At the end of all that fighting, after the Thirty Years War, 1648, a treaty was signed called the Peace at Westphalia. It took away powers from the Pope and created a new type of nation. That’s what you live in, a Westphalian nation-state. Sure, your way of life is rooted in a Judeo-Christian/Western Civilization/Constitutional Republic/Democracy/melting pot, sure. But the basic structure of our politics has only been around for 400 years, and it was formed under duress, and it’s not working. A bunch of morons from the Middle Ages made it up to get the Pope out their business and we can get the billionaires out of our pockets if we create the next system.
Something else happened once the European Princes and Bishops quit making us kill each other. It was the British Royal Society, founded in 1660 to promote scientific thought and learning. It was the fertile ground where Isaac Newton flourished. Newton created the mathematics that got us to the moon (along with some of those other folks above). Computers were first put to the test during that work. That pretty much brings us up to where we are now.
To have that sort of creative energy, to allow the brilliant people of the day to discover something, you have to first have some degree of peace. You have to have a little extra left over at the end of the day to give to the general welfare, to build some roads, to have some nurses ready to take care of us instead of working overtime to pay off student loans and a mortgage from that house they bought before the bankers destroyed the economy.
What gets left out of historical discussions like this is none of it happens if we don’t care about people that we will never meet; people on the other side of the world and people who are not born yet. If we aren’t keeping the world clean and free from violence and filled with beauty, if we aren’t nurturing the people who grow our food, or who are sitting in a room somewhere coming up with formulas that who knows what they will do, but we can bet they will do something, then none of this happens. Then we slip back into using those stone tools to harm each other and take whatever we can just because we can. None of this happens if we don’t realize we need each other.
A note on the present: We aren’t purposely crashing the economy by shutting it down, just so we can save a few million lives. The economy would have crashed if we didn’t do anything because the hospitals would have been overrun. People would have chosen to quit interacting with others after it was far too late. Services would be much more disrupted because the closures would be random; we wouldn’t be choosing to keep groceries open as opposed to restaurants, we would be choosing from far fewer options.
It would not be some simple math of 2 or 3% more people dead. We would be surrounded by sick people and no one would want to touch them for fear of getting sick themselves. This would multiply the problems. Any normal illness or regular medical attention needed would be almost impossible. We would have new priorities, like disposing of the bodies.
The stock market selloff was recognition by those who understand how their system works, that it is not working, that it is not designed to respond to a problem like this. It is not designed to take care of the people that actually create the wealth that they accumulated. Ironically, it created the problem by changing the environment, putting workers under stress, and prioritizing profits over health. It put messaging over science. They know this, they saw it coming. They didn’t tell us until they cashed out. But cashing out is a strategy of the dying system. I don’t know what the next system will be, but it won’t be the current leaders who create it.
I’m a little embarrassed about how much of this chart I’m familiar with, but I’ve had to look up these things when seemingly intelligent people bring them up and tell me I should be concerned about them. I admit at one time I thought there might be something to the Nostradamus prophecies, but then I simply read what they said. The actual words don’t match the theories about how he predicted the Kennedy assassination. But the guy who made this chart seems to be serious about it, and I’m sure you all know someone who is very serious about at least one of the items found here.
My obsession with this is partially just curiosity, partially the human tendency to gawk at disaster, but it is also rooted in academics. I was in an African American Studies course in my freshman year in college when the people following Jim Jones all killed themselves rather than disband their group and reconsider their life choices. The professor asked us to think about how this happened, particularly why middle class black people joined this group.
Part of it is mind control, making them repeat the ritual without using real poison and barraging them with long speeches about his view of the world over a loud speaker all day long. But cults almost always begin with some reasonable ideas that seem intuitively good. Those roots are usually not well documented and get swept under the longer story that is easily found once the group has some fame. It seems obviously wacko to outsiders at that point, but those who accept it have a history that has altered their intuitions about what is right, so they can justify the wackiness.
Each one of these nodes has a story like that behind it. A story of how it began as someone asking questions that seemed reasonable. They become conspiracy theories when answers are provided that aren’t based on facts, evidence, and logic that is interpreted by people familiar with the full context. People choose the simple answers of the complex inclusive data. This could remain a small group of gossipy neighbors or grow into a political party with actual power.
In this chart, most of it is real names of people, corporations, and organizations, but the connections and the arrows are almost always a stretch. “THX 1138” was really a movie by Steven Spielberg about a guy who escaped a domed city where the government controlled everything with lies and kept people sedated by prescribing drugs. Why that is right next to the “Birth of the Internet”, I don’t know. Further up, in the historical section, the Rockfellers really did monopolize oil in the USA and they did it with nepotism and corruption. Why that is right next to “Ritual Magick” on the chart, who knows?
Harder to miss, the big arcing arrow from scientific discoveries of the modern world to “DEPOPULATION”. You would need to read a lot of stuff that would challenge your credulity of the authors belief in what they were writing to know why Monsanto and Flouridation are on this chart. You might feel like brain cells were trying to escape as you read it, hoping to find a place where reason and logic still exist. What this chart shows is evidence is not needed once you’ve decided to live in a world of fear where you have no power. In that world, it’s better to give up your powers of reason and, according to the logic of that opposite world, then you’ll see what is obvious.
In the world of facts, people do horrible things to each other in plain sight. I couldn’t find “Organized Crime” on here, but we know the names. They walked around in major cities and people loved and adored them. They were treated like the ones who were fixing the problems that the government and police were causing. Meanwhile, they were building their private armies and throwing bodies in the river. Pablo Escobar appears. He financed social programs while also bankrolling corrupt politicians, guaranteeing that those social programs would not have democratic oversight. They got the blame for what was wrong, he got the credit for doing what was right and the power that comes with it.
When you decide that what you see is not real, that you were taught nothing but lies, and that anything that comes from a respected source is actually designed to control you, then everything is part of the giant conspiracy and your best strategy is to do nothing except tell everyone else about how you figured it out. By saying you are questioning everything, you get to feel powerful, but by not using your powers of logic and reason, by claiming your theory is beyond question, you’ve relinquished the power you actually have.
There are of course bad things in the world. Caligula, near the top in the Antiquity section, was a vicious narcissistic ruler. That’s why we say Rome was “falling” at the time he ruled. Democracy was conceived, then faded and came to light again over a thousand years later. This chart seems to connect that re-emergence more to the Illuminati than to the formation of nation states full of free people. No explanation is provided.
Alchemy was a waste of time but as the chart notes, it led to gunpowder. There are good and bad uses for gunpowder but you could say it would be a more brutal world without it. Many items appear on the chart without comment, so it’s hard to say what judgment QAnon is passing on them.
The paradox of “conspiracy theorists” is they will use real conspiracies like Nixon and Watergate, The Gulf of Tonkin incident, Bush lying about weapons of mass destruction, and Jeffrey Epstein as their evidence that governments and rich people are really corrupt, but it’s not “conspiracy theorists” who uncover those conspiracies! The mainstream information sources that are supposedly covering up the conspiracies are the ones that brought those to light.
Conspiracies that actually happen like a President lying on a daily basis or a small family getting rich off of a Pharmaceutical company selling pain medicine, are not included in this chart. Epstein is being investigated even after he died because living people conspired with him, but this chart only has “Pizzagate”. The same people that missed the Epstein conspiracy are now making up stories about how he was killed by the Clintons. This chart was made in 2018, before the Epstein and Sackler stories broke and the QAnon writers are now catching up with them.
There is a big difference between conspiracies where powerful people are lying and hiding information and working for themselves while saying they work for us, and decisions made in the regular course of people trying to figure out how to make a living in a decent and ethical manner. We use toxic chemicals and precious resources to make life better for most people on earth. Billions of people sleep soundly knowing their taxes are supporting a military operation somewhere on the other side of the world that they would never consider participating in. We do our best to discuss decisions like this, requiring layers of oversight and regulating whatever industry gets to profit from the lesser of evils that we eventually choose. We hope that we get the chance to work on the new problems that we caused by implementing the solutions to the original ones. None of this belongs in the same category, on the same chart, as lizard people using the Denver Airport as their secret base.
This chart is the modern version of Greek mythology; mixing historical figures with imagined monsters and giving them all personalities and character traits that attempt to reflect human traits and failings. But the words and actions of the stories didn’t happen in the real world . It’s done in an attempt to try to explain the crazy world we live in, to reconcile what we know is right with all the wrong that we see. It skips over the hard work we need to do to uncover those wrongs. I hope this type of thinking fades and the methods of science prevail and continue to be improved but there is no guarantee. The record of civilizations is not that great, they kind of come and go. Fortunately, even when the powerful and the structures they built fail, we still have each other.
I saw this graph at a lecture, and I couldn’t find it, so finally I was able to screen shot it. The lecture was on atheism, but it shows something pretty amazing that has happened in the last 80 years. That’s grandparent age, so it’s not that long of a period of time in political terms. Unfortunately the years were cut off, but as it says, Gallup started asking this question in 1937, so that’s on the left. It goes to 2012 on the right. It’s only asking if you would support your party endorsed candidate if they were one of these categories, so one person could say yes to any or all of them.
Note, that at the time, a black, gay, lesbian or atheist President is not something they even considered asking about. Catholic, Jewish or a woman, that’s it. And women did not do too well. Women rose steadily, probably due to their prominence in the war and work efforts around World War II. They started including blacks and atheists after that war as those were both things being talked about. Blacks started out low, but the civil rights movement moved them up within a few decades. Anyone who reads anything about that time knows this was no easy ride for any of these groups. Finally, somewhere around the 60’s it was recognized that Gay/Lesbian is also a category that someone might answer “yes” to.
I could say a lot more about the two groups who are still polling low, and there are other polls where Muslims come in around the 50% or less level too. I’ll link the talk, where Hemant Mehta did talk about it. What really struck me though is this is the dream of democracy and diversity coming true. Another 100 years earlier, just about anywhere in the world, the only people who could lead their country were people who had a royal blood line for that country. Either that or they killed whoever was there before. This question wouldn’t even make sense to the man on the street in feudal Europe or any other continent. Those two lower lines have continued to rise since 2012 and I believe it will not be that long before the strangeness of this question, because the answer is obviously “yes”, will be as strange as asking someone from a monarchy if they would support a king from a different country or of a different religion.
As a line graph, it looks like more and more people are crowding up at the top. But in terms of population the proportions of people hasn’t changed that much, it’s just that they can openly be who they are without needing to compromise and more of us are fine with all of us getting the benefits of working in and living in this modern world we’ve built. The 70% who once said “no” to these questions are seeing that it’s better to say “yes”. Granted some of them are no longer around but statistically this graph is showing people who changed their minds. Even the younger people participating had to learn this from somewhere. Culture does not usually change that fast, but lessons like this can be learned that fast.
Before I go on, I promised back in the 2nd of this series that I’d talk about the problems of the early Catholic Church. I hope I have spent enough time discussing the Enlightenment era and the flaws in Western philosophy in general. But there are good reasons why I still choose them over Christianity. There are a few things that started gnawing at me about Christianity and the more I looked into them, the more I realized they were foundational problems that could not be solved. That is, they weren’t just cracks in the foundation of Christianity; they were demonstrations that there is no foundation.
The first is the consensus on the existence of Jesus. That’s it really. That is, the entire extent of the scholarly consensus on Jesus is that he existed, and maybe that he was crucified. The dates of his life are disputed, his name is in dispute, everything he said is debatable, let alone what he meant, his family life, if he was a spirit or a man who was inhabited by spirit or if he was born God. All of these questions are played out in the scriptures and some of them have led to wars and schisms (John 14). Holy wars are not cool as they used to be. Claims about what someone did in the past are expected to come with data that can be confirmed and facts that are agreed upon by a number of experts. Part of the statement of the consensus on Jesus is that we can’t recreate any of these details from the documents we have, not the four gospels or with the help of the apocryphal documents.
They spent centuries trying to work back to some original theme and what they discovered was there isn’t one. Instead, we get Peter arguing with Paul (Acts 10), Thomas painted as an unbeliever who repents (John 20), and a fourth gospel that is out of sync with the other three. This was expected and normal at the time the scriptures were written. Authors added to and reworked the stories to bring their new insights to them. But now we have modern history which is expected to be accurate and to let us know when something is uncertain. This leads to a confusing mixing of these two different genres. A historical fact like “Jesus existed” is used to claim that everything written using the name “Jesus” is also historically true. It may be true that Jesus died at the hands of the Romans but that says nothing about how that death washed away sins or the details of how he rose or who found him or who saw him later. The truth of one historical fact has very little effect on the truth of most of what is found in the New Testament.
This leads to the second thing, the order of the New Testament. If that collection of books was simply reordered to the order in which they were written, I think we would all have a very different view of the meaning they are attempting to convey. The first book in the New Testament, Matthew, begins with a birth narrative, connecting Jesus back to King David. That makes sense if you are attempting to tell a story that you think is real. But many believe the story of the virgin birth was concocted later to sell people of that time on the idea of Jesus being God. Gods of that time were born of virgins, so Jesus should be too, so you need a story.
If you want to follow how the stories began and were copied and embellished, start with the Book of Mark. It was written first. It has no birth story. It doesn’t have a resurrection story either. Maybe I should say it didn’t have a resurrection story. Many Bibles have footnotes telling you that the last verses of Mark were added on later, to harmonize it with the other gospels. Matthew and then Luke were written after Mark, sometimes copying, sometimes changing stories slightly, sometimes adding a new story. The gospel of John was written decades later.
To further correct the chronological order, all of the works of Paul need to be shuffled to the beginning. All of them were written and its author died before the first gospel was even heard of. Acts talks about Paul, but it was most likely written by the same author as the Book of Luke. Making sense of the different stories and contradictions is hard enough, but if you were to be presented first with a story of a man who only met Jesus in a vision and mentioned virtually nothing of a family or any earthly travels, it would be disconcerting indeed to then find out about Kings hearing of a virgin birth, to read of encounters with priests, of a man having meals, and telling parables. Was Paul unaware of all of this? For me, it’s led me to consider that this is a legend that developed, not a history that was poorly documented.
This project of ordering the books chronologically is complicated by the difficulty of assigning dates to the writings. That is an inexact science, and the authors sometimes attempted to mask who they were and when they were writing. The complete reordering might begin with the “undisputed Paulines”, Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians, and Philemon. These would be followed by Mark, Matthew, Luke/Acts then John. The job would get more difficult after that as we would need to sort out the psuedepigrpaha (like 2 Thessalonians), the works that were falsely attributed to Paul or other figures of the time. These were either assigned authorship in error by people who didn’t know any better, or deliberately claimed to be an author other than the actual one as a way to legitimize the message.
This is not just a New Testament problem either. Deuteronomy is the fifth book in the Old Testament, but is now known to have been written much later. Maybe most significant is the story of Eve tempting Adam with the apple. Besides simple facts like no apple appearing in the Bible, the story itself might not be a creation story. It may have been written earlier but it was given its place in the Bible by the people who assembled it, not some original author attempting to write a coherent narrative. It’s a folk tale, probably not intended to be an account of the first man and woman. So the entire reason for Jesus, to save us from the sin that got us kicked out of the Garden of Eden, is a mistake of some scholars in the centuries around the Fall of Rome who received a text and did not question its authorship or authenticity. They were told Moses wrote it and that was good enough for them.
With all of these competing narratives and a lack of scholarship, we arrive in 381 AD at the third thing. In that year, soon after Theodosius became emperor of Rome, he declared that he knew the correct version of all of this. Rather than honor other ancient traditions and allow for freedom of expression of a plurality of religions, it was time to get everyone under one system. To do that would require enforcement of these Catholic ideas using his military power and in many cases, the burning of anything and anyone who didn’t agree. This included not just pagan or Jewish places of worship, but Christian churches that didn’t preach the correct doctrine.
“In January, 381, the prefect had orders to close all Arian chapels in the city and to expel those who served them. The same severe measures were ordered throughout Theodosius’s dominion, not only against Arians, but also in the case of Manichaeans and all other heretics.”
It tries to soften exactly what these “severe measures” were but that’s why you shouldn’t get history from only one source, and especially from a source that is biased. By the way, “Arians” here have nothing to do with Nazis. The big problem with them was they were not Trinitarians. They said Jesus was subordinate to God, not part of him. My problem is no one can explain what the Trinity is. Instead of discussing it that though, Theodosius just said he was bored with all the talk and started killing people.
This wasn’t just an establishment of a strong military rule or just a wedding of religion with government it was a closing of minds that had been developing philosophies of democracy and science for centuries. In his book, Confessions, from around 397 AD Augustine wrote, “There is another form of temptation, even more fraught with danger. This is the disease of curiosity. It is this which drives us to try and discover the secrets of nature, those secrets which are beyond our understanding, which can avail us nothing and which man should not wish to learn.” Granted I’m taking this out of context in this short piece. He was confessing his thoughts as a young man and how they led him away from a more pious life. However, from archaeology we can see that technology stopped advancing around this time and we see less works of literature over the next few hundred years. I’m not blaming the Fall of Rome on Christians, but they didn’t prevent it and didn’t even seem troubled by it.
You should check all of my facts here and draw your own conclusions. Nothing I said here necessarily cancels out everything the Church has ever done. It shouldn’t change your relationship to your favorite parable or the community you consider your spiritual home. For me, it led to questions and it was the reaction to those questions from church leaders that eventually led to my lack of a belief in the divinity of Jesus and ultimately anything supernatural.
Theologians throughout the ages have attempted to straddle the worlds of belief and non-belief, of faith and reason. Thomas Aquinas was banned by the Catholic Church for his writings on this and then given sainthood not long after his death. In the last century, Catholic monk Teilhard de Chardin was told not to publish his thoughts on bridging these two worlds, but not long after he died, a friend published his works, (according to Teilhard’s wishes) and some gave him credit for contributing to the liberal ideas expressed at Vatican II. I find these philosophical thought experiments interesting, and although many do not, and even though I can show they ultimately don’t lead to a conclusion, I also hope to show that having the discussion has brought the people who hold those opposing beliefs closer together so we can work on the common goals.
Chardin became a Catholic monk not long after the turn of the 20th century and then began writing about his thoughts about spirituality. He was rewarded by being sent to a remote monastery in China. That’s sarcasm in case you didn’t catch it. He was also a paleontologist and his work with hominid fossils brought him a degree of fame. Evolution was a big challenge to the church at the time, and here was one of their own making strides in that area. As a contemplative and peaceful man, outwardly it appeared he was at peace with this. We can only speculate how it felt to him to have to choose between expressing his most important thoughts openly and keeping his job and position in the Church that he loved.
Teilhard tried to harmonize evolution and creation by saying that God does the creation thing while evolution builds the physical world. The two are not separate, but happening together all the time. God created and continues to create the world, and evolution is the mechanism that moves that creation forward. Our conscious is part of that evolution, so we have become co-creators with God. There isn’t one without the other, just as exhaling and inhaling are needed for there to be breath.
For him, this helped to solve the problem of evil in the world. The existence of evil is used as an argument that an all loving and all knowing God does not exist, because if one did, it would not allow such pain and suffering. Teilhard said that God does not will that suffering occurs. God is not intervening in the world on a regular basis to cause people pain because of something they did. Rather, God sets the world in motion toward the end, which is a world without suffering, but it is not possible to create that world without going through the suffering. We are part of the creation as it is occurring so we are experiencing what is required for it to happen. Since we are part of it, it becomes our job to prevent or at least reduce suffering, and we evolve skills and strategies to do just that.
I think it’s pretty clear why his ideas were not accepted by the Church. He disrupts the prescribed need to get you to go to confession every week. Less clear is why he decided to remain a monk his entire life and accept their condemnations of his writings and not be able to have them published until he was dead. He obviously wanted his ideas shared even knowing we would never be able to ask a follow up question.
To the scientifically minded, it should also be clear that none of his work comes close to qualifying as a scientific hypothesis. Although there is a certain logical flow to it, he makes assumptions about a need for a creator and endows that creator with attributes that are pulled straight from his theology classes, not his paleontology.
His posthumous following is thus peopled mostly by those who don’t accept the controls of religions, but still desire some sense of a supernatural to give meaning to our existence as well as those who are not too concerned with the rigors of scientific proofs. Many of these followers would consider themselves pantheists, but Teilhard often stated that a Christian sojourner is not a pantheist. He was firmly a Christian and being in the world didn’t mean his life in the world was divorced from his life in Christ. The Christian symbolism of the cross signified this connection and that was meaningful to him.
On pg 116 of the Divine Milieu, he says, “Pantheism seduces us by its vistas of perfect universal union.” But the Divine Milieu is about God and the world, not one or the other, so Teilhard is always working to keep that aspect in his writing, even while acknowledging that evolution is obviously happening and can be observed by us every day and confirmed using our powers of reason and logic. We evolved with animal traits, but we find individual fulfillment in the divine. I would have loved to ask him why he did not find fulfillment in participating in the discovery that we are connected to nature in ways that we have not been aware of before.
He says, “Christianity alone therefore saves, with the rights of thoughts, the essential aspiration of all mysticisim: to be united (that is, to become the other) while remaining one's self.” All punctuation is from the original. This axiom is sometimes expressed by him as “union differentiates”. That is, the essential aspiration of all mysticism to be in union with others, with God, with the world, and yet to be able to be one's self. Teilhard stresses that diving into Christian theology will not cause you to lose yourself, whereas other forms of mysticism or modernism will, “If you suppress the historical reality of Christ, the divine omnipresence which intoxicates us becomes, like all the other dreams of metaphysics, uncertain, vague, conventional—lacking the decisive experimental verification by which to impose itself on our minds, and without the moral authority to assimilate our lives into it.”
None of this works for me. On the contrary, I do find “decisive experimental verification” in metaphysics. They are not vague at all. I can only wonder if Teilhard and I sat down, if we might find we were talking about something different or of the same thing in different terms. But he didn’t leave behind experiments for me to repeat, so I can not verify his findings. Instead, we have physics, which can describe how I came from stars and stars came from hydrogen which was left over after an expansion from a compressed amount of energy. When those explanations fail to explain what came before them, I can still use the same methods to define the boundaries of what I know and what might be true. This “omnipresence” “intoxicates” me. Although there is much left unknown, there is certainty in the mathematical proofs of what we do know so I can “assimilate” that into my life. When combined with biology, we can begin to understand the basis for our morality.
But I didn’t go to the trouble of summarizing his work here just so I could shoot it down. I don’t need to accept his entire thesis to see that he made a contribution, he moved forward the conversation about how we relate to a vast cosmos full of unanswered questions. Teilhard de Chardin was an accomplished scientist and a devout Catholic monk. Many on either side see this as irreconcilable. He could be dismissed as a scientist troubled with cognitive dissonance who came up with some new age answers to explain his faith, or as a man of faith who felt the need to explain his discoveries of the origins of humans in terms of that faith. But as Yuval Harari said in his book Sapiens, it’s in our cognitive dissonance where we find understanding about our cultures.
The question of whether or not Teilhard accomplished his goal of reconciling science and faith, is perhaps the wrong question. What can be shown is that he lived through two World Wars, a time when the future of civilization was very much in doubt, and during a time when churches were struggling with the new theory of who we are and where we came from that began with Darwin, then, not long after he died and his writings began to be absorbed by the culture, the Catholic Church convened a Council, where they said this:
159. Faith and science: "... methodical research in all branches of knowledge, provided it is carried out in a truly scientific manner and does not override moral laws, can never conflict with the faith, because the things of the world and the things of faith derive from the same God. The humble and persevering investigator of the secrets of nature is being led, as it were, by the hand of God in spite of himself, for it is God, the conserver of all things, who made them what they are." (Vatican II GS 36:1)
You can enter the reference at the end into any search engine and bring up the full text. Granted it still is hanging on to the idea that God made it all, but this from 1965 and it is written by the Church. You change one word in that first sentence and make it valid from a scientific point of view, “…the things of the world and the things of faith derive from the same place.” I changed “God” to “place”. The feeling of faith grew out of culture, which grew out of our biology which is a result of the physical laws of the universe. Whether a faith statement is true or not, it’s true that faith is a human experience.
This statement from the Vatican was a big step from 1859 and they have made greater strides since. Not everyone is coming along on those steps, but that is true of any discipline or culture. The question itself has not changed. That is, the question of how we reconcile the feelings we have of connectedness, of mystery, with the answers that we are getting from research and data, knowing that the data leaves much still unanswered. The amount and complexity of the data has changed, but the question remains.
Having sent probes above the clouds, where gods used to dwell and not finding them, having peered as far into space as the limitations of the speed of light will allow us, and finding nothing, the answer that there is a god out there that made all this is becoming increasingly less likely. Having gone beyond the Newtonian physics of cause and effect, into the quantum world, and still being unable to find how the electronic pulses in our brains translate into complex concepts, we are starting to wonder if there is a limit to how much we can know about ourselves. We’ve managed pretty well without answering either of these questions. Countless gods have been fought over until no one was left to believe in them. Science moves at its own pace, providing us with information, while civilizations move as they need to in order to survive.
All of this has involved a lot of pain and suffering. One of the most important things I take away from Teilhard is that God is not going to do all of the work of alleviating that suffering. A purely scientific approach to these questions would say there is no god at all and it is completely up to us to address the suffering in the world. No matter where you stand on that question, I think we can all see that it’s time to put the question of faith vs science somewhere off to the side and find more ways to work together on alleviating the suffering and less time arguing about where it all comes from.
This is the first time I missed a February for this blog. The Ides of March have already been upon us. No excuses. I even had an idea brewing. I have a few favorite podcasts and I want to relate a couple recent episodes from one of them. It’s Bart Campolo, and he includes something from another favorite, On Being. In fact, I’ll go ahead and start with the poem, rather than try to lead up to it.
Your great mistake is to act the drama
as if you were alone. As if life
were a progressive and cunning crime
with no witness to the tiny hidden
transgressions. To feel abandoned is to deny
the intimacy of your surroundings. Surely,
even you, at times, have felt the grand array;
the swelling presence, and the chorus, crowding
out your solo voice. You must note
the way the soap dish enables you,
or the window latch grants you freedom.
Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity.
The stairs are your mentor of things
to come, the doors have always been there
to frighten you and invite you,
and the tiny speaker in the phone
is your dream-ladder to divinity.
Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into the
conversation. The kettle is singing
even as it pours you a drink, the cooking pots
have left their arrogant aloofness and
seen the good in you at last. All the birds
and creatures of the world are unutterably
themselves. Everything is waiting for you.
The story doesn’t quite complete the answer to the question posed, can insignificance be liberating? Bart spends about a half hour filling in the blanks. It’s not some simple folksy wisdom. We’re all at different places with regards to how well known we are and how others judge our significance, but our approach to the idea of significance can have an effect on our happiness and maybe significantly more than that. He mentions the Tiger Mom who drives her kids to succeed. Whatever you think about that, it will most likely lead them to more success than if she had not done what she did. What her philosophy doesn’t talk about is that at some point in their lives, those kids will be able to make their own decisions, based on that success, and they will no longer need to be driven to succeed strictly for the goal of succeeding. They will be able to enjoy the journey they find themselves on.
With memes and commercials and self-help books and helicopter parents and just everything that is available to us at any moment, we receive a lot of wisdom in small bites, and a lot of it is not for us at this moment in our lives. Like, stopping to smell the roses is a good idea, but if you are on your way to your final exam, better not stop for too long. People will tell you all sorts of reasons for working hard and others will tell you to spend more time with your family. Others will tell you that you can have it all. What I love about Bart’s podcast is that he’s spent some time thinking about what “all” actually is.
In the story that starts this podcast, Conan O’Brien uses the example of President Calvin Coolidge and Bart has referred to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, people who have changed the world in significant ways. We don’t know much about Roosevelt’s private life, and very few people visit Coolidge’s grave. While they were alive perhaps only a hundred people knew them intimately, maybe less. When Albert Brooks tells Conan, “none of it matters”, he’s talking about his movies and his legacy and even the lives he touched because even those will pass and be forgotten. But of course, something matters. It’s true that all of us will be forgotten, so if we despair our individual inevitable end and dwell on the comparison of our accomplishments to those of great Presidents, we have miscalculated where we should be spending our emotional energy, because in the end, we all end up in that same place.
If you are focused on survival then you probably aren’t reading this. If you need to focus on survival, then do that. Hopefully you aren’t creating a sense of panic where there is no need for it. But if needed, you can find help and get to a place of comfort. There are tribes that have room for more and there are ways to find help, so do that first. If you’re already there, reflect on how that happened, what did your tribe do for you, what do you have to be thankful for? Bart tells the story of a chess mentor who teaches a young man not just to play well, but to love the game. Unfortunately, we don’t all get coaches like that, but we can hear about a story of someone who did. It comes around the middle of the podcast. I won’t spoil the story for you.
In the first one, Bart tried to come up with some analogies, like riding a wave. You don’t control the wave, but you can control the surf board and make it to the end of the ride without getting dunked. He gets a bit dark at times and he apologies for that. He tries to end on a positive note about love. No matter when the end times occur or how, it’s still important to love your kids and appreciate the world we have now. The difficulty of this type of question is a matter of focus. The wave analogy breaks down when you start thinking about where our “waves of life” come from, the things that push us along, some of them are man-made and have levers behind them that we can get control of, and maybe we should try to grab them, instead of just going along for the ride. Or, I’d like to spend time appreciating the world, but there’s a lot of crap going on, and I’d like to fix some of it while I’m here. Bart posits that if the choices we make as individuals lead to a life well lived, then those same values should also apply to what we do as a species, as a whole.
After doing some research and giving it more thought, Bart comes up with some more solid answers to the question in episode 409. One of those is; we just aren’t wired for thinking about the future. Throughout history we’ve survived many disasters, of our own making or not, either by luck or ingenuity and that survival is both due to and feeds back into our optimism bias. I’m not even sure that’s a bad thing. You can check out the optimism bias Wikipedia page and TED talks about it.
Josey, the one called in the question, is a student, so she is just learning about this looming disaster and wondering why everyone is not acting like it’s coming and like it’s the highest priority for all of humanity. Her teacher is not wired to act that way and he has other things to teach. We could get hit by a meteor, our economic system could collapse or we could create nanotechnology that gets out of control and destroys everything. He has to teach all of those things knowing that his students understanding of any one of them could cause a lot of worry. He has also known about them for a long time and has continued to keep his job and feed his family throughout, so he might not see them as worrying. I don’t know what he is thinking, but it’s poor reasoning to equate all doomsday scenarios and conclude they are all wrong because we are still here, but that is part of how our brains work.
This is a problem for anyone trying to get others to adjust their actions to actual threats. Some people will respond to fear but many will get fatigued with constant warnings that don’t appear to be near or present. If you can show that people are trying to solve this problem, even if they are failing, you’ve just shown that someone is working on it, and we can hope they succeed. There are other problems, many more immediate, that also need attention. A constant drum beat becomes background noise. Bart didn’t defend this way of thinking, he just pointed out that we do it.
This isn’t just some psychology problem to deal with when you are talking to your friends either. It is built in to our political structure. To solve the problem of despotic kings a few centuries back, we created a democratic system where leaders can be voted out every couple years. This works great for slowing the accumulation of power but it is not designed for a change in climate that is occurring over many decades. We didn’t plan for this because it is only recently that we can predict such events. It’s only the last couple hundred years that we knew the earth was more than a few million years old. It’s even more recently since we have been able to predict the weather, let alone long term climate trends. We survived a long time without thinking on these scales.
It may be that the action we need is not the technological solution, although we’ll need that too, but we won't get to that if we don’t adjust our thinking first. We need to figure out how to accept and understand the science, understand our place in a vast universe and deep time, see our part as cooperative social creatures including future generations, and learn to discuss all of this with a diverse set of people and cultures knowing our survival depends on all of us getting along in ways we have never seen in human history. That’s a pretty tall order.
At the end of this episode, Bart says the answer to the question is to listen to all his other episodes. That might sound like a cop out or a marketing ploy, but I have listened to a lot of them, so I know it’s not. Bart’s theme of building community attempts to address all of these concerns at different times and in different ways. It takes hours of discussion to even begin to chip away at this and Humanize Me is one effort to do that. They answer it from the perspective of providing comfort to each other in difficult times, even up to and including the end of the world and how to be in a world of difficult choices so we can get together and solve all the world’s problems. The bottom line answer to all those is to care and nourish those close to you and do it in a way that helps to expand that caring and nourishing out into whatever surrounds you.
To understand this search for who we are and how what we
think of ethics and morals has evolved, it helps to look back to the time when
religion still dominated. If you go back too far it gets impossible to know
just what people were thinking, not that it’s possible to know what anyone is
thinking at any given moment even in the present, but at least we start to find
more articulate writing sometime around the 12th century. To get
to those early Humanists, I’ll first tell what I think is the fascinating story of how Western ideas
traveled east then returned over the course of a millennium.
As Rome fell, Plato and Aristotle fell out of favor. And
when you fall out of favor in a warring ancient empire, it’s a lot worse than
having your facebook account revoked. Anything written that contradicted an
emperor could be burned, sometimes along with its author. Much of their works
were taken east to Istanbul, which became Constantinople, the center of the
Byzantine Empire. This was a Christian empire so they weren’t too interested in
what the writings said, but they kept them. Language was also changing so even
if someone wanted to read them they would need special training.
When the walls of Constantinople were finally breached by
the Muslims, the writings were passed on to that Empire. They didn’t do much with
them either, other than create copies and translate them into Arabic. Four
hundred years later Ibn Rushd (also known as Averroes), schooled in law,
theology, medicine, physics and more was commissioned to figure out just what
those men were trying to say. He had to do this while maintaining his position
in a theocracy. That is, he tried to balance the godless world of reason with
his employers who were working to spread the word of Allah throughout that same
world.
By this time, the Muslim Empire had reached its peak and was
beginning to fall apart because it’s just plain difficult to maintain an empire
that size and they continued to choose emperors based on the inheritance of
kings instead of any merits of those kings. Also, the theologian Al-Ghazali had
become popular with his Revival of the
Religious Sciences, saying they needed to get back to their spiritual
roots. He sparred with Averroes, writing Incoherence
of the Philosophers and Averroes responding with Incoherence of the Incoherence. Averroes spent much of his last
years in prison, so you can see how that went. In the next century, the Mongols
sacked Baghdad and the Muslim Empire has never recovered. Fortunately, they
survived long enough to ally with European Christian armies and prevent the
spread of the Mongols further west. Not only did we never send them a thank you
note, we took the works of Averroes and other translations and philosophy and
made it our own.
With the works of the Greeks now reunited, it fell on the
likes of the Christian Thomas Aquinas and the Jewish scholar Maimonides to take
another stab at unifying the ancient with the modern. The 13th
century version of "modern" anyway. Teaching of Aristotle’s works was already
under the watchful eye of the religious leaders. They were fine with logic and
biology but wary of the metaphysics, psychology and anything touching on
values. Professors had to stop teaching these subjects at the University of
Paris or move to Oxford or Toulouse. These debates continued on to 1277 when a
somewhat hastily thrown together list of Condemnations
was published.
The idea of churches controlling what universities teach
seems ridiculous today, so this is often seen as a horrible period of suppression
of knowledge. It is also seen as the beginning of science since the result of
the Condemnations was to divide the areas of the study of religious matters,
like who or what ultimately controls the universe or what is or isn’t a miracle
from areas allowed to be studied methodically like the motion of objects in
space or the workings of living creatures. There was also dogmatic adherence to
Aristotle and these bans forced the professors to develop proofs of his ideas. There
is no one point of the beginning of science. Applications of scientific
principles can be found in pre-Christian Rome and throughout the Muslim Empire
as well as India, China and the Americas; however 1277 was a turning point in
human history. At least Aquinas got sainthood not long after he died, which
meant the Condemnations pertaining to him had to be adjusted. The world was
changing quickly from then on.
Early Humanism
Not much was going on in the development of philosophy for
that thousand years, but then voices like Erasmus began to emerge. His training
was in the priesthood because that’s pretty much what you did if you wanted an
education, you studied the Bible, in Latin. Hardly anyone spoke it, but it was
the language of the Vulgate Bible, the one that was assembled in 382. It remained The Bible until scholars tried to
reconcile it to the original Greek and began to question the meaning of words,
verses and whole books. This scholarly work grew out of the Renaissance and it
has direct parallels to the work being done today to rescue Christianity from
the hands of the Fundamentalists. With his reinterpreted version of the New
Testament, Desiderius Erasmus hoped to restore and rebuild the Christian
religion. He did not care for the 4th century theology of St.
Augustine preferring that of the earlier Origen of Alexandria who only garnered
the title of Church Father, not sainthood.
Augustine
wrote extensively on what horrible creatures we are and how we can be nothing
but sinners due to our fall from grace in the Garden of Eden. Wikipedia
summarizes his text titled On the
wretchedness of the human condition thus; The text is divided into three parts; in the first part the wretchedness
of the human body and the various hardships one has to bear throughout life are
described; the second lists man's futile ambitions, i.e. affluence, pleasure
and esteem, and the third deals with the decay of the human corpse, the anguish
of the damned in hell and the Day of
Judgment. Origen and then Erasmus did not see it that way. Reading
critiques of Christianity today, you would never know this debate ever
occurred. You would most likely be familiar with Pope Innocent III who launched
one of the crusades. Innocent was a fan of Augustine. But most likely you have not
heard of the response to it On the Dignity and Excellence of Man by the early humanist and Christian
writer Giannozzo Manetti.
Manetti and
others developed the principles of Christian humanism; every person is sacred
and autonomous, we are participants in our salvation, not passive actors
waiting for the end times, and religious pluralism. Pluralism was also being
expressed by Sufi writers at the time like Ibn al-Arabi who said god is not limited
by any one creed. With all of these men, a connection to their traditions was
still maintained. Al-Arabi famously said, “So for wherever you turn, there is
Allah.” He may have seen the divine in every face, but the divine was the god
he grew up with. He did not relinquish his faith. Since their ability to get
published was highly dependent on maintaining a faith statement, they may have
hid their private thoughts.
An art
historian who believes he has uncovered some evidence of this dynamic between
artist and patron is Antonio Forcellino. While cleaning a sculpture made by
Michelangelo he found a flaw and theorized that in the middle of making the
piece, it had been changed. His theories about Michelangelo might be wrong, but
they are interesting to consider. In 1505 Michelangelo was commissioned by
Julius II to paint the Sistine Chapel. In 1513 Julius dies. Michelangelo has
been paid to sculpt statues for his tomb but this is a time of contention among
Catholic leaders and they pull him into other work. His work continues to be
pulled in two directions by Popes and Cardinals.
They are
also vying with each other to either split off the newly forming Protestants or
work on reform within. Some of them, including Cardinal Reginald Pole, start a
society called the Spirituali. Michelangelo is known to have attended some of
their meetings. They eventually had to start meeting in secret when Pope John
Paul III established an official Congregation of the Inquisition. When Michelangelo
finally completes the tomb of Julius II it appears he may have included
symbolism indicating his leanings toward that group, rather than the Church that
was actually paying him. He included a torch, which could be a symbol of the
power to enlighten and the Protestant belief that works alone can’t bring you
to Christ, and Moses is looking to the left, not at the altar where the church
leader is but instead searching for the light and contact with God. When Michelangelo
died, his body was whisked away by his Spirituali friends and many of his papers
went with it, so we may never really know
