“How we met”

     (The local newspaper has a “contest” seeking brief “how we met” stories. I sent one in, and, for a change of pace on this blog, thought I’d post it here as well)

     First, I stepped on her foot. 

    We were on line, signing in for a singles organization’s discussion on “romantic love.” I noticed her name, written above mine, because it seemed curiously half French and half Irish: Therese Broderick. 

     I was 40, newly single, and looking. I cased the room with a gimlet eye. The women appeared, well, “mature.” Now, I actually wanted maturity, having resolved against chasing the flighty young things I had vainly pursued in my youth. Yet I wasn’t quite ready for middle age either, and that’s what confronted me. The only exception was Therese Broderick – who, alas, looked to me like a mere teenager. 

     Well, doggedly, I went through the grim business, meeting all these gals whom I saw more like my mother than like romantic prospects. Finally, at the very end, I sat beside Therese, and remarked that she seemed out of place here, age-wise. 

     She replied, “I’m twenty-eight.” 

    I perked up. I had figured thirty as my cut-off; but, okay, 28, close enough. So I phoned her at the library where she’d mentioned working: “I’m the guy who stepped on your foot.” We made a lunch date. 

    As it ended, I was frankly still skeptical about her presumed youthful callowness. Then she asked me who my favorite artist was. “Magritte,” I answered, smugly supposing she’d never heard of him. But no: Therese was quite conversant with the works of Magritte! 

     She had me. 

    We married six months later. That was in 1988. Therese has told me that after the singles event, she wanted to kick herself for apparently letting me get away. Good thing I’d remembered her name from the sign-up sheet.

     That original page of signatures now hangs in a frame on our wall. 

     And she still looks (to me) like a teenager.

“A People’s History of the United States”

     Howard Zinn is one of my least favorite public intellectuals – one of those guys, like Noam Chomsky, whose entire philosophy seems to boil down to “America bad.” I was never keen to read his book, A People’s History of the United States, but I got a copy at a used book sale, out of masochism, I guess.

      Zinn professes to present the history you don’t get in schoolbooks. But it’s not a “history of the United States.” It’s mainly a history of societal division in the United States: black against white, Indian against white, poor against rich, workers against owners, women against men. And, of course, “imperialism.”

      Most is presented in a straightforward manner, but Zinn does make his own feelings very evident. Of course that’s his right; and many of the outrages he denounces were, indeed, outrages. But what he denounces, in the main, were people pursuing their self-interest and personal advantage at the expense of others. This Zinn seems to find inexplicably shocking: for example, that 19^th century mill owners would deny workers generous wages, when they could get away with paying stingy wages. The book becomes kind of tedious in nattering on and on about “the privileges of a wealthy elite,” etc.

      Zinn’s overall attitude is evident in the way he discusses the 1787 Constitutional Convention. Zinn seems to feel those men really ought to have abolished slavery, given votes to blacks and women and the propertyless, and maybe even to have established an egalitarian socialist utopia where no one would be allowed to exploit economic advantages. That this wasn’t done Zinn considers more or less criminal.

      Our entire history, indeed, he considers more or less criminal, for which we should seemingly feel stained with guilt down to the hundredth generation.

      But it’s just silly for Zinn to write as though all society’s ills should have, or could have, been cured if only people had acted in self-denying ways he would approve. It takes struggle, and Zinn’s book is much about chronicling (indeed, glorifying) that struggle; but what is bizarrely missing is any sense of the results achieved. In Zinn’s mirror, America and its “system” now are just as rotten as ever. A Martian reading the book would infer that, despite all the struggle, no progress has occurred since colonial times. Where Zinn does acknowledge some seeming progress, he always immediately dismisses its significance. For example, he cannot avoid noting that women got the vote in 1920; but says it meant little because their votes reflected the same thinking as did men’s votes!

      I take away from all this a completely different lesson: America today is an incomparably better country than when it started (and it started incomparably better than any other – a perspective also absent from Zinn’s book). It is a country where people have indeed struggled to improve their own situation, and society; and a country wherein such struggles can succeed, and have succeeded, gloriously. That is the one big lesson of American history.

What to do about North Korea

     There isn’t an easy answer. Diplomacy has reached a dead end. The North Korean regime has proven that it treats this as a sucker’s game: milking bribes for agreements that it then flouts. After decades of this, North Korea still continues its nuclear weaponry development. And with North Korea heavily armed and possessing nuclear weapons, there really isn’t a military option, the risks and costs would be too forbidding. Meantime, within the country, a humanitarian nightmare continues.

     Actually, what the chief nations concerned want most is to preserve the status quo: including keeping North Korea’s regime in power. Why? Because if the regime implodes, there would be a huge mess to clean up, including a flood of starving refugees. South Korea in particular fears the cost of having to take over an impoverished, devastated north.

     But this is one of those situations that will have to get worse before it gets better.

     I believe the only path to an ultimately acceptable outcome is to bite the bullet of allowing the North Korean regime to fail. That is, stop negotiating, stop bribing, stop effectively propping up the regime, and quarantining the country with sanctions. And, yes, stop food aid. That sounds cruelly inhumane. Our aid is the only thing that keeps many northerners alive. But even with that aid, this is still a land of endemic malnutrition and starvation, not to mention all the other hideous human rights evils. Our food aid enables the regime to cope, prolonging the agony. Withdrawing that aid would mean great suffering for today’s North Koreans, but if we continue it, that would mean great suffering for generation after generation of North Koreans.

     The regime will bluster about “acts of war” and shriek threats. Let them shriek. It’s obvious the only thing they care about is maintaining power. A military adventure would have huge potential for upsetting that apple cart. I don’t think they’re suicidal. And, if we do cut off aid, they’ll have their hands full just trying to somehow survive, even without an added military complication.

     In a previous entry, I wrote that the only thing that matters, cosmically, is the suffering or joy of sentient beings. My notion for North Korea would entail great suffering, but I see it as offering the only prospect of minimizing suffering in the long run. The vile North Korean regime cannot endure forever; all the horrors we fear will have to be faced sooner or later. Better that it be sooner, so we can get on with the job of making that corner of the world livable for human beings. History teaches that squeamishness about biting bullets like this only makes the mess, when it finally comes, worse.

A brand new, Grand NEW Party?

    When Tony Blair won leadership of the British Labor Party, it had long been unelectable. A previous party platform had been dubbed “the longest suicide note in history” because of its loony left agenda. Blair set out to fix that, most importantly by getting Labor to rescind the dearest left-wing shibboleth of the party charter, nationalization of premier business firms. And, to signal this decisive break with the party’s unappealing past, it was rechristened the “New Labor” party.

    America needs a New Republican party.

    Or, rather, a new OLD Republican party. The pre-Tom DeLay party; the pre-Jerry Falwell party; the pre-Karl Rove party; and, yes, the pre-Bush party.

    Those guys’ approach may admittedly have won a few elections, but at the cost of positioning the Republican party athwart the tides of history.

    The colossal irony of the GOP’s later years in power was how it tried to buy votes and achieved the opposite. The whole point of “pork” spending is to bribe voters (with their own money, i.e., tax dollars) – and the GOP tried to compound it with tax cuts besides, having the government go into hock to pay the bribes. But what it got for its pains was not gratitude for doling out goodies, but instead, becoming known as the bribery party.

    Somehow, the Democrats had managed to play the same game with impunity for decades. Maybe they had perfected the art of such bribery. For Republicans it did not come naturally, they weren’t slick enough at it.

    Its height was the prescription drug program. After decades in which Democrats perennially scared elderly voters that the GOP would take away their Social Security, Republicans actually imagined they could turn the tables with a massive new bribe to elderly voters. Even though existing entitlement programs were already careening toward a huge budgetary train wreck. This was fiscal insanity. The Republicans did it anyway, for the wrong reason – not because they really thought it made sense, but in a crass bid for political gain. They didn’t understand the difference between seduction and whoredom.

    As if becoming the bribery party was not enough, they also thought it was somehow a good idea to become the intolerant party, the anti-immifgrant party, the torture party, the anti-science party.

    But don’t get me started on all the ways the Democrats too have their heads up their posteriors.

    Yet I’m still an optimist. I’d far rather live in this crazy country with its crazy politics than in, say, China, with no politics at all – at least none that ordinary people can participate in. This blog would not be allowed in China. It would be shut down, and I’d be jailed.

Me, Myself, and I

     We all have our linguistic pet peeves. Well, those of us do who have more than a casual affaire with language.

     Here’s mine: the virtual extinction of the word “me,” and its (teeth-jarringly incorrect) replacement by “myself.” People now use “myself” almost exclusively, instead of “me”, to refer to themselves. Example: “The waiter brought food to John and myself.”

     Here’s a simple rule of thumb: if a sentence would sound OK using “me,” then “me” is correct and “myself” is wrong. It’s just that simple. “The waiter brought food to John and me.”

     I suspect that this ubiquitous and seemingly bizarre substitution of “myself” for “me” has a sociological cause. We’ve grown up with the phrase “me generation” ringing in our ears, and are intimidated by it to the point of imagining that any reference to “me” is narcissistically outré. Using “myself” is not so blatantly me-ish. Thus do some people seem incapable of uttering the word “me.”

     Then there’s that age-old grammatical tripper-upper, “I.” I think we’ve been confuzzled by grade school grammar teachers telling us that “John and me went home” is wrong, and it should be “John and I went home.” That’s true; but it does not mean “I” is always correct in place of “me.” People, trying, they believe, to be grammatically correct, say things like “the teacher smacked John and I.” Ouch. “She smacked John and myself” is also wrong. She smacked John and me.

     If a modern Patrick Henry were speaking, he’d probably say, “I know not what course others may take, but as for myself, give myself liberty or give myself death.”

Mattering

     Rene Descartes had the best opening line in the history of philosophy: cogito ergo sum (I think, therefore I am). That was his starting point for constructing a philosophy – the one thing he could be sure about was that he was cogitating.

    I have a different starting point. Mine is to ask: what matters? Why does it matter? What does mattering mean? After all, if something doesn’t matter, then why think about it at all?

    The three questions turn out to be really one question, with one answer. What matters, ultimately, is what sentient beings feel. It matters because there just isn’t anything else that could matter. If there were no sentient beings to experience joy or suffering, then whether or not the universe even exists wouldn’t matter. Because for something to matter, there has to be someone to whom it matters. Otherwise the concept of “mattering” makes no sense. “Mattering” means mattering to someone.

    By “sentient beings,” I mean beings with consciousness – self-awareness, with the capability to experience feelings, such as suffering or joy, to know they are being experienced, and to respond to the feelings. The prime example is a human being. It would include some other higher animals (say, elephants) as well, that experience such feelings. It would not include clams, insects, or trees. And certainly not rocks or rivers or planets (sorry, “Gaia” people, the Earth is not sentient).

    Some people have big cosmic beliefs. Okay; believe what you like. But nothing there can matter to human beings unless, in some way, it has an effect upon feelings that take place in human minds. If it doesn’t, then even if the belief is true, it’s an irrelevance.

    The foregoing gives us the foundation point for a philosophy that matters: everything is judged by its effects upon human feelings, whether positive or negative, conducive to suffering or joy. What we do affects human feelings, our own and those of others. This is the way in which our lives matter, and have meaning.

    There is nothing else.

Shame

     This is an optimistic blog, but even optimists must recognize problems in the world. The pessimist will just accept them. Only by crying “Shame!” can we hope to make the world better. Here are a few (among many) recent ones:

• During Russia’s Chechnya War (one long atrocity), Col. Yuri Budanov saw a teenaged Chechen girl he fancied and had her brought to him. Next day her raped body was found. Remarkably, this was one crime too far, and Budanov was actually prosecuted and imprisoned. But then he was let out early, in January. Stanislav Markelov, 34, a Russian civil rights lawyer, held a press conference to protest. Exiting, Markelov was gunned down in the street. Anastasia Baburova, a human rights activist accompanying Markelov, ran after the killer. She too was shot dead.

 

This is not an isolated incident in Putinist Russia.

 

• Rohingya tribespeople in Myanmar, brutalized by that vile regime, have been escaping to Thailand. Thailand doesn’t welcome them. Recently, Thai troops put one large group of them out to sea in a boat with no engine.

 

• Thailand’s supposedly beloved King Bhumibol supposedly protects democracy. In fact he connives behind the scenes with coupsters and other anti-democratic forces. One calls itself the “People’s Alliance for Democracy,” which shut down the airport last fall. Two elected governments have been brought down lately by these elements. Those governments were backed by Thaksin Shinawatra, whose own government was similarly ousted in a 2006 coup. Thaksin is no angel, but, unusually, he made promises to Thailand’s poorer people which he actually kept, which is why his lot have widespread popular support and win elections. The PAD can’t accept that; it should be called the “People’s Alliance Against Democracy.” Its bloody-minded anti-democratic tactics, suborned by the King, are making Thailand ungovernable. Meantime, Thailand rigorously enforces laws banning any insult to the King, using them as a pretext for locking up scads of people.

Optimist’s note: the King is 82. And nobody even pretends the heir-apparent is loved.

 

• A national Martin Luther King memorial is being built on Washington’s Mall. Jonathan Turley in the LA Times (here’s a LINK) writes that the King family has extracted an $800,000 payment from the Memorial Foundation for the use of King’s image. The family also demands payments for any re-broadcast of King’s “I Have a Dream” speech.

Turley writes, “King gave that speech to a nation.” And that when King himself received the Nobel Peace Prize, he gave the money to charity, because he was adamantly opposed to any appearance of profiting from his work.

The Future of Work

     There was a commentary in the 4/9 Albany Times-Union by Philip Lord, “Jobs? For All? Says Who?” (Here’s a link.) Lord worries that we’ll never again have full employment because businesses are figuring out how to provide more and more goods and services with ever fewer workers. He sees a need for some sort of radical change in our whole economic model.

 

     We’ve been hearing such foolishness for at least two centuries. From its beginnings, the Industrial Revolution was fought by Luddites fearing that people would become redundant. Every technological advance has encountered the same dire predictions that human beings would have no place in the future economic landscape. And meantime Malthusians have perennially warned that population growth would outrun food production.

 

     Of course none of these fears has ever come true. The opposite has happened. World population has exploded – but human productivity has grown even faster, so that living standards have risen, not fallen. Rather than depriving people of jobs, technology frees them to do different jobs, and always creates needs for those different jobs. Luddites like Lord never learn this. A growing population does not impoverish us because, thanks to technology, most people produce more than they consume. World average incomes today, in constant dollars, are five times greater than a century ago.

 

     Lord’s commentary rhapsodizes about the pre-industrial hunter-gatherer lifestyle, a supposedly halcyon Eden where the environment provided people’s needs “free for the taking.” Money was a convenience, not a necessity, Lord says; people worked but did not have “jobs.”

 

     Nor much else, one might add. Nature provided, but it was the equivalent of living on less than a dollar a day. To use Hobbes’s famous line, life was “poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Its average span was around twenty years. That picture actually didn’t change much until the Industrial Revolution, enabling humanity to harness energy in our service as never before.

 

     That has brought with it some problems, to be sure. But the bigger picture is human betterment on an almost inconceivably vast scale. And that has not come to a screeching halt in 2009. I am excited about the human future.

 

The Secular Conscience

 

            I recently attended a talk by Austin Dacey, of New York’s Center For Inquiry. He has a Doctorate in Applied Ethics and Social Philosophy. His book, The Secular Conscience – Why Belief Belongs in Public Life, was published in 2008 and has received wide attention.

 

            Dacey began with a Bible reading: the story of God commanding Abraham to sacrifice his son, Isaac. Abraham prepared to obey. Isaac was saved in the nick of time by an angel who said, “Never mind, it was just a test.” This story is usually read as one of faith and obedience. But Dacey takes a different lesson: to be pleasing to God, Abraham’s action would have to have been not just obedience qua obedience, but a reflection of Abraham’s judgment that obeying would be the right thing to do. And this must mean there is a source of rightness outside God’s command.

 

            Some people ask, “What would Jesus do?” But Dacey suggests the right question is “Why would Jesus do what he would do?” That, he said, is what Socrates would have wanted to know. He noted that when confronted with a proposed action deemed holy and loved by the Gods, Socrates asked his best question: is it holy because the Gods love it, or do the Gods love it because it is holy? Anyone who thinks morality is based on faith gets into trouble whichever way they try to answer that question.

 

            The better solution, per Dacey, is that conscience comes first; and its source must be secular, not religious. Any religious notion of ethics must actually proceed from a deeper underlying secular moral sense. If you do follow the commands of religion (as in Abraham’s case), you do so because you have made a judgment that that is the right path; and that initiative judgment must stand apart from religion. You can’t get it from religion; that would be circular logic.

 

            Dacey’s book mainly concerns his view that secular liberals are being undone by their own idea that religious matters ought to be kept out of the public square, and that matters of conscience should be separated from state power. Thus, they are inhibited from directly challenging the public assertiveness of religionists, while religionists themselves feel no such inhibition. We see the problem most vividly in issues concerning Islam. The Islamic world has mounted a forceful campaign to delegitimize anything critical of Islam as defamatory and an impermissible abuse of freedom of expression. And, to an appalling extent, Western secular liberals are knuckling under to this. Thus, for example, the UN’s human rights panel has now instructed its press freedom watchdog to be concerned not with curtailments of press freedom but, rather, “abuses” of press freedom.

 

            The point here is that human rights are the rights of individuals. Religions do not have such rights; and the Muslims are trying to subordinate the human rights of individuals to asserted religious rights. This is the kind of argument that has been used throughout past centuries to deny human rights. It must be fought.

 

            Dacey concluded his talk by pointing out that we Americans actually have our own “testament” – consisting of texts such as Tom Paine’s Common Sense, the Declaration of Independence, the Gettysburg Address, and, of course, the United States Constitution, which invokes its own set of moral objectives: to establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity. Now that’s holy – gods or no gods.

 

Social Change in Vermont

     Vermont has become the first state to enact gay marriage through democratic processes – not judicial edict. (Vermont has always had a quirky individualistic streak. Vermonters also think it’s cute to elect a “socialist” Senator.)

     There are a few big lessons here.

     One is that social change of this kind can, indeed, be achieved democratically. Efforts to attain such ends through judicial processes, insulated from democratic control, are misguided and asking for trouble. That was the problem with Roe v. Wade – not just a bad decision from the standpoint of legal reasoning, but exceedingly bad social policy. I’m talking not about abortion policy but, rather, the policy of forcing this sort of thing down people’s throats without a grounding in democratic process. The result has been 36 years of ugly abortion wars. European countries, in contrast, liberalized their abortion laws through the democratic process, with the result that those who lost the debates have peacefully accepted the outcome. Gay marriage advocates seem intent on repeating the Roe v. Wade mistake, trying to do an end-run around public opinion through the courts. Thus we see, in California, judicial efforts to nullify a referendum in which voters made clear their views. Bad idea.

     Achieving gay marriage is not about changing LAWS. It’s about changing MINDS. Changing laws without changing minds is a recipe for conflict. Vermont has shown the way to go.

     The second lesson is that minds can indeed change; societies, and cultures, change. We should remember this whenever we are told that we should not contemplate change for this or that other foreign culture, that we should respect their traditions, and so forth. Segregationists in the American South made this exact argument too. But of course there has been enormous social and cultural change in that regard. So when you hear, for example, that democracy is out of the question for Slobovia, because they’ve never had it, and it’s incompatible with their cultural traditions, and so on, don’t buy it.

     In fact, not only can cultures change; they must. The world is always changing around us, and we continuously have to adapt. Our vast human ability to do this is the glory of our species.