I’m reading the Sunday New York Times and drinking coffee at McDonalds while I procrastinate about doing the real work of the day.

The Sunday print edition of The Times is about half the size that it used to be. The pages are smaller, there are fewer of them, and whole sections have been eliminated. Partly, it’s because of the recession. Mostly, it’s because there are fewer readers and thus lower advertising revenue. But it’s still a substantial newspaper, one of the few remaining examples of the species.

It’s also, as Churchill said of Russia, a mystery wrapped in an enigma.

During the Bush-Cheney nightmare, The Times slavishly suppressed any stories that the administration wanted to keep secret, such as torture, illegal wiretapping, and anomalies in the official story of the 9/11 attacks. At the same time, it enthusiastically front-paged administration propaganda that it knew, or should have known, was false, such as the myth of Iraqi WMDs and various provocateur-fabricated “terror plots.”

Now, however, The Times is printing secrets all over the place. Partly, it might be because Executive Editor Bill Keller is ashamed of his actions during the Bush-Cheney years. Partly, it’s probably because he isn’t as afraid of the Obama administration as he was of Bush and Cheney.

Machiavelli, Nixon, and Obama

The Bush-Cheney regime asked a simple question to get people’s cooperation: “If you cross us, would you prefer to have your back broken or your neck broken?”

The Obama administration, however, wants to sit down and reason with you. If progressives say that white is white and Wall Street Republicans say that white is black, Obama’s instinct is to split the difference and say that white is gray. But as soon as he makes that concession, Wall Street Republicans insist that gray is black, and the negotiations begin again. Inch by inch, compromise by compromise, working Americans get scr*wed.

It’s not for nothing that Machiavelli said it’s better for a prince to be feared than to be loved.

We can see the difference not only in news media but in Congress, where obstructionist Republicans and spineless Democrats blocked or weakened legislation vitally needed by working and unemployed Americans. They’re not afraid of crossing the Obama administration as they were of Bush-Cheney. They’re more afraid of Wall Street, Fox News, and Glenn Beck.

Another brilliant political thinker, less admired than Machiavelli, was — believe it or not — disgraced U.S. President Richard Nixon. As president, he tried to make people think he was slightly crazy, so that they believed his actions were not rationally predictable: “If you set him off, Heaven knows what he’d do: he might start a nuclear war!” Nixon called it his “madman theory.” Of course, it was a variation on Machiavelli, whose work Nixon had read.

Obama suffers from the opposite fault. He seems very calm and rational, so his actions and reactions are quite predictable. It enables his adversaries to play him like a violin.

Reporters Sneak Facts Past Censorship

The Times still carries water for the government, if less consistently than it did during the Bush-Cheney era. Having worked as a newspaper reporter in Washington DC, I can see that Times reporters often try to “sneak” forbidden facts past management censorship.

One news story about the collapse of the World Trade Center towers after the 9/11 attacks noted, far down toward the end of the article, that (a) in addition to the two towers, WTC Building 7 collapsed but hadn’t been hit by anything; and (b) no comparable buildings before or since 9/11 have ever collapsed due to fire or airplane impacts. The reporter knew.

Another news story about the recent Wikileaks release of Afghan war documents dutifully parroted the government’s line that Wikileaks had not sought the Pentagon’s help in redacting potentially harmful information. But further down in the article, near the bottom, it recounted how Wikileaks  contacted the Pentagon and sought its help to do exactly what the same article earlier said Wikileaks had not done. The reporter knew.

It’s how things work sometimes. When I was a reporter, I once wrote an important article about government security measures that was accurate and had no classified information. The newspaper’s editor re-wrote the first two paragraphs to say exactly the opposite of what the rest of the article documented. The theory was that most people wouldn’t read the entire article, which still had my byline. Anyone who read the whole article must have thought I was nuts.

Bringing Democracy to Iraq

On the other side, there’s still plenty of propaganda in The Times.  A “Week in Review” article about “Winning, Losing, and War” states:

As the last officially designated American combat forces left Iraq, television cameras caught the exultation of a soldier finally heading home.

“We won!” he yelled. “It’s over! America, we brought democracy to Iraq!”

When I first read that, I thought of the incident years earlier when news media reported that Iraqis had spontaneously pulled down a statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad. Of course, the whole thing was staged by the Bush-Cheney administration for propaganda purposes, and many of the people pulling down the statue weren’t even Iraqis, having been flown in as actors for the “unreality TV” show.

Did a soldier really yell that nonsense about bringing democracy to Iraq? Possibly. Was the soldier instructed to say it, and was the incident staged for propaganda purposes? Almost certainly, and the reporter had to know it.

Fearless Leader Bush

But of course, we all remember how Fearless Leader Bush called Americans to arms in 2001-2002, saying that “it’s time we brought democracy to Iraq.”

Oops. He didn’t say that. He said that dat debbil Saddam Hussein, whose only difference from Bush and Cheney was that they dress better, had nookular bombs and anthrax-spraying aerial drones that he was going to unleash on American cities. Darth Cheney went on TV to say that “we know where the weapons labs are.”

General Colin “Uncle Tom” Powell went before the United Nations with a faked slide show purporting to prove that Iraq was bristling with illegal WMDs. Administration officials and surrogates also peddled the false story that Saddam Hussein had been involved in the 9/11 attacks, thereby to provide a fig leaf of legality to an otherwise naked act of aggression.

The Bush-Cheney regime didn’t invade Iraq to make it into a democracy. Bush and Cheney lied and frightened Americans into supporting the war:

• Because they wanted to conquer and loot the country.
• Because Dubya wanted the glory of being a “war prezadent.”
• Because they wanted to enrich their friends and military contractors.
• Because they wanted to regain control of Iraqi oil resources for themselves and their friends in the oil industry.
• Because they wanted to satisfy their perverse lust for murder and destruction.
• Because they wanted to increase the threat of terrorist attacks, real and imaginary, so that they could destroy the tattered remains of Constitutional protections for ordinary Americans.

Saddam Hussein is dead. Bush and Cheney are still walking around free, and they will be supported in luxury by taxpayers for the rest of their evil lives. You couldn’t write this stuff as fiction. Nobody would believe it.

“You furnish the pictures and I’ll furnish the war,” wrote newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst to his reporter in Cuba in 1898.

Hearst was using his news media empire to promote a war against Spain so that the United States could seize the Spanish colonies of Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines. And just as with the wars against Afghanistan and Iraq, a false-flag attack (the sinking of the U.S.S. Maine) was used to create a casus belli.

The rulers of countries have traditionally used news media to promote wars. Under the Bush-Cheney regime, The New York Times and cable news shows constantly promoted false stories about “threats” by Iraq against the United States, just as they currently hype false stories about the supposed threat posed by Iran.

The goal was and is to provide a pretext for aggression against those countries. It doesn’t do any good for the American people, for the soldiers on both sides who are wounded or killed, or for the non-combatants in those countries who are slaughtered. But it lets slimy politicians pose as heroes: “war prezadents,” as Dubya Bush put it. It does lots of good for weapons manufacturers and other war profiteers. And it does lots of good for the government officials and their friends who loot the conquered countries, and into whose pockets that loot disappears.

Two recent events prompted those thoughts.

First, I was sitting in a coffee shop drinking coffee and doing some work. As usual in such places, there were several television screens tuned to “news” shows. One of the screens is always tuned to Fox News, where the hosts typically agitate for war, push ever more tax cuts for the rich, and debate about whether President Obama hates all Americans or just white people.

Another screen was tuned to the Headline News Network (HLN), which seems like a news version of the Lifetime cable TV channel: if I recall Lifetime’s slogan, “television for women, and men are no damn good.”

Cable TV News Is Not Serious

TV hostess Jane Velez-Mitchell (left) interviews comedienne Lily Tomlin.

One of the talk-show hostesses, Jane Velez-Mitchell, looks like a cartoon caricature of an overly made-up and coiffed celebrity. Her perpetually pursed lips make her look like she just swallowed a bug and is trying to cough it up.

If you go to the CNN Web site, you can find out more than you ever wanted to know about Ms. Velez-Mitchell, including her “lifelong battle with alcoholism” and the fact that she recently came out as a lesbian (mazel tov). And in fairness, I found out why her lips look so weird: she was born in 1955, which makes her 54 years old, and she’s undoubtedly “had a little work done.” She does look pretty good for 54: I wouldn’t have guessed she was that old. Her shows typically deal with celebrities, nasty divorce cases, custody disputes, and lurid insinuations that someone might or might not have kidnapped a child / murdered a cheerleader / and so forth.

Nancy Grace

The other notable hostess is Nancy Grace, a former prosecutor with a trademark sneer who seems like a pretty nasty piece of work. After being cited several times for ethical misconduct as a prosecutor, Grace became a TV commentator. Her shows cover pretty much the same ground as Ms. Velez-Mitchell’s, albeit with a meaner edge.

The first time I ever heard of Ms. Grace was in 2006, when she used her show to browbeat a mother whose two-year-old child had disappeared. The day after Grace insinuated on her TV show that the mother was involved in the disappearance, the mother committed suicide. Grace also hyped a prosecutor’s false accusations that Duke University lacrosse players had raped a black stripper. Later, the accused players were exonerated and the prosecutor who brought the charges was disbarred for misconduct. But Ms. Grace walked away clean, her trademark sneer intact.

Cable TV News Hypes a “Threat” from North Korea

What brought all this to mind was the headline that the HLN channel flashed this morning along the bottom of the TV screen: “North Korea threatens U.S., South Korea with nuclear deterrence.”

What?! North Korea is threatening us? Why, those cheeky little yellow bas**rds! We’d better attack them right away so they don’t threaten us anymore.

Take a breath, people. North Korea is “threatening us with deterrence.” In other words, if we attack them, they’ll counter-attack. The nerve of those foreign devils!

Of course, we could just not attack them, but what would be the fun (and profit) in that?

The Moral Equivalent of War

"Pragmatism and Other Essays" by William James.

The second thing that led me to these musings was an essay I read last night by William James (1842 – 1910) and titled “The Moral Equivalent of War.” James, an American philosopher / psychologist who taught at Harvard and was “the father of American psychology,” is too little known these days. His essays “Human Immortality” and “The Will to Believe” are classic statements of a rational basis for Judeo-Christian religious faith.

In “The Moral Equivalent of War,” James surveys the psychology that leads to war:

We inherit the warlike type … Dead men tell no tales, and if there were any tribes of other type than this, they have left no survivors. Our ancestors have bred pugnacity into our bone and marrow, and thousands of years of peace won’t breed it out of us. The popular imagination fairly fattens on the thought of wars.

But, James notes, we have a problem. Civilization has made us increasingly aware of the conflict between our actions and the moral principles we profess:

At the present day, civilized opinion is a curious mental mixture. The military instincts and ideals are as strong as ever, but we are confronted by reflective criticisms which sorely curb their ancient freedom. Innumerable writers are showing up the bestial side of military service.

And then he gets to the point most relevant today:

Pure loot and mastery seem no longer morally avowable motives, and pretexts must be found for attributing them solely to the enemy.

You see? It’s not that our rulers wanted to conquer and loot Afghanistan and Iraq. They attacked us! Well, they didn’t attack us, but they wanted to. Or planned to. Or might have at some point in the future. So we had to attack them first.

It recalls a comment made by another American writer, Mark Twain, in Letters from the Earth:

So what do you think of the human mind? I mean, in case you believe that there is a human mind.

I believe that there is a human mind, but some days, I wonder about it a bit.

They're proud! Of what? Uhh ... we're not sure.

What if they threw a gay pride celebration but nobody knew what they were celebrating?

I’m not criticizing, just asking.

I’ve been all over the world and speak six languages, but now I live in my old hometown of Indianapolis, Indiana, USA.

It’s in the middle of the industrial Midwest, though there isn’t much industry left, most of it having high-tailed to impoverished countries where it could hire people for five cents a day and not have to put up with all those pesky environmental and safety regulations. It’s also in the middle of the farm belt, though most of the family farms are gone and the remaining farms are owned by agribusiness.

Local banks are gone: Indiana National, American Fletcher, Indianapolis Morris Plan, and a dozen other smaller banks were wiped out by Bank One and other out-of-state financial behemoths. Local stores are gone: O’Malia’s Grocery was acquired and then closed. Atlas Market, where late-night TV host David Letterman bagged groceries as a teenager, is gone.

I went to school with some of the Ayres kids, of Ayres department store; it was acquired and expunged by the Macy’s national department store chain. In college, I worked as a night watchman for Blocks department store and knew Maurice Block, as did most of the employees. Blocks was acquired and closed; the main store downtown has been turned into condominiums. Stationers and other local office supply stores were wiped out by Office Max and Office Depot. Hundreds of other smaller local firms were crushed and plowed under by Wal-Mart and its ilk.

Hooks Drug Store was acquired by one national drugstore chain, then by another, and was finally closed; now you can buy your drugs anyplace you want, as long as it’s a Walgreens or a CVS. The only remaining Hooks Drug Store is an exhibit in the drug store museum at the state fairgrounds. It has a lunch counter where you can get a Coke for five cents. That’s the only place you can still get a Coke for five cents. And it’s the only place at the state fairgrounds where you can get anything at all for less than five dollars.

Two of the local daily newspapers were closed, including the one I delivered on my bicycle when I was eight years old, and another one for which I was a columnist two decades later. The only remaining daily newspaper, The Indianapolis Star, is now owned by the Gannett media conglomerate and is essentially USA Today with a little local content added.

A lot of people here are hurting, but they remain true to their vision of an America that doesn’t exist anymore. They have faith that if they are honest, work hard, and don’t give up, then justice will prevail and their ship will come in. I’d like to live in the society that they see in their heads. Well, mostly. Hoosiers aren’t cosmopolitan, nor are they especially open-minded, but most of them are pretty good people.

So I like Indianapolis even though it’s not the most avant garde of communities. Nothing much ever happens here, but you don’t need to worry about missing anything.

I did, however, miss the “gay pride” celebration last weekend.

There were two reasons. First, I’m not gay. Yes, I know that some people regard being straight as a disability, inasmuch as I can neither dance nor color-coordinate. Life can be cruel. I soldier on as well as I can, wearing mismatched socks and tripping over my own feet on the way to the coffee machine.

The second reason is that publicity for the event was so circumspect about its purpose that you couldn’t tell what it was. My first awareness of the gay pride event was on Sunday at the grocery store, where I asked the girl at the checkout if she’d done anything interesting over the weekend.

“I went to the pride celebration downtown,” she said.

“Pride? What was that?” I said.

“Gay pride.”

“Oh, I didn’t know you were gay,” I said, smiling benevolently.

“I’m not,” she said. “I just went for all the free stuff they were giving away.”

Okay, I guess that’s a reason. If you could recruit people to one sexual preference or another by giving them free stuff, it might be a winning strategy. Though I think that most fundamentalists in Indiana would object. They already suspect that’s what’s going on. But consider the therapeutic possibilities for “cure the gays” clinics. Just give a gay teenager a Nintendo game console and suddenly he becomes straight. It’s another miracle of modern psychiatry.

Today, while driving, I passed a billboard for the event. “Indy Pride Celebration,” it said, giving directions to the downtown parks where it took place. The directions were explicit. But there was no mention of what the participants were so proud about: Just of living in such a darned good city, perhaps?

Indianapolis still is a darned good city, albeit a sleepy one and afflicted with prejudices of various sorts. I spent part of my childhood here, and my first job was as a copy boy for one of the local newspapers downtown. On my lunch hours, I occasionally ran into an old lady who accosted people as they waited to cross the street.

“Are you a papist?” she growled, a fanatical gleam in her eyes, her lips smacking and her dentures rattling in her mouth.

“Papist,” for those of you who came in late, is a nasty way of saying “Catholic.”

I’m Jewish. But just once, to see what came next, I said “Yes, I am a papist.”

Immediately, she started screaming at me about “that papist whore Jacqueline Kennedy,” referring to the wife of the U.S. president who was assassinated in the 1960s. The Kennedys were Catholic, and the old lady seemed to think that Catholics viewed Ms. Kennedy with a reverence only slightly less than that bestowed on the Virgin Mary. As for why the old lady hated Catholics so much, I never got to that part. I was, after all, on my lunch hour.

Another instance of bigotry occurred a few years earlier when a gay psychopath in Texas murdered a dozen or so young men. In one of the most shameful acts of journalistic malpractice I’ve ever seen, an Indianapolis newspaper identified a local gay man and printed his photo on its front page. The article with the photo stated that he slept in a coffin and might be a danger to local youths. No, I am not making that up. And yes, people did believe the article. Even as a kid, I thought it was horribly wrong.

The implication was clear: gay people were potential murderers, and that man in particular was a string of serial killings waiting to happen. I never heard anything of what happened to the man; perhaps the reporters and editors were so ashamed that they didn’t want to touch the story again. But if he didn’t leave town or commit suicide, I’d be very surprised.

Things are different now, which is why I get a little impatient with gays who think that gay marriage is the be-all and end-all of their liberation. They don’t realize how far they’ve come.

Not only do local news media no longer imply that gays are murderers, but gays are now having “pride” events downtown with no fear of harassment or arrest. Most people really don’t care much if anyone else is gay or straight or Martian. Well, maybe if they’re Martian, it would be an issue because they’d be illegal immigrants. But things are good for gays now. Why do they seem to be so p*ssed off all the time?

And if they’re going to have a gay pride event, why can’t they say the word “gay” when they advertise it? Aren’t they proud of it?

Of course, I might have things all wrong. Maybe that billboard I saw really was about civic pride in general.

Indianapolis is a darned good city, after all.

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* That’s a reference to the poem “Two Loves,” published in 1894 by Lord Alfred Douglas. He referred to homosexuality as “the love that dare not speak its name.”

Some Americans react with hostility to Muslim attire. Source: The New York Times.

Unenlightened Americans are being mean to Muslim women.

That’s the central message of “Behind the Veil,” an article in the Styles section of this morning’s New York Times.

And the article is correct: A few Americans are indeed being mean to Muslim women.* Gratuitous meanness is unenlightened.

But let’s reflect for a moment about the article’s contention (with which I agree) that the meanness is gratuitous.

The article recounts the troubles of Hebah Ahmed, a woman who started wearing a Muslim veil after the 9/11 attacks that were blamed on Muslim terrorists from Saudi Arabia.

The veil, called a hijab, covers Muslim women’s faces and bodies, though part of the face is left uncovered so that they can see where they’re going. Ms. Ahmed’s veil provoked strong reactions from some Americans:

Hebah said she has been kicked off planes by nervous flight attendants and shouted down in a Wal-Mart by angry shoppers who called her a terrorist. Her sister was threatened by a stranger in a picnic area who claimed he had killed a woman in Afghanistan “who looked just like” her. When she joined the Curves gym near her home in Edgewood, N.M., some members threatened to quit. “They said Islamists were taking over,” Ms. Ahmed said.

The Heckler’s Veto

What the article describes is called a “heckler’s veto.” Ms. Ahmed is having trouble because other people object to her attire and its Muslim affiliation.

The premise of a heckler’s veto is that if an idea offends anyone in a speaker’s audience, then the offended person can shout at the speaker to stop him or her from stating the idea. The heckler’s veto was on display last year, when Republican Party operatives disrupted legislators’ “town hall meetings” to prevent them from explaining health care reform to their constituents.

To her critics, Ms. Ahmed’s veil symbolizes terrorism, an alien religion, and a threat to Western society. They would like to exercise their heckler’s veto to prevent her from bringing that symbol into their presence, whether it’s on a plane or in a grocery store.

Ms. Ahmed and other peaceful Muslims, of course, argue that the hijab and other Muslim customs do not symbolize terrorism to them. They symbolize merely a religious tradition and its customs.

Both sides have a point. Rightly or wrongly, Ms. Ahmed’s critics are offended by her Muslim attire and what it symbolizes to them. Ms. Ahmed counters that she means to convey no such message and that her critics’ interpretation of her attire is different from hers. They think that her hijab is an in-your-face endorsement of terrorism. She thinks that it’s merely a statement of piety.

Her critics suspect that her avowals of peace and piety are just a smokescreen. They believe that she secretly endorses terrorism and war on the West. She denies it.

Because both sides have legitimate arguments, one can decide the dispute either way. In America, we have decided that freedom of expression should override a heckler’s veto.

Well, sometimes. Let’s consider another case where the same issue is involved.

The Confederate Flag

The Confederate Battle Flag. Source: Wikipedia.

In the 19th century, Southern states tried to secede from the United States because the Union government’s economic policies favored the industrial north at the expense of the agrarian south. Slavery was an issue, but a minor one. Slavery was legal in both Southern and Northern states. Although U.S. President Abraham Lincoln’s “emancipation proclamation” is widely thought to have freed all American slaves, it applied only to Confederate states, where Mr. Lincoln had no legal authority. It said nothing about ending slavery in the Union states over which Mr. Lincoln actually had at least some legal jurisdiction.

Based on the U.S. Constitution, the Southern states argued that they had a right to secede from the Union. But their Constitutional argument was crushed by the superior military power of the Union, which invaded and subjugated the Confederate states.

As a result, many Americans in former Confederate states see the Confederate flag as a symbol of their “lost cause,” and of the principles of the original U.S. Constitution that decentralized most power to the states.

But those flag supporters have their critics. Critics argue that the Confederate flag is merely a racist symbol affirming white superiority over black people and denying the evils of slavery. Seen that way, the Confederate flag is deeply offensive to African-Americans and to anyone else who believes (as I do) that people of all races are equal in rights and human dignity.

So this is another case in which a symbol’s supporters claim that it means only good things to them. Its critics suspect that the supporters are really motivated by hatred and racism, but that they are concealing those motives behind high-sounding rhetoric about the Constitution and states’ rights.

In the case of Muslim attire and practices, received wisdom rejects the heckler’s veto. Polite society accepts Muslim symbols as meaning what nice Muslims like Ms. Ahmed say that they mean. Anyone who doubts it is considered to be a narrow-minded hater.

Yet in the case of the Confederate flag, received wisdom embraces the heckler’s veto. Polite society accepts the flag as meaning what its critics say that it means. Anyone who defends it is considered to be a narrow-minded hater.

Threatened by boycotts and federal sanctions, Southern state legislatures have acted against the wishes of majorities to remove Confederate imagery from flags and to ethnically cleanse building and street names of references to Confederate heroes. Students wearing T-shirts with the flag are sent home from school to change clothes. Any public display of the flag is subject to harassment, violence, and even (rarely) arrest. Why? Because hecklers might be offended by the flag.

What’s the Difference?

The inconsistency most likely arises because Muslims in America, whatever their merits or demerits, are an “official victim” group against which it is socially and legally unacceptable to hold any bias.**  Their hecklers, on the other hand, are just plain vanilla Americans, with no special status or rights.

In the dispute over the Confederate flag, however, the roles are reversed. Supporters of the disputed symbol are just plain vanilla Americans with no special status or rights. Their hecklers are members of, or profess to act on behalf of, an aggrieved official victim group (African-Americans).

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* Not as mean as some Muslim men are to Muslim women, but it’s still wrong.

** It serves the interests of the U.S. government to handle its domestic Muslim population gently, lest American Muslims be driven by mistreatment to make common cause with their co-religionists in Muslim countries currently under attack or occupation by U.S. military forces.

A co-worker, who just turned 28 and is younger than I am, mentioned that he has high blood pressure.

That reminded me of how fortunate I am to be healthy. It also reminded me of my favorite quote from Alexander Pope‘s Essay on Man, published in 1734:

Hope springs eternal in the human brest,
Man never is, but always to be, blest.

Pope’s point is that we are never satisfied with what we have. No matter how well-off we are, we always want something better.

His ideas are still relevant today, which reminded me that knowledge and learning are very much a social project. We engage in an extended conversation not merely with other people in our own time, but with people in the past and future.

Each of us has a unique and important contribution to make. But together, we create a result that is more than just the sum of our individual contributions. As Robert Oerter remarks in The Theory of Almost Everything, his excellent book about the development of particle physics:

The Standard Model [of elementary particles] was cobbled together by many brilliant minds over the course of nearly the whole of the twentieth century, sometimes driven forward by new experimental discoveries, sometimes by theoretical advances. It was a collaborative effort in the largest sense, spanning continents and decades.

The idea that human beings are self-contained units (“individualism“) might have some applications, but it’s incorrect as a general picture of who and what we are.

We do not become who and what we are in a vacuum, but by interacting with and learning from other people. Without that, most of us would still be grunting in caves and hunting for berries to eat. What affects one of us, affects all of us. As Jesus said,

Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me. (Matthew 25:40)

Its individualist bias is the essential flaw in libertarianism, as well as in the closely-related (and more explicitly Nietzschean) preachments of Ayn Rand. Both see human nature as something you can identify by studying an individual person in isolation from others. As far as they’re concerned, you can take an individual human being, put him or her in a box, do some tests, and that gives you a good definition of human nature.

In fact, their view of human nature is even less accurate than that. They believe you can throw away every part of a person except for the reasoning part of the brain. You can then base your concept of human nature solely on rational calculation and economic self-interest.

Libertarianism is thus an ideal political philosophy for a population of disembodied brains. For real human beings, it is somewhat less appropriate.

Update: My niece, who attends college in Massachusetts and blogs under the pen name of Rinth de Shadley, wrote a very thoughtful blog article about libertarianism. She did a fine job, and it’s here.

Miscellaneous thoughts while drinking coffee at McDonalds:

Look for the money

The Dow dropped by 1,000 points in just a few minutes on Thursday, then rallied. The Sgt. Schultzes at the Securities and Exchange Commission profess to be baffled about the cause.

My advice: look for the money. Running the market up and down is a classic method that big players use to make money at the expense of smaller investors.

Maybe they did it this time, maybe they didn’t. But with their enormous resources, insider knowledge, and computerized trading, they have the ability to do it. And they are not known for their keen moral sense.

If some investment bank or hedge fund walked away from the “glitch” and ended up billions of dollars richer, then it’s worth investigating.

France affirms it’s a society

Muslims and civil libertarians are enraged that France has banned public wearing of the burqa, a full-body covering that fundamentalist Muslims (but not all Muslims) require their wives and other female family members to wear in public.

There are valid arguments for and against the ban. But the fundamental point, in my view, is that a society is defined and united by its rules and mores, both written and unwritten.

A society in which anyone is allowed (by law or social custom) to do whatever he or she wants is not a society. It’s a “libertarian paradise” of disconnected individuals who have nothing in common and no mutual obligations except to refrain from shooting each other.

France has just reaffirmed that it is a society with shared mores and values that aliens (whether ethnic, national, cultural, or religious) must respect.

If fundamentalist Muslims don’t like that society, then they should consider moving to another country that embodies their values and mores. There are lots of choices.

Last night, I was asked to expatiate on the question “What is mathematics?” I didn’t have a lot of time to compose my thoughts, but here they are:

Mathematics is the study of the fundamental structure of reality, together with a set of techniques that enable us to study it.

Although it has many practical applications, its main value is in helping us to understand our world, as well as to show us a powerful, beautiful, and inspiring vision of Truth itself: not of this or that particular truth, but Truth in the Platonic sense, transcendent and all-encompassing.

Only partly in jest, the English philosopher and two-time Nobel laureate Bertrand Russell wrote (in his book A History of Western Philosophy) that mathematician Rene Descartes had a simple proof of God’s existence:

1. If God does not exist, then mathematics is impossible.
2. But mathematics is delicious.
3. Therefore, God exists.

The sheer delight and deliciousness of mathematics have been the primary motivation of mathematicians throughout the ages. Practical applications, important as they are, have seldom been as significant. The mathematician Leonhard Euler (1707-1783) discovered abstract techniques and concepts that seemed useless in his time, but are now central in understanding particle physics and string theory. The famous British number theorist G.H. Hardy once remarked (in his book A Mathematician’s Apology) that he had never done any work with a practical application in mind. Hardy added:

Any genuine mathematician must feel that it is not on these crude achievements that the case for mathematics rests … In these days of conflict between ancient and modern studies, there must surely be something to be said for a study which did not begin with Pythagoras, and will not end with Einstein, but is the oldest and youngest of all.

In the 20th century, a few mathematicians denied the transcendent character of mathematical truth. Calling themselves “constructivists,” they argued that mathematics was purely a human creation. They contended, therefore, that mathematical truth was limited to what had been, or at least could be, proven by human mathematicians.

But the constructivists’ argument, whatever its merits, could not drown out the resounding call of mathematical inspiration, the irresistible vision of mathematics as truth, beauty, and goodness, that continues to uplift mathematicians and draw them forward.

Matthew Arnold? Who’s that? Didn’t he play a character on the TV series “Roseanne”?

Nope, that’s a different Arnold. As far as I know, they’re not related. Actor Tom Arnold, who appeared on “Roseanne,” is funnier but has said little about the human condition.

Matthew Arnold

Matthew Arnold was a 19th-century English poet and social critic who has a lot to say that illuminates our current problems. In his day, he was most famous as a poet, being considered the third-best poet of the 19th century, right after Tennyson and Browning. His other claim to fame was as a son of Thomas Arnold, the real-life headmaster of England’s Rugby School who was fictionalized in the popular 1857 novel Tom Brown’s Schooldays and makes a cameo appearance in the 1969 novel Flashman.

Today, most people read almost nothing that was written before last month, let alone before they were born. As a result, they have no inkling that the furious debates they hear every day are pretty old stuff.

The same issues and arguments arise in society after society, century after century. They arise because they come not from technology or any unique conditions of the present era, but from human nature and the nature of human society. Those things don’t change.

Matthew Arnold on Empathy for Others

There’s a joke about the run-up to the Bush-Cheney regime’s invasion of Iraq in 2003. U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin Powell are sitting in a tavern. Rumsfeld says to the bartender, “We’ve decided. We’re going to kill a million Iraqis and Britney Spears.” The bartender, in horror, gasps “Why are you going to kill Britney Spears?” Rumsfeld laughs and turns to Powell triumphantly. “See? I told you that nobody would care about the million Iraqis.”

Matthew Arnold would understand that joke.

In his book Culture and Anarchy, Arnold describes how Englishmen of his time viewed other races and nationalities:

It never was any part of our creed that the great right and blessedness of an Irishman or, indeed, of anybody on earth except an Englishman, is to do as he likes. And we can have no scruple at all about abridging, if necessary, a non-Englishman’s assertion of personal liberty. The British Constitution, its checks, and its prime virtues, are for Englishmen. We may extend them to others out of love and kindness, but we find no real divine law written on our hearts constraining us so to extend them.

In other words, we reserve our empathy mainly for our relatives, our group, and our nationality. Anyone outside those groups is a second-class citizen of the human race.

We wouldn’t explicitly think of them — whether “they” are Irish, African, Arab, Muslim, or members of some other group — as sub-human, undeserving of compassion or human rights, but that’s how our baser selves feel about them. That’s why we instinctively recoil at the suggestion of killing Britney Spears but are less troubled, at least on a gut level, with the idea of killing a million “foreign devils” who look different from us, who speak an unintelligible language, and who follow a “heathen religion.”

Matthew Arnold had never heard of sociobiology or kin selection, because in his time those theories hadn’t been invented. But he would have understood their basic idea: We tend to help those who are genetically related to us. We regard with suspicion anyone who is not so related. The closer the relation, the greater the emotional bond, so people in the same family have the greatest loyalty to each other. People in the same group or nationality, though more distantly related, are more likely to share genes than people in different groups or nationalities. Hence, they regard “their own” people as having human rights, but are ready to attack and kill “the other” people.

Later in the same essay, Arnold wrote:

And then the difference between an Irish Fenian and an English rough is so immense … [The Irish] is so evidently desperate and dangerous, a man of a conquered race, a Papist, with centuries of ill-usage to inflame him against us … with no admiration of our institutions, no love of our virtues, no talents for our business, no turn for our comfort!

A few substitutions can bring that passage up to date:

And then the difference between an Arab and an American is so immense … [The Arab] is so evidently desperate and dangerous, a man of a conquered race, a Muslim, with centuries of ill-usage to inflame him against us … with no admiration of our institutions, no love of our virtues, no talents for our business, no turn for our comfort!

As the popular saying goes, S-S-D-D: “Same stuff, different day.”

Atheists on the Warpath

It’s Christmas time, and that means one thing: Atheists are on the warpath. Again.

According to Roy Speckhardt, executive director of the American Humanist Association, their message of Christmas cheer is

… just to say that you can be good without God, so their atheist neighbor down the street shouldn’t be vilified as though he is immoral.

Also, of course, if you believe in God, they think you’re a gullible fool. Either that, or you’re so terrified of death that your reason has deserted you and you’ve taken refuge in childish fairy tales.

But let’s get back to Mr. Speckman’s point. Matthew Arnold had a fair amount to say on the subject. He was no secular humanist, but by 19th-century Victorian standards, he was quite a freethinker. He was frankly sceptical about the Biblical stories of miracles, but he didn’t want to get rid of the Bible or belief in God. He just wanted to reinterpret them in ways he thought were compatible with modern science. So atheists find him congenial in a lot of ways.

However, unlike contemporary atheists, Arnold recognized the great value of faith in God and in a transcendent moral order to which we are all accountable. He writes about Christianity, but his remarks apply to any theistic religion (such as Judaism) that includes a strong and enlightened moral code. In his book God and the Bible, Arnold writes:

At the present moment, two things about the Christian religion must surely be clear to anybody with eyes in his head. One is, that men cannot do without it; the other, that they cannot do with it as it is.

Nobody with eyes in his head claims that an atheist can’t be a good person. It’s just more difficult to be a good person when one believes that there is no transcendent moral order and that one will never be called to account for one’s misdeeds. Life is hard enough for most people. Why make it harder for them by taking away beliefs that reinforce their conscience and strengthen their better selves? Psychology, history, and common sense testify in unison on behalf of Bible-based religion.

Thus, whether true or not, the Bible and theistic religion are socially beneficial. Given that there are also persuasive (though not conclusive) reasons for believing them to be true, it becomes, in the words of George Bush’s CIA director, a “slam dunk.”

Freethinker that he was, Arnold was also too smart to believe that we can safely ignore history and human experience that show the value of faith in God. In that respect, he was a conservative. Another passage in God and the Bible reads like a description of today’s fashionable atheists:

Only when one is young and headstrong can one thus prefer bravado to experience, can one stand by the Sea of Time, and instead of listening to the solemn and rhythmical beat of its waves, choose to fill the air with one’s own whoopings to start the echo.

Waaaay back in the 1960s — yes, during that tiresome decade of Woodstock and flower power and Vietnam — something remarkable happened in Czechoslovakia.

From the end of World War II in 1945 until 1989, Czechoslovakia was dominated by the Soviet Union, which was the 20th-century’s nom de voyage for the Russian Empire. Its official ideology was communism. Its official governing method was oppression.

In 1968, a reformer named Alexander Dubček became leader of the Czech Communist Party, which was the country’s ruling party. He wanted to keep the egalitarian goals of communism (such as equality and social welfare) but get rid of its oppressive aspects. His government allowed free speech, including open dissent from government policies. He reined in the secret police.

Dubček called his movement “communism with a human face.”

Naturally, the Russians couldn’t allow it. They invaded Czechoslovakia and put an end to that experiment.

How little things have changed. In 2009 under President Obama, the United States is now being treated to “Bush-ism with a human face.”

One must admit that it is a slight improvement. Instead of having to endure the smirking, murderous, simian countenance of Dubya Bush, we now hear very similar policies from the serious, calm, intelligent visage of President Obama. It cuts the nausea factor by quite a bit. It’s been months since I threw my shoes at the TV set.

But it’s still Bush-ism: Bail out the Wall Street sharks who wrecked the economy, but not the unemployed whose jobs and lives the Wall Streeters destroyed. Sell out health care reform to the in$urance companies, the drug companies, and their hired lackeys in Congress. Crank up the war against Afghanistan. Slow down the exit from Iraq. Beat the drums about largely imaginary terrorist threats. Provide legal defense for the Bush regime’s chief torture apologist, John Yoo. Leave in place the instruments of oppression established by the Bush regime, such as the Transportation Security Agency, no-fly lists, warrantless wiretapping, and the Department of Homeland Security: instruments that never stopped a real terrorist threat, but hyped plenty of fake ones and beat down the American people into cowed submission lest they be put on a “watch list.”

An article in today’s New York Times recalls the worst paranoia and propaganda of the Bush years, when hapless loudmouths and street thugs were framed as dangerous terrorists. The Times article, “Domestic Insecurity,” uses the same weasel-words that we saw over and over in propaganda from the Bush-Cheney regime: the supposed terrorists were “accused of being drawn into terrorist scheming,” “accused of helping plan the killing spree in Mumbai,” “accused of going to Pakistan for explosives training,” and they “allegedly participated in a rocket attack against U.S. troops in Afghanistan.”

Anyone can be accused of anything, and since the Bush-Cheney regime’s signature event of 9/11, they have been. Jose Padilla was accused of plotting to explode a “dirty bomb,” and was then tortured in an unsuccessful attempt to get any evidence at all that would implicate him in such a plot. The “Miami Seven,” who couldn’t have assembled a bomb even if they’d bought it “ready to assemble” at Wal-Mart, were led by an FBI agent provocateur to take an “oath of allegiance to Al Qaeda” before being framed for a virtually non-existent plot to blow up the Sears Tower in Chicago. There are many more such cases.

Are any of our current “accused people” actually guilty of anything? The Bush years taught us to doubt it. The Obama administration hasn’t given us good reasons not to doubt it.

I still believe that President Obama is trying to do the right things. The problem is that he’s not trying very hard. Instead, he’s “going with the flow.” Since 2001 (and even before that, to a lesser degree), the flow has been in the wrong direction.

Dad

I remember a lot of things about my father, who passed away on November 28.

When I was a child, Dad liked to watch “the Friday night fights” (professional boxing) on television. While he watched, he drank a beer or two: usually Budweiser, “the king of beers.” Occasionally he drank Wiedemann beer, though he later avowed that it was “awful stuff.”

Saturday mornings, I took charge of the television to watch “The Three Stooges,” a slapstick comedy team from the 1930s and 1940s whose antics I still enjoy on DVD. Dad was usually in the kitchen, adjacent to the TV room, cooking pancakes for the family. He enjoyed listening to the Three Stooges because of all the sound effects they made as they punched each other and poked each other in the eyes (don’t try that at home, kids).

Every Christmas, Dad dressed up as Santa to distribute presents to the children in the pediatrics ward of Methodist Hospital, where he was chief resident physician. Even though I wasn’t a patient in the hospital, I attended the big Christmas party where he gave out presents. I felt as if I was in on a big secret: The one handing out the presents wasn’t really Santa, he was my father.

On Christmas Eve, most children and their parents leave cookies and milk for Santa Claus in case he’s hungry when he visits. At my house, we left cookies and beer. Budweiser, the king of beers. I was starting to get suspicious about the Santa story.

When I played baseball in Little League and wanted to be a pitcher, Dad built a pitching mound for me in our backyard. On the side of the house, he painted a circle so that I could practice throwing accurately into the center of the circle. Dad had opened his own medical office by then, and his secretary was married to one of the players for the Indianapolis Indians baseball team. From the player, Dad got a major-league baseball bat that had been used in several games, and gave it to me. It was almost as big as I was, but it gave me extra confidence as I dragged it onto the Little League field to the awe of the other children. Dad was also a popular umpire for Little League games, partly because of his fairness, partly because of his knowledge of baseball, and partly because of his zany theatrics as an umpire.

Those are cherished memories, but they’re the kind of memories that many sons have of their fathers. I want to tell you about the man himself.

Aristotle recommended “moderation in all things.” The Buddha said that we should follow “the middle way.”

Neither of them ever met Dad. He was not a man of the middle way. His philosophy was more akin to that of Jesus, who said that if someone wanted our coat, we should give him our cloak as well; and if someone wanted us to go a mile, we should go two miles.

Whatever Dad did in life, he threw himself into it fully and without reservation. As a soldier, as a student, as a doctor, as a husband, father, and grandfather, as a civic leader, or just as a man, in baseball or golf or singing, he didn’t go just one mile. He didn’t go just two miles. He’d always go at least three, or four, or however many it took. And when he finally had to leave us, he did so on his own terms. As much as any man can be in control of his own destiny, he remained in control of his until the very end.

His total commitment applied to his moral beliefs and conduct as well. He wasn’t a perfect person: none of us is. He didn’t get everything right the first time. But whenever he became convinced that he’d been wrong about something — in belief, attitude, or action — he moved heaven and earth to do better and to get it right.

That’s part of the reason he was more than just a good man: he was a great man. His life and example continue to inspire us and enrich our community.

The night before Dad left us, I was at Starbucks writing an article — working, as Dad would have wanted — when my brother Dave called me on my cell phone. He told me that he had just come from Dad’s hospital room, and if I had anything else I wanted to say to Dad, now was the time to do it. I told Dave that Dad and I were lucky to have settled all our outstanding issues 10 years ago. I had been to the hospital every day for two weeks, including earlier that same day. We had said everything that needed to be said. And I went back to writing.

But then I stopped writing. I got up and drove to the hospital. There were two more things I needed to say to him.

I stood by his bedside and looked at the man who had taught me so much. And I said:

“I’m sorry that I am not a better man.”

I’m no worse than most people, and probably better than some. But no matter how long I live, and no matter how much I achieve, I know that I will never be the man my father was.

I took Dad’s hand. And I said:

“I will see you again someday.”

Each year, the hospital gave an award to the doctor with the highest percentage of correct diagnoses. Dad won the award year after year, until the hospital finally declared him "permanent champion."

What’s not in the official obituary:

• As a doctor, Dad made house calls and charged $35.
• He was almost never late. If you had an appointment with him at nine o’clock, you saw him at nine o’clock unless you were late.
• He had only one examining room and saw only one patient at a time. As a result, he made less money than most doctors but gave his patients better care.
• He was much in demand as a diagnostician. When other doctors couldn’t figure out what was wrong with a patient, they called Dad. He was like the TV doctor “House” except that he didn’t need a cane, he didn’t need a “team,” and he was always kind to patients.
• When he was chief resident at Methodist Hospital, he dressed up each Christmas as Santa Claus to distribute presents to the children in the pediatrics ward.
• Though he was a scientist, he believed in the personal and spiritual side of medical practice. He thought it was just as important to care for his patients as people as it was to give them the right drugs.
• If he had a fault, it was that he believed all doctors (and all Republicans) were as dedicated, honest, and conscientious as he was.
• He provided a moral example that I still struggle to follow.

Robert W. Palmer, M.D., born 1922, passed away after a brief illness.

Dad was born in the small town of Tyler, Minnesota in the United States, son of the Rev. Roy Palmer and Cassie O’Camic Palmer. He grew up in Waterville, Minnesota. He had three brothers and two sisters. As a youth, he was a talented athlete in football, baseball, and basketball, and a successful Golden Gloves boxer.

When the United States entered World War II, he enlisted in the Army Air Corps and became a B-24 bomber pilot in the South Pacific. He flew 76 combat missions, became a squadron commander, rose to the rank of Major, and was decorated repeatedly for heroism.

After the war, he used the G.I. Bill to enroll in Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, where he graduated with honors three years later. While visiting a friend in upstate New York during his senior year, he made an impromptu Saturday morning visit to the University of Rochester Medical School. There, he encountered an elderly gentleman who gave him a tour and asked him questions about his background. After the tour, the man asked Dad if he wanted to enroll. When Dad said that he doubted he could gain admission, the man revealed that he was Dr. George Whipple, a Nobel prize-winning medical researcher and dean of the medical school. He told Dad that his application was accepted. Dad enrolled the next year and earned his M.D. in 1953.

He moved in 1956 to Indianapolis, Indiana. There, he became chief resident physician at Methodist Hospital, a post later held by one of my brothers, Steven. He entered private practice as an internist in 1960 and retired in 2003, though he continued to serve as staff physician for Meals on Wheels.  He was affiliated for most of his career with Community Hospital, where he served on the board of directors and established the family medicine residency program.  He was also assistant professor of clinical medicine for the Indiana University School of Medicine. He was elected to the Fellowship of Distinguished Physicians of Community Hospital in 1991.

Dad was active in many civic and charitable causes. He was president of the Lawrence Township School Board, president of All Souls Unitarian Church, and a founder of the World War II Roundtable. He was an active member of the Service Club of Indianapolis and the American Legion, as well as a volunteer at the Indiana State Museum and a driver for Meals on Wheels.

Link: A 1988 interview that I did with my father about his life.