I recently saw the movie “The Help,” which chronicled the insults and indignities suffered by black people in the early 1960s.

Its basic theme, of black people humiliated and oppressed by whites who were either racist or oblivious, rang true. It was consistent with my experience in life, though it took me many years to understand that experience.

As a child, I knew almost nothing about racism. It never occurred to me that racial differences were significant.

I don’t say that to establish how virtuous and enlightened I was, because I wasn’t. Virtue requires conscious choice. And children, no matter how clever, are almost never enlightened. I didn’t choose not to be a racist. I simply wasn’t one.

Even as a child, I was a nerd. I lived in a world of books and ideas, not of people. I still do. I might not remember your face (or your race), but I’ll remember numbers and facts about you. We nerds don’t dislike people, but people don’t register with us as vividly as do ideas, facts, and principles. As a character on the delightful and quickly-cancelled TV sitcom “Wonderfalls” said of himself, “It’s a borderline autistic thing.”

By the way, that’s not just a funny line from a TV show. Some neuroscience researchers think that autism is an extreme form of male cognitive organization. But I digress.

In my primary school class, Greg was the only African-American kid. There were no Hispanics or Asians, so except for Greg, we were all white. As far as I could tell, no one treated Greg any differently from the rest of us. I never noticed anyone make hostile remarks about him or pick fights with him. Of course, as a nerd, I wasn’t attuned to that kind of thing. However, I would have noticed it if it had been intense or repeated.

Much of the time when I was a child, one or the other of two black ladies took care of me.

Margie, my parents’ housekeeper, was from Alabama. She’d previously worked in an ice cream shop, which to a seven-year-old boy seemed like a glamorous and exciting job. She taught me how to scoop ice cream “the professional way” and how to make chocolate sodas. She praised the childish comic strips that I drew and she encouraged my artwork. She nagged me to practice for my piano lessons.

Bea, my grandparents’ housekeeper, was a plump, good-natured lady a little over four feet tall. Whenever my father saw her, he jokingly asked Bea if she was standing up or sitting down. She was devoted to my grandparents and to me. She taught me a lot, including personal hygiene.

And yet, there was something odd about Bea’s relationship to my grandparents. I didn’t understand it at the time. My maternal grandfather loved Bea but hated black people. That wasn’t what he called them, but you can guess the word he used.

After a while, I realized the inconsistency of my grandfather’s attitude: he hated black people in general, but every black person who he  knew personally was “different.” The ones he knew were all right. It was only the ones he didn’t know who were — well, whatever he thought they were. He never elaborated on the subject, at least not to me.

In high school, one of my best friends was John, an African-American who again was one of a very small number of black students at the school. Everyone, including John, made jokes about race, but as far as I could tell it was all good-natured. Just as with Greg in primary school, I was never aware of anyone being unfriendly to John or saying hateful things on account of his race. He was a very likeable guy, and as far as I could tell, everyone liked him.

In college, one of my friends was Charlie, a pre-med student. That was when I first became aware of race as an issue, though I was still fairly obtuse and insensitive about it. Charlie was one of a fairly small number of black students at our college.

My perception might have been unfair, but it seemed to me that most of our black students confirmed the worst racist stereotypes. I thought that they weren’t serious about their studies, and that they complained constantly about real and imagined insults. Looking back, I’d guess that my perception was biased by those very same racist stereotypes, but that’s what I thought I saw.

Charlie was different. (That sounds just like something my grandfather would have said.) Unlike the other black students, he wasn’t on scholarship. Whenever you saw Charlie, he was doing one of three things: studying, participating in class, or working at one of the part-time jobs he held to pay his way through college. The other black students thought he was “acting white” and viewed him with disdain. He graduated with straight ‘A’s. I’m sure that he’s now an eminent doctor somewhere.

How much hurt and anger lurked beneath the smiles and easy-going demeanor of all those black people? Were they really as happy as they seemed?

I hope so. But I suspect it was partly because they knew what happened to black people who expressed dissatisfaction or stepped out of line.

What have I learned from all that? I suppose it amounts to this:

• A just society doesn’t treat any group of people as second-class citizens.
• Even if people smile when they’re mistreated, it doesn’t mean they’re happy about it or that they think it’s okay.
• An injustice done to any person is an injustice done to all of us, and we should treat it as such.

As well as what I always knew:

• All people have infinite worth and importance. To the extent that we can, we should treat them that way.

Copyright 2011 by N.S. Palmer. May be reproduced as long as byline, copyright notice, and URL (http://www.ashesblog.com) are included.

By N.S. Palmer

In today’s New York Times, its column “The Stone” asks what The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy called “the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything:”

What is the meaning of life?

The British comedy troupe Monty Python devoted an entire movie to that topic. At the end of the movie, John Cleese summarized the meaning of life as follows:

• Be nice to people.
• Don’t eat too much fat.
• Try to get some walking in.
• Read a good book every now and then.
• Live in peace and harmony with people of all races, creeds, and nationalities.

That’s a good answer, considering that the question itself is badly stated. As the supercomputer Deep Thought observed in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, you can’t understand the answer unless you understand the question.

So you can’t answer to the question “What is the meaning of life?” unless you can answer “What is the meaning of the question?”

The New York Times column has some good ideas in it, but largely misses the point. It approvingly quotes Jean-Paul Sartre‘s remark that without God, life has no meaning. But then it disputes the idea that life has meaning with God, either.

The Meaning of Meaning

In logic and linguistics, meaning typically refers to intentionality, the property by which an object refers to something other than itself.

If I say “there is an elephant in the living room,” my statement is not self-contained. It refers to something beyond itself, that is, to the presence of an elephant in the living room.

In fact, intentionality is one of the defining characteristics of consciousness, and therefore of us. To be conscious is to be conscious of something.

That isn’t too far removed from people’s vague sense of what it means for their lives to have meaning. We want our lives to be about more than just themselves. We want them to be in relation to something else.

Most people want to live for something beyond themselves: for God, for their spouse, for their children, for their political ideals, for music, and so forth. They want their lives to be in accordance with their objects (God’s wishes), pleasing to those objects (God’s approval), or beneficial to those objects (the welfare of their children, the success of their political ideals, and so forth).

In that sense, God does give meaning to people’s lives, both:

• In an absolute, metaphysical sense (whether people believe in God or not), and
• In a psychological, moral sense (if people choose to devote their lives to following God’s directions as they understand them).

But you can’t make sense of the answer unless you can make sense of the question. That’s how I make sense of it.

Your answer might differ: but if it makes sense to you, that’s what counts.

Copyright 2011 by N.S. Palmer. May be reproduced as long as byline, copyright notice, and URL (http://www.ashesblog.com) are included.

“Hypocrisy is the tax that vice pays to virtue.”

That quote has been attributed to various people: to the Irish satirist Oscar Wilde, the Chinese philosopher Lao Tse, and the French social reformer Francois La Rochefoucauld, among others. Perhaps they all said it.

But it spotlights a truth: However much we dislike hypocrisy, it serves an important social function.

President Obama, like President Bush before him, now claims the right to order anyone killed, anywhere in the world, without a trial or conviction for any crime.

Here’s a non-surprise: The U.S. government has been doing that for a long time.

Someone gets in the way, whether of the U.S. government, the oil companies, or the multi-national corporations, and he gets killed. Saddam Hussein, who was the first President Bush’s favorite Middle Eastern dictator until he got too independent. Ngo Dinh Diem. Patrice Lumumba. News reporter Danny Casolaro. Now, it’s Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi‘s turn. He has a target on his back because he annoyed the oil companies.

But in the past, there was a difference. Even if the president knew what was going on, he avoided any personal involvement. He had “deniability.” The president pretended that he knew nothing about it. And the rest of us went along with the charade.

Yes, it was hypocritical. But that’s the point. The hypocrisy was a good thing. When a hypocrite sins covertly, he breaks moral and statutory law but he acknowledges their validity.

President Obama and President G.W. Bush are not hypocrites, at least not on the issue of government-sponsored murder. They embrace their evil acts. They even boast about them. By so doing, they deny the validity of the moral and statutory laws that forbid such evil acts.

Not only do they do evil, but they compound their sin by weakening the moral foundations of civilization. They avow that we are nothing more than lawless, bloodthirsty barbarians. And they have the power to prove it with their actions.

So let’s hear it for hypocrisy. If people are going to sin, they should at least have the decency to lie about it.

Copyright 2011 by N.S. Palmer. May be reproduced as long as byline, copyright notice, and URL (http://www.ashesblog.com) are included.

By N.S. Palmer

I’ve been reading Christopher Moore’s excellent book Lamb. It offers a light-hearted but surprisingly respectful “alternative Gospel” about the early life of Jesus.

The story is told by Biff, Jesus’ boyhood best friend. On the orders of the Most High, the archangel Raziel resurrects Biff in the present day (2010) to write the new Gospel. The two of them live in a hotel room in New York while Biff writes about his experiences with Jesus. The Gospel narrative is interspersed with scenes in the present day, as when (a) Biff finds a Bible in the hotel room and tries to read parts of it without letting Raziel find out, and (b) Raziel becomes obsessed with TV soap operas but doesn’t realize they are fictional.

The idea of telling about Jesus’ boyhood is not a new one. One of the Gospels that did not make it into the Christian canon was the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, which recounts stories about the childhood years of Jesus. The Infancy Gospel of Thomas has Jesus striking his playmates dead on at least one occasion, but Biff’s Gospel in Lamb paints a kinder, gentler picture of Jesus that is more in keeping with our traditional view of him.

Apart from recommending the book to anyone except those who would find any non-canonical Gospel offensive, I’d like to make two points of interest.

First, you might have noticed that I wrote “Jesus’ boyhood.” According to the authoritative writing manual The Elements of Style by Willard Strunk & E.B. White — a book that writers regard as a “Gospel” of correct English — the normal rule is to form singular possessives by adding apostrophe-s. That applies even to words ending in the letter ‘s’.

Thus, for example, you’d normally write “James’s brother” instead of “James’ brother,” the latter of which is incorrect. But there’s one exception, and only one: when you form the possessive of “Jesus,” referring to the Biblical Jesus, you only add an apostrophe. No ‘s’.

All right, it’s not earth-shaking, but it is interesting. It’s a linguistic remnant of the culture in which we used to live, which in the last 70 years has been bulldozed and plowed under by Goldman Sachs and Wal-Mart and Britney Spears and Halliburton. Even in punctuation, the name of Jesus got special treatment.

Second, in the book Lamb, the angel Raziel refers to another angel as “a Seraphim.” Unless you know Hebrew or have studied theology, you might not recognize that as incorrect. But the “-im” is a masculine plural ending in Hebrew. You can have one Seraph or multiple Seraphim, but you can’t have “a Seraphim.”

Besides singular and plural, Hebrew also has a “dual” ending that refers only to pairs of things, such as hands or eyes. I don’t recall if there’s a dual ending that applies to two angels, but there might be.

Angels are an interesting topic in themselves. If you believe in them, then their interest is theological; if you think they’re mythical, then their interest is cultural and psychological. The Thomist philosopher Mortimer J. Adler, who was editor of The Encyclopedia Britannica for many years, wrote a good book about The Angels and Us.

Copyright 2011 by N.S. Palmer. May be reproduced as long as byline, copyright notice, and URL (http://www.ashesblog.com) are included.

Earlier this evening, I was reading Men of Mathematics by E.T. Bell.

It’s one of my favorite popular books about the history of mathematics. It discusses both the lives of great mathematicians* and their major discoveries. Some of the discoveries are pretty abstract, but the book does a good job of explaining them in simple terms. And Bell isn’t shy about saying when he thinks that someone acted like an ass or an idiot. With a little effort, almost anyone can understand and enjoy the book.

However, in his chapter about Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777-1855), Bell wrote:

Instead of the easy Latin which sufficed for Euler and Gauss, and which any student can master in a few weeks, scientific workers must now acquire a reading knowledge of two or three languages in addition to their own.

As a boy, I had two years of Latin study. I enjoyed them immensely, both because Latin is fun and because I had a wonderful teacher. The teacher was Mr. Shaugnessy. He tricked us into thinking that we were goofing around when we were actually learning Latin. Sneaky devil. Because it was a boys’ school, he could (and did) spice up exams with dirty jokes in Latin that we were supposed to translate. Sadly, he was also a chain smoker. Lung cancer. All his students remember him and benefited from having him as a teacher.

I never really understood English until I took Latin. It showed me how all European languages work, since all European languages are either derived from or influenced by Latin. It even gave me a conceptual framework to understand non-European languages such as Russian, Hebrew, and Hindi.

Hindi, by the way, is one of the official languages of India and has surprising similarities to English. Both English and Hindi are Indo-European languages derived from the same ancient language group. In spite of the geographic distance between New York and Mumbai, their official languages are related.

Anyway, I’m a big fan of Latin. But Latin that “any student can master in a few weeks?” That strikes me as one of the most optimistic characterizations of Latin that I’ve ever heard.

Yes, Latin is logical. Yes, almost any student can learn the noun declensions, verb conjugations, and a working vocabulary in a few weeks. But that’s just to read a little Latin, not to write in it. And it’s hardly “mastering” Latin. Euler, Gauss, Newton, and their contemporaries wrote in Latin, which is much more difficult than simply reading it.

Either Bell has a very liberal concept of what constitutes mastery, or he’s referring to a subset of Latin that people of Gauss’s time used for their scientific writing. I suspect that it’s the latter.

I also suspect that Bell was a trifle optimistic about how many languages the average scientific worker can read. Most U.S. doctoral programs require their students to pass a reading proficiency exam in one foreign language relevant to their field. A few years later, very few American graduates can still read the foreign language in which they took the exam, let alone any other foreign language. The percentages are higher in Europe, of course, where many people at all educational levels are multi-lingual. And around the world, English has replaced Latin and French as the lingua franca of science and commerce: lots of people know English as their second language.

Nevertheless, Latin remains a wonderful foundation for understanding all other languages. It’s also a gateway to reading a lot of classical literature. One of the best texts, for study on your own or in a class, is Wheelock’s Latin, now in its sixth edition. Other resources for learning about Latin are:

• Why Study Latin? An About.com page with links about the benefits of Latin study.
• Getting Started on Classical Latin: The Open University’s online course in basic Latin, with 10 hours of instruction.

Have fun, and don’t expect to master Latin in a few weeks. You can get a good working knowledge of Latin in that short a time, however.

_________________________
* Women mathematicians, too, in spite of the book’s title. I received an indignant email about the sexist title from my niece, who graduates from college next month and is quite good at mathematics.

Copyright 2011 by N.S. Palmer. May be reproduced as long as byline, copyright notice, and URL (http://www.ashesblog.com) are included.

I’ll miss newspapers when they disappear. There will still be a few of them online, but it just won’t be the same.

This morning, I’m sitting at McDonalds and perusing The New York Times while I quaff my coffee.

I should put this in context, both politically and metaphysically.

Politically, I’ve concluded that the U.S. government and political system are irredeemably corrupt. A sufficient number of politicians and government officials are “on the take” from giant corporations and the super-rich that almost nothing positive can be accomplished.

Wall Streeters, banksters, and giant corporations will continue to loot the United States until there’s nothing left to loot. Then they will pick the carcass clean, leaving honest Americans to fend for themselves in a wrecked country. There’s nothing non-violent that we can do about it, and since violence is a very unpredictable instrument of social change, I don’t advocate it. All I can do is get a big tub of popcorn, watch the show, and laugh.

There’s a reason why mature people don’t start revolutions, which are almost always started by the young. When you reach a certain age, you’ve learned not to act without thinking about the results of your actions. You tend to act only if you are reasonably sure that your actions will improve the situation.

Violent action lacks that kind of predictability. Revolutions are launched by young people who are so outraged by injustice that they don’t care about the result. That might happen in the U.S., though corporate control of the army, the secret police, and almost all of the communications and news media would make it difficult. My guess is that our decline will continue until the corporations and super-rich start fighting each other for control of the country, with each side enlisting working-class cannon fodder to “fight for their freedom.” Then the country will break apart, with unforeseeable results.

In any event, that’s my political assessment: We’re done. Stick a fork in us. And the reason for the political situation — indeed, the reason why justice and freedom are such rare commodities in human history — lies in our metaphysical situation.

Metaphysically, in this world at least, the evil have a systematic advantage over the good. And the very evil, such as the Bushes and Hitlers and Stalins, have an advantage over the moderately evil. The pickpocket beats the liar. The robber beats the pickpocket. The murderer beats the robber. The psychopathic mass murderer beats the ordinary “amateur” murderer.

Consider what it means to be a good person. Among other things, it means that:

• You will not do certain things even if they are in your material self-interest.
• You will do certain things even if they are against your material self-interest.

The evil, on the other hand, have fewer such limitations. And the more evil they are, the fewer limitations they have.

Imagine a tennis match between two players of equal ability. One of them not only obeys the rules of tennis, but in the middle of volleys, he runs over to the side of the court to help children and little old ladies. The other player pays no attention to the rules and cheats constantly. He “wastes” no time on anything except winning the game.

Which player wins, the good one or the evil one? The answer is obvious. Unless the good player gets very lucky — which does happen on occasion — the evil player wins.

The same applies to life on earth. Good people have a long list of things they won’t do. Evil people say, “Sod all that, I’m going to win.” And they do.

All that provides a context in which the morning newspaper becomes an exercise in dark humour.

On the front page, we learn that the Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi has been using cluster bombs against the rebels who want to overthrow him. The lead paragraph observes that such bombs “have been banned in much of the world.” Only later does the article mention that the U.S. uses cluster bombs. It never mentions that the U.S. and Israel both use cluster bombs against civilians, or that those two countries have not agreed to the treaty banning cluster bombs.

The New York Times is a real newspaper and often does a good job, but when it’s under pressure (or under orders) to publish war propaganda, it does so. The first paragraph demonizes Qaddafi, who is undeniably as bad as Bush or Cheney, but “buries” the inconvenient facts further down in the article. What distinguishes the Times is that to retain a little credibility, it did at least mention some of the inconvenient facts. Dedicated propaganda outlets such as Fox News and The Weekly Standard probably wouldn’t have bothered.

Elsewhere on the front page, we learn that Republican governors and state legislatures want to gut environmental protection laws so that corporations can pollute ad libitum and impose the costs on others.

On the editorial page, we learn that House Republicans want to throw open the Gulf of Mexico once again to the tender mercies of the oil companies, given that they did such a good job almost destroying it last year.

On the op-ed page, Columnist Gail Collins catches Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney falsifying the history of the 1990s, much the same as almost all Republicans routinely falsify the history of tax cuts for their wealthy sponsors.* Romney would probably take refuge in Republican Sen. John Kyl’s excuse that his lie about Planned Parenthood spending 90 percent of its funds on abortion “was not intended to be a factual statement.”

In fairness to Mitt, Collins found the lie (births to teenaged mothers peaked during the Clinton years) in a book of which Romney was the listed author. As a former Capitol Hill ghost writer, I can tell you that Romney almost certainly didn’t write the book.

Elsewhere on the op-ed page, columnist Charles Blow reiterates what’s widely known to everyone but Fox News viewers and Tea Partiers: corporations and the super-rich get a steadily increasing share of the national income but pay steadily decreasing tax rates. The top income tax rate was 91 percent under Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who would now be considered a radical socialist. Since then, it’s been repeatedly reduced to reach its current level of 35 percent. House Republicans want to cut it even more to 25 percent.

U.S. economic growth was higher when the top tax rate was higher, but that’s one of those inconvenient facts that politicians can forget in the interest of getting money from Wall Street. Republicans are determined to give more tax breaks to “job creators:” but they fail to mention that the jobs are created in China and Indonesia, not in America.

I made my mind up, back in Chelsea,
When I go, I’m goin’ like Elsie.
Start by admitting, from cradle to tomb
Isn’t that long a day.
Life is a cabaret, old chum,
Only a cabaret, old chum.
And I love a cabaret.

– Cabaret

_________________________
* I don’t mean to beat up exclusively on Republicans. It seems to me that Wall Street pays Republicans to commit the crimes, and pays Democrats to stand around whining that they can’t do anything about it.

Copyright 2011 by N.S. Palmer. May be reproduced as long as byline, copyright notice, and URL (http://www.ashesblog.com) are include

… was sent to me by someone in Madison, Wisconsin, who found it in the Capitol building last week. It was obviously written in a hurry, and it carries the label “first draft.”

Wisconsin is the latest battleground in the on-going war by corporations and the super-rich to strip working Americans of all their rights and reduce them to abject destitution. Similar battles are being waged against working people in Indiana and other states. But the exploited majority is finally waking up and fighting back.

Manifesto of the People’s Party

It’s emerging from the heartland – from Wisconsin, Ohio, Indiana, Missouri, and Iowa — and it is spreading across the nation. It doesn’t have a formal organization or Washington lobbyists behind it, but it’s gaining strength nonetheless. Like the Tea Party did with Republicans in 2010, the People’s Party will pressure Democrats in primaries and general elections leading up to 2012 and beyond to have the courage of the party’s core convictions. But unlike the Tea Party, which has been coopted by the super-rich, the People’s Party represents the needs and aspirations of America’s vast working middle class, along with the less fortunate.

The People’s Party is dedicated to the truth that America is a rich nation – richer by far than any other, richer than it’s ever been. The People’s Party rejects the claims of plutocrats who want us to believe we can no longer afford to live decently – who are cutting the wages and benefits of most people, attacking unions, and squeezing public budgets. The People’s Party will not allow them to turn us against one another – unionized against non-unionized, public employee against private employee, immigrant against native born. Nor will the People’s Party allow the privileged and powerful to distract us from the explosive concentration of income and wealth at the top, the decline in taxes paid by the top, and their increasing and untrammeled political power.

We have joined together to reverse these trends and to promote a working people’s bill of rights. We are committed to:

1. Increasing the pay and bargaining power of average working people.

We’ll stop efforts to destroy unions and collective bargaining rights. Protect workers who try to form unions from being fired. Make it easier for workers to form unions through simple up-or-down votes at the workplace.

2. Requiring America’s super-rich to pay their fair share.

Increase top marginal tax rates and the number of tax brackets at the top. Treat income from capital gains the same as ordinary income. Restore the estate tax. Revoke the citizenship of anyone found to be sheltering income abroad.

3. Protecting and expanding government programs vital to the working middle class and the poor.

These include Social Security, K-12 education, Pell Grants for disadvantaged students, public transportation, Medicare and Medicaid, and the Earned Income Tax Credit.

4. Ending corporate welfare and cutting military outlays.

Trim defense spending. End special tax subsidies for specific corporations or industries – at both state and federal levels. Cut agricultural subsidies.

5. Saving Social Security while making it more progressive.

Exempt the first $20,000 of income from Social Security taxes. Make up the difference – and any need for additional Social Security revenues – by raising the ceiling on income subject to the Social Security payroll tax.

6. Ending Wall Street’s dominance of the economy and preventing any future taxpayer-funded bailout.

Break up Wall Street’s largest banks and put a cap their size. Link pay on the Street to long-term profits rather than short-term speculation. Subject all financial transactions to a one-tenth of one percent transactions tax.

7. Fully enforcing regulations that protect workers, consumers, small investors, and the environment.

Raise penalties on corporations that violate them. Expand enforcement staffs. Provide more private rights of action.

8. Providing affordable health care to all Americans.

The new health law isn’t enough. We’ll fight for a single payer – making Medicare available to all. End fee-for-service and create “accountable-care” organizations that focus on healthy outcomes.

9. Slowing and eventually reversing climate change.

We’ll fight to limit carbon emissions. Impose a ceiling on emissions or a carbon tax on polluters. Return the revenues from these to the American people, in the form of tax cuts for the working middle class.

10. Getting big money out of politics.

We’ll fight to appoint Supreme Court justices who will overrule Citizens United v. FEC. Require full disclosure of all contributions for or against any candidate. Provide full public financing for all presidential, gubernatorial, and legislative candidates in all general elections.

A few of the places it’s happening:

• Madison (ongoing).
• Des Moines (ongoing).
• March 10: Indianapolis. Gather at 10am and rally at 11:30am at Statehouse, 200 W. Washington St., Indianapolis. Rallies will continue at the capitol until the impasse is over.
• March 11: St. Louis. Downtown at 3:30 pm at Kiener Plaza. SB 1 is expected to be voted on in the Senate the week of 3/7 or 3/14.
• April 4: In cities across America. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day – Demonstrations to show that “We Are One.”

Corporations and the super-rich control the government, all the levers of power, and almost all of the news media. Their agents are experts at discrediting, disrupting, and co-opting popular movements. We don’t have much of a chance. But as Americans, let’s at least make sure that they know they were in a fight.

This isn't Nazi Donut, but it looks similar. I liked to sit at the counter.

Intellectual humility can come to us in surprising ways. Sometimes, it’s served up in a donut shop, along with darned good coffee and the best chocolate donuts in town.

Mine came garnished with ignorance and bigotry, but it was helpful anyway.

Years ago, I went each morning to the local gym to work out with a trainer. After the gym, on my way to work, I stopped at Busy Donut, where I sat at the counter to read the morning newspaper, drink coffee, and eat two chocolate donuts.

The news was idiotic then, just as it is now, but at a lower volume. The coffee was outstanding. The chocolate donuts were to die for.

Busy Donut was definitely a working-class establishment. At the counter, I sat beside truck drivers, sales clerks, gas station attendants, and of course policemen. If there’s one thing that cops know in any city, it’s where to get the best donuts.

Unlike most people with too many university degrees, I know all those people quite well. I worked in a factory where I was the only person who didn’t speak Polish; an elderly lady in the factory office taught me enough to get by. I was a drugstore delivery boy: one of my customers was nicknamed “Maalox” because she ordered a case of it every week, but she tipped well. I drove a taxicab part-time for a couple of years. As a paralegal (which isn’t hard and requires no law license), I helped lower-income people handle their debts. And like most students, I did my share of delivering pizzas, busing tables, and working in bookstores.

I found that on average, blue-collar workers weren’t significantly less intelligent than university professors or other members of the more affluent and respected classes of society. The main difference was that they lacked educational opportunities. As a result, their views of the world were based on common sense but were sometimes uninformed or misinformed.

But let’s get back to the counter at Busy Donut, which on that morning had not yet earned its unofficial name of “Nazi Donut.”

I was sitting a few seats down the counter from several gas-station attendants who were in a heated conversation. Because I was reading the newspaper, I didn’t listen until this line grabbed my attention:

“… This police officer was a Jew-boy, and he admitted it!”

Yes, I know that anti-Semitism is supposed to be scary. But it was so ludicrous that I choked on my coffee and almost burst out laughing. The police officer “admitted that he was a Jew-boy?” My gosh, had he no shame?

Those gas-station attendants weren’t jackbooted storm troopers filled with hate. They were just ordinary people who had been misinformed and misled. They trusted their favorite magazines and radio shows to tell them the truth: instead, they were fed a steady diet of fantasies, lies, and stereotypes. That misinformation distorted their view of the world and of other people.

And I don’t even want to beat up too harshly on the sources of their misinformation. The human mind is a frail and fickle thing. It leaps very quickly from the premise “I don’t like him” to the conclusion “He must be evil.” And since it’s established that he’s evil, “He must be doing evil things.”

The latest example is a story in right-wing circles about the recent shootings in Arizona of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ), Judge John M. Roll, and several others.

It goes like this: That dirty Kenyan Muslim Socialist Obama (they call him a “Kenyan Muslim Socialist” because they can’t use the n-word) wants to seize our retirement savings — presumably to give the money to undeserving black people. Judge Roll said that Obama couldn’t do it, so Obama had him assassinated. All the other shootings were just a smokescreen. Never mind that Judge Roll wasn’t even scheduled to be there. Don’t confuse us with the facts.

Let’s follow the chain of reasoning, shall we? Obama is black. And he’s uppity, and he uses big words, like he thinks he’s better’n us white folks. And he somehow got to be president. So he must be lying about being an American, or about being a Christian, or something. And that means he’s evil. Because he’s evil, he does evil things. Killing a judge is an evil thing, therefore Obama must have done it. Is that about right?

It reminds me of Woody Allen‘s example of the syllogism:

• All men are mortal.
• Socrates is a man.
• But Socrates is a homosexual.
• Therefore, all men are homosexual.

These kinds of beliefs are ludicrous, of course. But people who hold such beliefs quite honestly think that they’re true. They’ve been fed information that is at least mistaken and sometimes deliberately false. And based on that information, they’ve arrived at conclusions that are false and could lead to violence.

Have any of us ever accepted false information and thereby reached false conclusions? Of course we have.

Sometimes, we know a lot. But we usually know far less than we think we do. And at least half of what we think we know is probably wrong. So it behooves us to be a little careful about what we think we know: whether in politics, science, religion, or personal relationships.

Otherwise, we risk becoming like the benighted anti-Semites at Nazi Donut. And that’s not worth it, even for the best chocolate donuts in town.

Copyright 2011 by N.S. Palmer. May be reproduced as long as byline, copyright notice, and URL (http://www.ashesblog.com) are included.

He's from the government and he's here to help you.

Reason Magazine, a venerable libertarian publication, recently published a column arguing for the abolition of drunk-driving laws.

Back when I was a libertarian, I spent some time as a Research Fellow at the Reason Foundation in Santa Barbara, California, writing papers and giving seminars about abstruse philosophical topics such as the grue-bleen paradox and St. Augustine’s theory of knowledge. I also wrote an article for the magazine, in which (foolish youth that I was) I argued for abolishing all public education.

Reason was established back in 1968, when the pointless but profitable Vietnam War still dragged on (much like the wars against Iraq and Afghanistan, which are equally pointless but even more profitable). President Johnson had decided not to run for re-election, and America was graced with Richard M. Nixon as its new president.

The similarities between that election and the election of 2000 are striking. In both cases, a generally right-thinking and competent but un-exciting Democrat (Hubert Humphrey in 1968, Al Gore in 2000) had served as vice president in the previous administration. A ruthless and somewhat amoral Republican (Richard Nixon in 1968, George Bush in 2000) was able to win by tarring his opponent with the real and imagined sins of the previous administration. Unlike the 2000 election, the 1968 election was not stolen by the Republican establishment, but it was still a close call.

Now, I have a confession. As bad as he was in many ways, I’ve always had a soft spot for Nixon. As far as I can tell, Humphrey was a perfectly nice man whose heart was in the right place. Nixon was not, even though he was a patriot and he did care about the United States.

In 1960, when he ran for President and lost to John F. Kennedy in a close vote marred by allegations of fraud, Nixon did the same thing as Al Gore did in 2000. Rather than challenge the election and besmirch the legitimacy of the U.S. government, Nixon conceded the presidency to Kennedy. Nixon was a proud man of humble birth, and conceding a tainted election to the patrician Kennedy must have been one of the hardest things he ever did.

And Nixon was one thing Humphrey wasn’t: he was brilliant. He knew the issues inside and out, not just tactically but in terms of history, philosophy, and geopolitical strategy. Unlike most politicians, he wrote his own books instead of using ghostwriters. He wrote out the manuscripts in longhand on yellow legal pads. I’ve read some of those books. Their intelligence, learning, and insight rival those of Winston Churchill, who was also brilliant and had shortcomings, though he sometimes used ghostwriters.

I never met Nixon, though I did correspond with him once in an attempt to get him to write something for a book; he ultimately turned me down. Friends of mine who knew Nixon personally confirmed what I had inferred from his writing and his behavior: He had a mind like a computer but not much of a conscience.

I’d like to focus on that last qualifier: “not much of a conscience.” Nixon might not have had much of a conscience, but unlike some of our more recent politicians, he did have one. In a sense, he was an extreme version of all of us: he would do wrong sometimes, but then he would feel guilty about it. It’s his feeling of guilt that, in my eyes, redeems Nixon morally. He was a flawed man trying to do his best and often failing at it.

Most people have heard about the Watergate scandal that ultimately led to Nixon’s resignation as president. What most people don’t know is that it was indeed about a “third-rate burglary” that Nixon didn’t authorize, though he probably wouldn’t have disapproved either.

Nixon lied to Congress and to the American people not to cover up his own crimes, but to protect some of the people who worked for him. The lies and coverup brought down his presidency. At that time, it was unimaginable to most people that their president would lie to them. Even comic-book heroes shared that belief. In an early 1960s comic strip, President Kennedy impersonated Clark Kent to help Superman protect his secret identity. Echoing the sentiments of most Americans, Superman said “If I can’t trust the President of the United States, then who can I trust?”

Today, of course, we have lower expectations. President Bush and Vice President Cheney lied to Americans and to Congress about WMDs, illegal wiretapping, torture, and their own war crimes, but no one is surprised except the benighted viewers of Fox News. Bush and Cheney still walk free, living in luxury at taxpayer expense, instead of being in prison where they belong. And unlike Nixon, they seem incapable of guilt or remorse.

In any event, those were heady days for Reason Magazine and for libertarian true believers. The conceit behind the name of the magazine was the idea that only one political philosophy was rational and correct: libertarianism, in its mainstream or its Ayn Rand variant. Libertarians believed that their viewpoint was so clear and obvious, just like 2+2 = 4, that anyone who knew about it had to realize its truth. The only reasons why someone wouldn’t believe in it were that:

• They hadn’t heard about it (no one had preached the Gospel to them);
• They were stupid and unable to understand it;
• They were mentally ill;

or, and this was the favorite explanation,

• They were just plain evil and deliberately denied what they knew was the truth.

That attitude has interesting parallels with the attitude held about non-believers by some Christians. But I’ve gone far afield from my initial topic of drunk driving.

I agree with the Reason article that the main impetus behind drunk driving laws is “to punish sin,” as well as to give police and court officials an excuse to disrupt people’s lives for their own sadistic enjoyment. However, the issue is not as simple as one side being “right” and the other side being “wrong.”

Drunk driving laws, to the extent that they have any rational justification, are about risk. A drunk person is more likely to cause an accident than a sober one. The argument is that we cannot allow that risk. Of course, anti-drunk-driving fanatics exaggerate the size of the risk, but that is not the main point. Any society will legally prohibit some risks and not others.

For example, if I point a gun at you but do not fire it, then you have not been injured but you are at risk of being injured. For that reason, it’s illegal for me to point a gun at you. Technically, it’s a case of assault, but without battery because I didn’t fire.

It comes down to where we draw the line: how much risk is too much? That’s a value judgment that we should collectively make as a society and embody in law. Fifty years ago, it was illegal to drive drunk but it wasn’t considered a hanging offense. You could also drive with kids in the front seat and ride bikes without a helmet. You could get on a plane without being harassed by security guards, and the flight attendant would cheerfully stow your gun in the overhead compartment. People survived. They had a few more risks but they had greater freedom. Were they right? They thought so.

Our latter-day Carrie Nations seem to be obsessed with scourging “DDs:” Drunk Drivers. Drug Dealers. Deadbeat Dads. But their main phobia is risk: risk of any kind and of any magnitude, however small. We should not let them and their obsession with total safety stampede us into a totalitarian society.

Copyright 2011 by N.S. Palmer. May be reproduced as long as byline, copyright notice, and URL (http://www.ashesblog.com) are included.

“Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it — good and hard.”
– H.L. Mencken

America’s current election campaigns by the two major political parties remind us yet again of the stupidity, foolishness, and gullibility of the electorate.

In California, the Republican U.S. Senate candidate is  Carly Fiorina, the former CEO of computer maker Hewlett-Packard. So far, she has not promised in her campaign to do for California what she did for Hewlett-Packard: throw people out of work, run the state into the ground financially, and walk away with a Golden Parachute severance package.

In Nevada, Lunatic Republican Sharron Angle, who can’t tell the difference between the border of Mexico and the border of Canada, is running for the Senate seat held by Gutless Democrat Harry Reid, who can’t tell the difference between caving in to Republicans on every issue and fulfilling Democratic campaign promises.

In Delaware, anti-masturbation scold Christine O’Donnell is running as the Republican Senate candidate on the platform that she is just as ignorant as the most ignorant people still capable of signing their names on a voting register. One wonders if she really cares about winning, or if she just wants to raise some cash and get people to pay attention to her.

What gets lost in all the hoopla, gets lost on purpose. If you bog everyone down in nonsense about who’s a witch and who supports death panels, they don’t have time to discuss substantive issues. Like unemployment. And ruinously expensive, unjustified wars. And an increasingly  oppressive police state. And the fact that government should promote the greatest good for the greatest number, not just enact policies to benefit Wall Street, giant corporations, and the super-rich.

The truth is that democracy is a sacred cow but it really doesn’t matter that much. It’s just a means to a goal. The goal is to promote a just, free, humane, and prosperous society.

Whether the government is chosen by voting, by hereditary titles, or by a lottery isn’t important. If it does the right things, then it’s a good government. If it does the wrong things, then it doesn’t matter how many votes it gets: it’s a bad government.

We have a middling government that’s trending toward bad. Voting doesn’t seem to help much. I wonder what will.