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.

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.

“Metaphysics is the finding of bad reasons for what we believe on instinct.”
–F.H. Bradley

Theists and atheists argue about a lot of things, but most of the issues that divide them are derivative. They almost never* address the fundamental point of disagreement:

Is this universe a manifestation of something else, or is this universe all that exists?

The “something else” can be imagined in different ways, such as:

• The will of God.
• A cosmological multiverse of which our universe is one of an infinite number of variants.
• The virtual reality depicted in the “Matrix” movies.
• The surface world described by Plato in his book The Republic.

Based largely on the spiritual insights of great men and women as recorded in religion, theists (a group that includes me) argue that this world is just a temporary residence where we live until we’re ready to go someplace else, variously defined.

Based largely on the undisputed usefulness of science and a considerable amount of hubris, atheists argue that Goddammit – excuse me, that should be only “dammit” — this world is all that exists, and that anyone who disagrees with them is an idiot.

Neither side has proof. Theists usually cite their sacred books, which they believe without evidence to have been written by God, a being they cannot define. Atheists cite the ability of physical science to explain processes within the physical world, which they fail to see is irrelevant to explaining the existence of that world in the first place.

It occurs to me that there’s a reason for all that fruitless disagreement.

I tend to think of this world as being like a metaphor: a poetic use of words that is related to their literal use.

When Homer says in The Iliad that the goddess Athena seized Achilles‘s arm to prevent him from killing Agamemnon, we understand that it means Achilles restrained his murderous rage. We’ve seen people go into a rage and restrain themselves, so we’re familiar with the situation to which the metaphor refers. We don’t believe that the gray-eyed goddess flew down from Mount Olympus and grabbed someone’s arm.

When Alfred Noyes says in his poem “The Highwayman” that “The moon was a ghostly galleon,” we understand the imagery he is using and the emotional mood he is trying to create. We’ve seen the moon look spooky at night, so we know the situation to which the metaphor refers. We don’t believe that a sailing ship was flying around in the sky.

But suppose that we didn’t know who Athena was, and that we didn’t know what “galleon” meant? Suppose that we’d never seen someone go into a rage and we’d never seen the moon at night. Would we be able to start from the metaphorical use of those words and deduce their literal meaning?

No. We could guess. We could cite evidence and reasoning. We could argue. We could exhort. And we might be right, but we couldn’t prove it.

The same thing applies in other areas.

In mathematics, if one thing is a projection of something else, we can identify precisely what the “something else” is — but only if we know the values and system of equations that generated the projection. In physics (except for quantum physics), if one event is caused by another event that is unknown, we can work backwards to the cause if we know the exact forces, masses, and physical processes that led to the effect.

If we lack the relevant knowledge to connect the original element of a mathematical system with its projection, or to connect a physical event with its cause, then we can guess, argue, and exhort. We might even be right. But we can’t prove it.

The same thing applies to our universe. Whether you think of it as a metaphor, or as a mathematical projection, or as a metaphysical effect of an unknown cause, all we see is the result. We not only don’t see the cause, we also have no experience or knowledge of what the cause might be like. And we have no discursive knowledge of the nature of the poetic imagery, the equations, or the processes that might lead from something to end up with our universe.

As a result, we latch onto hypotheses, clues, and intuitions. Then all of us — theists and atheists alike –  decide what we’re going to believe about our world and about ourselves. As a matter of ego, we don’t like to be “wrong,” so we defend our beliefs against all comers. But ultimately, all we have is the metaphor and what we make of it.

What are you going to make of it?

If I may invoke my own version of the metaphor, don’t worry too much about your verbal answer: God loves you no matter what you believe about Him. Answer with a life of love, truth, generosity, and forgiveness. The rest will take care of itself.

_________________
* An outstanding exception is John F. Haught’s book Is Nature Enough? Meaning and Truth in the Age of Science.

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

A Muslim family in America. Source: The New York Times.

Today’s New York Times has a front-page article titled “U.S. Muslims Ask, Will We Ever Belong?“

The family described in the article seems perfectly nice, so I’d like to answer that question with an unqualified “yes.”

But sadly, the truthful answer is, “yes and no.”

To the extent that Muslims adopt Western culture, customs, values, and behaviors, yes, they do indeed belong. A society is a group of people who share those things.

And there’s the rub. Whatever its merits or demerits as a religion, Islam is not a significant part of Western history and culture except as an antagonist. Muslims stand outside the Western tradition.

It’s important to understand what that means and what it does not mean.

It does not mean that Muslims are bad people or that they are necessarily our enemies. It does not mean that they can’t contribute to our society and be accepted in most contexts. It doesn’t even mean that Islam itself has nothing to offer us in religious insights or examples of faith and courage.

What it does mean is that by their answer to one of the most important questions of life, “What’s it all about,” Muslims stand apart. They do not belong. And depending on how they interpret their faith, it means that they disagree with some of Western civilization’s fundamental conclusions about justice, individual rights, freedom of religion, the role of government, and the relationship between humanity and God.

It also means that most Western people will regard them with just a little bit of doubt. The more values and beliefs that people share, the more they feel confident that they understand each other and can trust each other. Don’t blame me for it: that’s just the fact. There are both valid and invalid reasons for it.

And it has nothing specific to do with Islam. It applies to all differences between people. The more extensive and important the differences, the greater is the potential for distrust, misunderstanding, and hostility.

Difference is not a license to treat anyone with less than the respect and love that all people deserve. But it’s foolish to pretend that the difference doesn’t exist.

Alexander Pope's Essay on Man

Let’s take a break from current events to contemplate some truths that will out-last the next news cycle.

You’ve probably heard this quote, but you might not know its source:

Hope springs eternal in the human breast.

That’s the only line most people know from “Essay on Man” by the English poet Alexander Pope (1688-1744). The more complete version of the quote hints at the wisdom contained in the rest of the poem:

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

In other words, people are never satisfied with what they have. We always hope for a “blessing” that is yet to come. Rich people want to be richer, or to be loved; tyrants want more power; humble people wish for more material comforts or security. What we have is seldom good enough for us. We always want more, and we think ourselves ill-used because we don’t have it yet.

Pope’s “Essay” is replete with such insights, beautifully and often poignantly expressed.

About the complexity of human nature, he writes:

What would this man? Now upward will he soar,
And little less than angel, would be more;
Now looking downwards, just as grieved appears,
To want the strength of bulls, the fur of bears.

But Pope has a prescription for all that discontent:

Presumptuous man! The reason wouldst thou find,
Why form’d so weak, so little, and so blind?
Ask of thy mother earth, why oaks are made
Taller and stronger than the weeds they shade.

Then say not man’s imperfect, Heaven in fault;
Say rather, man’s perfect as he ought.

Who finds not Providence all good and wise,
Alike in what it gives and what it denies?

Pope recommends an attitude of serenity and acceptance toward things we can’t control. In this, he anticipates the serenity prayer written by 20th-century theologian Reinhold Niebuhr:

God, grant me the serenity
To accept the things I cannot change;
Courage to change the things I can;
And wisdom to know the difference.

Pope  saw that people are not merely thinking beings, as some contemporary writers insist. They are also buffeted by self-love, emotion, and instinct that bias their judgment:

Two principles in human nature reign:
Self-love, to urge, and Reason, to restrain.

Self-love and Reason to one end aspire,
Pain their aversion, pleasure their desire;
But greedy that its object would devour,
This taste the honey, and not wound the flower.

If only the executives of BP had used their reason to “taste the honey without wounding the flower,” the Gulf of Mexico wouldn’t have been damaged by BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil spill. But like all of us, the people running BP fought an internal battle. In their case, the battle was joined between self-love (the desire for more, more, and more profit regardless of consequences) and reason (understanding the importance of protecting the Gulf, its people, and its other living creatures).

The same principle applies to Wall Street banksters who wrecked the world economy. In a different way, it applies to politicians who lead their countries into wars of aggression to enrich themselves and their friends by destroying other nations and killing hundreds of thousands of people.

Even if it’s sometimes hard to overcome self-love, reason gives us the ability to see and do the right thing:

This light and darkness in our chaos join’d,
What shall divide? The God within the mind.

But we need to be careful how we live and what we do, because repeated exposure to evil can make it seem normal:

Vice is a monster of so frightful mien,
As, to be hated, needs but to be seen;
Yet seen too oft, familiar with her face,
We first endure, then pity, then embrace.

Every person is vulnerable to the siren song of self-love, so we must be on our guard against it:

Virtuous and vicious every man must be,
Few in the extreme, but all in the degree;
The rogue and fool by fits is fair and wise;
And even the best by fits what they despise.

Pope alludes to the joys and the brevity of human life:

Behold the child, by Nature’s kindly law,
Pleased with a rattle, tickled with a straw.
Some livelier plaything gives his youth delight,
A little louder, but as empty quite.
Scarfs, garters, gold amuse his riper stage,
And beads and prayer-books are the toys of age.
Pleased with this bauble still, as that before,
Till tired he sleeps, and life’s poor play is o’er.

What insight he packs into those eight lines! All through our lives, one trifle after another catches our attention. Shallow and stupid as they often are, such trifles fill our days with joy. And though the toys get more expensive as we get older, mostly they’re still just toys, whatever ponderous nonsense we tell ourselves about them. We love them not because they’re precision instruments, or because they’re important, but simply because they make us happy.

We occupy ourselves with rattles, then romance, and early or late with religion. At the end, as Shakespeare says, we fly away to “the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveller returns,” our life’s poor play over at last. And we barely pause to take a bow before the curtain falls on our little drama:

Hope humbly, then; with trembling pinions soar,
Wait the great teacher, Death, and God adore.
What future bliss, He gives not thee to know,
But gives that hope to be thy blessing now.

We live with our little joys for the moment and with our giant hope for the future. It’s less poetic than Pope, but “what’s not to like?”

“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.

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.

Copyright 2010 by N.S. Palmer. May be reproduced as long as byline, copyright notice, and URL (http://www.ashesblog.com) are included.

Censorship can be overdone. Everyone understands that. But it can also be done correctly.

Popular entertainment shapes popular morality, and our popular entertainment is sometimes pretty vile. A little censorship wouldn’t be a bad thing.

There are good arguments on both sides of the issue. The problem, I think, is that most people hold few if any explicit moral principles. Instead, their sense of right and wrong tends to be guided by what they see on television and in movies. And what they see these days is unwholesome.

It’s true that that scene-by-scene censorship is prone to abuse. So is censorship of ideas, though I would argue that even censorship of ideas is not always a bad thing. Televised fantasy-dramas such as the Fox Network’s “24” did more to legitimize torture, brutality, and lawlessness than would any number of wonkish policy studies from The Heritage Foundation or neocon preachments in The Weekly Standard.

I’d like a set of broad principles about the kinds of moral values that entertainment should and should not promote. I’ll give you an example from a movie I recently watched: “The Browning Version,” which won an Academy Award as the Best Picture of 1951. It got a “restricted” rating, meaning that only adults could see it.

Why? Because although it contained no nudity, no sex acts, no foul language, and no violence, two characters were involved in an adulterous relationship. The restricted rating, and the way that the movie handled the situation, conveyed the clear message that such relationships are wrong.

One can argue that moral education should be more widespread. However, in modern secular society, that is probably impossible. The most we can get are politically-correct nostrums about avoiding racism and sexism. That leaves us with popular entertainment. The only question is whether it will be a benign or malignant influence.

The usual tendency of corporate capitalism is to seek the lowest, the meanest, and the stupidest common denominator it can find. Carefully designed censorship could tip the scales in a more positive direction.

“Metaphysics is the finding of bad reasons for what we believe on instinct.”
–F.H. Bradley

It’s not poetic, nor even grammatically correct, but it’s a question that everyone eventually asks: “Why are we all so messed up?”

I can’t presume to offer the complete answer, but I do have a little piece of it to share. It has to do with epistemology.

Episte-whatsis?

Epistemology. That’s the study of how we acquire and test our knowledge, as well as how our knowledge is structured and what it means “to know something.”

For example, suppose I say that “I know there is an elephant in the closet.” What exactly am I saying? Common sense gives a threefold answer:

• I have adequate evidence to believe that there is an elephant in the closet. In other words, my belief is justified.
• There is, in fact, an elephant in the closet. In other words, my belief is true.
• I believe that there is an elephant in the closet. In other words, I really do believe what I claim.

Those three criteria are embodied in the usual definition of knowledge as “justified true belief.”

However, most situations are far more complicated than just having an elephant in your closet — however troublesome that might be. If you suspect that you have an elephant in your closet, it’s easy to find out. Just open the door and look. Then you know.

Harder than having an elephant in your closet

But consider a different kind of situation. This is a puzzle given by New York Times columnist John Tierney:

The printed version of Tierney's puzzle, scanned from a newspaper clipping.

My mother presented me with that puzzle after our weekly family dinner last Sunday night. Such are dinners at Mom and Dad’s house: It’s like being on a quiz show, except that you get a home-cooked meal and there are no cash prizes. Sitting at the dinner table are three medical doctors, an art historian, an entomologist-biochemist who looks like movie actress Anne Hathaway, a computer expert, a golf pro, a four-year-old prodigy, and me. Every one of us secretly believes that he or she is the smartest, and is determined to prove it. Over chicken and pasta, the conversation leaps from obscure diseases to medieval manuscripts, the life cycles of bugs, computer software, and the latest doings of Tiger Woods. Over dessert, an impromptu lesson in Spanish, German, or Hebrew for the boy. But I digress.

(Note: If you want to have a go at Tierney’s puzzle on your own, stop reading here. I’m going to start talking about the solution.)

My mother wanted to know the solution to the puzzle, which The New York Times columnist avowed had stumped him. She gave the puzzle to me because I’m the mathematics geek of the clan, am single, and therefore have the most free time. The figures looked at first glance like ancient numerals, perhaps from the Babylonian, Chinese, or Indian number systems. I wasn’t sure which. When I got home and looked them up, I found that they weren’t ancient numerals.

Then I latched onto the last word of the hint in the puzzle description: “knots.” An area of mathematics called “knot theory” investigates, among other things, what happens when you manipulate knot-like geometrical figures in certain ways. I didn’t know much about knot theory, and it wasn’t a perfect match anyway, but it was close enough for me to theorize that:

• The second and third figures on row 1 were rotations and twists of the first figure.
• The fifth figure on row 1 was a rotation of the fourth figure.

I concluded that there were two series of three figures each. For the answer, I needed a figure on row 2 that was a rotation or twist of the fourth and fifth figures on row 1:

• The fourth figure was a triangle pointing downward.
• The fifth figure was a horizontal line, as if the triangle had been rotated toward us in 3-D space and we were seeing it from the side.

Rotating the figure one more time, toward us in 3-D space, gives us a triangle pointing upward. That’s answer (c), which I triumphantly emailed to my mother and the other family members who had been present at dinner.

The Web to the rescue

I decided to check the Web to see if Tierney had posted an answer. However, the Web version of his puzzle included some vital information that wasn’t in the printed clipping:

The Web version of Tierney's puzzle.

The most important new information was that row 1 consisted not of five figures, but of four figures and a blank. And the horizontal line in fifth place, which didn’t look too different on the newspaper clipping, was clearly a different color on the Web page.

I took another look at the hint. It says something about mirroring, also part of knot theory. The next solution was easy. The first figure on row 1 is the numeral 1 paired with its mirror image. The second is the numeral 3 paired with its mirror image, the third is 5, and the fourth is 7. So the series is 1-3-5-7, consecutive odd numbers. The next figure should be the numeral 9 paired with its mirror image. And that makes the answer either (a) or (d), assuming that Tierney drew the nines in an eccentric way.

Well, duh. That wasn’t hard.

One of my brothers was unimpressed both with the puzzle and with my two solutions. He emailed three more puzzles that he thought might be more challenging:

Steve's puzzle #1. One possible answer is (D) because the line of figures moves from left to right, and (D) is the only one to the right of the last figure on row 1.

And a second puzzle:

Steve's puzzle #2. One possible answer is (A) because all the other objects are partly or entirely black.

And a third puzzle:

Steve's puzzle #3. One possible answer is (A) because all the others are waving their hands.

Yes, Virginia, there really is a point to all this.

The point of the discussion is this. Tierney’s puzzle deals with a very limited set of simple geometrical facts. It asks the reader to explain those facts and to predict another very simple geometrical fact. But even in that simple situation, different answers are possible. The answer you get depends not merely on the evidence, but on your background and interests. It also depends crucially on which pieces of evidence catch your attention.

The same applies to my brother Steve’s puzzles. For most people, the answer to puzzle 1 is obviously “B” because it would complete a series of progressively larger squares. Likewise in puzzle 2, the spatula is the only item that isn’t an animal, while in puzzle 3, the television character of “Barney” is the only item that isn’t a dictator.

However, other interpretations are possible. In puzzle 3, for example, the Soviet dictator Josef Stalin “does not belong” because he’s the only person not waving at least one hand. The fact that different solutions are possible makes it hard to design such puzzles for standardized tests, such as college aptitude tests. What such puzzles really measure is test-takers’ ability to find the solution that the test-designers expect. Truly creative people sometimes score badly on such tests because their solutions, though logical, are unexpected* and therefore “wrong.”

And all those puzzles represent very simple situations with very limited data sets that you evaluate to get a solution. Real-life situations involve hundreds or thousands of pieces of information that are connected, or not, in ways that are often unclear.

Real-life situations are even more prone to have multiple, equally-logical explanations. Which explanation you choose depends on your prior assumptions about the situation, about people, and about how the world works. It depends crucially on which pieces of evidence you spotlight, which pieces you ignore, and which pieces you outright reject. For example:

• Conservative economists who look in good faith at official economic data think it shows clearly that we must give more tax cuts to the rich and get rid of regulations that inconvenience giant corporations.
• Liberal economists who look in good faith at official economic data think it shows clearly that we must increase taxes on the rich and more aggressively regulate corporate misbehaviour.
• In the Middle Ages, doctors liked to treat illnesses with leeches. They noted that people treated with leeches often got better. But so did people not treated with leeches, a fact which the doctors’ theory caused them to discount in evaluating the merits of leech therapy.
• Scientists who contemplate the symmetry and elegance of the physical universe often get a feeling of transcendence. They conclude that it’s because the physical universe is all that exists and is just wonderful.
• Christians who contemplate the works of God and read the New Testament get a feeling of transcendence. They conclude that it’s because God is infinitely good, Jesus is right there with him, and that only Christians can go to Heaven.
• Muslims who contemplate the works of God and read the Qu’ran get a feeling of transcendence. They conclude that it’s because Allah is running things, Mohammed was right, and that only Muslims can go to Heaven.

A little intellectual humility

What it really comes down to is this: Most of what we consider our “knowledge” either consists of, or is based on, WAGs (wild-a**ed guesses) that we simply follow until something better comes along.

It’s relatively harmless until our WAGs combine with our arrogance to make us demonize and try to destroy people who disagree with us. What we need is a touch of humility: The awareness that however sure we are that we’re right, we still might be wrong. We should accordingly proceed with caution, giving due respect to the viewpoints, rights, lives — and the feelings — of others.

Of course, I might be wrong about that. But I’m sticking with it until something better comes along.

____________________________
*There is a relevant story about Nobel laureate physicist Niels Bohr, a pioneer of 20th-century atomic theory. When Bohr was a student, a professor supposedly gave the following problem on a test: “Use a barometer to determine the height of a tall building.” Obviously, the professor was expecting students to solve the problem by measuring the atmospheric pressure at the bottom and top of the building, but Bohr had a different solution. “Go to the top of the building. Tie a long piece of string to the barometer. Lower it to the ground. Measure the amount of string that you lowered over the side of the building, then add its length to the height of the barometer. The sum is the height of the building.” It’s not the expected answer, but it’s a correct answer.

Have you ever seen a car commercial on television?

Think about that commercial. The most important criteria for choosing a new car include:

• Reliability
• Safety
• Gas mileage
• Comfort and roominess
• Features such as satellite radio and GPS
• Price
• Warranty

Did the commercial emphasize those criteria as the car’s selling points?

Of course not. Instead, it showed endless video clips of the car zooming along the highway, looking attractive and powerful, suggesting that the person who drives it must also be attractive and powerful. If the driver was male, the car most likely zoomed past a bevy of admiring women on the sidewalk. The message, quite obviously, is Drive this car and you’ll get women. All that’s missing is the grunting of the cavemen.

Have you ever bought a car?

Think about that experience. Unless both it and you are quite unusual, the salesperson was trying to push your emotional buttons. Salespeople will talk about facts and figures if they must, but it’s not their tool of choice. Their main approach is to manipulate you emotionally. The car salesman’s motto is: “Sell the sizzle, not the steak.”

Let’s consider an example from a different field. This is from an October 3, 2000 debate about Medicare between Vice President Al Gore and presidential candidate George W. Bush (quoted in the book The Political Brain by Drew Westen):

A book by Drew Westen that examines the role of emotion in politics.

GORE: Under [Mr. Bush's] plan, if you kept the same fee for service that you now have under Medicare, your premiums would go up by between 18 and 47 percent, and that is the study of the Congressional plan that he’s modeled his proposal on by the Medicare actuaries. Let me give you one quick example. There’s a man here tonight named George McKinney from Milwaukee. He’s 70 years old, has high blood pressure, his wife has heart trouble. They have an income of $25,000 per year. They can’t pay for their prescription drugs. They’re some of the ones that go to Canada regularly in order to get their prescription drugs. Under my plan, half of their costs would be paid right away. Under Governor Bush’s plan, they would get not one penny for four or five years and then they would be forced to go into an HMO or to an insurance company and ask them for coverage, but there would be no limit on their premiums or deductibles or any of the terms and conditions.

BUSH: I cannot let this go by, the old-style Washington politics, if we’re going to scare you into the voting booth. Under my plan the man gets immediate help with prescription drugs. It’s called Immediate Helping Hand. Instead of squabbling and finger pointing, he gets immediate help. Let me say something …

JIM LEHRER (MODERATOR): You’re …

GORE: They get $25,000 a year income. That makes them ineligible.

BUSH: Look, this is a man who has great numbers. He talks about numbers. I’m beginning to think not only did he invent the Internet, but he invented the calculator. It’s fuzzy math.

Gore’s argument is mainly about facts and figures. Only after he’s presented the facts and figures does he give an example, probably as an attempt to connect emotionally with the audience because his advisors told him that he should.

Bush’s argument — well, he doesn’t really make one. He accuses Mr. Gore of engaging in “old-style Washington politics” and seems to claim that because his own plan is called “Immediate Helping Hand,” it provides immediate help to the man in Gore’s example.* He tells a joke about Gore inventing the electronic calculator and alludes to the Republican campaign’s outright lie that Gore said he invented the Internet.

Bush’s approach is to draw people’s attention away from policy issues and engage in emotional attacks on Gore’s character. Gore is all about the steak, but like many a car salesman, Bush only wants to talk about the sizzle.

My point isn’t that Mr. Bush is uniquely deceptive. He’s not. Mr. Bush provided many examples of such fact-avoidance and emotional manipulation, but one could also find them on the Democratic side. However, one of the most vivid examples comes from my own experience of watching the first 1980 debate between President Jimmy Carter and presidential candidate Ronald Reagan.

1980: Ronald Reagan vs. Jimmy Carter

I supported Mr. Reagan in his 1980 presidential campaign. To this day, I believe that he was a good man and a good president, apart from his tragic choice of George H.W. Bush as his vice president.**

After the first Reagan-Carter debate, however, I was despondent. I thought that Carter had pretty much destroyed Reagan in the debate. Carter was armed to the teeth with facts, figures, and logic. I knew many good arguments Reagan could have made for his positions, but he didn’t make them. All he offered was grandfatherly charm and quips such as “There you go again.” I thought Carter had won so decisively that there was virtually no chance Reagan could win the election.

Surprise. Most people who watched the debate thought the opposite: That Reagan had pretty much destroyed Carter. They didn’t want to hear about facts, figures, and logic. They liked Reagan, as did I. To them, that was what mattered. He was someone with whom they would have felt comfortable “having a beer.”

People Are Both Rational and Emotional

It’s hardly a hot news flash that both reason and emotion influence our beliefs. The irony in U.S. politics is that:

• Democrats often believe that people are just animals, but they tend to argue as if they believe that people are rational, intelligent beings who can be swayed by logic and evidence — such as all those “numbers” for which Mr. Bush derided Vice President Gore in their debate.
• Republicans claim to believe that people are children of God with the ability to reason. However, they tend to argue as if they believe that people are just stupid apes who can be manipulated into adopting false beliefs and supporting causes against their own interests.

And guess what? On both issues, the Republicans are right. People are indeed children of God with the ability to reason, but effective propaganda easily manipulates most of them, most of the time, into believing almost anything and supporting almost anything.

I say this with no feeling of superiority. During the 1990s, I was completely deceived by the Republican propaganda campaign against the Clinton administration. In place of affordable medical care for all Americans, we got embroiled in endless debates over issues that were at best unimportant and at worst completely manufactured. Did Mrs. Clinton profit from sweetheart stock trades years before her husband was elected president? Did the Clintons want to put their own friends in charge of the White House Travel Office? Did an embarrassed President Clinton try to cover up his affair with Monica Lewinsky? Did someone in the Clinton campaign, sometime, accept an illegal campaign contribution? Did White House lawyer Vincent Foster really commit suicide?

The most important good things that the Clintons wanted to do were blocked by the savage Republican attacks and the Clintons’ need to defend against them. What we got instead was the “giant sucking sound” of NAFTA, thank you very much. Multi-national corporations love it; Mexican and American working people, not so much.

When the time came to elect a new president in 2000, we were all so disgusted by the “Clinton scandals” that we allowed a regime into power far worse than the Clintons had ever dreamed of being. We traded political patronage and sexual dalliance — sins, to be sure, but relatively harmless ones — for war and illegal wiretapping and torture and stolen elections and the drowning of New Orleans.

The Propaganda War Against President Obama

The Republican establishment is now using a variation of the propaganda campaign it ran against the Clintons. The white-hot emotional pitches are there again. Based on no evidence at all, they scream that Obama was “really born in Kenya” and isn’t legally eligible to be president, that he’s really a Muslim instead of a Christian, and so forth.

Establishment Republicans don’t want to talk about any real issues except for abortion and “gay marriage” because those are the only real issues they’ve got. Almost all the other proposals they have are variations on their standard mantra: stick it to working people and consumers, slant the laws and tax code even more outrageously in favor of the rich, and let giant corporations do whatever they want.

They know that if Americans start thinking for themselves instead of blindly following emotional propaganda, they’ll demand affordable national healthcare, greater protection for workers and consumers, sensible business regulation, and an end to the tax code’s “free ride” for corporations and the super-rich. Those are all things that the Obama administration might deliver if it’s not blocked by the Republican attack machine.

So I have only one request: Think for yourself about the real issues that matter, and give your political support accordingly.

——————————————————–

*Mr. Bush seems to be fond of naming things in ways that suggest their opposite. For example, the Bush-Cheney administration’s “Clear Skies” law of 2003 increased the legal amount of air pollution, thereby promoting the opposite of “clear skies.”

**The choice would have been even more tragic if John Hinckley, the son of one of George H.W. Bush’s political financiers, had succeeded in his attempt to assassinate President Reagan, thereby enabling Bush to assume the presidency to which he felt entitled.