Scale

A blog friend, Robert, and I have had a spirited political exchange on Deb's and my sailing blog. It has been fun, though there is a basic misunderstanding typical of conservative thought. For him there is only one possible social scale with conservative ideology at the “right” end, liberal ideology at the “wrong” end. Everyone and every policy falls somewhere on that scale. Since I do not share his conservative ideals I must therefore be a liberal.

That scale is an illusion, it has no units that measure how I see the world. But the truth is I cannot offer Robert, or anyone else (including myself), a label that fits how I do look at the world. “Off the Reservation” is all I have managed, and it is not very enlightening. I am a human being who suspects that humanity is a failing evolutionary experiment on what to do with consciousness and intelligence. We are smart enough to do ourselves in and not wise enough to avoid it. I can be described as an atheist. Yet I see self awareness as a fundamental facet of the universe, akin to a dimension or force, in a cosmos that is more like a thought than a machine. We are a mote of an idea in a fully integrated and border-less reality, and maybe not a very good idea. It may be that biology, tool making, tribalism, and intelligence are simply a bad mix that can never mature into much of anything, but it was worth a try.

At best we are a collection of dimly intelligent children who learned how to write just 10,000 years ago. We have barely begun to grasp our place in the universe, if we have even gotten that far. Our politics, religions, economics and wars are largely driven by animal instincts we do not understand and mostly deny. Our religions have their foundations in our caveman beginnings.

Adulthood is hundreds, perhaps thousands, of generations away. One might suspect, on the evidence, that we lack the capacity to ever live that long. Our travels through this life will always be those of children who do not really understand much of anything. If we could just grasp that, maybe we would actually start to grow up a little. Sadly, that understanding is one that still lies beyond our limited reach.

I am not a believer; neither am I completely comfortable with the label “atheist”. Both terms have their foundations in a view of the cosmos so primitive as to be essentially nonsense. “God” is a term that has no meaning. How can one “not believe”? It is like trying to grasp a vacuum, there is nothing there. In addition most of religion is based on the utterly false claim that we were created as adults, but are fallen. It tells us that we are damaged, not children, and need salvation, not maturity. It teaches that someone will come and save us, not that we need to grow up. Our society is steeped in the false assumption that we already know everything we need to know to be adults; that humans are as intelligent as intelligence gets. Religion prevents us from understanding the one thing we need to understand if there is to be much hope for a future that includes humanity.

We have yet to invent a political or economic system that works. I am not a conservative or a liberal. I am not a socialist or capitalist or communist. I don't “believe” in democracy, theocracy, or the divine right of Kings. They are all the babbling of children whose vocabulary is limited to a few hundred words, pictures whose coloring is far, far from being inside the lines. Scribbles mostly, incoherent and chaotic. With politics we have yet to outgrow the “bully” stage. Nation / States are make believe boarders. This swing set is where the cool kids hang out. That carousal is for the nerds. Our economics consists of “THAT is MINE”.

We still love war and force and threats. We like to hurt things. We like to break things; not to understand them better, but just to break them, like a two year old knocking down his brothers block tower.

I have to live in this world, navigating the preschool playground that is humanity, all the while knowing I am just one of the children. A person who lived 20,000 years ago couldn't reach much beyond his or her primitive society. He or she was limited by the social boundaries of knowledge and technology. I can't reach much beyond mine. We are all as integrated into human kind's current disposition as we are in the dimensions of space and time. That current disposition is one based mostly on fantasy, hubris, ego, and delusion. (Remember that that earlier person was physically identical to us and fully human in every possible way, just as smart, just as capable.)

I try to live my life with the curiosity and joy of a child while remembering that we do not even know what it is we do not know. I try to judge things by how they work for all of us on the playground. Who gets hurt, who gets helped, who does the hurting, who does the helping. Who is hording all the marbles. Who are the bullies and just how dangerous are they likely to be. Who cheats. Who plays fair. But I can't help but hope that in a truly adult world such concerns would be laid aside, making room for a better way to live.

I act all grown up when I talk about it, use the biggest words we have, pontificate a bit. All kids like to sound like adults, and we all do it. But the fact is we do not even know, for sure, just what “adulthood” means. I thought I did when I was 20. I thought I did when I was 30. At 59 I am not so sure. Humans have barely 5,000 generations of evolution behind us, just 300 since we started to write, 13 since Galileo first spotted the moons of Jupiter, 5 since Darwin published his book, not yet 3 since Hubble discovered the universe is expanding. Dark energy was discovered and the Internet invented in this generation. (The cosmos by the way, if measured by human standards, is 490,000,000 generations old. But then, we are not exactly sure just how to measure time. All we have is our reference frame. For a photon of the original “Big Bang” - what we call cosmic background radiation – no time has passed at all.)

I'll argue politics, religion, economics, and philosophy. Not very well sometimes, but I will give it a shot. I may even enjoy it. But I can never forget that the debaters are children playing hopscotch in the sand, that most of what is being debated is based on utter, unrelenting, nonsense.  We are talking but, on any real scale of measure, we can't possibly know much of what we are talking about.

 The only saving grace is the hope that we are doing the best we can. But I'm not sure that we are.

Robin Williams

Robin Williams died today of an apparent suicide. It may seem strange that I noticed or cared, given my contempt for America's celebrity culture is deep and long standing. But I enjoyed his manic humor and was touched by his work in “Good Will Hunting”, “Dead Poets Society”, and “Patch Adams”. He was, to me, a celebrity because he was an artist and thus in his own unique way a speaker of truth.

Truth is a rare commodity in our world. Politics is devoid of truth, as is religion. Business cares only for profit and will sacrifice truth, without thought, if a single penny can be added to the bottom line. So the loss of anyone who speaks to the truth of the human condition is a loss to be noted and felt.

There is another sad truth to his passing. With all the resources available to him, a loving family, money, access to the best health care available, and a community of people who respected his work, he was still unable to win a battle with depression. Just being a human was too heavy a burden for him to carry and his illness made death preferable to life. That is a sad and sobering thought.

I don't suffer from depression, which might seem odd given my generally poor view of human kind. One would think that being a member of a species as demented and self destructive as is ours would be enough to depress anyone. This is particularly true given the head long rush to insanity that drives every day's headlines. But, somehow, I bumble along finding tiny bits of joy midst the chaos.  We humans are likely a failed attempt in the evolution of a conscious universe. But a failed experiment is not a bad experiment so long as something is learned.  Even as we fail there and things to discover, children and grand children to love, and adventures to seek and enjoy.

Humans have proved that tribalism and hate will undo any society, regardless of its promise of intelligence and curiosity. It appears that true intelligence requires the skills of a tool maker for, without tools, learning and curiosity are truncated.  Without tools there is no ability to spread intelligence across the cosmos. But the tools of war based on tribalism and hate will negate an otherwise promising history.

Anyway, Robin Williams died today. The world is a slightly sadder place.

Random musings of the last few months

1.  All religions continuously evolve as various sects form, evolve within themselves, sometimes turning into something new, sometimes fading away. Conflict between sects of the same religion is a continuous part of human history. At times the conflicts are mostly intellectual contests as various doctrines are presented, defended, challenged, and changed. Often the conflicts are simply violent confrontations between warring sectarian groups. Those are the source of much of the world's misery, currently threaten the daily survival of millions of people, and may engineer the extinction of the human race.

Drawing clean lines between the sects is often impossible. Sects within a religion must share large blocks of ideology and doctrine, and the prejudices of the person drawing the lines must always be considered. For this atheist all religions are sects of “god belief”, much of it pure superstition and all of it based on a magical view of the cosmos where a “god” can do anything it likes without limit or restraint.

Then I consider the Jewish / Christian / Muslim faiths three sects of the same religion, one based on the God of Abraham as described in the Jewish scriptures. Those broad divisions are divided into additional sects, and those divided even further; a reflection of the tribalism which is a part of human evolution. Because I was born in America and raised in the Protestant sect of the Christian sect of the religion of the God of Abraham, Christianity is the faith I know the best and the one that I abandoned. It is also the faith that all Americans simply cannot avoid. Christianity is its various forms deeply affects American politics and sets the foundations for much of the national identity.

In America several of Christianity's major sects are pretty easy to define. There are somewhat liberal and much more conservative branches of the Catholic sect. Among the Protestant sects there are branches much more liberal than the Catholic brand, and those much more conservative. There is also the growing sect of the Mormons with (I am going to guess) its own branches more conservative and more liberal. And to all of this I am going to add my own sect, that of American Capitalism Christianity.

American Capitalism Christianity (ACC) is its own sect, though its adherents self-identify as Catholic, Protestant, or Mormon. (Drawing lines between sects is always an exercise in “fuzzy logic”, and not in a good way.) In spite of these three distinctions, American Capitalism Christianity is a real sect of like minded individuals. Among the shared doctrines of ACC is a absolute faith in unrestrained capitalism and its religious counterpart of a prosperity doctrine. ACC has as its benchmark of “good” that which makes money. Oddly, it doesn't matter if the individual believer shares in that prosperity, only that he or she believes that they might become wealthy in the future should they serve god in the proper manor. Bound up in this ideology is an antipathy for the poor, or anything that would appear to be a social safety net for the disadvantaged.

This love of money is the defining doctrine of American Capitalist Christianity and sets it apart from every other Christian group. But it is not the only doctrine that defines this sect. Deep at the core is a fundamental racism / tribalism. Though there are some minority individuals who claim this sect as their own, fundamentally this group is the home of the middle aged and the white; with their social values carried from the 1950s.

2. Liberty …

Liberty is not the right to self-absorbed narcissism. Liberty is the chance to live in a society where the value and aspirations of each individual are cherished and supported by every other member of that society. Liberty is found where universal civil rights are protected by the full weight of a first world society. Liberty is found were every individual is rewarded for his or her contribution to a better life for all, where no one profits from the contributions of another. Liberty is found where no one is allowed to coerce another in any way for any thing. Liberty is only found where the full resources of a society are focused on protecting me from you, and you from me.

Liberty is not an individual thing. Liberty is a gift offered to each individual by an enlightened and powerful community.

Liberty is too hard, too complicated, and too fragile a thing for any individual to gain alone. Liberty is a community effort. Which is why liberty has been lost in the United States of America.

3. Clive Whats-his-name, the T-Party / Republican rancher who owes the US taxpayers a million or so dollars for grazing his cattle on public land, is back in the news. The last time was for avoiding being arrested (hopefully temporarily) by holding Law Enforcement Officers off at gunpoint. Republicans all over the country cheered him as a true American Patriot for that, at least until it became clear he was also a dumb shit racist.  Of course, had he been a Black American holding off the law with a gun, he would have been filled with government issued bullets in less than a heartbeat and Republicans all over the nation would have cheered.

This time he is making the news for claiming God instructed him to start his “civil war” with the US government. If Clive was brown skinned and skinny, sporting a scraggly beard and turbine, and invoking the Islamic sect's version of the God of Abraham for his jihad against America, every Republican in the country would be howling for his head on an NSA platter. But Clive is fat and white, and invoking the Christian sect's version of the God of Abraham as the justification for his “civil war”.  No one is calling for his head, and he has yet to take up residence in an NSA holding cell for terrorists.  I would love to hear any Republican explain why that is without sounding like a idiot.

It is hard to imagine that Clive is so dumb as to believe he has actually provoked, or is involved in, a civil war with America. Seal Team Six, by all accounts and all by itself, could end the War With Clive in less than a week without so much as working up a sweat. They appear to be pretty good at offing religious fanatics who threaten the Homeland. A single Predator drone could do the same in less than an hour. The only reason Clive is hale and whole and still shooting off his mouth is, as an American inside the boarders of the US, he has claim to certain legal rights from the same government he derides as his enemy. A good bet would be, should Clive ever pull the trigger and actually kill a Law Enforcement type in the name of his God, he will have the chance to talk it over with the Almighty, face-to-face, a few moments later.

It is also telling that in a world of war, poverty, child sex slaves, and genocide, God's big problem is with the America's Bureau of Land Management.  Even more amazing is His prophet, chosen to bring holy war to America, is a welfare rancher who likes guns. For Clive to see himself as talking with, and being a particularly chosen servant of, the One-And-Only-God-Of-All-The-Cosmos, is surely a level of delusion that clears the bar of being a serious mental illness with several light years to spare.

So its hard to tell if Clive should be arrested for the criminal he clearly is, laughed at for the fool he clearly is, or medicated for the mental illness he clearly has.