When We Don't Understand ...

Understanding Must Change!  The alternative is deliberate ignorance.


Slavery was normal and accepted until Wilberforce and others said it wasn't.  They said it was wicked and unchristian and inhuman, and they described it as it was, actually.  They described individuals affected by it, how it tortured and degraded and robbed them of life and family and liberty.

John Brown recounts how as a young fellow, he had visited a family who had a negro slave boy about his own age.  Brown remembers being treated wonderfully while the slave boy was poorly clothed and fed and, while Brown looked on, was beaten with a shovel.  Brown commanded the raid at Harpers Ferry which led to secession and the Civil War.

It took more than a century for the common understanding of slavery to be reshaped.  More than a century to deal with basic human equality.  Today, everybody knows, it was just wrong.  Now, there's no way to talk about slavery that makes it good or just or moral.

So, what are today's issues?  What are those parts of culture that are normal and accepted, but which similarly need to be reshaped in our understanding?

Your first reaction upon seeing this - this is wrong! Of course. This isn't what we saw in school.
Countries are their correct size in relation to each other in this south-up view,
an example of a cylindrical equal-area projection.

... how about the real world?

The world we've been shown never existed.  It's a distorted map that was created when Europe was the center of the world.  In use since 1600, it exaggerates the relative size of northern countries by 2x-3x.  Bizarrely inaccurate, yet it's used in most of the world's academic curricula today.   Does size matter?  Would it be helpful to our worldview if we knew how the countries of the world are actually arranged?  (watch the short video here before moving on)

And yes, Brazil is about the size of the U.S., and four times the size of Greenland.

The impact of such misrepresentation:
The world's view of the developing world is 'below' and 'lesser', in part from our concept of relative size and position.  The common map is known to have been produced as an expression of cultural superiority, racism, and positional relevance.  Most westerners refer to Africa as a country.  It's not.

... then perhaps, class distinctions?

Prejudice and discrimination have historically been imposed along racial and ethnic lines, but even more so based on wealth.  We have created a class and economic inequality in every instance.  The upper class has access to wealth and privilege to which lower classes do not.
We've labored in the west to provide equal opportunity, and in many ways we've done well.  Social mobility has changed over the decades in America for minorities and others.  For a while (part of the 20th century), we saw the working and middle classes doing well along with the rich.  For the last five decades, however, the GAP between working folks and the wealthy has widened, and the GAP is accelerating.  It's now visible in every developed nation.  Social mobility, the opportunity to rise out of poverty, has declined through that period for a number of reasons.

Updated 10/2018

Economic inequality - it plagues every nation, and in the developing world it is exploding in an exaggerated form.  Its root is ancient, and it is propagated today to a great degree by the international marketplace.  What was once trade for mutual benefit has become wealth extraction at the expense of others, a predatory form of capitalism.

How if affects people - in a developing country, I sat with the men of a large, extended family.  All had been educated in local schools and had done well enough.  All were bright, energetic fellows.  Conversation continually returned to 'a little business', things they might attempt that would generate income.  They raised crops in gardens, they bought in the country and sold in the city market, they tried roadside kiosk sales, they attempted to restore a junked taxi and put it into service.  The country has no emerging industry, no jobs market, no particular growth that offers a chance for the great majority.  Kids who stay in school at great expense and effort by the family find little opportunity for employment afterwards.  The country is corrupted, of course, by the international marketplace.  Natural resources are profitably exported, but the profit goes to just a few, mostly outside the country.  This is typical.  Wealth flows from bottom to top.  Developing countries pay more in interest to the developed world than they receive in assistance projects.  Sixty dollars monthly is a typical employment income.

In the developed world, the GAP is that uncrossable expanse between those who are working hard to get by and those who accumulate wealth just by having wealth.  In the U.S., income for the top 1% exceeds the total for the bottom 40%, and it's not from labor and productivity, it's from the effort of others.  Every day, income; extraordinary wealth is extracted from the economy at the expense of those at the bottom.

Social and economic mobility happens for some, but it's largely a myth for most.  Forty-seven million Americans live in poverty; their children and grandchildren are likely to do the same.  It's not something they chose; it's done to them.  It's a less obvious but equally virulent form of indentured servitude, of slavery.  As William Garrison would have said, there is no neutral position.

We've attacked discrimination based on race, on culture, on gender with some success.  The root of it all continues unchanged, based solely on position, wealth, and influence, the acquisition of more at the expense of others.  Is there anything wrong with that?  Or is there some appropriate equality for all mankind, some measure of grace and worth that makes a place for each one?  Can we contribute to it?  Is there any good news on the subject?

Macroeconomics is not a simple science.  There are no single-point solutions to such broad spectrum flaws of function.  As with the issue of slavery, however, the GAP exposes a national flaw, a vulnerability which, unless addressed and resolved, will continue to fracture the national identity and preclude success of the national purpose.

Welcome to the American life, the vision, and the task.

It's hard to say.

It's difficult to express some things in words.

We have important things to share with our children and friends, but doing it in words gets mixed results.   The problem is the 'words'.  They aren't good enough.

The years since the Enlightenment have given us both more and less understanding of reality.

From the Enlightenment era, we have philosophy, the study of the general and fundamental nature of reality, existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language.  It's that last one that has caused the most trouble.  Language, and the words we commonly use to discuss and describe life and the things we face from day to day....

That which we would like to communicate is almost always larger than the available words will convey.  Imagine, for example, standing at the altar on your wedding day as the music begins and the people stand and turn toward the entrance.  Moving gracefully into view, your veiled princess approaches on her father's arm, and as everything else fades from your awareness, your eyes meet and you feel it to the core of your soul; your entire world is consumed in a firestorm to be replaced by the most improbably magnificent view of the days to come ....  See what I mean?  You could talk for the rest of your life and never really convey what you experienced in that surreal instant.  If you've experienced it yourself, you've perhaps got a clue.  If not, your imagination may or may not get you even close.

It provokes the question, are words ever enough?  And, do words impose artificial limits on reality?  Converting reality to words is a philosophical imperative today, but is that a realistic expectation or just arrogance.  Can today's human mind truly grasp and convey everything and anything?

“Words are but the vague shadows of the volumes we mean.  Little audible links, they are, chaining together great inaudible feelings and purposes.” 
― Theodore Dreiser

“The struggle of literature is in fact a struggle to escape from the confines of language; it stretches out from the utmost limits of what can be said; what stirs literature is the call and attraction of what is not in the dictionary.” 
― Italo Calvino

“For in spite of language, in spite of intelligence and intuition and sympathy, one can never really communicate anything to anybody.” 
― Aldous Huxley

Describing adequately in words what you can do

in a day could take a lifetime or more.  Something

worth remembering when you try lecturing your kids.

"Jesus did many other things as well.  If every one of them were written down, I suppose that even the whole world would not have room for the books that would be written."
― John, the Apostle  

Thus we come to the crux of the matter.  Do we understand what is offered to us in words?  Do we see the reality it's attempting to describe?  How much more is there beyond the scope of the words?  

Now we see a bit of the dilemma faced by physics and metaphysics; only one of the two finds words to be sufficient.  Similarly struggling through the centuries, science and religion (things you can explain vs. those you perhaps cannot).  

The Enlightenment may have let us down somewhat.  We thought we were moving toward a concrete reality where we would have scientific descriptions for everything ... and controls for everything.  Disappointed?  Because there is so much more than we'll ever find described in words?  

Perhaps for now, we see as though looking through a murky glass, darkly; ... which is to say that 95% of everything, everywhere in the universe, is still unknown, undetectable, and 'dark'.  And that's the science of it as of 2016; almost all of everything is unseen and undescribed.  There's more beyond all of that as well.


“It is not that the meaning cannot be explained. But there are certain meanings that are lost forever the moment they are explained in words.”   ― Haruki Murakami

... and, “If you could say it in words, there would be no reason to paint.”   ― Edward Hopper


You might enjoy Liberal Arts, too.
Happy New Year.  :)

Rising Tide

We've been waiting for the rising tide that lifts all boats.  That was the way our economy worked when I was in Economics 101, but things have changed. Curious why it doesn't trickle down?

• In the 80's, big business abandoned the multifaceted concerns of community and common good for just the bottom line.  Profitability and competition by acquisition are the rule now.
• Regulatory reform - relaxation of constraints on risk in the finance marketplace gave us the Great Recession along with today's continuous flow of wealth into the finance industry.
• Income - wages have been flat for the bottom 80% since the 70's.  At the top, extraordinary increase.  Wages affect profits, so common practice is to pay the least possible for needed skills.  Employees are a managed cost of production.
• Limited hours - as corporations grow in size, a variety of mechanisms have emerged for keeping benefits low for employees, the most common of which is artificially reduced hours.   Employees need only be treated well enough to avoid costly problems.

Not that WalMart is the only predator in the marketplace, but the WalMart heirs have more wealth among them than the economically lower third of Americans combined.  There are several million extraordinarily wealthy folks in the U.S., but only a few who have earned it.  Most have inherited it or gained it through the efforts of others.  

U.S. tax regulations allow a number of escape paths for the very wealthy.  Channeling income through Bermuda, for example, costs millions but avoids hundreds of millions in taxes for the exceptionally wealthy.  

Forecast:  This is neither an equitable economy nor culture.  It has morphed in the last half-century into a rather predatory capitalism.  The GAP between the privileged few and everyone else continues to widen at an accelerating pace.  

Income inequality is not uniform among the states.  After tax income inequality in 2009 was greatest in Texas and lowest in Maine.^[a]

Scholars and others differ as to the causes, solutions, and the significance of the trend,^[1][2] which in 2011 helped ignite the“Occupy” protest movement.  Education and increased demand for skilled labor are often cited as causes,^[3] some have emphasized the importance of public policy; others believe the causes of inequality’s rise are not well understood.^[4]  Inequality has been described both as irrelevant in the face of economic and social mobility in America^[5], and as a cause for the significant decline of that same mobility.^[6]

Happy New Year. 

The near future

Have large corporations always been considered untrustworthy? Actually, yes.

In 1816, Thomas Jefferson wrote, “I hope that we shall . . . crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.”

From Woodrow Wilson, “There was a time when corporations played a minor part in our business affairs, but now they play the chief part, and most men are the servants of corporations.”

Mitt Romney gave us, “Corporations are people, my friend . . . of course they are. Everything corporations earn ultimately goes to the people. Where do you think it goes? Whose pockets? Whose pockets? People’s pockets. Human beings my friend.”  For comparison, Senator Elizabeth Warren at the Democratic Convention in 2012 countered, “No, Governor Romney, corporations are not people. People have hearts. They have kids. They get jobs. They get sick. They thrive. They dance. They live. They love. And they die. That matters. That matters because we don’t run this country for corporations, we run it for people.”The last two decades have given us ample evidence of the influence big business has in our governments.  Regulatory changes 'purchased' by the finance industry gave us the Great Recession.  The Trans-Pacific Partnership is more of the same.On the Forbes list of America's most trustworthy corporations, there's not a single bank or finance entity.  No surprise there.
The issue, of course, is not the existence of incorporated businesses.  Small and local businesses are the backbone of the economy.  Our difficulties emerge from the extraordinary power inherent in the largest corporations.  They seem to become extractors of wealth and resource, thriving at the expense of employees and suppliers, and even regions, channeling benefits away from communities and across the country to the wealthy and fortunate few.  They exert inappropriate influence in both the marketplace and in government for their financial success rather than for the benefit of the nation or the citizens.  Of particular concern are finance and oil corporations, many of which are bigger than countries.
Of the world's 100 largest economies, 63 are countries and  37 are corporations.  Of those 37 corporations, most of them are oil companies or banks.  These are economic behemoths that are larger and more influential than most of the world's nations.   The 'economic convergence' theories defend big business citing the equivalent of international trickle-down promises.  It hasn't worked, and a significant number of developing countries have seen zero growth over decades while their resources and wealth are consumed by the international marketplace.  

In the absence of significant regulatory reform, eco & poly sci forecasts are for continuing transformation of national governance in favor of greater economic dominance, economic conquest and empire, if you will.  

Things will indeed change in the near future. Do you know how your vote affects the issue?  And your faith?

As individuals, we perhaps cannot solve the dilemma, but we can make a difference for others.

Trumpisms

Donald Trump continues as a front runner for no discernible reason.  I am at a loss to understand his being seriously considered for public office.  

His performance in business over the years unveils his questionable judgement and equally suspect ethical standards.  His career shows he has branded well but has perhaps provided little of benefit or good to anyone.

His recent statements, many of which are inaccurate and often unwise or inappropriate, continue demonstrating the person we're being offered to represent and lead us as a nation.




"[I am] calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on" - Donald Trump and what appears to be  fear mongering

"An ‘extremely credible source’ has called my office and told me that Barack Obama’s birth certificate is a fraud" -Donald Trump and a fable disproved long ago.

"Ariana Huffington is unattractive, both inside and out. I fully understand why her former husband left her for a man – he made a good decision.”- Donald Trump and his insults spoken in anger 

"You know, it really doesn’t matter what the media write as long as you've got a young, and beautiful, piece of @!$%#." - Donald Trump

“I will build a great wall –and nobody builds walls better than me, believe me – and I'll build them very inexpensively. I will build a great, great wall on our southern border, and I will make Mexico pay for that wall. Mark my words." - Donald Trump and nonsensical exaggeration 

"When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending the best. They're not sending you, they're sending people that have lots of problems and they’re bringing those problems with us. They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They’re rapists… And some, I assume, are good people." -Donald Trump and what appears to be racist fear mongering 

"Our great African-American President hasn't exactly had a positive impact on the thugs who are so happily and openly destroying Baltimore." - Donald Trump and his perhaps racist perspective

·"The Mexican government ... they send the bad ones over." - Donald Trump and international relations

·President Barack Obama "wants to take in 250,000 (people) from Syria."  ·Among Syrian refugees, "there aren't that many women, there aren't that many children."   ·The federal government is sending refugees to states with governors who are "Republicans, not to the Democrats." - Donald Trump, too many inaccurate statements

Says crime statistics show blacks kill 81 percent of white homicide victims. - Donald Trump and more of his inaccurate thoughts on African Americans

The 9/11 terrorists' friends, family, girlfriends in the United States "were sent back for the most part to Saudi Arabia. They knew what was going on. They went home, and they wanted to watch their boyfriends on television." - Donald Trump and just plain wrong accusations

"I watched in Jersey City, N.J., where thousands and thousands of people were cheering" as the World Trade Center collapsed.    - 
Donald Trump and his inaccurate claims

"The beauty of me is that I'm very rich." - Donald Trump, perhaps hubris 

"It's freezing and snowing in New York – we need global warming!" - Donald Trump

"My fingers are long and beautiful, as, it has been well documented, are various other parts of my body." - Donald Trump and inappropriate comments

"If I were running ‘The View’, I'd fire Rosie O'Donnell. I mean, I'd look at her right in that fat, ugly face of hers, I'd say ‘Rosie, you’re fired." - Donald Trump and inappropriate comments in anger

"I think the only difference between me and the other candidates is that I'm more honest and my women are beautiful." - Donald Trump, and he doesn't seem to know it's an insult.

He would crush the Islamic State and send American troops to “take the oil”.   "We have politicians that are grossly incompetent. We have leaders that are incompetent and we have negotiators that are incompetent." He would “Make America great again” by being a better negotiator than all the “dummies” who represent the country today.  Notice his worldview - “[E]very single country that does business with us” is ripping America off. “The money [China] took out of the United States is the greatest theft in the history of our country.” He would, in some unspecified way, adjust how America protects allies such as South Korea and Japan, because “if we step back they will protect themselves very well. Remember when Japan used to beat China routinely in wars?”
He actually said those things. Popular demagogues in other countries sometimes win elections, and there is no compelling reason why America should be exempt, I suppose. Republicans should listen carefully to Mr Trump, and perhaps vote for someone else.

It would perhaps all be humorous if it weren't such a potential catastrophe.  

18 JAN 2016 - Hoping perhaps to attract evangelicals, Trump attempted a quote from the bible and stumbled rather badly, without a clue what he was reading.  Perhaps just showmanship, nothing genuine.

UPDATE:  30 SEP 2016 - He's the candidate.  

Is there Evil in the world?

“The modern skeptical world has been taught for some 200 years a conception of human nature in which the reality of evil, so well-known to the age of faith, has been discounted.  Almost all of us grew up in an environment of such easy optimism that we can scarcely know what is meant, though our ancestors knew it well, by the satanic will.  We shall have to recover this forgotten but essential truth ‑ along with so many others that we lost when, thinking we were enlightened and advanced, we were merely shallow and blind.” ~Jaroslav Pelikan

Science is doing its best to squash evil under the thumb of neurology. In recent years, there have been several fMRI studies suggesting neural anomalies are the cause of evil behavior. The absence of 'empathy' as a result of a failed neural sequence is the culprit, if the popular analysis is correct.  I.e., a broken brain.

The theory, in order to be valid, requires an absence of free will, and further, an inability of some to consider the feelings of others, plus other troublesome concepts. If the scientists are right, the brain is a machine that follows programming, and if the machine itself has flaws, flawed behavior may follow. From such a rationale, there remains no responsibility for personal actions. They're just the programmed outworkings of a machine, neither truly good or evil, however problematic.

None of us, as we observe our own choices, truly believe that to be the case.  We exercise the opportunity to choose almost continuously. We weigh and evaluate and choose regarding everything from what we'll watch on TV to what we'll do with our lives.  We choose, and conscience plays a part. There is no experiential support for the absence of free will, yet the debate continues as it has for more than a thousand years.

Adding complexity to our question, there are indeed neurological disorders (physical flaws in the brain);  they can be mild to extreme. Those who suffer from disorders report a degree of conflict ranging from mild to extreme difficulty in controlling them. That fits the science.

Moving beyond that physiological nuance, we next find that cause and effect can be misidentified in the course of observation and analysis. Some brain functions are formed by experience, PTSD being a familiar example.  A perfectly healthy brain can be damaged and become dysfunctional due to traumatic experience.  

We understand too that our chosen (or imposed) exposures shape the way we think; our brain function is changed. Chosen and repeated behavior becomes habitual, a formulated context for response.

So then, cause or effect? Does brain function cause the evil actions, or do our choices shape and trigger the brain function?   

There is evil in the world, and one measure is certainly in the individual, but then what of the many?  

Hitler, perhaps the first evil individual who comes to mind, would have been a solitary mental case had he been alone in his thinking, but he was one among many with similar ideological leanings. Beyond Göring, Himmler, and Hess, there were literally hundreds more in positions of authority and power in the Nazi hierarchy who willingly participated in the same behavior.  The Nazi impact on the world was extraordinarily destructive, and millions died, but there were so many who joined in the slaughter.  Thousands enthusiastically pledged themselves to Hitler, loyal unto death, and of their own ... free will?  Suggesting a common neurological defect appearing at the same time in so many is statistically improbable.

Is there some 'spirit' of evil?  Is there a sweeping change of atmosphere that can bend the minds of people en masse?  Of course.  Depending on your theological perspective, you'll have words to describe it this way or that, but we've seen it. So how does it work?

In Nazi Germany, deliberate vision casting (the story they told, propaganda) swept up the populace in agreement to conquer the world, to clean out the lesser races and defective folks, and occupy the lands of Europe. They drank the koolaid. Boundaries were crossed when euthanasia became the accepted solution for mental defects, when citizenship was rescinded for Jews, and deportation became the public solution.  Boundaries were crossed when Albert Speer brought prisoners to be slave laborers in the war industries; they were worked literally to death.  Boundaries were crossed when work camps became death camps for men, women, and children.  It was broadly approved evil.  The result was a sweeping change of national atmosphere that bent them all toward extraordinary slaughter. Everyone knew at least part of the horror story.  They did their best to hide from what they were doing. Front line soldiers in the extermination camps went insane after shooting thousands of men, women, and children; the process had to be industrialized.  As the war turned against them, they tried to destroy the evidence of what they'd done.

Discrimination, oppression, and genocide resurface regularly in history.  How do they spread?

In the middle ages, Europeans were faced with a new world.  The preferred explanation (propaganda again) which kings and clergy endorsed was that the indigenous peoples they encountered in Africa were less than fully human, uncivilized, immoral, unworthy creatures. The same judgement was passed against caribs and amerindians.  The death and suffering that followed defies description. Centuries later, residuals of that thinking still persist.

Mass discrimination against Jews - antisemitism is visible as far back as 300 B.C. It never had a basis.

The Discovery Doctrine - before Columbus, the Christian world decided that if they should 'discover' a country, they could claim and own it by right, even if it was already occupied. The legality was formalized by the Pope and courts.  That was the extraordinary (and unChristian) bending of reason that was their foundation for conquering the world.  The result was the consciousless exploitation of native populations and civilizations.  Conquest, slaughter, and slavery came first.  Class and inequality are the direct descendants.

That was the story they told us all through the subsequent centuries, that it was okay for white people to invade and conquer other nations if they weren't Christian.  At the turn of the last century, they were still telling that to high school students, that 'discovering the new world' and 'settling' the Americas, it was all noble and right and good.

As Americans, it offends us deeply for someone to say we were murderous and immoral in our 'Manifest Destiny' thinking.  Why is that?  The emergence of our new nation brought so much that was spectacularly good, but it included harm to so many as well.

So, to the question, is there evil in the world?  Of course, there was and still is.  Individual and communal evil continues among us.  One question for us, is there any of that in our own thinking, or more accurately, how much?

A father and his son are in a car accident.  The father is killed and the son is seriously injured. The son is taken to the hospital where the surgeon says, “I cannot operate, because this boy is my son.”

This popular brain teaser dates back many years, but it remains relevant today; 40 to 75 percent of people still can’t figure it out. Those who do solve it usually take a few minutes to fathom that the boy’s mother could be a surgeon. Even when we have the best of intentions, when we hear “surgeon” or “boss,” the image that pops into our minds is selective based on our personal bent. 

Similarly prejudicial thinking will apply across racial, ethnic, and political boundaries, across perceived class and economic boundaries, and among religions. The farther we are removed from the individuals involved, the less we care and the more willing we are to just let it pass.  

In the new year, we might perhaps consider the irrational justifications we hold for such thinking and rise up a bit. Most make the effort, but it's not a simple path, dealing with ... evil.  Just how big is it anyway?

Happy New Year.