Progress!

See the problem?

In 1820, survival was difficult and most of the world was harshly poor.  Perhaps 900+ million lived in what is today described as absolute poverty, living on less than the equivalent of $2 per day.

After almost a hundred years, we've made incredible progress, but now there are more than one billion in that poverty grouping.  There are more people in deadly poverty today than there were a century ago.

Population has grown, of course.  There are 7 times as many people in the world than there were in 1820.  One reason for the growth, a smaller percentage of people in absolute poverty means folks are living longer and children are more likely to survive to adulthood.  That part is encouraging, of course.

How much folks have to live on - from 2015 data for population, productivity, and share.

On the less encouraging side, we still have hundreds of millions who are left out of the progress so many of us enjoy.  It is difficult to grasp the life circumstances they face.  It's hard to imagine holding your children in your arms and knowing you don't have enough food for them.  We've made progress; the problem can be solved.

In a world filled with difficult challenges, dealing with human suffering should perhaps be at the top of the list.

Thoughts on the subject?

BREXIT

Should I stay or should I go?  The UK is in the process of deciding whether to leave the EU or stay.  Being a member has changed their view of themselves as a nation; their identity has been diluted, according to some.  Economic issues, sovereignty issues, political and ideological issues ... and the migrants.

One party supporting Brexit ('Britain's Exit' from the EU) has published the poster (right).

It has been displayed in the media, on billboards, and on the sides of busses, suggesting that refugee immigrants are the last straw in the decision to abandon the EU.  Sound familiar?

Parties opposed to leaving the EU have pointed out the incitement to racial discrimination, segregation, and an abandonment of humanitarian values.  It has even been noted for similarity to Nazi propaganda. The offered arguments are indeed similar and perhaps equally misleading.

The UK discussion on the EU sounds much like the run-up to the election in the states this year.  People here are voting 'with their middle finger', as one southern gentleman has suggested.  And the migrants are an emotional issue. One commentator offers that folks are fed up with 'experts' on economics and politics and with lack of representation.  Exaggerated fear mongering is everywhere.

Times of distress, particularly economic distress, can cloud common thinking on the issues.  The stakes are raised as national impetus for a solution escalates.  In Germany following WWI and the Great Depression, times were hard, and it was a perfect opportunity for popular change.  In retrospect, we see how people lost contact with reality and bought into the promises of the National Socialists.  They blamed their problems on one ethnic minority and became participants in the outcome, a perhaps cautionary reminder.

We have perhaps some choice in the matter, at least in our own thinking.  There is no single decision, no one politician that will resolve all the difficulties and return things to an easier form.

For the record, most difficulties we face today have developed over decades, and are unlikely to be fixed by some knee-jerk popular choice or simple decision.  It's worthwhile to be thoughtful in our choice of leaders and representatives, and we, at least, needn't be fear mongers.

(In the U.S., the fact that neither presidential candidate is particularly appealing is troublesome, but they aren't the only contest being decided on the ballot.)

What's on my mind? Orlando.

49 killed, 53 injured by gunman in Orlando nightclub

While speculation in the media abounds, we know that neither religion nor gun regulations are the cause.

In the news, one candidate blames the Muslims, another blames the gun laws, and someone raises the issue of inadequate mental health care as the cause. Despite the claims of leaders who, for whatever purpose, blame this group or that, science has demonstrated that the phenomenon of 'us against them' is rooted in selfishness and in fear of loss.

Confusing cause and effect, it's easy to suggest that Islam is the cause of terrorism.  Similarly, we could say that Christianity caused folks to crusade and slaughter for hundreds of years. Both cases, however, are examples of extremist thinking by leadership and by followers, perhaps many of whom are deceived. By the time such behavior is chosen, the ideological origin has been morphed and adapted by the participants.  What follows is from power players, broken values, and corruption.

'Self above others' and 'self at the expense of others' are normally identified and corrected, at least initially, during the childhood years by family and community.

When a culture (whether political, religious, or national) supports the standard, peace follows as we saw along the Niger river for more than a thousand years.

When a culture fails the standard, the culture is warped violently, and civilization is at risk.*

Guess what the solution might be. :)**

Norman Rockwell's painting reminds us, the ethic

of reciprocity and tolerance is taught in every major

religion.  That's every major religion including Islam.

*E.g.: 'self above others' and 'self at the expense of others' give us racial discrimination, religious discrimination and persecution, class discrimination and elitism, intolerance, political polarization, oppression, disenfranchisement, and social ostracism. And bullying. It's all deadly.  

A civilization's fall, while not precisely predictable, appears to be inevitable, and with an average lifespan of around three centuries.  So the folks living along Africa's Niger river were a persistent civilization for more than a thousand years, how did they do that?

**Next question: at the very core of self and identity, what does it take to change us for the better?

Science tells us we're all bent this way or that, and most of the time, we're not even aware that our thinking is less than objective, that our judgement is self-serving, and that our criticism of others is often inaccurate and unwarranted. So what's the way out?





You might appreciate: Civilization's Reasonable Rise and Cities Without Citadels

Paying attention

"Did you notice?  You have to look back just a bit.  For nearly 50 years, as our country got richer, our families got richer -- and as our families got richer, our country got richer.

And then about 30 years ago, our country moved in a different direction. New leadership attacked wages. They attacked pensions. They attacked health care. They attacked unions. And now we find ourselves in a very different world from the one our parents and grandparents built. We are now in a world in which the rich skim more off the top in taxes and special deals, and they leave less and less for our schools, for roads and bridges, for medical and scientific research -- less to build a future." Elizabeth Warren

While I don't share Senator Warren's political leanings, she's correct.  Do your own research on changes in wealth, income, inequality, family, etc.  Take a look at The century's deadliest idea.

And yes, J.P.Morgan is one of the players responsible for the economic difficulties that plague
most of the world.  They received billions from government bailout programs so they could
stay in business. They spend millions each year on political contributions (purchasing
legislation) and millions more on lobbying. They have a voice in our government
while the typical citizen (non-billionaire) does not.

Real income, inflation adjusted        

Inequality in the U.S. in both income and total wealth is higher than most developed countries.  The effects of such disproportion are now visible as change in both the economy and in the culture.

What might those effects be?

• A decline of the middle class
• A decline of economic mobility
• Stagnant wages for the bottom 90%
• Persistent poverty in the lowest quintile
• An accelerating gap between the top quintile and all the rest
• Increase in corruption and white collar crime
• Increase in urban crime and incarceration 
• Increase in wage and benefit theft by employers
• Decline in integrity in the financial sector
• Decline in fiscal stability for middle class communities and urban regions
• Economic abuse of the working poor
• Increased impediments to economic advancement by minorities
• Widening quality gap between the top decile and the rest for quality of services available; e.g., education, healthcare, security, representation

So how might we minimize the damage and correct our course forward?

Suffer through it

Rembrandt - St. Paul in Prison

So how long did the apostle Paul spend in prison?  Maybe six years or so.

But why?

Well for one thing, that's how he had the time to write the prison letters; e.g., the letters to the church in Galatia, in Ephesus, in Colossae, in Philippi; he had a lot of time on his hands, so he wrote and it changed the world.

Was it worth it?  In the end, it did cost him his life.  We each have to make our own decision about that, I suppose.

So is there perhaps more purpose to our lives.  Might we find opportunity to serve well while we're in this less than ideal place, less than pleasant job, less than perfect city, country, world????  Of course.



Thanks and a hat tip to OFH for the reminder.

ISIS, atheists, and others

There's always more,
 perhaps infinitely
 more ...
   

It never occurred to me as a kid that the world might be limited to the size of my understanding. We always knew there was more. Perhaps our father taught us that.

Later in life, when I encountered angry atheists, and similarly angry religious folks, I didn't understand the anger. If we think differently, must we be mad about it?

Then I saw that anger tends to spring up and perhaps violence as well between any groups that disagree about anything.  Are we supposed to hate those who are working from some different starting point than we?  Brawling soccer fans come to mind.

A quick look at ideological violence (from a somewhat objective distance):

ISIS (and Al Qaeda before them) have horrified the world with their violent extremes.  The public face of Islam they offer (their extremist version) is inhumanly brutal, and murderous.  It's minimally related to religion and is more decipherable as a narrowed response to the diversity and ambiguity of the world's cultures.  It's much like the Crusades a thousand years ago.  In fact, it's virtually identical, but more about that in a moment.

I spent a couple of years corresponding with ex-Christians.  Most were furiously anti-church, anti-religion, anti-bible, etc.  Each, it appeared, had been badly treated by fundamentalist religion. Demanding and judgemental, criticism and condemnation, and destructive exclusion, these were common in their various personal stories.  They had been expected to listen and agree and comply with the teachings without question.  Christianity makes no provision for such practice.  Of course.

The question for us all, are we supposed to hate each other if we don't agree?  Do we have a choice in the matter of how we respond?

We could just continue killing and hating and justifying it, I suppose.   Did you know that killing someone* is morally neutral, as long as your intentions are good?  Not true, of course, but that was the published and accepted rationale in the early years of so called 'Christian warfare'.

• 400 A.D.  Augustine gave us a narrow definition for a 'just war'.  Later, Thomas Aquinas further explained, it must be a war with good intent, expressing the love of God, and without desire for gain.  Despite their attempts at reason and restraint ...

The definition of holy war went downhill.  Leadership of 'the church' became national authority and corrupt, indistinguishable from secular government and empire.  A couple of interesting doctrinal changes they made:

• 1) Violence in holy war is morally neutral rather than evil, leaders decided. The offered analogy is to a surgeon, who cuts into the body, thus injuring it, in order to make it better and healthier.

• 2) Christ is concerned with the political order of man, and intends for his agents on earth, kings, popes, bishops, to establish on earth a Christian Republic that is a 'single, universal, transcendental state’ ruled by Christ through the magistrates he endowed with authority.**  That was the offered propaganda.

Defending that Christian Republic against God’s enemies, whether foreign infidel or domestic heretics and Jews became a moral imperative.  A Crusade became a holy war fought for the recovery of Christian property or defense of the Church or the Christian people. It could be waged against Turks in Palestine, Muslims in Spain, pagan Slavs in the Baltic, or heretics in southern France, all of whom were enemies or rebels against God.

Christianity makes no provision for such behavior, just the corrupted, propagandized version.

• So, in 1099 A.D.   The First Crusade deploys around 20,000 combatants and captures Jerusalem, massacring its inhabitants, Muslims, Jews, and Christians alike. The Crusaders divide up their new territories, and Godfrey of Bouillon is named “defender of the Holy Sepulcher” and ruler of Jerusalem.

And that brings us to ISIS today.  And to polarized politics, polarized religion and anti-religion, and to conflict in modern life.  From mild to vicious and deadly, conflict persists today for reasonless reasons, killing and hating and justifying it.  It is perhaps the easy response to fear and perceived threat.***

Might God have a different opinion on the subject, and can we understand?  If we have any choice in the matter, that would be information worth pursuing, even if it took a lifetime ... or we can just exist, crippled by fear and anger and hatred as so many apparently do.

Beyond ourselves, we must introduce our children to the good path since they'll face the same world every day.  If we don't teach them well, they'll spend a lifetime fighting their own way out, won't they.  :)




If you have other thoughts on any of this, feel free to offer a critique.
*** Here is some info on why conflict happens and how it works.
**   The Crusades: a history by Jonathan Riley-Smith, Professor of Ecclesiastical History, University of Cambridge
*     Thanks and a hat tip to Dr. Richard Abels, U.S. Naval Academy, Annapolis.