Axis B: Ordinariness

Having looked at all the reasons we are each considerably more unique than the proverbial snowflake, we now take the opposite view: You and I are just typical repetitions of the human theme, fitting very comfortably into the norm by almost every standard of measure.

Typical Bodies

We should be very glad our bodies are ordinary, and generally we suffer when they are not. The practice of medicine only works because almost every human body has the same plan, right down to the location of every tiny nerve and capillary. If you have dextrocardia (Wikipedia), your heart is on the right side of your chest, not the left. That can cause a critical delay in treatment if you need an EMT's assistance. ("I can't find a heartbeat!" "She's breathing, what's the matter with your stethoscope?")

Because we are typical from the gross details right down to the most subtle chemistry of cell respiration, we can be helped when we are sick. The Heimlich Maneuver can be taught to everyone because everyone's airway and lungs and rib-cage work the same way. (But that is also why choking on food is common enough that it is worthwhile teaching the Heimlich: everyone's airway has the identical stupid design, sharing a path with the food-way.)

On any physical measure you care to take -- height, weight, finger-joint length, microbial population of the gut, lung capacity, blood lipid fraction -- whatever doctors can measure now or will figure out how to measure tomorrow -- each of us will be found somewhere on a bell curve and almost always, comfy at the fat center part of the curve.

You and I share a body plan with everybody else and the differences between the extreme examples on any scale are really small. The difference between the tallest and shortest people is what, a factor of four? Between the skinniest and the heaviest, perhaps a multiple of six? I will go out on a limb and say that nowhere in the human race will you find a difference of one order of magnitude (10X) between the most and least of any measure. (But differences of an order of magnitude can be found for example between the largest and smallest trees, cetacians, hailstones, and lots of other products of natural processes.) Even when two human bodies differ greatly on one scale, for example weight, IQ, visual acuity or hair length, they remain near-identical on most other measurable scales.

Even when the gross details of our visible anatomy differ, the internal organs don't. There is much less variation in the size of hearts and livers than there is in body weight or arm length. The 500-pound man has a heart pretty nearly the same size as that of the 90-pound model. There certainly are differences in the efficiency of internal organs; as a pathetically feeble bicyclist I am very aware that my heart, although it may be the same size as Lance Armstrong's, is nowhere near as efficient at moving blood around. Or maybe it's his lungs that are better than mine, or his blood platelets. There is one or a few bell-curves in which Lance and I are found in the opposite tails, thus accounting for the difference in our cycling capacities. But even then, on most measures, he and I will be similar. (I wonder in which measures I exceed him? None of any external significance...)

We are all very, very similar to each other. This is unsettling to think about. One time that it becomes very unsettling indeed is when we come across a picture of a lot of human corpses: a heap of Nazi death camp victims, or a row of people drowned in the 2004 Tsunami. The sight of human bodies lined or stacked like awkwardly-shaped cordwood strips all pretense of uniqueness, leaves us knowing that our bodies, too, could be flung in such a pile and would not stand out in the slightest.

Similar Minds

Our minds, too, are much alike. No big surprise, since minds arise from the physical basis of our brains, which vary little in their anatomy. Again, we can be glad our minds are alike, because that's what makes communication possible! There could be no teaching, and no story-telling, if our minds were even as varied as our hair styles.

Philosophers worry at great and inconclusive length about whether your experience of "red" (or "hot" or "sweet") is the same as my experience of those things. How can we know? We can't. It is at least conceivable that when you and I stand side-by-side and look at a red flag, I see red and you hear (what I would call) a C#-major chord.

Possible, but damned unlikely. This is the sort of thing that philosophers like to chew on, but since the hypothetical you and I are using near-identical corneas, retinas, optic nerves and visual cortexes to see the red flag, the only practical conclusion is that your experience is very much like mine -- in this and every other physical perception.

Emotional perceptions are another matter. The brain is unique among body parts in that its whole purpose is to learn, and it changes throughout life. All our other organs aim at being consistent, and returning to a consistent state after any injury. The brain (and for this essay, I extend "brain" to include all the distributed parts of the body that cooperate in emotional responses) changes and adapts with every experience, so in the pattern of our emotional responses to life, we are each as potentially unique as our individual life histories are. You didn't grow up on a dairy farm in the Pacific Northwest in the 1940s, or attend college in the 60s or live in England in the 70s; and I didn't grow up and form my emotional patterns in the marvellous places you enjoyed. It's a wonder we even speak the same language...

But that wonder is in fact demonstrated, millions of times a day. People whose life histories are so drastically different can yet agree, cooperate, work together, fall in love, teach each other's children, manage each other's finances, enjoy the same novels, plays, and art, vote for the same candidates. Those things simply could not happen if it were not the case that all of our minds tend toward very similar responses. In mental and emotional measurements, as in physical ones, we end nestling fraternally in the fat part of most bell-curves.

In the physical realm I know that Lance Armstrong and I are in opposite tails of some distribution or other. Similarly, in mental abilities I have had the privilege of being in the presence of some really smart people. I rank as smart by some measures; well, I'm on the right-hand side of the IQ curve. But I've talked to and worked near people whose abilities were wayyy over there from me. And I've occasionally tried to teach something to people who were on the other side of the curve and been frustrated by it. So there are outliers; and perhaps the mental and emotional bell-curves are a bit flatter, have longer tails than the physical ones. Just the same, human society, human art, human culture in general could not work if we were not all very closely alike in the way we think and feel.

Alike and Different

We are each absolutely unique; we are each absolutely typical. Which is it? The answer is "yes."

Next time: the Lone Cowboy/Corporate Cog axis.

Axis A: Uniqueness

Each of us is an utterly unique event. This follows from the two things that make us what we are: genetics and history.

Unique Inheritance

Genetically, every physical trait we have is determined some of the tens of thousands of genes our DNA. Gross features like our hair and eye color; subtle features like our tendency toward, or resistance to, certain diseases; features obvious from the cradle and features that only manifest late in life: every possible trait with an organic basis is established by our genes.

And, because the physical structure of our brains provides the machinery of thought, many if not most of the major tendencies and capabilities of our minds and personalities are also established by our genes. Whether we are risk-averse or risk-seeking; whether we can remember musical harmonies, or only remember melodies, or are tone-deaf; whether we are good at spatial orientation or get lost in a closet; whether we flourish in company or prefer to brood alone: all these traits are life-defining and all have a genetic basis. (In twin studies, identical twins separated at birth often prove as adults to have near-identical tastes in clothes and food.)

We get this package of traits and possibilities from our parents, of course, but in an amazing way. In our DNA, each gene is present in double form, two copies, one copy on each side of the ladder-shaped DNA molecule. The copies are not identical. We got one copy from Mom and one copy from Dad, and they can differ. There are lots of complex rules about which copy the cell actually uses when it needs to make a protein (sometimes the paternal copy wins, sometimes the maternal one, which is why my balding hair pattern is exactly like my mother's father's) but the basic idea is: your traits are a mix of your parent's traits.

But wait, there's more. When a male's body makes a sperm, or a female's, an egg, something absolutely zany happens. The double strand of DNA is unzipped, with each strand going to make one germ cell (sperm or egg). That makes sense; when an egg and sperm get together, they'll combine their single strands to give the child a set of properly double-stranded DNA, one strand from each parent.

Let's let one letter stand for each gene along your DNA, at this point just M for Mom's and D for Dad's. In this view, your genome is pretty boring, just a series of gene pairs MD-MD-MD-MD...

But wait, there's more: before making two germ cells, the split strands of DNA randomly exchange segments of genetic information (Wikipedia:meiosis). So what you get from your father's DNA is a random mixture of his parent's contributions. And what you get from your mother's DNA, likewise, a random mixture of genes she got from Nana and Fafa.

Now let's represent a genome with pairs from four letters: N for Nana, your maternal granny, F for mom's dad Fafa, M for dad's MomMom and P for dad's PopPop. Each gene copy you got from your mother was randomly an N or an F, and each copy from your father was randomly an M or P, so your genome (or mine) could be: FP-NM-FM-NP-FM-FP-NP-... with each gene one of 4 combinations of your grandparents' genes at that position.

A human genome has at least 20,000 genes. On that basis there are 4²⁰⁰⁰⁰ possible combinations of grandparental genes. That's already an unimaginably huge number but we can make it larger. Let your mother's four grandparents be a, b, c and d. Let father's be A, B, C, D. Now you can represent your genome as aC-cD-aC-bC-cB-bD-... and so on, with each gene being one of 16 possible combinations of great-grandparents' genes. Now there are 16²⁰⁰⁰⁰ ways to make a genome.

We could continue the math games, adding generations, but after the 6th or 7th (when the genome is a number in 128²⁰⁰⁰⁰) we have to start thinking about multiple contributions, where we inherit from the same people on both sides of the family (cousins marrying, etc.).

It doesn't matter. There won't be 16²⁰⁰⁰⁰ humans born in all of time, or 2²⁰⁰⁰⁰ for that matter. Your precise combination of genes, nor mine nor anyone's, has never existed and will never be repeated before the heat death of the universe.

Moment in Time

From the moment of conception a person's genome is in dynamic interaction with its environment. The body grows, changes, struggles, waxes and wanes as the environment lets it; and as soon as birth happens the brain begins to do the same. Every experience changes us. Even identical twins have different life histories, right from infancy: one is fed before the other; one sees a butterfly and the other is napping; one throws a snowball and the other is hit.

We are altered moment by moment by experiences trivial and shattering. Every interaction between our senses and the physical world changes us, as does every interaction with another person—obviously some more than others, but nothing that penetrates consciousness fails to leave a mark however light.

And your life history is different from mine and every other person alive, even people born in the same place, same time, same social class, same ethnicity.

And your history cannot be the same as that of any person born in another place or another moment in history. Sure, when you look at the ocean, you see "the same" ocean as did Whonk, the Neanderthal, and everyone between you and him. But you got to that view wearing shoes... and your perception of what you see is different in a thousand ways from Whonk's, because you know the ocean as the skin on a globe, something traversed by people. Even if you look at the ocean with your identical twin, you can't be certain the pair of you are seeing "the same" ocean—because of the time when you saw an Orca lobbing, and your twin was looking the other way and missed it.

Even if there were another genome like yours to nine places, the person bearing it couldn't be the same as you because that twin couldn't share your identical life history.

Summary

Bottom line: you, me, any human being, is as utterly unique as a phenomenon can be, never to be repeated. Any philosophy must acknowledge and build on this.

Next: we contradict all of the above.

The cruciform axis: overview

I've been thinking about four related statements.

All four can be justified by observation (and I will do that as we go along) and yet they contradict each other, at least superficially.

I think that these statements are really the four poles of an X-Y coordinate system, and by locating ourselves on the social plane that they define, we can learn about ourselves and say useful things about how we should behave.

Here are the four statements.

1. You are utterly unique, a one-of-a-kind event never to be repeated as long as the universe lasts.
2. You are utterly typical, barely distinguishable from the other 6,000,000,000 people that crowd this world.
3. You are an independent agent, solely responsible for your actions and for your own survival.
4. You are inextricably mixed into human society, depending for your very life on the actions of others and sharing responsibility for every success and failure of your family, school, and nation.

As I say, each of these can be justified by observation, and I mean to do that. Yet each pair is contradictory: a contradicts b, c contradicts d.

Each probably strikes you as having elements of truth, yet each probably seems like an exaggeration. In each pair, one probably seems more accurate and the other, more of a stretch. But which? My expectation is that different people will weigh the statements differently.

Thinking about fundamentalists (1)

Continuing to post extracts of previous writings: this is a portion of a talk I prepared for the Stanford Atheist group in November, 2005. The heart of it was a sense of cultural alienation, of not being at home in my birth nation, although...

To their credit, the great majority of our fellow Americans, whatever their personal beliefs, could not care less what we believe or don't. Which is good, because they don't bother us. But that same uncritical tolerance provides a cloak, a shelter, under cover of which some really creepy people can operate: the evangelicals who, if they had the power, would happily put us unbelievers in prison as dangerous to the public morals.

There is a tiny minority of Americans -- a bigger minority than atheists, but still small -- who genuinely espouse hard-core evangelical religious ideas. The common thread is that they are biblical literalists, that is, they insist that the Bible is to be taken as exact, literal, un-metaphorical truth.

For these biblical fundamentalists, creation took seven days, woman was created from man's rib, etc. Among them are "Dominion Theologists" or "Christian Reconstructionists" whose stated aim is to convert the US into a theistic state with a civil code based on that literally-true Bible -- or their reading of it. (Their precise counterparts in Islam are those who would make the Quran the sole basis of civil law.)

These are scary people. If you want to give yourself a fine shiver, don't rent a video of Nightmare on Elm Street. Just Google the phrase "Dominion theology" and read for a while. I promise you cold sweat and a sleepless night.

It might be some slight satisfaction that the Biblical literalists are even more alienated from mainstream American culture than atheists are. I feel alienated because people around me don't react to what (to me) is clearly bullshit. However, that same culture happily accomodates many ideas that are flatly contradictory to everything evangelicals believe in. Whereas I feel mildly at odds with our culture, they must feel like missionaries among the cannibals.

Dr. Phillip Johnson was one of the architects of the Intelligent Design thing, he counseled and inspired various of the authors like Michael Behe. This is Johnson, addressing a conference on "Reclaiming America for Christ" in 1999:

...the Darwinian theory of evolution contradicts not just the Book of Genesis, but every word in the Bible from beginning to end. It contradicts the idea that we are here because a creator brought about our existence for a purpose.

Hang onto that phrase about "creator brought about our existence for a purpose." That's key.

This is a portion of an interview with Johnson in a Christian magazine:

It's a great error Christian leaders and intellectual leaders have made to think the origin of life [is] just one of those things scientists and professors argue about, Mr. Johnson says. The fundamental question is whether God is real or imaginary. The entire way of thinking that underlies Darwinian evolution assumes that God is out of the picture as any kind of a real entity. He points out that, it is a very short step from Darwinism and science to the kind of liberal theology we find in many of our seminaries that treats the resurrection as a faith event...



...Mr. Johnson explains, Once God is culturally determined to be imaginary, then God's morality loses its foundation and withers away. ...

Hang onto that phrase about "God's morality losing its foundation." That's another key.

Notice how far out, how radical Johnson is. He is not only alienated from the majority culture which has no problem with materialist science, he is also at odds with mainstream contemporary religion. In mainstream religions, the theologists do not see a conflict between the Bible as spiritual sourcebook and evolution as a concept. The Biblical account of creation is not undermined by Darwinian evolution -- when taken as poetic metaphor. You only have a problem with Darwin when you insist that the Bible is literally, not metaphorically true. Johnson and his ilk take that position, and that forces them into opposition to society at large and mainstream religion too.

Evangelicals quite accurately diagnose that materialist explanations for anything make a mockery of a literal reading of the Bible. Yet they have pinned their entire belief system -- including the foundation of their moral code and their very conception of purpose in life -- on a literal reading of the Bible. Ergo, anything that undermines that reading threatens the very basis of their lives!

They have to be very alienated, very frightened. And because they are afraid, they feel no shame about subverting the mechanisms of scientific debate to undermine science. And they are brazen in taking advantage of that great American tolerance for diversity, however wacky, to propagate their beliefs.

These people are not stupid. They are skilled debaters who know how to get on the good side of an audience. They are well-funded. I've shown you how very deeply and seriously motivated they are! If they are not opposed effectively, they will succeed. You will find high-school biology classes in several states having to acknowledge Intelligent Design, or some other cobbled-up alternative to evolution by natural selection.

The big question is, who will oppose them? Because of the marshmallow consistency of the American public's mind, its blithe ignorance of critical thinking, its lack of confidence in common sense, the evangelicals just don't get the kind of sharp, sarcastic criticism they should get. The criticism they would get, I like to think, in a country like Australia. Here we say things like "They mean well." "There might be something in what they say." "It's good to have all sides represented."

Are you and I supposed to do it? Heck, no! It is not us few, lonely scared atheists who should be debating these people. Evangelicals LOVE to have admitted atheists as opponents; it lets them grab the high ground as true defenders of spirituality and faith -- in the eyes of the audience of believers. In the Dover trial, the attorney who cross-examined Dr. Forrest made a big, repeated deal out of the fact that she was a signatory to the Humanist Manifesto -- as if that should disqualify her from talking about religion at all.

It was Jim Heldberg of the SF Atheists who first pointed out to me that the people who ought to be opposing them are the representatives of mainstream religion. There are clever, sophisticated theologians in the mainstream denominations who really understand the nature of literalist thinking, who know well how radical it is and what a dead-end it is because it inevitably has to clash with science over and over.

The Catholics seem to get this. An important Cardinal Shoenborn, in July, had an op-ed piece in the NY Times that seemed to dismiss the previous Pope's support for evolution. But Cardinal Shoenborn recently back-pedalled hard, saying in a lecture that Darwin's work "remains one of the very great works of intellectual history" and saying he has "no problem combining belief in the Creator with the theory of evolution"

Almost simultaneously Cardinal Poupard, who has the title of President of the Pontifical Council for Culture, said similar nice things about Darwin, and negative things about fundamentalism. Materialists can't take much pleasure from either Cardinal's statement, because both were insistent that "the universe didn't make itself" and that science has no business talking about ultimate origins. Still, the Catholic church has gone on record as not supporting anti-evolutionists.

That's more than can be said about American clerics and denominations, who seem to stand back and keep very quiet when a public debate like this Dover trial happens. I think this is cowardly and short-sighted of them. If they let the fundamentalist wackos carry the banner for religion, and if the fundamentalists are discredited, all religion will be discredited along with them. It will be too late for the Presbyterians and Lutherans to say, oh, they weren't speaking for us.

What would help long-term is if unbelief, materialism, could be made a practical alternative to religious belief -- so that more people were willing to check the "No Affiliation" box on a census form. What keeps that from happening? I see two causes, and they are areas that atheists or humanists could and should address.

Remember the two phrases from Phillip Johnson I said to hang onto? One was that materialism contradicts the idea that God created us for a purpose. The other was that materialism undermines God's morality.

These are the two crucial points at which almost anybody who believes in God feels threatened by the idea of atheism. They don't have to be Biblical literalists or fundamentalists; Christians of any type will almost instinctively leap to those conclusions:

1. If they didn't believe in God, they would have no sense of purpose; and the universe would be a howling, unintegrated chaos of random chance.
2. If they didn't believe in God, their morals would have no basis; and they would have only a shifty relativism that potentially allowed or forgave any act no matter how evil.

You have to admit, these are two very unpleasant choices: between belief versus an unintegrated chaos; and between belief versus a baseless relativist anarchy. I think it's because of these two instinctive leaps that people are so automatically shocked or scared of the idea of atheism, and retreat from it without giving it any rational thought.

Now, both perceptions are quite wrong, as this audience should realize. I've discussed the constructive alternatives to each in my book, chapter two on finding purpose in a materialist universe, and chapter eight on finding morals. I listed a number of creative, constructive alternatives and barely scratched the surface.

But I have no pulpit, no street cred. There's a crying need for an atheist Savanarola, or a humanist John Wesley -- someone to articulate and promote, first, all the profound and beautiful ways that a person can be authentic and purposeful in a materialist universe; and second, to promote the truth that ethics arise out of the basic human condition, and that the best argument for the ethical life is simple self-interest -- being ethical makes a person healthier and happier.

(Since I wrote this, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens have all had some success in the role of "atheist Savanarola." However, none of them has seriously tried to make the positive points I hoped for: purpose and morals.)

These are the two arguments that are not being made by unbelievers. If they were made and cleverly promoted, it would go a long way to making unbelief a viable alternative to religion. The fundamentalists would never be convinced, but the majority could begin to find belief less essential, atheism less frightening. That could begin a swing toward a more secular society, and hopefully a more skeptical one.

I am sorry to wind up here with only a pious hope, not an actual plan. But that's where my ramblings have brought us.

The death of local retail

As long as fuel prices stay low enough that UPS shipping remains cheap (right now, it is cheaper to send a small parcel by UPS Ground than by USPS 1st Class Mail -- and it arrives as soon if not sooner), online retailers will continue to eat up the business of local suppliers of anything but food.

Two cases in point, in one day's shopping. I needed two not dreadfully unusual items and shopped for them diligently on the way home today. I wasted an hour, found neither, left dissatisfied, and got both online in a few minutes.

The Camera Accessory

First, a step-down ring that would allow me to attach a slide duplicator to a particular camera lens. Not a standard drugstore item, but absolutely something that ought to be available from a large professional photo store such as our local Keeble & Suchat.

They have two stores that face each other across California Avenue. The one on the South is the Professional store, with gear for sale or rent to the pro photog. I went there first but no, they didn't have any step-down rings, but if there were any, they'd be across the street in the consumer store. Apparently pro photogs never try to mate odd filters to standard lenses...

Across the street in the consumer store, it was as usual a zoo, and as usual the four guys behind the counter were all involved with customers and never looked up to give the waiting ones so much as a "be right with you." I searched all the merchandise shelves and saw no filter adapters at all, thought about online ordering, and left.

Back home it took less than 5 minutes to find the device that I needed at two outlets (Adorama and B&H, to decide to order it from B&H, and to complete the purchase using Paypal. I don't have the instant gratification of getting the item into my hands right now but it will show up in due course.

The Herbal

The other thing I wanted to pick up on the way home was Resveratrol, which I have taken routinely since reading about it in Scientific American (see here and here).

I've bought it at our local earnestly-healthy supplement store, Country Sun, but whoever stocks the antioxidant shelves at Country Sun has no sense of consistency. It seems one never finds the same products on successive visits. As has happened before, the Resveratrol that I had been buying, from Country Life products, was not on the shelf. Resveratrol preparations from several other makers were there, but none from a company I had ever heard of, and all of different potencies and combined with different things -- vitamin C, or Green Tea Extract, or anything else that could be stirred up and called "antioxidant." And all at what seemed high prices.

Once more I thought, "Phooey, I bet it's online," and left. Back home, another 5 minutes turned up my desired Country Life Resveratrol caps at several retailers at prices substantially less than the local retailer asked. I ordered a 6-month supply.

It has taken considerably longer to write this account than it did to find exactly what I wanted at prices substantially lower (even after shipping) than the local outlet would have charged, if it had even carried the item.

What's a local retailer to do? Well, in the case of Keeble & Suchat, they could figure out how to deal with their normal customer flow quicker and more politely; and they could carry a broader range of small items. Country Sun could carry the same stock consistently. These steps would help.

But in general, the local retailer can never carry the range of stock the internet offers, and can never offer instant service. They can only hope that the price of fuel will keep going up so that the rising cost of delivery will erode the price differential and let them keep their margins up.

Rebuttal to Singer's Collectivist Ethic

Peter Singer, in his How Are We to Live, approvingly quotes Aquinas to the effect that a starving man is justified in stealing bread. Singer glosses Aquinas's words as follows:

Property, in other words, has limits. ... There is no just title to retain surplus wealth when others are in dire need. Those in danger of starvation, or those who are coming to their aid, are entitled to take from those with surplus wealth.

I read How Are We to Live? carefully and mostly with
enjoyment, but when I reached this passage I had to stop and wonder: How can a mind of Singer's evident sharpness not see how this collectivist principle—that one in need can take, but the one in possession has no corresponding right to withhold—points directly to the destruction of all wealth and most civil order? To me it is clear that it leads directly to ethical issues that have no decent answer under any system, for example:

• Who, previous to the taking, is to adjudicate the quantity of “need” versus the degree of “surplus”? Who will say, you are needy, go ahead, but take no more than this, because only that much is "surplus"?
  
• 
  If you are willing to breach the right of property on no more than the assertion by the taker that his need is "dire," how can you still deny the owner’s assertion that the taken goods were not "surplus" but needed, or that they were intended for the aid of some other?
  
• 
  Since the owner and the taker are inevitably to be in disagreement about this—since both “need” and “surplus” are inevitably visible only in the eye of the beholder—who is to recompense the owner for his loss, if the taker is shown to not be in dire need, after all? Or if is shown that he took beyond the amount that would relieve his "dire" need, or took beyond the amount that is called (by someone) surplus?
  
• 
  The ability to take is extended to those who say they intend to "come to the aid" of the needy, but who will ensure that what they take, they do in fact pass on to some needy? And, who will tell them what percentage they can keep as “legitimate” expenses?
  
• 
  And if the owner chooses to defend his property with force, who is to step in and stay his hand at the moment of violence, saying, wait, this is a person in "dire" need? Or after the fact, who will rule on the corpse saying, this was not a needy person, so the death was not murder, or this one was truly needy, and the owner was wrong to stop him and now shall hang?
  
• 
  Again, if two takers come at once, or a hundred, how are they to settle who is neediest among them, to take first? What if the first, or first few, succeed in taking all there is; is it right then for the remaining needy ones to turn upon them and take from what they took?
  
• 
  The quote from Aquinas mentions “dire” need, probably assumed to be temporary; but what of the incorrigible, ever-needy one? (And you know there are such people.) Can he take, and when he has consumed (or wasted) what he took, and is again in need, how many times can he take?
  If one is willing to live a life of no self-respect (and some people are), can he go on taking forever?
  


• 
  If one knows that he will be taking again, must he always wait until the need is “dire,” or could he take in advance of "direness," or perhaps take periodically to a regular schedule?
  
• 
  How many thefts produce a verdict of "incorrigible"; and who keeps the tally; and who tells the incorrigibly feckless they must now stop taking, and enforces the rule?
  
• 
  What if the inhabitants of one village or city block band together and decide that they as a group are direly needy, and that the inhabitants of the next village or some other block are as a group possessed of a surplus. Can the first group legitimately go and loot the second?
  
• 
  What is to say that a country may not decide that it is direly needy (as many countries could truly say) and that another country is in surplus (as many are, from the viewpoint of the poor nations, although not in the view of their own citizens), and why would this determination not be a proper basis for a “just war”?
  

These few lines of Singer’s open the pit of the full horror that Libertarians correctly detect in any “collectivist” philosophy: when you put determination of the bounds of property into any hands but the owner’s, you destroy all security that property creates. The issue is starkly this: who decides which one’s “need” is dire, with respect to which other one’s “surplus”? There are only two answers that I know of (and Singer does not show me any third option):

1. 
   Open thuggery, in which the needy define themselves, and choose who will succor them based on hearsay, envy, and (inevitably) on their estimate of how well-defended the candidate succorers appear to be. This truly invites the war of all against all. Several West-African states have tested this scenario in recent years, with the role of “needy” played by young men in uniform.
   
2. 
   State communism, in which title to all property is held by the state, no private wealth is permitted, and value is allocated according to an official's assessment of need. This inevitably leads people to game the "need" system, trying to get more, and to hide property.
   

Nobody, however Libertarian, claims that money and the market are perfect; the claim is only that the market always exists. The difference between systems is the choice of the currency used: the value-neutral currency of money, or the currency of influence, force, cronyism, and corruption. If you desparately want to keep your property, and if the official who comes to evaluate your “surplus” wants his cock sucked, and you want to keep what you have, you get down on your knees. (This is not an example picked at random, but comes from a specific account of life in the old USSR.)

Is there no medium between the horror of full communism and the chillyness of an Objectivist anarchy? Of course there is, and you live in one, that is, in a country with a representative government and a moderately free market. All these countries leave much wealth to private exchange, but reserve some goods and powers to a government, to be retained for the future or to be distributed (in principle) according to a benign policy.

Societies like these are in perpetual dynamic balance between the poles of collectivism and anarchy, like a pencil balanced on a fingertip. The motions that maintain the balance are the disclosures of a free press and the constraints of an educated electorate. The gravity that forever tugs the pencil off vertical is need: the need of bureaucrats to consolidate their authority and regularize their systems; and the needs of a myriad special interests, commercial or idealistic, to attain some of the benefits held by the system, using payment in the non-monetary currencies of patronage, influence, and bribery.

Despite the ills of avarice that Singer describes at length, these countries have supported generations of citizens who have been, on the whole, relatively humane, sane, and healthy. They have done this despite (or perhaps from) being in a constant state of political turmoil from the multi-way tug-of-war between citizens of conscience, bureaucrats, and special interests.

A secular ethics should speak to the needs of these countries, if for no other reason that that is where the people can be found with the education, time, and freedom to understand a new ethics. A secular ethics should support humane instincts amid the dynamic, chaotic, babel of democratic politics. A thoughtless collectivism is not a recipe for an ethical state. Singer's failure to critique it in any way casts doubt on the quality of his ethical plan, and his failure to see its dangers casts some doubt on his perceptivity and common sense.

The Drive for (A Sense of) Control

(The following notes were made after reading two powerful papers: Rodin, J., and Langer, E., "Long-term effects of a control-relevant intervention with the institutionalized aged,: J. of Personality and Social Psychology, 35, 897-902, and Rothbaum, F., et. al, "Changing the world and changing the self: a two-process model of perceived control," J. of Personality and Social Psychology, 42, 5-37. Between them these show that a sense of having some control over the world is essential to well-being, and that the mind is quite prepared to deceive itself, if that is what it takes to achieve this sense.)

IMO, this basic need accounts for almost all magic, shamanism, a great deal of medical quackery such as theraputic touch, and is certainly a cornerstone of religion. Fundamental to religion is giving you designated, ritual “handles” on causality. Is there something you need, crave, or dread -- but you have no actual control over it? You pray, light candles, promise rosaries etc. Merely the sense of having handed the problem off to another, even the sense of having explained the problem thoroughly to a listening intelligence, assists in dealing with the bad affect that would otherwise go with having no (real) control over the outcome.

How can the unbeliever achieve a substitute for this? Is this why atheists are fewer in foxholes? The trench under bombardment is the ultimate state of being without control, you just wait in awful din to see if you are going to be blown up or not. If you can have even the tiniest belief that a prayer might affect the outcome -- ridiculous as that idea might seem when the battle is considered from an outside, objective viewpoint -- it’s better to pray than not. Not better because the prayer will achieve anything in the external world; nevertheless it might achieve something in the mental condition in which you leave the battlefield.

Any ritual meant to influence objective events, including especially rituals of sacrifice, but magical rituals, religious ones, etc, can be seen as an attempt to develop and maintain a sense of control over events when no such control exists along any physical or social channel. How do unbelievers get along without such rituals? Are they all especially healthy, carefree people? Are they all numbed against worry, unable to feel anxiety? I will forecast on this basis that active unbelievers are more often successful than not, healthy than not, living unthreatened lives.

Is this an achievement of the Existentialist view of the Absurd? To promote a frank, honest, and emotionally tolerable acceptance of the fundamental lack of control we really have over our lives? Look, Sartre said in effect: the universe can accidentally squash you or your loved ones like bugs at any moment and not know or care, and there isn’t a damn thing you can do for all your intelligence and insight. Isn’t that a hoot!? Armor yourself against the inevitable calamity by accepting right now that your continued existence is contingent on completely unreliable bases that you don’t even know about, much less control.

Detachment and Happiness

(Continuing to post small essays that turn up in my file clean-up... this is an early draft of a passage that eventually got into Secular Wholeness...)

Detachment: “this is what is” -- which can be stressed several ways, tho my primary meaning would make it: this is what is.

Regarding any phenomenon that you cannot personally influence, to judge that thing on any subjective scale -- good/bad, right/wrong, skillful/stupid, ugly/beautiful -- is first, futile, and second, harmful to yourself.

Judging is futile because -- given the first requirement, that this is a thing you cannot personally influence, such as the weather, the outcome of an election, or a stranger’s behavior -- your judgement does not and cannot alter the thing in any way. Your thinking it wrong, stupid, or ugly does not make it cease to be or improve it; and your thinking it right, moral, skillful, or beautiful does nothing to preserve or multiply it. Your judgement is simply irrelevant to what is.

Judgement is harmful because the very formation of a value-opinion creates an emotional pull or push that cannot be resolved (because, again, this is something you cannot influence). Say the weather is not what you hoped for: if you feel emotion about that (anger, distress, frustration) this emotion cannot be discharged. You have no choice but to eat your liver until the emotion subsides; or worse, until you vent your spleen on another person or thing, making an innocent bystander pay for how the weather makes you feel.

Emotion that results from value judgements of what you cannot affect is precisely the “stress” of the Second Noble Truth of Buddhism: suffering that is caused by craving for what is good but unobtainable, or by aversion to what is bad but unavoidable.

The only valid attitude you can take regarding a thing-you-cannot-personally-influence (TYCPI), that is, the only productive attitude and the only attitude supportable by logic, is the attitude of “this is what is.” It is a third attitude, distinct from liking and disliking, and not the same as either.

Some might call this third attitude “acceptance” -- as in, “you must accept things as they are” -- but that word carries a connotation of approval, or at least, of acquiescence, as if you agreed to the thing, or would permit it to be (supposing you had any say in it at all). The proper name for this third attitude is: recognition. You recognize what is: you see it, you comprehend it, as far as possible you understand the causes of its origination and its likely results. Recognition does not imply acceptance; does the pathologist who recognizes cancer in a biopsy approve of it?

Our society likes binary choices, and popular wisdom does not allow much room for this third attitude. People like to say things like, “If you aren’t part of the solution, you’re part of the problem,” and “Silence is consent.” If you simply acknowledge that something exists, in our culture, it is often taken to imply that you approve of its existence. “It looks as if it will rain on our school picnic tomorrow.” “Well, you don’t sound very unhappy about it, aren’t you sorry that the kids will be disappointed?”

One important reason our culture favors this sharp dichotomy and prefers not to acknowledge the detached stance is that cliques and causes draw their influence, and gain their memberships, from just this source: by creating strong value judgments in people’s minds, and then, having fomented a state of emotional distress, promising to release that distress in group action. This is what a political party is: a group organized around a set of stressful value judgments. The party creates the itch by trumpeting the badness of one set of things, and promises to alleviate the itch by political action. Political activists can never allow that it is possible to recognize an issue without also judging that issue. All their membership, contributions, and influence depend, first, on getting people to make value judgments about issues which those people can’t personally influence, and second, by making them feel emotionally bad about those judgments, and third, by promising to relax that emotional stress with group action -- if they will only contribute a little more time and money.

Recognition, the third stance, may also be wrongly called denial. If we do not form an emotional judgement, especially of a wrong or a tragedy, we may be accused of denying that it has happened. In psychology, the mechanism of denial is seen as having a practical purpose, of sheltering the mind from overwhelming emotion. That also is the purpose of recognition, but recognition does not deny, it investigates. It does not withhold vision; it is willing to see microscopically and comprehend; it only withholds judgement and emotion because they are useless.

Recognition may also be mislabeled resignation, passivity, or apathy. If we do not react to some event we cannot influence with conventional elation or dismay, other people use these words to say we are somehow incapable of feeling or reacting. But feelings and reactions, when they cannot possibly lead to change, are simply pointless. It is much more helpful to gain a cool, clinical understanding of the situation than to characterize it.

In fact it is not only possible but immensely valuable to be able to recognize and comprehend phenomena while not judging them on a value scale. You perform this act often, without realizing it amounts to anything special. Look at an ordinary chair, look at your thumbnail, or think about the public transit system in your city. You know a great deal about these subjects, and you could learn more if you needed to, yet you never form a value judgment about them. Is this a virtuous thumbnail, or a pretty one? A moral transit system or an ugly one? Not especially, either way. You understand these ordinary phenomena intimately; you could become expert on them if you needed to, and you do that while never judging them on any subjective scale of values.

The secret of detachment is to be able to form the same kind of clinical, intelligent, detailed knowledge about an issue that tugs at your emotions, but about which you can do nothing. As part of that kind of thinking, you may have to form a similarly detached, nonjudging appraisal, not only of events, but of other people’s actions and their emotions. As a result, someone may accuse you of being “cold.” Before you allow yourself to feel guilty about that charge, ask yourself why your accuser makes that accusation at all. That person wants to influence you: your nonjudgmental recognition calls into question the validity of the person’s own emotions; they have been made to feel isolated; and they want you to join them in their stress and validate it. This is the difficulty that every psychological therapist has to deal with: how to walk the line between being sympathetically understanding of someone else’s pain while not agreeing and joining in with that pain.

You may find that your emotional engagement, your hating or loving some particular issue, is hard to shed. In that case, you can adopt a clever trick used by meditation teachers: make the disturbing emotion itself the object of your attention. When a student tells a meditation teacher that restlessness or anger or some other problem is interfering with meditation practice, the teacher is likely to tell the student to make that very discomfort the focus of the meditation, telling the student to focus full awareness on the discomfort, to examine it, to locate it precisely in the body, to observe its every facet; in short, to create a nonjudgmental recognition of the disturbing emotion. When this is done, the emotion itself tends to evaporate. The same strategy can be used in practicing detachment. When you cannot emotionally detach from an issue, begin in a detached way to examine your own emotions about the issue. Recognize them and their sources and effects, grasp them as thoroughly as you understand, say, the catalog system at your library, or the tax code, or some other neutral subject you know well. Why does this issue perturb you? What will be the worst possible and best possible outcomes? If you felt differently about it, would the outcomes be any different? Is there any conceivable way you can have personal influence on the outcomes? If not, is there any conceivable preparation you can make to take advantage of, or improve, the good outcome, should it come to pass, or to shelter from the bad outcome or to minimize it for yourself or for others?

There are two purposes for developing detached recognition in this way. First, to reduce your own emotional distress, and to achieve tranquility. But second, to improve your own ability to act and to influence events. To say of something that is going on, “that’s bad, that’s evil, that’s stupid, that’s wrong” is to harm yourself by increased stress, first; but also we tend to stop at these judgemnts, as if making that pronouncement ended the matter. Even worse, we might judge incorrectly or superficially; and then, because we have our indignation to maintain, because we are emotionally invested in a belief that the event was evil (or wonderful), our judgment actually gives us a motive to not look too closely at the facts, or to look selectively for details that will sustain and justify our emotions.

The attitude of detached recognition permits us to go much further in understanding events and their causes and their outcomes. Everything, when examined, turns out to be more complicated than we knew at first. If we can dispense with the pain of negative emotion and the waste of time of futile judgement, we can look deeper into the why of the thing, and further forward in time. We might very well discover that there is an opportunity, after all, for us to influence this event, or its sequels, not now but after some time has passed, if we are tranquil and prepared. And even if that does not turn out to be so, we will at least be wiser in how things like this come about, and be able to see them forming sooner in the future. None of this penetrative wisdom is possible if we are wrapped up in the stress of judging the quality of the thing or supporting a judgment.

The Explanation Generator

I'm cleaning up and reviewing some old directories. Here and there in them I find little essays, and when one seems especially good, I'll repost hit here... This, in an email to a friend talking about myths and their roles in modern life:

Briefly: we have lots of modern myths. We swim in them. Even oral
ones -- see Snopes.com and all of Brunveld's "Urban myths" books.
These are all highly colored, emotional stories that people concoct
and tell each other.

My understanding of current thinking is that the human brain contains
a functional part (not necessarily located in specific anatomy) that
we could call the Explanation Generator.

The EG runs in parallel, examining everything we pay attention to,
trying to generate explanatory accounts for everything
we see. When it succeeds, we feel reassured. When it fails, it
kicks up a fuss and we feel discomfort, unease. We can't help it,
this is basic wiring -- we are literally hooked on explanations, crave them.

The EG isn't scientific, it doesn't work with logical, algorithmic or
structural explanations, it only does narratives. And it has a stock
of standard skeletal templates for these narratives. Most of those would be
learned, but -- if there are templates that emerge from genenome-directed wiring,
those would be the
Jungian "archetypes."

The EG is powerful and demanding. If it needs input, the imagination is only too
ready to help. The sense-interpretation circuits can even be
persuaded to select, distort, and reinterpret in order to shut the
EG up. And memory is a total whore to it.

Everything that happens in the brain after simple awareness, including
the generation of explanations, is
"constructed," filtered and extruded through our vocabulary of language
and cultural gesture. So every account that we come up with is unique
to our individual history and embedding in culture and time.

Explanatory accounts that address common issues, and which satisfy the
EGs of a community of people: these are myths, interpreting the word to
mean "an accepted public explanation for a widely-felt concern."

In this sense we are surrounded by myths, only we don't see them as
such because we call them "explanations." Some of our modern myths
have a sound factual or scientific basis, like modern cosmology or darwinian
accounts of life. The factual basis is valuable, but irrelevant to their function
as myths, which is to satisfy the junkie-craving for explanations
of big issues. (A factual basis is a good reason for choosing one
explanation over another, but doesn't change the reason for craving explanations
in the first place, and doesn't change the EG's fundamentally emotional reasons
for accepting an explanation and being satisfied with it.)

Economic myths: Marxism was a big one. Libertarian free-market
economics is an economic and moral myth that has vast influence in
America today. Each is an explanation of the past that offers
guidance for the future. In the field of religion, the Christian,
Islamic, Judaic, and Buddhist traditions each contain an
internally consistent explanatory narrative that addresses concerns
that trouble many people. (Again, this is not relativism, I do not say
that because they operate as myths they are equally desirable in
an abstract sense. I only say that all exist to fulfill the same
fundamental craving.)

Given the fundamentally organic, species-specific basis for this,
it shouldn't surprise to find common constructions across cultures.
Such commonality only goes to prove and clarify this basic myth-myth, or meta-myth,
that I've just expounded.

The Gibbon is Gutsy

Shortly after writing that post, the combination of fiddly fixes from the parallels and ubuntu forae worked and I could finish the install of Ubuntu 7.10, "Gutsy Gibbon," in the Parallels VM.

Since then I've run it a few hours, verifying the install procedure for Guiguts and I must say, Linux in the latest Ubuntu version is getting very polished. The minor annoyances I had previously have been mostly smoothed away.

It's so nice when things work...

Wasting time ...

Once I had a practical, if slight, reason for having a Linux system around. That was when I was writing a manual for Guiguts and wanted to be able to try it out in Linux as well as Windows and OS X.

I no longer maintain the manual but I had the virtual machine (VM) set up under Parallels and every week or so would fire it up and run the package manager to update it.

Then Ubuntu released version 7.10 ("Gutsy Gibbon") and it was supposed to be a big upgrade. Perhaps it had fixed some of the minor annoyances? I ordered a CD when it came, sat down to install it into the VM. Unlike all previous virtual installs, which had moved along flawlessly, this one flailed and flopped. Endless chatter about it on the Parallels and Ubuntu user forums. Something about the emulated video adapter causes the software to mis-configure the screen.

I've spent maybe four hours futzing with it, trying the different things people say worked. I even downloaded an evaluation copy of VMWare's Fusion, a different hypervisor product, to see if it would work better (it failed differently but still failed). All for a system that I don't really need. Why do I waste my time this way?