The Gift

How to be thankful, without anyone to be thankful to.

Remember back when Barack Obama told business leaders that "you didn't build that"? He meant that they didn't build all the public goods that their businesses relied on- the roads, the legal system, the military defense, the regulatory bodies creating fair playing fields, the educational system. Businesses make it their business to be as myopic as possible, feeding off "business models" that foist as much cost onto others- workers, the government, the environment- as amorally possible. That is the only way to survive.

We all are a little like that, with tunnel vision focused on what we need, what we can get, and what we can do. Sometimes it is all one can do merely to survive in a world that seems so difficult, competitive, even hostile. But at the same time, who and what are "we"? Is our next need the full measure of our place in reality? Our focus on doing and on agency is a highly misleading aspect of consciousness. It presupposes a gazillion things that we have no agency over, couldn't even if we tried, and couldn't understand in any case. We didn't make our bodies, for one thing. This biology that we think we are so familiar with is, to biologists, incredibly inscrutible. The trillions of cells, billions of neurons, gajillions of molecules, all work away in obscurity to make us go. But are we thankful? Rarely. We didn't make them. We don't even understand them, and a century or two ago, we really, really didn't understand them. They are utterly alien. Yet they are also us.

The story goes similarly with everything else about us- the flow of time and fate, the universe we live in. All these are, at a fundamental level, still hardly understood. Where did all the energy of the big bang come from? What did it expand into? Why did it cool into the particles of physics? Are there other universes? No idea. And even if we had an idea, we weren't there and didn't make it happen. We are recipients, not actors, in this most vast drama. We should not be distracted by the competitive social systems we live in, and the pressing difficulties of life, to forget that we, as the conscious "I" of an individual human, are mysterious feathers floating on rivers of unplumbed unconscious depths, in a rich forest of abundance, on a planet mild and pleasant, in a universe that rendered these provisions in fantastic plentitude, to us and possibly to countless other worlds as well.

The lilies of the field, well, they toil quite hard, actually, in their own way. But that may not be apparent to the homilist, and took some science to figure out.

There needn't have been an intention behind all this- to conjure a cosmos, and evolve life. Indeed, it is rather unlikely given the little we do know. At any rate, we have speculated long and hard enough to know that more speculation isn't going to get us very far, or obtain any brownie points. We are, regardless, the benificiaries of these gifts. This is a, perhaps the, fundamental religious feeling- thankfulness for the infinite powers and entities that we embody, experience, and rely on, yet have precious little understanding of- the mysterium tremendum.

Does this all imply god? No. God is a rather pathetically inferred solution to, or better yet, an anthropomorphization of, this mystery. As social beings, and products of families, we in a primitive state might naturally ascribe the vast mysteries that undergird our existence and far outstrip our conceptions to a personified father figure (or mother, if one's society happens to be matriarchial). No error could be more obvious. Science has served to push the boundaries of mystery a little farther out, from a choking fog where virtually everything is obscure, to a view that goes billions of light-years across the universe. What all this has shown is, that as far as we can see, mechanism is the rule. Our bodies are mechanisms. The universe is a mechanism. Diseases are not the vengeance of jealous gods, nor is the weather. The inference of god has not held up well over time- not well at all. Yet that does not mean that we shouldn't be thankful for the gifts we receive, which are so rich on our life-giving planet. Nor that we shouldn't strive to pass them on rather than destroying them in the current moment of greed, by our thoughtless overpopulation and immiseration of this world.

• Another soul eaten by the president.
• And his base... the truly demented.
• The ideology of business naturally shoots itself in the foot.
• Failure of public management angers some.

Cliques of Civilizations

Huntington's "Clash of Civilizations", twenty five years on.

Is America great again, yet? Well, that didn't turn out quite as promised. China is ascendent as never before, having vanquished a virus that we simply can not get our heads around. China is also putting the screws on its neighbors, assimilating Hong Kong, building island bases in the South China sea, ramping up soft power efforts in its Belt and Road and other diplomatic initiatives, and slowly building the sphere of influence that it merits as the largest nation in the world. In comparison, we are a laughing stock, our incompetent leadership high and low exposed for all to see.

It is quite a different world from that of Francis Fukuyama's "End of History", which imagined that international conflict would disappear with the close of the Cold War and the march of liberal democracy across the globe. Instead, while democracies did advance significantly in the first post-cold-war decade, progress since has stalled. An alternate model of governance has taken root out of the communist ashes- an authoritarian capitalist fusion of the Russian and Chinese types.

Numbers of democracies rose after the Cold War, then plateaued.

Samuel Huntington wrote his "Clash of Civilizations" in response to Fukuyama, offering a conservative, realist view of history as continuing apace in the post-cold-war era on a very traditional basis- that of civilizations, rather than of ideologies. Donald Trump seems to have read (or skimmed, or heard about, or heard about "people" talking about) Huntington with some attention, since his instincts hew quite closely to Huntington's views. Rather than liberal democracy resplendent and ascendent, Huntington proposes that the new world order will be a traditional sphere-of-influence model, centered on the core civilizations of the world- Western, Chinese, Orthodox, Indian, and Islamic. Africa is so far behind that it does not count seriously in Hungtington's scheme, though that may change a few decades on. The Catholic/Hispanic cultures of Central and South America also do not count for very much in his scheme. These civilizations are based on different religions and ethnic histories, and are centered on core states. The US is the core state of the West, (though the EU may take over that role sooner than anticipated!). Russia is the core state of the Orthodox / Slavic civilization, India is virtually the only Hindu state, and China clearly leads the Sinic or East Asian world.

The Islamic world lacks a clear core or leading state, with Saudi Arabia, Iran, Turkey, and Pakistan all in contention, a contest that is still nowhere near resolution, and involves starkly different visions for the future of Islamic culture. Islam is a special case not only for its lack of a central or core state that can lead and moderate its civilization at large, but also for its general lack of effective governance, and its peculiar historical position of having had its golden age almost a millenium ago, after which the West gained progressive, and eventually overwhelming, superiority. The bitterness this engenders has not been channeled, as in the Asian tigers, into competition and often superior performance vs the West, but rather into regression, grievance, fundamentalism, and a rededication to its own cultural superiority. Thankfully, Huntington forecasts that by about now, the demographic bulge of Islam, which had been fueling much of its internal discontent and violent lashing-out, would moderate and lead to a less combative general culture- a prediction that I think is slowly coming to pass.

One of the most interesting themes of Huntington's thesis is the clique-like banding together of nations with similar civilizations. Unlike the American ideal of international affairs, where all people everywhere just want democracy and plenty of shopping, Huntington sees nations aligning on cultural terms, like people do in many other settings, like high schools, religions, neighborhoods, and so much else. The Balkan wars are, for Huntington, exhibit A. Each contestant was backed by its cultural kin among the larger countries, with the Muslim Bosnians supported by a variety of Muslim states from Saudi Arabia to Iran, the Orthodox Serbs supported by Russia, and the Catholic Croats supported by Germany, particularly the German Catholic church. Likewise, in the first Gulf war, Huntington writes that, while several Muslim countries were, under Americal pressure, part of the military alliance against Iraq, the Arab street was uniformly anti-West and pro-Saddam. His description of these sentiments and how they sapped their government's respective resolve about the war and its aftermath was sobering, and should have given the next Bush administration pause in its headlong rush into its own crusade against Iraq.

Another corollary of the civilizational world as Huntington sees it is that some cultures are odd nations out. Japan is a prime example. Clearly, Japan exists in the Chinese general sphere of influence. But Japan has been closest to the US since its defeat in World War 2, has adopted many Western attitudes and practices, a highly functional democracy among them. It also, through its wartime and pre-war imperialism, has earned the virtually undying hatred of China and Korea, among other countries in the region. What will its future be like in a world where China takes prime position over all of East Asia? Can it band together with anti-Chinese fellow coutries like Taiwan, Vietnam, South Korea, and Australia to create a balancing anti-Chinese bloc? That looks generally unlikely, partly due to negative US leadership, and partly due to the obvious problems it entails, ending in some kind of vast war.

China's sphere and local conflicts.

What China wants as the regional, even global, leader, is actually quite unclear. The history of Korea is instructive in this regard. China has been Korea's big neighbor for at least 2,000 years, and has repeatedly enforced vassalage, favorable trade, and cultural exchange. But it never took over and tried to exterminate Korean culture the way the Japanese did before World War 2. China clearly seeks control over some of its fraternal cultures, like the Tibetan and Uyghur, and now Hong Kong and ultimately Taiwan. But Vietnam? What China wants out of other nearby cultures such as Vietnam, Korea, and Japan is not entirely clear, and some kind of vassalage relationship may suffice. Perhaps seeing the Yuan as the reigning currency, along with other clearly friendly military and trade relations would be enough for long-term stability.

More darkly, some nations in Huntington's system are "torn", in that they partake of more than one culture and therefore face diffcult conflicts, internally and externally. Yugoslavia was an obvious example, but there are many others. Turkey is one, in that it has for decades tried to enter the EU and be a Western country. But with increasing Islamization, this is increasingly off the table, and Turkey is moving towards leadership as a modernizing influence within Islam rather than being a little fish in the EU and lapdog of the US security establishment. Russia has also made its definitive choice, after centuries of conflicting sentiments about the West, turning against a possible turn to NATO and the EU in the post-Soviet moment, and retrenching as leader of the Orthodox civilization. Was it ever realistic to think that Russia might become a normal, Western parliamentary democracy, after its communist collapse? Perhaps not, though our wretched economic advice surely didn't help.
 
Huntington closes on very Trumpian themes, warning that increasing Hispanic immigration to the US may make us into a "torn" culture, less cohesive in international and other terms. Multiculturalism is clearly the enemy. He spins a truly bravura dystopian scenario towards the end of the book, where China and Vietnam spark a world war (with some blundering US intervention) that spirals out of control, Russia and India allying with the West. The US is hobbled, however, by Hispanic dissention, which causes a lack of fighting resolve, and we settle for negotiation! Yikes!

Much of what Huntington wrote was quite precient, especially in the turns that both China and Russia have taken against the West and towards rebuilding their traditional geographic and cultural spheres of influence in clearly civilizational terms. He warns against American universalism- the idea that everyone wants what we want, we just have to invade their countries and give it to them. That way lies imperialism, pure and simple. And his warning about unity in the US is significant. We need to continue to expect and encourage assimilation of immigrants, not social and political balkanization. But it turns out that the principal risk of disunity in the US comes from the native rich, not the foreign poor. The logic of hyper-capitalism and its related ills of political and media corruption has created a plutocratic class that treats the rest of the country as a vulture capitalist project- a place for tax breaks, pet politicians, flagrant propaganda, and walled compounds served by a feudal workforce. That is what is killing our institutions and destroying our standing in the world.

• Sunk costs and lost souls- Trump's enablers.
• Such as Sessions. But GOP voters are just as complicit.
• Should Australia be independent?
• Man or woman?
• The rich getting richer...
• Small steps in the right direction.

A Crisis in Public Management

What is the common thread between the US SARS-Cov2 crisis and the Black Lives Matter movement? Dysfunctional public management.

It is curious how the George Floyd crisis came up during the Covid 19 pandemic. Were people a little stir-crazy? Perhaps. Were people fed up with the callous culture war being waged from the White House? Definitely. But I think there is more to connect these crises- deep problems in American public management. Our problem with the pandemic speaks for itself. While many other countries, large and small, have eradicated this virus and proceeded to re-open their economies, (Canada, New Zealand, Singapore, China, Taiwan, to name a few), we obviously have not, and continue to lead the world in new cases, day in and day out. What is wrong?

I think the main thing that is wrong is that our public health officials do not know what they are doing, and do not even conceive of the problem correctly. Their ambition has been to flatten the curve to reduce hospital congestion. This sentences us to, at best, a continous slow burn of viral cases, spiraling up when people get too careless, and quieting down after lockdown rules are re-instituted. It is clear that public officials completely lacked the ambition to fully contain and eradicate the virus. Doing that would require mobilizing an army of contact tracing and containment deputies, and enforcing quarantines on traced contacts, possibly with phone-based apps. We in Northern California had an ideal opportunity during the April-May time frame to fully control the virus. But did we? Not at all. The public officials contented themselves with testing and publicizing the daily trickle of cases, and having the police close public parks and other venues of congregation. Never was eradication even in the conversation, nor the appropriate powers and staff contemplated, as far as I can tell. Then, when the economic cost of even these half-hearted lockdown and distancing measures became too much, we re-opened, with the natural result of a rising tide of cases.

By not even conceiving that they should and could mount a total eradication campaign, our officials, from the local to the national levels, gave up before the game even began. And why was there this complete lack of ambition? First, we have not been used to this kind of disciplined, society-wide activity. Our social, not to mention political, system, is so atomized and uncohesive, dedicated to individualism, that an actually effective Chinese-style lockdown seems to have been inconceivable. But still, Canada has managed it at least partially- our closest neighbors, geographically and culturally.

Another obvious issue is the lack of a coherent health care system. The public health portion of it is an atrophied vestige, devoted more to bureaucratic stasis and policy quibbling than to actual intervention, uncertain whether it is a safety net for the poor, or a guardian for everyone. Higher officials should have realized that the given infrastructure would be and remains completely unable to mount the effort needed- which is thorough testing, contact tracing, and enforced isolation of contacts. A new organizational infrastructure needed to be built immediately, which was done in other countries, but not here. This is an obvious failure of public management, both in imagination and in execution.

In China, green means go.

Just as the pandemic shines a ghastly light on our public health organizations, the death of George Floyd, and the many prior cases of brutality and murder shines a similar light on another sector of public management- the police. Most police do great work in difficult conditions. Problems arise from a (large) sub-culture of callous disregard, inherited from Jim Crow and other authoritarian elements, combined with weak public management. One issue is unionization. Public employee unions have been toying with the electoral system for decades, running influential campaign ads and altering local elections and public policy to suit their interests. No wonder that we now have a public pensions crisis, absurdly early retirements, double dipping, secrecy for key records, and a litany of other abuses of the public purse and trust. Policies that make it virtually impossible to fire public employees are only one part of the problem, but one that is most central to the George Floyd case. Unlike the situation in public health, the rogue policemen are overzealous, rather than under-zealous. But the management issue is similar- who runs these organizations, do they have the full public interest in mind, whom do they serve, and do they have effective control over their employees? Answers to these questions are not pretty.

We are faced with two brands of corruption when it comes to public management. One is the Republican brand, which hardly cares about the public interest at all, only private interests. Anything they can do to drown the govm'nt in the bathtub, and allow natural feudalism to reign, giving social and economic power to the powerful, is OK with them. This means supporting white power and a traditional racial hierarchy, attracts sympathetic authoritarian types to police forces, and then winks at their indiscretions in enforcing the "natural" order.

The other is the Democratic brand, which cares so much about public service that it gladly ties itself up in knots of bureaucracy and procedure (and pensions, and consultants, and politically correct meetings, due process, and translators, and environmental review, and...) ending up incapable of accomplishing anything, or holding anyone to account. The Democratic brand is also pro-union, adding a whole other level of dysfunction and mismanagement to an already difficult situation. To bring in yet another example, the California high speed rail project is an object lesson in this style. Tens of billions of dollars have been poured down a bureaucracy dedicated to good pensions, due process, poor land acquisition practices, and continual underestimation of the fiasco they are participating in. The expected path of this train now looks more like an amusement park ride than a bullet train, and will only go from Los Angeles to somewhere in the central valley. As a citizen, it is incredibly frustrating to watch this waste and ineffectiveness.

The countries that have been most successful against Covid-19 have been the most cohesive societies, either by nature or by authoritarian force. Cohesiveness correlates with good public management, since it represents shared objectives and understandings about values and ways of doing things. Cohesiveness helps smooth the way between ideals and implementation. The US stands, clearly, as one of the least cohesive societies in the world, particularly after the trauma of the current administration. Is there strength in diversity? Up to a point. But there is more strength in unity.

• We are not good at collective action, at least these days.
• Public health.. what is that? Is it safety net care for the poor, or is it health for everyone?
• Thoughts on building better public institutions.
• Happy thoughts on the current administration.

How's Your Relationship With Jesus?

Review of American Gospel, Christ Alone- an evangelical hate letter to prosperity- and happy-gospel televangelists.

As an atheist, my relationship with Jesus is not very good. I regard him as historically questionable, and if a real person, then wildly misinterpreted and inflated by the subsequent mythological process that resulted in Christianity and Islam. Oh, and also dead, really most sincerely dead. But just for fun, I watched a film provided by my library- American Gospel, Christ Alone. It features a parade of mostly white evangelical male pastors excoriating the prosperity gospel- the Joel Osteins, Benny Hins and Creflo Dollars of televangelism. They get rather worked up- Why? Aren't there actual atheists and heathens about, or sick and destitute to help? As usual, internecine conflict is the most bitter (remember early Christianity, or the refomation and counter-reformation). It is about an attention market where conventional evangelicals, Baptists, etc. compete perhaps mostly closely and intensely with this other theology that is so uncomfortably close to their own. Though Mormons come in for a few potshots as well, as do Catholics.

For, did Jesus die for your sins, or your happiness? Is faith enough, or would a donation help? It is a fine line, really. Even if one takes the conventional, Lutheran attitude that faith alone, scripture alone, and Christ alone are sufficient for salvation and whatever else is putatively desirable in worshipping and satisfying god, why do we want to satisfy god at all, or want salvation, or want our sins redeemed? Might that be to make us happy? To be righteous, better than one's neighbor, part of the tribe, and to have that great insurance policy, heading to the big family reunion in the sky? There is no getting around the happy part of the gospel. It is supposedly good news, not bad. And the parts that are difficult, like giving up one's family and possessions, and waiting in penance for the end of the world? Well, who takes that seriously? Not the evangelicals.

Creflo Dollar freely misinterprets the Bible. "Provision" is no part of the original. Rather, the kingdom is heaven, and the very next verse is.. "Sell your possessions and give to the poor. Provide purses for yourselves that will not wear out, a treasure in heaven that will not be exhausted". But do the Evangelicals take this rank communism seriously either? Hardly.

The prosperity gospel may be gauche and low class, aimed like a heat-seeking missile at the downtrodden who need something a little more concrete to hope for than snooty biblical correctness and heavenly rewards. But it is not so far from the original message of Christianity, which offered a tight-knit community along with the sugarplums of heaven in return for the acceptance of Christ as one's totem in opposition to all the other totems available, particularly the official ones of the Roman Empire. And those early Christian communities were no monastaries. They were full of normal people, including merchants, who benefited from the commercial networks and moral creeds taking shape in this church. While the creed had an ideal of communism and anti-materialism, in practice it quickly came to an appreciation of money as a beneficence, for clergy, and for alms and other good works. Does that make money good?

There was a long tangent in this film about health and sickness. The prosperity preachers generally have a sideline in faith healing. Which is likewise low-class and disreputable. Evangelicals, in contrast, portray themselves as demurely thanking god for everything good that happens, and if in the mood, thanking for the trials and tribulations as well, all without expecting that prayer is going to help. Nothing so gauche as a transactional prayer! But lo, what happens after every tragedy and in every evangelical church? Thoughts and prayers go out to those in hardship, with a wink-wink that god presumably must be paying attention, big as "he" is. It may not be as callous as selecting the not-very sick for dramatic faith healings and speaking in tongues, but the principle is exactly the same. We pray, and someone should listen, and all that should lead to results, in a the world we want to see, hopefully here, but if not, then hereafter.

So, high or low, it is all equally nonsense in the service of personal comfort and mass psychotherapy, whether one has the fancy degrees to go with one's Biblical references or not. The film is positively crawling with citations- cherry picked quote after quote, to say (among many other things) that faith alone is sufficient, no dollars required to enter into heaven. But the televangelists have plenty of quotes too, and so do the Jews! Rather contrasting belief systems can all draw from the same well, and all the rhetorical hellfire and brimstone isn't going to resolve these endless contradictions. Second, and more important, what on earth does god want? That is what this whole drama is about. But after a god treats his originally chosen people with derision and scorn, then issues himself in human form to conduct some rather cryptic repentence preaching, and then has himself killed in grisly fashion in order to show the world that he is the soverign king of all creation... Well, no wonder there are various interpretations.

It is not a focus of this film, which is full of self-righteous pastors, but religious people often proclaim the inscrutability of god. And that would be a good place to leave the subject, rather than saying in one's next breath what god wants, how we miserable sinners are both so important to him (always him!) that we have to do what he or she says, but at the same time how complete he or she is, great, omnipotent, and omniscient, needing nothing whatsoever. The sheer idiocy of these contradictions and paradoxes are generally meant to cow the humble sinner under the eagle eye of the charismatic pastor. Heaven forbid that a thought enters one's head. For, back in the day, pastors used to be the most educated and intellectually capable members of society. Similarly, American protestantism has settled on having a "personal" relationship with Jesus, or, if one wants to be ambitious, with god. The therapeutic value of meditation, mantras, and lucid dreaming are real enough. But communing with dead people, voids, and imaginary friends? Really? It is a method of mass and self-hypnotic propaganda- pure nonsense.

So, spew vitriol on each other as much as they like, but what we are seeing here is simply upper-class versus lower class charlatanism at loggerheads. Conventional pastors uphold conventional (reformed) understandings, like our sinning depravity and undeserving natures that can only be saved by faith and repentence - that is what god wants. Since their parishioners tend to be well-to-do, conservatism is quite sufficient for this world, and faith can be directed mostly at the next. (Plus, the collection plates fill up without any crass appeals to transactional prayer.) But the unconventional pastors speak to a more downtrodden demographic. Sure, they prey on their hopes and dreams, but they also strengthen those hopes by saying that god is not the disinterested, damning character you hear about in mainline churches. No, he is powerful, and healing, and helpful.

The film ends with the wife of the producer proclaming that despite her many health woes, (which she wouldn't dream of asking god to fix!), she knows Jesus is in her heart, and that makes her super-happy. That, and having a delightful house, husband, and kids. Oh, and a tube sticking out of her nose, presumably for oxygen, and some more tubes out of her insides, for feeding. But thankful for all the clever people who researched the feeding mixture, and invented the tubes, and manage their sterility, and who performed the operations, and who serve her at the hospital? Not a word about all that. It is Jesus in her heart that she is thankful for. And by the way, they could use some money.

• Enter your prayer request here, and god will answer.
• BBC looks askance.
• Christianity Today is alarmed. And no, God does not want you to be happy.
• Treatments for Covid-19 will probably save us before a vaccine does.
• People who know, know creeping fascism.
• Recessions are damaging and unnecessary.
• What it is like working for a weasel. Or being an idiot.
• History and Henry Wallace.
• Why aren't the gun nuts equally vociferous about women's rights against state interference on their most personal and significant actions?