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?

Iran: Object Lesson of the Enlightenment

Review of Iran: A Modern History, by Abbas Amanat. Part 2- the contest between autocracy, democracy, and theocracy.

Has history ended? Did all countervailing ideologies give up and yield to democracy as the universal form of government and does peace now reign? Apparently not. Indeed, democracy is embattled in many areas as it has not been in decades- even in the US, whose institutions are under sustained attack by a renascent autocratic / plutocratic coalition. Iran has exemplified the contest between the ideals of democracy, human rights, state stability, authority, and religious sentiment in ideologies of government over many centuries. It has been positioned at some remove from, though in durable if not tragic contact with, the European cultures that fostered the Enlightenment in all its aspects. What has been their impact, and what are we to make of the current result?

Amanat provides a magisterial overview of Iran's recent history, (recent meaning since 1500, which leaves out a vast portion going back to antiquity and beyond), focusing on its political systems as they range between autocracy and revolution, growth and decline, consolidation and decadence. Iran was heavily influenced by Europeans starting in the mid-1800's, as the great game got underway. While Russia was unapologetically autocratic, making its menace clearly lineal with previous contests against other invaders, Britain, and later the US, brought a new level of hypocrisy as imperial powers founded on Enlightenment ideals and practices, which were, however, not for foreign consumption.

The Qajar monarchy in the 1800's managed a weak position relatively well, keeping Iran intact and largely sovereign, if also continually corrupt, indebted, and backward. But finally, the modernist winds were too strong, and a constitutional revolution established a constitutional monarchy and parliament in 1906, then again in 1909. This parliamentary system never fully found its footing, however, tussling with the Shah for power, and buffeted through disastrous invasions and occupations during world war 1. It was sort of a Weimar Republic, never attaining full power in military or political terms.

But it embodied the idea of a Western-style, constitutional, democratic system. The addition of an Islamic advisory council was an afterthought and never seriously implemented during this era, since the ulama, or community of clerics, was generally content with its long-standing role of loose collaboration with the secular power, tending to a narrow sector of jurisprudence over religious, business, and personal matters, on a somewhat freelance basis. While the Shi'i clergy had occasionally led protests and fostered limited political activism in the face of gross injustices and suffering from their base among the small merchant class and urban poor, the idea of becoming a full partner in government, or its comprehensive adversary, did not cross their minds, since government was fundamentally unclean and not worthy of theology, short of the return of the twelfth Imam. The clerics were also fully invested in the somewhat corrupt system, having gotten quite rich from their segment of the economy.

But the trauma of the Pahlavi era, broken in the interval between father and son by a hopeful but chaotic constitutional period under Mohammed Mosaddegh, set the clergy- at least some of it- on a more activist path. Both Shahs were dedicated modernizers, dismissive of religion and destructive to the livelihoods and institutions of the clergy. Along with other islamists in the Sunni world like Qutb, they (that is, the less quietist elements, spearheaded by Ruholla Khomeini) started generating a comprehensive critique of modernism, the Pahlavi apparatus, and the West as antithetical to Islam, which it quite obvoiusly was and remains. They found that they still had enormous political power and public sentiment on their side, not among the intelligentsia, but among the common people who had been coming to the mosques, and requesting judgements, and paying their dues all along. All this was seized by Khomeini, who in 1963 gave fiery sermons denouncing the Pahlavi regime, and was duly detained, almost executed, and then exiled to Iraq. The Shah ran an economically successful few decades, but also a brutal secret service and a grandiose view of himself and the dynasty so severely out of step both with native sentiment and with the democratizing / human rights trends in the West, suddenly put on the top of the table by Jimmy Carter.

Faithful Shi'ite Iranians were interested in more spiritual fare than what the Shah offered, and the clerics, through Khomeini, gave them visions of an ideal society, rectified through "dear Islam" to resolve all the injustices and degradations of the Pahlavi era. In return, Khomeini was first elevated to the unprecedented status of "Grand Ayatolla", and then ultimtely to "Imam" status, which had never been done before, the twelfth Imam having been the last of the set, now in occultation. So the revolution rolled on with inexorable power, but also with inexorable revolutionary logic, piling up bodies and hypocrisies as the imperatives of staying in power overwhelmed all other scruples. For example, Amanat mentions with some acidity that, while centuries of Shi'i jurisprudence may not have foreseen the problems of writing a constitution, running foreign policy, or operating a secret service, it had long dealt, and dealt with care and discretion, in contract and property law. But all that went right out the window as the new government "inherited" or expropriated countless businesses and personal properties, took over all major industries of the country, and distributed their management to family members, cronies and loyalists.

Diagram of the Iranian government, from the BBC.

It is through the lens of the constitution and the cobbled institutions that have arisen in Iran that we can see the dialectic between Enlightenment principles and Islamic principles. Khomeini promised a democracy, where power would no longer be monopolized by a somewhat mad Shah. But it also had to be an Islamic democracy, "guided" by the clerics to retain purity and justice. The logic of all this resulted in a thoroughly theocratic state, where there is an interlocking set of instutions all run by the clerics, from the Supreme Leader to the Guardian Council, Assembly of Experts, and Expediency Discernment Council. Each are supervisory, with various veto and appointment powers, leaving the popularly elected parliament with little real power or even representative complexion, since its candidates are routinely disqualified by the Guardian Council for not being conservative enough.

In practical terms, this means that the system maintains just enough democracy to foster some hope and buy-in from some of the populace, while keeping complete control in the hands of the clerics. Will this end in utter corruption of both religion and government? It is difficult to say, but Iran has more of a functional democracy and republican system than many other Muslim countries, which is sadly not saying much. Those who reflect on the very origins of Islam and Shi'ism can readily see that theory of government is not a strong suit of this tradition. I see Khomeini as a demagogue- a Trumpian figure who promised the stars, offered a telling and comprehensive critique of the Pahlavi system, and had a genius for turning a phrase. But he did not promise a coherent and democratic program of governance, rather a messianic dream and relentlessly divisive politics. In the revolutionary process, he always played to the base, favoring extreme positions. A base whose core, there as here, is a religious element of great patriarchial conservatism and dismissive of intellect and compassion. He was fully behind the hostage-taking students, for instance, which solidified support at home while making Iran a pariah abroad.  Hate, of course, was and continues to be central to the Iranian theocracy, from the Great Satan (us), to the little Satan (the Iraq of Saddam Hussein), to the communist Tudeh party, to the Baha'i religion, which they particularly revile and persecute.

At first, the clerics worked with liberals to fashion a written constitution (a significant concession to modernity and Western ideas) and a civilian government. But as time went on, the many contradictions of this approach became apparent, since if the people were given real power, the clerics would lose theirs- that was a lesson of the first constitutions of the early 1900's, and again during revolutionary process in the 1970's and 80's, which saw many contestants for power. The clerics only won due to their cohesion and their ability, time and again, to move the masses with demagogic and messianic appeals.

So the Iranian clerics ended up in unknown territory, creating a government that had no Persian or Koranic precedent, other than putting clerics in charge of everything (including at the top, the monarch-for-life Supreme Leader), and hoping that their own formation, training, and institutions will keep them uncorrupted. At one dire point in the revolution, a hanging mullah suggested that his rather under-supported decisions didn't matter that much, since God would sort it all out in the end, sending those who deserved it to heaven. But by that logic, he should have killed himself first. It is always curious how those who supposedly believe in religion and the glories of its afterlife turn out to have a strong regard for their own lives in the here and now. One would think that meeting one's maker would be a more positive goal, rather than being a mere scrim for power politics in this fallen world.

Iran gets ranked just above China in the democracy index.

Anyhow, Iran has ended up with more torture, more executions, more war, a bigger secret service, a more intrusive state, and less freedom, than the Pahlavi era. It turned out that Islam is not a guarantee of good, let alone moral, governance. Islamic countries generally occupy the lower rungs of the democracy index, and other indexes of development and happiness. This while Islam portrays itself as a religion of peace, of mercy, and of the most exacting jurisprudence and scholarship. The revolutionary government of Iran dabbled in liberalism, and wrote up a semi-democratic constitution, and faced a culture of great diversity and intellectual depth. But in the end, authoritarian logic won out over traditional Shi'i quietism and over most Western trends, creating a sort of Shi'i Vatican writ large, with opaque committees of old bearded men running everything, with additional torture chambers and gallows.

Iran offers an object lesson why the interlocking lessons of the enlightenment are so important- why withdrawing religious projections, drama, and righteousness from the state, in favor of civic secularism, yields a more rational and humane way of life. Why even the most long-standing and cherished religious traditions and "scholarship", while they may serve as selective institutions to weed out the stupid and socially unskilled, are not conducive to the search for objective truth or even a marker of moral superiority.

All that said, the French revolution began with enlightenment principles, which did not prevent a similar revolutionary logic from sending it to appalling depths of brutality, injustice, and authoritarianism. Yet it also spread more liberal, anti-monarchical values throughout Europe during the Napoleonic era, and ended up, after decades of historical development, with true democracy in France and Europe. The whole point of political theory in the Enlightenment was to allow such development via a fundamental humanism and humility in the civic sphere and the state. Its antithesis is messianism of various sorts, from communism to Shi'i theocracy, (even atheist enlightenment, when driven to extremes!), which drives polarization, extremism, and totalitarianism. Iran may yet develop in a softer direction, after what is now forty years of theocracy, but that would take a substantial change of heart on the part of the current ruling class, and perhaps a reduced allergy to Western ideas.

• Happy Quds Day!
• Changing conceptions of masculinity...
• Right wing legal community is going over the deep end.
• It is not clear that California is ready to re-open. Graph of the week:

We Live in Each Other's Heads

Family, faith, abuse, and gaslighting- review of "Educated", by Tara Westover.

Memoir can be a powerful form, combining truth with the most personal urgency. Westover's coming of age saga tells of a prepper childhood spent far away from any school or doctor, in an isolated Mormon family in Idaho- a patriarchy of one. It was also idylic, with a mountain to themselves, horses, seven children, and the freedom roam and explore. The children, though not taught formally, were also free to roam intellectually, if they could do so on their own. The trajectory of Tara's childhood appears distinctly downhill, however, as she matures from carefree child to a girl who needs to be squeezed into the appointed role of a Mormon woman, wife, mother. The story revolves most strongly around the social pressures that she gradually comes to realize are choking her- love that curdles into control, so that time-honored roles are fulfilled, and life can go on as always.

The family eventually splits into two halves- three children who escape into the larger world, get educations, live independently, and are forced, because the family can love only those who are obedient, to break ties. And the four children who not just stay behind, but work for the family business. Tara has the most spectacular escape, getting a PhD in history at Cambridge, and using her scholarly skills to write this book which lays so much bare. She also learns a lot of philosophy ... and is no longer a Mormon.

Oh, how things have changed- the Oprah interview.

But it took a lot of agony, and some therapy, to get there. The core of the book is really about physical and mental battles with the male patriarchs- the father, Gene, and the brother, Shawn. The father is one of those cranky autodidacts who figure everything out for themselves, and then insist they are right (even writing blogs about it!) and speaking on God's behalf. He runs a junk yard, salvaging copper, iron, and other materials from junked cars in the most unsafe ways, getting various family members injured in the process. Finally, he manages to get himself half-incinerated by taking a blowtorch to unemptied gasoline tank, and, while surviving by the grace of his wife's diligent care, is hobbled for life. More striking, however is his prediction that the Y2K crisis will bring on the Days of Abomination. He is convinced that the end-times are near, society will break down, and they, on their mountain will happily be both safe and vindicated. Lectures on these themes go on endlessly. But as he and Tara watch TV that millennium night, nothing happens, and she sees him visibly diminish, brought down by a cruel reality.

The father provides the baseline fundamentalism and ultimate leadership in the family dynamic. But Shawn brings the muscle. His relationship with Tara has mostly been very close and positive. But it is also clear that he is a psychopath, and Tara's maturation brings out a dark, controlling and vindictive side. He makes a practice of calling her a whore for any transgression of the patriarchal code, then nigger if she has gotten dirty in the junk yard, then abusing her in cruel and physical ways. Afterwards, he says it was all in good fun, and she can just tell him to stop any time, right? We now call this gaslighting, though no one had a name for it back then. For a teen age girl, it was shameful, degrading, and confusing. And it is fully backed up by the family, since the father doesn't see anything wrong with a bit of horseplay and role enforcement, and the mother- well, the mother can not cross the father.

Years on, after some degree of consciousness raising, Tara has the temerity to call Shawn on his behavior. The father goes on an extensive campaign to close the family ranks, and finally comes to Tara to give he the climactic choice of the book- accept his priestly blessing, which is to say accede to the patriarchal hierarchy and squelch her own memories and growing self, or else be ostracized. Westover has told this story in excruciating detail in order to make sense of this moment, to show how powerful social control can be, capable of turning people against themselves and against their very knowledge of reality.

Why? The evolutionary argument is reasonably clear- people, living in social systems, need to have some shared understandings of each other and reality. These understandings are tied up with power and who gets to run these systems- whose interests are served. And it is historically clear that those who are disagreeable enough to buck the established narrative very often end up dead- burned at the stake, forced to drink the hemlock, run out of town, ostracized. The line between justice in some necessary civic sense, and totalitarian measures against deviance, impiety, and disobedience is not a clear one. It is a modern innovation to separate the state from religious conceptions of the social order, now leaving each religious community to police its own congregants with other tools. But over the long arc of human history and pre-history, these were closely intertwined, indeed indivisible. Being trapped in one's family and tribe meant getting along with its reality, whatever that might be.

Tara is almost crushed by the choice, and the dissonance of being loved by people who increasingly seem both untethered from reality, and intensely controlling of their communal version of it. She goes through years of depression and doubt, torn to the core between loyalty to family, and loyalty to what she is shaping as her new self, fostered on intellectual adventures that go unimaginably beyond what her former (and alternate) self could have achieved. Is it worth it? That is the frequent problem of waking up from a religion (or a family) - that one has to lose its comforts and support in order to understand it more fully and overcome its glaring limitations.

• You don't have to be smart to run a cult.
• Thanks, Tea Party.
• Stupidity is generally not the answer.
• How many times does this president need to be impeached?
• Bill Mitchell on the job guarantee, and on bandwagons.
• How's your sky?
• Some more nice piano.

Atheism, or Archetype?

Religion is built on a series of inborn archetypes and intuitions. Does that mean it is inevitable?

Religion is natural, but is it right? Increasing numbers of people in the US are giving up the practice and belief, if polls are to be believed. Hellfire and damnation is sure to follow, according to those left in the pews, at least those of the farthest evangelical congregations. As a student of Carl Jung, I appreciate the psychology of religion, seeing its processes as deeply reflective of our individual and communal psychologies, as well as the consequence of a complex evolutionary process whose aim has been as much social solidarity and reproduction as much, or more than, philosophical truth. At base, we are not rational beings, and follow a variety of themes and images, termed archetypes in the Jungian system, which persistently guide our dreams,  motivations, and cultures. We are not just economic units driven by profit and loss, but have richer dramatic lives and needs.

Father

What could be more obvious? We grow up in households with father figures who are unimaginably powerful. Food just appears, housing, furniture, love, care, and power and discipline. It is no wonder that, once we grow up, there is a father-shaped hole in our view of the world. In the usual patriarchial culture, the father stands alone, at the top, as both creator and moral disciplinarian, in an archetype that is expressed over and over again in cultures throughout the world, from Zeus to Allah, as it is in our political systems naturally as well. But the mother archetype is also in play, especially in Catholic and Hindu cultures, in the Marys and various powerful devas. Is it possible to see the world without using these instinctive lenses? That is what the scientific revolution and enlightenment attempted, in a cognitive revolution that remains, evidently, incomplete. Take prayer. In the form of requesting something from the father in the sky, it is pathetically immature and retrograde, however understandable in primitive conditions of complete existential mystery. On the other hand, some meditation, joy, and gratitude for the wonders of existence are surely healthy and consistent with mature knowledge of where we stand in the universe. Involvement with this archetype reflects quite directly how far one has gotten along the developmental road from childhood to maturity.

Heaven

The afterlife used to be a rather drab, depressing affair, in the classical Greek and Jewish systems. Then it was progressively gussied up into a lottery jackpot, in the Islamic and Christian systems. Buddhists and Hindus also find life after death, in the form of reincarnation, to be absolutely central to their philosophies. The magic of consciousness is incredibly hard to give up, and hard to get rational perspective on. It takes stringent dedication to naturalism and the evident facts of the world to accept, deep down, that death is really going to be the end- of everything. One need only think about animals- they are obviously conscious, and there are levels of consciousness all the way down the scale of evolution, to infinitesimal, then finally to nothing at all. How does that work, other than in direct proportion to their physical, brain-based endowments? What could be more clear, and in stark contravention of our intuitive and (weirdly) hopeful dream of life after death?

Tribe

We are not just endowed with intellect, but with a social nature, which focuses our striving and loyalty on the tribe. Our tribe is right and good, theirs is bad and wrong. Tribalism founds and plagues every new religious sect or philosophical school, which strains to show how it is right and its predecessors wrong. Jung vs Freud, Analytical vs Continental, Shiite vs Sunni, in endless profusion. Religions lack even the veneer of factual basis which characterize other divides like political polarizations or academic disputes. Doctrine, orthodoxy, and heresy are freely defined by whoever has social power. If one's village is Evangelical, woe to Catholics. If one's family is Seventh-Day Adventist, mere contact with outsiders is forbidden. Tribes have totemic symbols and artistic traditions as part of their identification / bonding apparatus, tokens of the archetypal processes at work.

Magical or zodiacal symbols in an Islamic Book of Wonders, circa 1400. 

Magic

Living in an enchanted word is natural, and wonderful. We all start there in childhood and treasure the dramatic, humanistic power of seeing the world through archetypal lenses- in animals with special totemic powers, crystals that heal, trees that listen. This is truly where traffic with archetypes is most fluid and explicit- bringing dreams to narrative life. Religious superstition raises this drama to existential levels, putting the magic on a celestial level of god(s), all-powerful father figures, and alternatives of eternal hell-fire or bliss. The chances of all this actually describing any kind of reality is nil- we are talking total fantasy. But its evident grip on billions of people shows just how powerful magical thinking is and how far we are from being rational.

Truth

All claim truth, but few prove it. Religions are notorious for splitting into sects, each possessing the final truth, the real story. Interestingly, atheists do not splinter in this way. There is plenty of bickering, about what humanism entails or is, how liberal humanists should be, etc., but there are no Seventh-Day atheists, or Twelver atheists, or other miscelleneous schools. Communism was atheistic, but was in truth a quasi-religious, authoritarian cult all its own. Once one has discarded attachment to these archetypes and the theologies they underpin, and to the need for truth as a matter of self-identification, why then it is easier to agree on what is actually true, as well as on the many areas where we just don't know, without the need to make up stories. This need, a dire need, for answers, especially to "big" questions, is a tipoff that we are dealing with archetypal energies, not with a rational level of thought.

One could compare atheism to the concept of nirvana in Buddhism and Hinduism- the release from the cycle of rebirth, from attachment to the archetypes, and escape to a level of intellectual / emotional freedom. Escape from rebirth is implicit, since the atheist doesn't believe in rebirth, heaven or afterlife at all. It focuses attention on this life, this moment, and compassion here rather than later. But to escape the causes of suffering, (especially the infliction of suffering upon others!), by regarding the archetypes intellectually and skeptically, and by distancing one's self from them, is far more important. To leave behind the seductive entanglements of archetypal belief and the often-abusive social relations they entail is personally momentous, and a healing balm for a planet full to the brim with faithful dogmatists.

• One moving, harrowing, story of escape.
• Viral data dump from a skeptic.
• Administration cut funding for surveillance before outbreak.
• Graph for New York.
• Unemployment-ocolypse.

The Extermination of Tibet

China is culturally cleansing Tibet. "Seven Years in Tibet", by Heinrich Harrer, and "My Land and My People", by the Dalai Lama.

It may be falling off the world's radar screen, but Tibet remains a tragically oppressed land, well worth our remembrance and sympathy. Two books, "Seven Years in Tibet", and "My Land and My People" describe the heartbreaking slide from a happy, innocent, and isolated region to the Orwellian horrors that succeeded and continue today. One of the first significant acts of the new communist government of China, fresh from its civil war against the government that actually faught the Japanese, was to fulfill not any orthodox communist aims or development for its people, but the most rapacious and ancient ambition of Chinese governments, to subjugate its neighbor to the West, Tibet. Amid a blizzard of lies, China invaded the virtually defenseless state, oppressing Tibetans from the start in an ever-escalating war of cultural extermination. After almost ten years of trying to get along with the overlords and calm the waters, amid general rioting, the Dalai Lama fled in a dramatic escape from occupation, to welcome refuge in India, where he and the Tibetan exile community remain today.

Tibet was, frankly, a medieval culture, with economic relations ranging from nomadic to feudal. But medieval in the best sense, of a people thoroughly engaged in a set of archetypes that yielded a richly nourishing, dramatic life experience as well as a durable social structure. Tibetan Buddhism is very demanding, taking a fair fraction of men and resources into monasteries where they live off the rest of population and devote themselves to philo/theological hairsplitting. But they also devote themselves to various traditional arts, and most of all to the cultivation of peace and compassion- the touchstones of Buddha's solution to the suffering of this world. After a long and martial history, Tibet eventually put itself under the control of its most respected leaders, the Lamas, creating a system that was peaceful and benevolent, if also hidebound and conservative.

Take the story of how the current Dalai Lama was found and put in power. It is a veritable fairy tale of portents, dreams, signs and wonders. It has a sort of Wizard of Oz quality, which obviously resonanates, not only with us as a romantic tale, but with Tibetans as a great origin myth. And one can make a case on a practical level that choosing a humble and obviously bright peasant child to rule one's land may be a superior method to one which relies on the most ambitious people to sell themselves in some way to various institutions of power, and to the populace every four years. How often do we fantasize that any halfway intelligent person could do as good a job as the current office holder? Especially if that person were from early on steadfastly dedicated to the cultivation of peace and compassion in him or herself and others?

Likewise, the Dalai Lama's secret and arduous escape from Tibet was again the stuff of legend, binding him to his own people, and endearing him to people around the world. The Tibetan system values spiritual attainment, expressed in the extremely pacifist ideology of Buddhism, combined with a great deal of pre-buddhist folk religion and symbology. The culture was thus temperate and peaceful, perhaps too peaceful for its own good, but surely a model to emulate in our spiritually unbalanced times. The Chinese, in contrast, brought rapacious domination, racism, and cruelty. They were and remain atheist. But it seems that their compassionless spiritual vacuity (which is quite a different thing) was more important, leading them (especially through the cultural revolution) to despoil the cultural treasures, institutions, and people of Tibet.

We may wonder whether China is more culpable in all this than the US was in its virtual extermination of Native Americans and their many cultures. The answer is clearly yes. The gulf between the American cultures was far wider, and the state of historical consciousness lower. Native Americans had no continent-wide governments of centuries standing, no meticulously recorded written histories and philosophical traditions, and little basis for common ground or negotiation with the colonists and their successors. We have belatedly granted Native Americans limited sovereignity in their institutions and barren territories, while China keeps pouring more Han Chinese into Tibet and keeps 100% social control. The world had just fought a war to end all wars, and to liberate peoples from totalitarian military oppression, including those of South Korea. But Tibet was a bridge too far- we could not lift a finger in China's back yard, and now hardly say a peep.

• Some numbers.
• Expert talk.
• This, as most other times, would be a good time for a job guarantee.
• Who is in charge here?
• How dare she?
• Poor people deserve less.
• Buddhist action thriller of the week- Milarepa.

Young Americans for Freedom

Is Bernie the next Ronald Reagan?

My father was an enthusiastic Reagan supporter, and contributor to many of the right wing organs of the day, one of which was Young Americans for Freedom, or YAF. As one can imagine, its idea of freedom was freedom from government regulation, freedom to found businesses, freedom to rise as high as one's talents allow. Freedom to use one's money to go to private schools, freedom to hire workers on any basis they are willing to work, freedom to discriminate, to contaminate the environment, among much else. Reagan led a long campaign in the wilderness of the Republican right, on these ideas which became and remain the foundation of the right, of FOX, and of our current government. The Reagan revolution was far more influential than observers at the time (and from the left) anticipated, viewing the aging actor and his gouche entourage with distain. Reagan repaid that distain in spades, doddering through the Iran-Contra scandal, and finally leaving office with imminent senility. But he also was on occasion remarkably articulate- in marked contrast to our current virtually illiterate executive- and even inspiring, and was decisive at key moments. The ideology that Reagan brought into the mainstream, which now seems so stale and self-serving, was at the time taken as a significant and intellectually advanced critique of a system that had over the preceding decades so carefully balanced the public and private interests.

YAF was a melding of libertarians and conservatives, hardly hip even in its own day, but with an intellectual case to make. Today, things have changed substantially, as we are living in the world that the YAF-ers grew up and built, notably as part of the Gingrich revolution, the Tea party revolution, and the advanced propaganda organs that have succeeded the paltry efforts of YAF and its ilk. It is a new gilded age, where Mitt Romney can run for president as a "job creator", where Trump can win on the backs of the dispossessed, then turn around and give the lion's share of the spoils to the rich, where billionaires  clog our political system, where employees are routinely underpaid and abused, climate heating is denied and ignored, and homelessness and despair are rampant.

The youth of today look at this world, and find a significant lack of freedom. Freedom is not a simple concept, and changes dramatically with one's situation and with the times. Is being homeless the epitome of freedom? In our world, money buys freedom, and poverty is a sentence of servitude and shame. With enough money, one can become president if one wishes, while without money, one can not even eat. This is the world that the Reagan revolution has sharpened, if not created- one of staggering and shameless inequality, where our communal humanity is being drowned in desperate competition and fealty to corporate overlords, and where we are presumed to be worshipful towards the blizzard of vanity foundations they sponsor in lieu of nuns and priests to chant their prayers.

The great task of society is to impose order and discipline, but also to inspire shared values and commitment, so that all members work towards the greater good, according to their respective abilities. There is a place for capitalism and hierarchy here, to supply the former. But the latter has been sorely lacking of late, systematically denigrated by the political right, in favor of an ideology of division, greed, and, frankly, hate. It is clear that the happiest societies strike a more compassionate balance, recognizing (and funding, with various public services) a baseline of common humanity and dignity (and freedom), while leaving plenty of room for ambitious achievement in the hierarchical, capitalist mode as well.

It is high time for the pendulum in the US to swing the other way, but how is that going to happen? I have been struck by the symmetries between Bernie Sanders and Reagan. Bernie is far from a lock on the nomination, but his accession would be a fitting bookend to the Reagan revolution. Both are outside politicians, who took over their party with a grassroots / insurgent campaign and pushed it away from the center, after decades of lonely ideological battle on the political fringe. Both have strong support among the youth of their parties, indeed a curiously militant sort of support, despite themselves being, by virtue of their long-march campaign, quite old.

But Reagan never had to face the kind of propaganda organs that the right marshals today. He benefitted from a much more decent, and unified, world. Today our fellow citizens are living in a starkly separate reality, which has bled strongly into the mainstream media. It is hard to fathom how Bernie's movement is going to make serious inroads other than over the dead bodies of FOX and its copycats. And the irony is that these outlets thrive even more in opposition than when their own party is in power, making it doubly difficult to imagine how our cultural conversation is going to change, no matter how momentous the Bernie movement is. Yet, all that said, hope springs eternal, and here we have to hope in Hegelian fashion that the forces of history, or of a timely leader, are able to break the witch's spell on the right, and bring our country back to a semblance of decency and rationality. And that that someone might just be the next Democratic nominee for president.

• Watergate all over.
• I'd move to a decent state.
• Wild-life extermination and trade at fault for new virus.
• Nuclear families are only for those who can afford to go it alone.
• Another perspective on Afghanistan. And then another. How many Afghans really have a role in determining Afghanistan's future?

Success is an Elixir

We are besotted by success. For very obvious evolutionary reasons, but with problematic consequences.

Why is the James Bond franchise so compelling? It got more cartoonish over the years, but the old Sean Connery embodied a heady archetype of the completely successful hero. A man as skilled in vetting wines as in flying planes, as debonair with the ladies as he was in fighting hand-to-hand, all while outwitting the most malevolent and brilliant criminal minds. Handsome, witty, and brutally effective in all he turned his hand to, there was little complexity, just relentless perfection, other than an inexplicable penchant for getting himself into dramatic situations, from which he then suavely extricated himself.

We worship success, for understandable reasons, but sometimes a little too much. As Reagan said, nothing succeeds like success. It is fundamental to our growth from childhood to adulthood, to demonstrate and be recognized for some kind of effectiveness- passing tests, graduating from school, becoming skilled in some art or profession, which is socially recognized as useful, maybe through the medium of money. The ancient rites of passage recognized this, by setting a key test, such as killing the bear, or withstanding some brutal austerity. Only through effectiveness in life can we justify that life to ourselves and to others. The role can take many forms- extroverts tend to focus on social power- the capability of bending others to their will, while introverts may focus more on other skills like making tools or interpreting the natural world.

The Darwinian case is clear enough- each life is a hero's quest to express one's inner gifts and capabilities, in order to succeed not only in thriving in the given environment, but in replicating, creating more successful versions of one's self which do so all over again. Women naturally fall for successful men, as James Bond so amply demonstrated, but as is seen in so many fields, from basketball to finance.

But all this creates some strong cognitive biases that have some influences that are not always positive. Junior high school is the most obvious realm where these play out. Children are getting used to the idea that life is not fair, and that they can communally form social standards and decisions about what constitutes success, which then victimize those on the losing end- what is cool, what is lame, who is a loser, etc. Popularity contests, like politics and the stock market, are notorious for following fashions that valorize what one generation may believe is success, only to have the next generation look back in horror and redefine success as something else. In these cases, success is little more than a commonly held opinion about success, which leads to the success of con men like our current president, who insists that everything he does is perfectly successful, and who inspires sufficient fear, or confidence, or suspension of disbelief, or is so ably assisted by the propaganda of his allies, that many take him seriously. Indeed, it is exactly the unaccountable support of his allies who surely know better that force others in the wider circles of the society to take seriously what no rational or decent person would believe for a second.

The status of minorities is typically a "loser" status, since by definition their beliefs and practices, and perhaps their very existence, are not popular. While this may be a mark of true Darwinian lack of success, it is far more likely to be an accident of, or an even less innocent consequence of, history. In any case, our worship of success frequently blinds us to the value of minorities and minority perspectives, and is a large reason why such enormous effort has been expended over millennia, on religious, legal, constitutional, and cultural planes, to remedy this bias and promote such things as democracy, diversity, due process, and respect for contrasting perspectives.

We are victimized in many other ways by our mania for success- by advertisers, by the gambling industry, by war mongers, among many others, who peddle easy success while causing incalculable damage. While it is hard to insulate ourselves from these social influences and judgements, which are, after all, the soul of evaluating success; as with any other cognitive bias, being in our guard is essential to avoiding cults, traps, and, ultimately, expensive failure.

• The news from Chris Hedges.
• Who produces value, where is the money going?
• History repeats itself.
• A look back, at Afghanistan.
• Life on earth is suffering.

The Participation Mystique

How we relate to others, things, environments.

We are all wrapped up in the impeachment drama now, wondering what could be going on with a White House full of people who have lost their moral compasses, their minds. Such drama is an exquisite example of participation mystique, on our part as we look on in horror as the not very bright officials change their stories by the day, rats start to leave the sinking ship, and the president twists in the wind. We might not sympathize, but we recognize, and voyeuristically participate in, the emotions running and the gears turning.

Carl Jung took the term, participation mystique, from the anthropologist Lucien Levy Bruhl. The original conception was a rather derogotory concept about the animism common among primitive people, that they project anthropomorphic and social characters to objects in the landscape, thus setting up mystical connections with rocks, mountains, streams, etc. Are such involvements characteristic of children and primitive people, but not of us moderns? Hardly. Modern people have distancing and deadening mechanisms to manage our mental involvement with projected symbologies, foremost among which is the scientific mindset. But our most important and moving experiences partake of identification with another- thing or person, joining our mental projection with their charisma, whatever that might be.

Participation mystique remains difficult to define and use as a concept, despite books being written about it. But I would take it as any empathetic or identification feelings we have toward things and people, by which the boundaries in between become blurred. We have a tremendous mental power to enter into other's feelings, and we naturally extend such participation (or anthropomorphism) far beyond its proper remit, to clouds, weather events, ritual objects, etc. This is as true today with new age religions and the branding relationships that every company seeks to benefit from, as it is in the more natural setting of imputing healing powers to special pools of water, or standing in awe of a magnificent tree. Such feelings in relation to animals has had an interesting history, swinging from intense identification on the part of typical hunters and cave painters, to an absurd dismissal of any soul or feeling by scientistic philosophers like Descartes, and back to a rather enthusiastic nature worship, nature film-making, and a growing scientific and philosophical appreciation of the feelings and moral status of animals in the present day.

Participation mystique is most directly manipulated and experienced in the theater, where a drama is specifically constructed to draw our sympathetic feeings into its world, which may have nothing to do with our reality, or with any reality, but is drenched in the elements of social drama- tension, conflict, heroic motivations, obstacles. If you don't feel for and with Jane Eyre as she grows from abused child, to struggling adult, to lover, to lost soul, and finally to triumphant partner, your heart is made of stone. We lend our ears, but putting it psychologically, we lend a great deal more, with mirror neurons hard at work.

All this is involuntary and unconscious. Not that it does not affect our conscious experience, but the participation mystique arises as an automatic response from brain levels that we doubtless share with many other animals. Seeing squirrels chase each other around a tree gives an impression of mutual involvement and drama that is inescapable. Being a social animal requires this kind of participation in each other's feelings. So what of the psychopath? He seems to get these participatory insights, indeed quite sensitively, but seems unaffected- his own feelings don't mirror, but rather remain self-centered. He uses his capabilities not to sympathise with, but to manipulate, others around him or her. His version of participation mystique is a truncated half-experience, ultimately lonely and alienating.

And what of science, philosophy and other ways we systematically try to escape the psychology of subjective identification and participation? As mentioned above in the case of animal studies, a rigid attitude in this regard has significantly retarded scientific progress. Trying to re-establish objectively what is so obvious subjectively is terribly slow, painstaking work. Jane Goodall's work with chimpanzees stands as a landmark here, showing the productive balance of using both approaches at once. But then when it comes to physics and the wide variety of other exotic phenomena that can not be plausibly anthropomorphized or participated in via our subjective identification, the policy of rigorously discarding all projections and identifications pays off handsomely, and it is logic alone that can tell us what reality is.

• The Democratic candidates on worker rights.
• Was it trade or automation? Now that everything is made in China, the answer should be pretty clear.
• On science.
• Turns out that Google is evil, after all.
• Back when some Republicans had some principles.
• If all else fails, how about a some nice culture war?
• What is the IMF for?
• #DeleteFacebook
• Graphic: who is going to tax the rich? Who is pushing a fairer tax system overall? Compare Biden with Warren carefully.

High Intelligence is Highly Overrated by Highly Intelligent People

AI, the singularity, and watching way too much science fiction: Review of Superintelligence by Nic Bostrom.

How far away is the singularity? That is the point when machine intelligence exceeds human intelligence, after which it is thought that this world will no longer be ours to rule. Rick Bostrom, a philosopher at Oxford, doesn't know when this will be, but is fearful of its consequences, since, if we get it wrong, humanity's fate may not be a happy one.

The book starts strongly, with some well argued and written chapters about the role of intelligence in humanity's evolution, and the competitive landscape of technology today that is setting the stage for this momentous transition. But thereafter, the armchair philosopher takes over, with tedious chapters of hairsplitting and speculation about how fast or slow the transition might be, how collaborative among research groups, and especially, how we could pre-out-think these creations of ours, to make sure they will be well-disposed to us, aka "the control problem".

Despite the glowing blurbs from Bill Gates and others on the jacket, I think there are fundamental flaws with this whole approach and analysis. One flaw is a failure to distinguish between intelligence and power. Our president is a moron. That should tell us something about this relationship. It is not terribly close- the people generally acknowledged as the smartest in history have rarely been the most powerful. This reflects a deeper flaw, which is, as usual, a failure to take evolution and human nature seriously. The "singularity" is supposed to furnish something out of science fiction- a general intelligence superior to human intelligence. But Bostrom and others seem to think that this means a fully formed human-like agent, and those are two utterly different things. Human intelligence takes many forms, and human nature is composed of many more things than intelligence. Evolution has strained for billions of years to form our motivations in profitable ways, so that we follow others when necessary, lead them when possible, define our groups in conventional ways that lead to warfare against outsiders, etc., etc. Our motivational and social systems are not the same as our intelligence system, and to think that anyone making an AI with general intelligence capabilities will, will want to, or even can, just reproduce the characteristics of human motivation to tack on and serve as its control system, is deeply mistaken.

The fact is that we have AI right now that far exceeds human capabilities. Any database is far better at recall than humans are, to the point that our memories are atrophying as we compulsively look up every question we have on Wikipedia or Google. And any computer is far better at calculations, even complex geometric and algebraic calculations, than we are in our heads. That has all been low-hanging fruit, but it indicates that this singularity is likely to be something of a Y2K snoozer. The capabilities of AI will expand and generalize, and transform our lives, but unless weaponized with explicit malignant intent, it has no motivation at all, let alone the motivation to put humanity into pods for its energy source, or whatever.

People-pods, from the Matrix.

The real problem, as usual, is us. The problem is the power that accrues to those who control this new technology. Take Mark Zuckerberg for example. He stands at the head of multinational megacorporation that has inserted its tentacles into the lives of billions of people, all thanks to modestly intelligent computer systems designed around a certain kind of knowledge of social (and anti-social) motivations. All in the interests of making another dollar. The motivations for all this do not come from the computers. They come from the people involved, and the social institutions (of capitalism) that they operate in. That is the real operating system that we have yet to master.

• Facebook - the problem is empowering the wrong people, not the wrong machines.
• Barriers to health care.
• What it is like to be a psychopathic moron.

Altruism Through Execution

Does our good behavior arise from artificial selection against norm-violators?

This is a companion piece to the prior "Altruism Through Genocide", which presented a group selection theory for our human moral nature. In that piece, group cohesiveness was the driving force that benefitted those cooperative people who could effectively conduct warfare to exterminate their enemies, who were, on balance, less effective in their in-group altruism/cooperation.

Now we are considering a new book, "The Goodness Paradox", by Richard Wrangham, which presents an alternative, only slightly less grisly, theory. The book generally argues that humans show many signs of selective domestication- a syndrome common in animals that we have domesticated- of arrest in many aspects of development, towards more juvenile characteristics, such as docility, lower aggression, floppy ears, white fur patches, and skeletal and especially facial juvenilization. That much is clear. Despite our love of warfare, we are on balance, and compared to our chimpanzee relatives and most other wild creatures, far less violent, less reactive, and far more effectively cooperative. This is not just a cognitive development, but an emotional change and a deep change to our moral natures. So who or what did the domestication?

Remember in Western movies how good it feels when the bad guy gets killled? It is an archetype of deep power, and we hardly think about its moral and genetic implications. Chimpanzees don't have this moral sense, as far as we know. Wrangham cites various experiments and natural observations to show that no matter how terrible some chimpanzees are, the others of their group will not or can not cooperate effectively to ostracize or disable them. It just isn't done. In the modern world, we have grown squeemish about capital punishment, but primitive cultures had no prisons, thus pervasively practiced ostracism or death as the only practical punishments for serious crimes and unredeemable people. It turns out to have been common for communities (typically the men of the group) to gang up on a member who got egregiously out of line and kill that person. Wrangham places this development at roughly the emergence of modern Homo sapiens, two to three hundred thousand years ago. Thus there is quite a bit of speculation about the relative backwardness of Neanderthals, who had much more limited cooperative capacities, though being roughly as intelligent as moderns, and having many advanced characteristics such as complex stone technology and control of fire.

For a Few Dollars More ... Clint Eastwood hunts down the bad men.

The development of advanced hunting and killing technologies made each person, and especially each man, in primitive human bands quite powerful. But even more important was language and great scope it offered to organize, to collude with and against others, This created enormous incentives to maintain a good reputation. Primitive societies are characterized by an almost pathological fear of rising above one's peers- there is a notable lack of ambition, for the very good reason that the group is all-powerful, and signs that one wants to rule others, abuse them, or collude against them, are all treated very harshly. The idea, then, is that the unique human ability and motivation to detect and eliminate threats inside the group led to a process of natural selection that quickly domesticated the species in superficial metrics of reactive aggression, while advancing our organizational, deceptive, and language capabilities, which have made us by far the most deadly species when it comes to organized hunting and warfare.

The explains rather easily the intense motivation that teens have to conform to their groups, to party, to bond and seek power, and to be forever uncertain about their status. It explains conventionality. But does it explain the nature of the morality that human groups generally express? The posses that hunt down criminals, and the modern state apparatus that does the same on a more legalistic basis, the value we put on altruism and kindness? Not quite. For example, the morality could have become one of extermination, where leaders would use all their guile to eliminate, one by one, each of the other males of the group, thus gaining all the females for themselves. This harem structure is common among other animals, and has occurred occasionally in humans in historical times. But it has obvious defects. If such an endpoint is common knowledge, then coalitions would be difficult to build, though perhaps not necessary since even crude technologies allow relatively easy killing, even one-on-one, given a small amount of planning. More importantly, however, such an endpoint would leave the group very weak relative to other groups.

So both overall hypotheses are relevant, I think, the group selection hypothesis and the execution hypothesis, to explain the complexity and explosiveness of our group relations, and the generally pro-social and cooperative instincts that form our group values most of the time. There is a complex calculation to be made, in light of the status of the whole group, with regard to the value of each person, each one of whom would on the face of it benefit the group in any outward encounter, but who might also be so disruptive and destructive of group cohesion as to instead be a net negative asset. Wrangham unfortunately finesses this problem, of the actual content of our moral group ethics, and suggests instead that pure relativism prevails- that our groupishness / conformity / docility is genetic, but our morals are not, and become whatever the leading (male) coalition says they should be. One can grant that human groups have adopted very unusual moral codes, like sacrificing their own children into volcanoes, or conducting constant ritual slaughter as the Aztecs did, or making a fetish of celibacy, as the Buddhist and Catholic theocracies do. Nevertheless, there is a core of cooperativity and deep-seated conceptions of right and wrong (including the rightness of killing when the target is damaging the group, or is an enemy outside the group) that demand a better evolutionary explanation, one that focuses on the value of the group as a unit.

Wrangham also finesses another issue- that of eugenics. His theory is essentially eugenic. We have been our own selective agents, however unintentionally. In an afterword, he gives a brief case against capital punishment. Though it has had such positive effects by his theory, capital punishment is now unnecessary, since we have prisons and other mechanisms of social control. Yet the deeper issue is whether genetic selection is still needed to bias reproduction towards the well-behaved and away from the aggressive, psychopathic, misogynistic, and congenitally sleazy. Not a word on this, since it is a far more explosive and difficult issue, not to mention politically tinged at the moment.

• Mind control in North Korea.
• Insurers are promoting, rather than fighting, ransomware. Make sure to keep backups!
• "This administration is ultimately driven by sociopathic disregard for our future"
• North Carolina finally puts a nail in gerrymandering.
• Figuring out common threads in the diverse genetics of autism.
• Notes by Veblen.
• Just because ....

Postmodernism: License to Lie

A continuation of the Enlightenment project turned around to burn it all down, and our political system went along for the ride.

The discontents of modernism are legion. It is soul-less, rational, scientistic, dehumanizing. And the architecture is even worse, exemplified by the glass box skyscraper. Modernism was the stage after the self-satisfied Victorian age, our last unconscious period when Westerners felt confident in our myths, our cultural superiority, and our untroubled right to all the fruits of the Earth. Modernism came in the wake of Nietzsche and World War 1, which left all those certainties in tatters, followed by an even more destructive World War 2. But from America rose a new unbounded ethos of progress through cooperation and science, leading to the UN, the EU, the conquering of air and space, and the comfortable dispensation of the fossil-fueled late Cold War West.

The long-term theme has been increasing consciousness, from the Enlightenment onwards, adopting ever more realistic views of the physical and social world. Art was first to experience this startling realism. Then politics, with the slow destruction of the myth of monarchical and aristocratic superiority. And finally religion, from the work of Nietzsche and Darwin, among many others. Throughout, science has been steadily dis-enchanting the world, removing Earth from the cosmic center, mystical vitalism from the chemistry of life, and God from among our forefathers and mothers. With modernism, we had reached a new level of consciousness. We could look at ourselves as one among many world cultures, accepting "other" forms of religion, art, and world view as good, perhaps even co-equal, with those of the West. Frills and decoration were out, myth was relentlessly exposed, and we sought to plumb the psychological depths as well, exposing our complexes and deep motivations.

Then in 1970's France, the postmodernist school took it up another notch, trying to show that all our remaining certainties were also questionable, and could be deconstructed. Whatever narratives we live by, even the most attenuated reliance on general progress through the evident workings of civic, capitalist, and scientific institutions, were unmasked as just another forum for power politics, patriarchy, and elite control of the society's metanarrative. Build all the skyscrapers and Hubble telescopes you want, it all boils down to Game of Thrones in the end. All narratives were destabilized, and not only was nothing sacred, nothing had meaning at all, since interpretation is an ever-flexible tool that gives authority to the reader/viewer, with little left over for the author (or for "reality"). Anything can be read in innumerable layers, to mean ... practically anything. The narratives we can not help but to live by are all ripe for deconstruction, but then how does reality relate to our (limited) cognition of it? That gets us right back to the foundations of philosophy in the Platonic cave.

This approach clearly follows the modernist and psychoanalytic line of excavating ever deeper into our sources of motivation, meaning, and narrative. Indeed, other disciplines, like anthropology, psychology, and even economics (in its study of institutions) have long preceeded the postmodernists. But one has to ask two big questions. First, is there some limit of analysis beyond which, even if the analysis is valid, human functioning is so destabilized that, for all the intellectual benefits, we end up inert, stripped of larger motivating narratives and reduced to mere units of immediate consumption, mediated by our TV sets and phones? Second, have they gone too far? Is the postmodernist analysis actually valid in all its implications? An excellent article in Areo chews over some of these problems.

Being scientifically and psychoanalytically inclined, I would have to answer no to the first question, and yes to the second. While unproductive over-analysis can lead some people to inertia, any correct analysis in psychological, cultural, or other terms can not help but illuminate the human condition. This is in general a big plus, and not one to be discarded because it is uncomfortable or destabilizing to our customary life and traditions. We dealt with Darwininan evolution, (well, most of us did), and can still reach for the stars. Sources of narrative and motivation are vast and perpetually self-created. Losing the old gods and myths is not a serious problem if we have new and significant tasks to replace them with. For example, nothing could be more dire than global climate heating- it is the central problem of our time, and tackling it would give us collective, indeed eschatological, meaning. What makes this moment particularly painful and fake is not that we lack an animating myth or center, but that we are dithering with regard to the true and monumental tasks at hand, blocked by a corrupt system and various defects of human nature.

The second question more pointed, for if the postmodernist analysis is not generally true, then we hardly have to worry about the first question at all. This is a very tricky area, since much of the postmodernist critique is valid enough. We live by many myths and narratives. But its earthshaking claims to destabilize everything and all other forms of truth are clearly false. Many fields, not just science, have a living commitment to truth that is demonstrably valid, even if the quest is elusive, even quixotic. Take the news media. While the tendency to endless punditry is lamentable, there is a core of factual reporting that is the product of a great deal of worthy dedication and forms a public good. Whatever the biases that go into selecting the targets of reporting, their products, when true, are immune to the postmodern critique. The school board really did fire its superintendent, or put a bond on the next election ballot. The fact that we have a president who fears "perjury traps", labels all truthful reporting about him "fake news", and allies with propaganda outlets like FOX and RT should not put anyone in any doubt that truth, nevertheless, exists.

Why some religious people have cottoned to the postmodern approach is somewhat mysterious and curious, for while postmodernism has mightily attempted to destablize reigning cultural orthodoxies, particularly those of science, it is hardly more kind to clericalism or religion in principle. At best, it may allow that these are at least honest about their (false) mythos/narrative basis, unlike the devious subterfuges by which science channels its bourgeois interests into claims to the really, really true narrative, which thus have posed the more interesting challenge in the postmodern literature. But make no mistake, if religion were the reigning cultural power, the deconstructionists would make mincemeat of it.

What makes Deepak Chopra so laughable?

But postmodernism has nevertheless filtered down from the academy to popular culture, destabilizing verities and authorities. Did they seek to have Republican policians declare that "we make our own reality"? Did they foresee the internet and its ironic capacity, not to make us all Orwellian drones with the same beliefs, but to let us stew voluntarily in propaganda-laced echo chambers, losing touch with reality all the same? At issue is the nature and status of factual authority, which we are so shockingly confronted with in this political moment. Coordinated assaults on our capacity for reason, from the wingnut right and its unhinged media, the new masters of the internet, the Russians, and the lying sleazebag who found his moment amongst the chaos, have posed this problem in the starkest terms. What is truth? Are there facts? What is an authoritative narrative of leadership, of care for the future and the nation? Should public policy be responsive to facts, or to money and nepotism? What is the point of morality in a fully corrupt world? Why is gaslighting a new and trending word?

The postmodernists insisted, as does our current president, that every category and supposed fact is a mask for power. They saw hobgoblins of social construction and violent dominance in the most innocent scientific facts and institutions. Such an attitude might be provocative and occasionally fruitful, but it has been taken way too far, rendering fields most affected (in the humanities) stripped of coherence, let alone authority. Leaving us with a modern art bereft of ideals other than shock, and the most banal literature and identity-based histories. It is also a sort of zero-sum-ism, needlessly oppositional and Manichaean. In their haste to unmask and tear down all idols and intellectual achievements that unify humanity, they have generated a sort of war against all meaning which is deeply anti-human- not just deconstructive, but destructive.

Yes, our narratives are in perpetual conflict. Different religions, political viewpoints, and cultures have distinct narratives and each seeks to win the hearts and minds in order to rule human soceity. The Reformation offers abundant examples of this, as does our current political scene. But at the same time, reality itself forms another, and very influential, locus in this conflict. For all the other narratives claim to be accurate views of reality, whether claiming that god is real, Catholicism is the true church, or that Republicans have a more accurate and effective view of economics and human nature. Each stakes its claims on discernment of how reality works, including the moral and other aspects of what people really want out of their social system. Do they want a king to look up to, or a representative government that may be more moderate and effective?

So narratives are not just thrashing our their conflicts on an entirely archetypal / mythical / power basis, as the postmodernists seem to assume. Rather, they are negotiating views of reality, including moral and social realities, which can be interrogated in large degree by reason generally and science specifically. Creationism and climate change denialism are just the most flagrant examples of narratives that seek social dominance on the backs of religious delusion and/or simple greed. And for all the equivocation of the postmodernists, they can be definitively dismissed given the knowledge we have outside of these or other narrative claims. The growth of mature consciousness means expanding our abilities to judge the reality-claims of narratives in a dispassionate way, considering both physical but also the psycho-social realities we share, and progressively leaving our psychological baggage behind.

• Coal is dead.
• The long road ahead against Alzheimer's. Though that article oversells our ignorance.
• Do shareholders come first, or workers and communities?
• Who is doing the harassing in the Persian Gulf?
• Rachmaninoff 3, after the instructive intro, ~5:30.
• Sanctity of life.
• Endless corruption.
• Better automatic stabilizers?