Spiritual Resources for the Religiously Abstemious

Nones are now a plurality in the US. What are we supposed to do?

The Pew research institute recently came out with polling that shows a significantly changed religious landscape in the US. Over the last couple of decades, while the religious right has been climbing the greasy pole of political power, gaining seats on the Supreme Court, and agitating for a return to patriarchy, their pews have been emptying. The religiously unaffiliated, or "nones", comprise 28% of the US population now, almost double the level two decades ago.

One has only to see the rabid support evangelicals give their orange-haired messiah to understand what has been turning people off. Or glance over the appalling chronicle of sexual abuse unearthed in the Catholic church. Maybe the horsemen of the Atheist apocalypse have had something to do with it. Russia under Putin is strenuously demonstrating that the same system can be just as cruel with or without religion. But these patterns of gross institutional, moral, and intellectual failure, and their ensuing critiques, are hardly new. Luther made a bit of hay out of the abuses of the Catholic church, Voltaire, among many other thinkers, ridiculed the whole religious enterprise, and Hitler was a forerunner of Trump in leaning on religion, at least early in his career, despite being a rather token Christian himself (other than in the antisemitism, of course). What is new now?

A dramatic rise in numbers of people with no religious affiliation and little interest, from Pew polling.

I am not sure, frankly. Europe has certainly been leading the way, showing that declining religion is quite compatible with prosperous and humane culture. But perhaps this phenomenon is part of the general isolation and atomization of US culture, and thus not such a good thing. It used to be that a community was unthinkable without a church (or several) to serve as the central hub. Churches served to validate the good and preach to the bad. They sponsored scout troops, weddings, charitable events and dinners, and committees and therapeutic encounters of all sorts. They were socially essential, whether one believed or not. That leaders of society also led the churches knit the whole circle together, making it easy to believe that something there was indeed worth believing, whether it made sense or not.

Now, the leadership of society has moved on. We are mesmerized by technology, by entertainment, and sports, perhaps to a degree that is new. The capitalist system has found ways to provide many of the services we used to go to churches for, to network, to get psychotherapy, to gossip, and most of all, to be entertained. Community itself is less significant in the modern, suburban, cocooned world. Successful churches meet this new world by emphasizing their social offerings in a mega-church community, with a dash of charismatic, but not overly intellectually taxing, preaching. Unfortunately, megachurches regularly go through their own crises of hypocrisy and leadership, showing that the caliber of religious leaders, whatever their marketing skills, has been declining steadily.

The "nones" are more apathetic than atheistic, but either way, they are not great material for making churches or tightly knit communities. Skeptical, critical, or uninterested, they are some of the least likely social "glues". Because, frankly, it takes some gullibility and attraction to the core human archetypes and drama to make a church, and it takes a lot of positive thinking to foster a community. I would promote libraries, arts institutions, non-profits, and universities as core cultural hubs that can do some of this work, fostering a learning and empathetic culture. But we need more.

As AI takes over work of every sort, and more people have more time on their hands, we are facing a fundamental reshaping of society. One future is that a few rich people rake off all the money, and the bulk of the population descends into poverty and joblessness, unneeded in a society where capitalism has become terminally capital-intensive, with little labor required. Another future is where new forms of redistribution are developed, either by bringing true competition to bear on AI-intensive industries so that they can not take excess profits, or by thorough regulation for the public good, including basic income schemes, public goods, and other ways to spread wealth broadly. 

Such a latter system would free resources for wider use, so that a continuing middle class economy could thrive, based on exchanges that are now only luxuries, like music, personal services, teaching, sports, counseling. The destruction of the music recording industry by collusion of music labels and Spotify stands as a stark lesson in how new technology and short-sighted capitalism can damage our collective culture, and the livelihood of a profession that is perhaps the avatar of what an ideal future would look like, culturally and economically.

All this is to say that we face a future where we should, hopefully, have more resources and time, which would in principle be conducive to community formation and a life-long culture of learning, arts, and personal enrichment, without the incessant driver of work. The new AI-driven world will have opportunities for very high level work and management, but the regular hamburger flippers, baristas, cabbies, and truck drivers will be a thing of the past. This is going to put a premium on community hubs and new forms of social interaction. The "nones" are likely to favor (if not build) a wide range of such institutions, while leaving the church behind. It is a mixed prospect, really, since we will still be lacking a core institution that engages with the whole person in an archetypal, dream-like fantasy of hope and affirmation. Can opera do that work? I doubt it. Can Hollywood? I doubt that as well, at least as it applies to a local community level that weaves such attractions together with service and personal connection.

• Those very highly moral religious people.
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• "As we’ll see, good old-fashioned immortality has advantages that digital immorality cannot hope to rival." ... I am not making this up!

Truth and the Silo

Living in a silo, and wondering what is outside.

The first season of Apple's Silo series was beautifully produced and thought-provoking. Working from a book series of the same name which I have not read, it is set in a devastated world where about 10,000 people live in a huge underground silo. As the show progresses, it is clear that the society got a little totalitarian along the way. We are introduced to a "pact", which is the rules set up ~150 years ago, when a revolution of some undescribed sort happened. Now there is a "judicial" department that sends out goons to keep everyone in line, and there are the rules of the pact, which seem to outlaw fun and inquiry into anything from the past or the outside. It also outlaws elevators.

On the other hand, the population has a window to the outside, which shows an extremely drab world. A hellscape, really. But due to the murky nature of political power and information control within the silo, it is hard to know how real that view is. I won't give away any spoilers because I am interested in exploring the metaphors and themes the show brings up. For we are all working in, living in, and raised in, silos of some sort. Every family is a world more or less closed, with its own mood and rules, generally (hopefully) unwritten. The Silo portrays this involution in an incredibly vivid way.

(Third) Sheriff Nichols meets with the (second) mayor in a lovingly retro-decorated set.

It is fundamentally a drama about truth. One could say that most drama is about seeking truths, whether in a literal form like detective and legal dramas, or in more personal forms like romance, coming of age, and quest-for-power dramas. The point is to find out something, like how attractive the characters are, who will betray whom, who has lined up the better alliances, what a person's character is really like. Why read a story unless you learn something new? Here, the truths being sought are in bold face and out front. What is outside? Who really runs this place? What built this place? Why are we here? Why is everyone wearing hand-knit woolens? And the lead character, Juliet Nichols, is the inveterate truth-seeker. A mechanic by inclination and training, she really, really, wants to know how things work, is proud of mastering some of that knowledge, and is dedicated to dealing with reality and making it work. This quest leads her into rebellion against a system that is typical for our time ... at least in China, North Korea, and Russia. A surveillance and control state that watches everyone, pumps out propaganda, outlaws contrary thought, symbols, and objects, imprisons those who disagree, and ultimately sends inveterate truth seekers outside ... to die.

The nature of truth is of course a deep philosophical question. A major problem is that we can never get there. But even worse, we don't necessarily want to get there either. We automatically form a narrative world around ourselves that generally suffices for day-to-day use. This world is borne largely of habit, authority, instinct, and archetypes. All sorts of sources other than a systematic search for truth. For example, the easiest truth in the world is that we and our group are good, and the other group is bad. This is totally instinctive, and quite obvious to everyone. Religions are full of such truths, narratives, and feelings, developed in the least rigorous way imaginable, ending up with systems fired in the crucible of personal intution, and the imperatives of group dynamics and power. But truth? 

Lighting tends to be a little dark in the Silo, as are the politics.

The Orwellian society is curious, in a way. How can people's natural thirst for truth be so dangerous, so anti-social, and so brutally suppressed? Due to the processes mentioned above, each person's truth is somewhat distinct and personal, each person's quest goes in a different direction. But a society needs some coherence in its narrative, and some people (say, our immediate former president) have an intense yearning for power and need to dominate others, thus to bend them to their own version of truth. Reality distortion fields do not occur only in the tech industry, but are intrinsic to social interaction. The Silo, with its literally closed society, is a natural hothouse for a social fight for dominance and control of reality. Oh, and it has a eugenic program going on as well, though that is not a big focus in the first season.

One can almost sympathise with the fascists of the world, who see truth as functional, not philosophical. Whatever glorifies the state and its leader, whatever keeps the society unchanging and sheltered from uncomfortable truths and surprises. Who needs those pesky and divergent people, who just want to make trouble? And the more baroque and unhinged the official narrative has become, the more dangerous and easy the work of the social sabateur becomes. If the emperor has no clothes, it only takes a child to ask one question. In the Silo, there are various underground actors and uneasy officials who are losing faith in the official line, but where can they go? Is their doubt and desire for the facts more important than the continuation of this very tenuous and smothered society? Could a free-er society work? But why risk it?

In our contemporary world, the right wing is busy making up a parallel universe of obvious and button-pushing untruths. The left, on the other hand, is pursuing a rather righteous investigation into all the mainstream truths we grew up with, and finding them lies. Is the US founded on genocide, slavery, and imperialism? Or on democracy and opportunity? Is capitalism salveagable in light of its dreadful record of environmental, animal, and human abuses? It is not a comfortable time, as the truths of our society are shifting underfoot. But is the left unearthing the true truth, or just making up a new and self-serving narrative that will in time be succeeded by others with other emphasis and other interests? 

History is a funny kind of discipline, which can not simply find something true and enshrine it forever, like the laws of gravity. There is some of that in its facts, but history needs to be continually re-written, since it is more about us than about them- more about how our society thinks about itself and what stories it selects from the past, than it is about "what happened". There are an infinite number of things that happened, as well as opinions about them. What makes it into books and documentaries is a matter of selection, and it is always the present that selects. It is a massive front in the formation / evolution of culture- i.e. the culture war. Are we a culture that allows free inquiry and diverse viewpoints on our history, and welcomes observations that undercut comfortable narratives? Or are we a more Orwellian culture that enforces one narrative and erases whatever of its history conflicts with it?

The top level dining room has a viewport to the outside.

The Silo is definitely a culture of the latter type, and its history is brutally truncated. Yet interestingly, character after character nurtures some object that violates the pact, representing a bond with the forbidden, hazy past - the forebears and former world that must necessarily have existed, even as nothing is officially known about them. The urge to know more, especially about our origins, is deeply human, as is the urge to keep one's society on an even keel with a unified and self-satisfied narrative. This tension is built up unceasingly in the Silo, which is as far as we know a unique and precious remnant of humanity. It asks the question whether its stability is worth so much oppression and ignorance.

Parenthetically, one might ask how all this connects to the dystopia outside. The Silo is only painting in extreme colors trends that are happening right now in our world. As the climate gets weirder, we spend more time inside, increasingly isolated from others, entertaining ourselves with streaming offerings like the Silo. Its apocalypse appears more nuclear than climatological, but for us, right now, a dystopia is unfolding. After decades of denial and greed, the truth of climate heating is no longer at issue. So what if the truth is known- has gotten out of the bag- but no one wants to act on it? Another form of courage is needed, not any more to uncover the truth, but to meet that truth with action- action that may require significant sacrifice and a fundamental re-design of our Silo-like system of capitalism.

• Leave your silo, please.
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Bukharin's Lesson in Communism

A review of "The ABC of Communism", by Nikokai Bukharin and Evgenii Preobrazhensky, 1920.

Nikokai Bukharin was one of the 1917 revolutionaries that brought communism to Russia. He was in New York (as was Leon Trotsky) in February 1917, as the news of the budding revolution spread around the world, and joined that revolution in May. He and Trotsky were penning a socialist newspaper at the time, and were particular fans of the New York public library- a great example of a public-private partnership, (not to mention free speech), which houses countless products of private enterprise, in a public facility. Back in Russia, they helped establish the world's first socialist and communist state, destroying the nascent parliamentary system of Karensky, and then the arrayed forces of the old aristocracy in the Russian civil war. They did this by promising something even better than parliamentary democracy- a proletarian state that would forever place workers in power, and end the power of capital and the aristocracy. 

A convenient document of the thinking behind all this is the "The ABC of Communism", by Bukharin and Evgenii Preobrazhensky, put out in 1920 and republished long thereafter to provide a popular argument for communism and the soviet system. It encapsulates the economic and political theories that animated, at least at a conscious level, the new rulers. Bukharin was relatively young, regarded as a leading theoretician, and somewhat on the liberal side, not quite as ruthless as Stalin and Lenin. An autobiography and film about his wife tried to paint a positive image of him and of what things would have been like if Bukharin had managed to not get murdered by Stalin. So this work should present a relatively coherent and attractive case for communism.

Bukharin (center) in happier days, in Soviet leadership.

Well, I have to say that it is not very impressive as either economics or politics. While it provides insight into some capitalist dynamics, it fundamentally fails to understand the most basic drivers of economic systems, and obviously has not engaged with Adam Smith, who had written almost 150 years before. 

On the plus side, there is a lengthy treatment of the economies of scale, which rightly describes the advantages that large industrial enterprises have over smaller ones. The point of this, however, is mostly political, to show why anarchism, which was one of the many revolutionary threads still active at the time, made little sense. The Bolsheviks were besotted by industry and large-scale industrialization, which was at least one area where they put a lot of resources and accomplished a great deal, saving their skins in world war 2, later on.

"Consequently, THE LARGER THE UNDERTAKING, THE MORE PERFECT IS THE TECHNIQUE, THE MORE ECONOMICAL IS THE LABOUR, AND THE LOWER IS THE COST OF PRODUCTION."

Secondly, the author's treatment of cyclical crises in capitalism is not too far off the mark. They pin the problem on over-production, which then leads to workers getting laid off, loss of income and buying power, loss of credit, loss of ancillary business, and the downward spiral of depression. Whether lack of demand or over-supply, imbalances of this kind are indeed central to this kind of crisis. The author's solution? Better organization, in the form of state control over every aspect of the economy. They ceaselessly rail against the waste of capitalism- the competition with similar products, the disorganized manner of production by competing and cut-throat capitalists, the lack of overall harmonious coordination for the public good. But what of Adam Smith? It turns out that the chaos of capitalism has its beauties, and its efficiencies, squeezing every drop out of the environment, and out of workers, in its Darwinian competition.

Thirdly, they make a great deal out of the ambient excesses of capitalism, which were truly horrific, and were clear enough all over the world, leading to the communist's program of world-wide revolution by the working class. The monopolies, the strike-breaking, the child labor, the inhuman conditions, and the vast inequality- these were unquestionable evils, some of which remain endemic to capitalism, others of which have been ameliorated through reform in (relatively) democratic countries. As is typical, criticizing is easy, and there were, and remain, plenty of problems with capitalism and with democracy as well. The question is whether Bukharin plumbs the essential depths of economics sufficiently to come up with a better economic system, or of its associated politics to come up with a better form of the state.

And here the answer has to be, as history demonstrated, no. In their discussion of large scale enterprise, they go through a rather particular example to show the power of scale.

"How great is the advantage of this system was made manifest by some American researches instituted in the year 1898. Here are the results. The manufacture of 10 ploughs. By hand labour: 2 workers, performing 11 distinct operations, worked in all 1,180 hours, and received $54. By machine labour: 52 workers, performing 97 operations (the more numerous the workers, the more varied the operations), worked in all 37 hours and 28 minutes, and received $7.90. (We see that the time was enormously less and that the cost of labour was very much lower.) The manufacture of 100 sets of clock wheels. By hand labour: 14 workers, 453 operations, 341,866 hours, $80.82. By machine labour: 10 workers, 1,088 operations, 8343 hours, $1.80. The manufacture of 500 yards of cloth. Hand labour: 3 workers, 19 operations, 7,534 hours, $135.6. Machine labour: 252 workers, 43 operations, 84 hours, $6.81."

... "All these advantages attaching to large-scale enterprise explain why small scale production must invariably succumb in capitalist society. Large scale capital crushes the small producer, takes away his customers, and ruins him, so that he drops into the ranks of the proletariat or becomes a tramp. In many cases, of course, the small master continues to cling to life. He fights desperately, puts his own hand to the work, forces his workers and his family to labour with all their strength; but in the end he is compelled to give up his place to the great capitalist."

If we read this carefully, and do the math in the case of the ploughs:

$54 / 1180 hours = 4.58 cents per hour in wages

$5.40 per plough in cost

$7.90 / 37.5 hours = 21.1 cents per hour in wages

$0.79 per plough in cost

... we can see that not only is the plough almost ten-fold cheaper (some of which is presumably shared with the buyer in the market), but the workers were paid almost five-fold more per hour. How is this a bad reflection on capitalism? This is by way of telling why small scale production dies in a capitalist system ... it doesn't stand a chance. But the authors fail to mention that, in their own example, some of these gains are apparently shared with workers. So the gains in efficiency are shared quite widely- with customers, with workers, and also with the managers and capitalists, since this new form of work requires much greater contributions of management and capital equipment.

Bukharin and Preobrazhensky are "doctrinaire" communists, blind to a gem hidden in their own data that tells us how and why the capitalist system really works. Why did workers flock to the cities when there were agricultural jobs to be had? It was higher pay. Were the new capitalists holding workers as serfs against their will? Not at all. In the US likewise, whatever the horrors of capitalism, it did not hold a candle to the horrors of slavery.

More broadly, Bukharin and the communists generally had little appreciation for the difficulties and role of management. The surplus labor theory of Marxism leaves no room for management contributions of value to the final product- it is all excess labor stolen from the worker, to be restored in the idealized worker state/paradise. The capitalists are parasites:

"In communist society parasitism will likewise disappear. There will be no place for the parasites who do nothing and who live at others' cost."

Rentiers may be parasites, but managers are not. Theirs is the job to locate the resources, drum up the customers, to build the factories, to negotiate the wages, to run the work and fire the lazy. It is not an enviable or simple position to be in, rather is perhaps the most complex in the capitalist system, or any economic system. (And it is noteworthy that failures of management are endemic in government, of even the most enlightened kind, where crucial parts of this constricting set of incentives are often lacking.) It is the competitive forces pressuring on all sides- from customers, from workers, from government, from the financial markets, etc., that are integrated by the petty bourgeoisie / kulak class into a solvent enterprise, and are the soul of the capitalist system, for which they take a premium of profits off the top.

Bukharin and colleagues never pause to consider why capitalism is so dominant:

"Contemporary capitalism is world capitalism. All the countries are interconnected; they buy one from another. We cannot now find any country which is not under the heel of capitalism; we cannot find any country which produces for itself absolutely everything it needs."

Why is this? There was no shortage of experiments in the 1800's in socialistic styles of life, extending from the Shakers and the Owenites to the Tolstoyans. Few of them even survived very long, and none had a broader impact, let alone rising to the organic level of country-wide economic system. Religious monasteries are probably the only example of successful long-term socialistic organizations, though most are run on more or less totalitarian lines, with a whole separate set of emotional and personal committments. This starkly unsuccessful track record should have been a red flag- forgive the pun!- that while socialist utopianism is very popular, it is not practical.

This cavalier disregard of management and the elementary aspects of human economic demand (aka desire, aka greed) naturally came back to bite the communist Soviets, when, in the absence of a well-thought out way to run things in the wake of winning power on the back of their fantasy of a perfectly (and apparently easily, thanks to a mythical "statistical office") ordered and efficient economic system, they fell to the lowest device in the manager's toolbox- terror.

Bukharin on his way to execution, after having helped Stalin hound Trotsky to death.

Why the loose economics, fantastical pronouncements, and embarassing lack of realism? The reason becomes apparent as you read through "The ABC of Communism", which is that its main purpose is to inspire hate. It is a political tract that, as was current among communists then and since, seeks to frame an enemy, inspire hatred of that enemy, and support for the valiant vanguard that will vanquish that enemy. 

"What civil war can compare in its destructive effects with the brutal disorganization and devastation, with the loss of the accumulated wealth of mankind, that resulted from the imperialist war? MANIFESTLY IT IS ESSENTIAL THAT HUMANITY SHALL MAKE AN END OF CAPITALISM ONCE AND FOR ALL. WITH THIS GOAL IN VIEW, WE CAN ENDURE THE PERIOD OF CIVIL WARS, AND CAN PAVE THE WAY FOR COMMUNISM, WHICH WILL HEAL ALL OUR WOUNDS, AND WILL QUICKLY LEAD TO THE FULL DEVELOPMENT OF THE PRODUCTIVE FORCES OF HUMAN SOCIETY."

... "We are thus confronted by two alternatives, and two only. There must either be complete disintegration, hell broth, further brutalization and disorder, absolute chaos, or else communism."

Millions of people all over the world were thoughtless enough to accept this poisoned chalice, and went down the road of economic brutalization, famine, mass terror, and the gulag. Communism turned out to be a power play, not an economic Oz. It was a bright and shiny political lie. We are in the US becoming familiar with the power of such lies- their use of the basest and most powerful instincts- hate, and hope. Their ability to cut straight through any rational and empathetic analysis, and their ability to make seemingly reasonable people believe the flimsiest absurdities.

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Founders, Schmounders

Elie Mystal rakes constitutional originalism over the coals, in "A Black Guy's Guide to the Constitution".

I was raised to revere the founders and the elegant, almost scriptural document they constructed to rule our society. But suppose I was a black person, knowing that these founders were the rich white guys of their time, owners and abusers of slaves? I might think that while their aspirations were rhetorically high, their constitution was rather more utilitarian in its denial of true democracy to most people living in the colonies, its indirect and unjust approach to the democracy it did allow, and its euphemistically stated, but absolute, denial of freedom to "other persons". I would have experienced the US legal and cultural system as one of systematic oppression, dedicated to the proposition that while white, rich, men might be equal in some way and enjoy a rules-based system, the larger point of the system was to maintain power in their hands, and deny it to all others.

At least that is the sense one gets from Mystal's book, which, along with a lot of colorful language and wry jokes, assembles a trenchant rebuke of the American constitution, of conservatives, of Republicans, and especially of the originalist ideology of jurisprudence. Every hot button topic gets its due, and every amendment its contrarian interpretation. The second amendment is easy- it is about a regulated militia, after all, not about some commandment handed down from Charlton Heston to the ammosexuals of the nation to stock up on AR-15s and have a mass shooting if they are feeling a little antsy. 

Police brutality, prejudice, impunity, and immunity from accountabiliy is another easy, if painful, target. Mystal describes how he has been profiled and roughed up, for no other reason than being black. The legal system seems to have driven a semi through the fourth amendment against unreasonable searches when it comes to vehicles owned by black people, for one thing. And the fifth amendment comes into play as well- why do we allow police to play cat and mouse with suspects, trying to trip them up and get them to confess, cutting corners and playing games with their Miranda rights? Mystal makes a strong case for doing away with this whole theater of intimidation, with its slippery slope to fraud and torture, by barring police from eliciting or transmitting confessions at all, period. He notes that anyone with even a glancing acquaintance with the legal profession has learned to say nothing to police without a lawyer by her side.

Mystal's approach to abortion, however, is where this book really shines. Was Roe "wrongly decided"? Hardly. In the first place, Mystal provides an interesting discussion of "substantive" due process, (fifth amendment, and fourteenth), meaning that the rights and protections of the constitution are not to be taken merely literally or trifled with by twisting their meanings. They must be afforded by realistic means and set in a legal / civil system that supports their spirit. And that means that the right to privacy is a thing. While its poetic origin may be in the "penumbras" of the constitution, it is integral to the very idea of much of it- the concept unreasonable searches, of rights against self-incrimination, of any sort of rights of the individual vs the state. This is not to mention the ninth amendment, which asserts that just because the constitution and bill of rights mentions some rights explicitly, that others by their ommission are not covered. Privacy would, in general terms, clearly fall in this category.

But where else could a right to abortion be found? Plenty of places. One is the equal protection clause of the fourteenth amendment. Mystal, and many others, note that this should be taken as applying to women, making the whole equal rights amendment (ERA) unnecessary, given a modicum of enlightened interpretation. It could also be taken to afford men and women equal protections regarding reproduction, meaning that the penalty for a roll in the hay should not be grossly unequal, as it is when abortion is banned. Mystal goes on to suggest that the eighth amendment against cruel and unusual punishment could be invoked as well. If men were faced, as a penalty for sex, months of mental and physical torment, and then the excruciating labor of birth, one could be sure that no court would consider banning abortion for a nanosecond. And how much more cruel and vindictive is it be if that pregnancy arose from rape? There is also, after all, the thirteen amendment against involuntary servitude/labor.

Originalists brazenly throw their so-called principles out the window when it comes to abortion. Unenumerated rights? Never heard of them. Keeping the state out of the most sacred precincts of our private lives? No comment. Colonial attitudes towards abortion were very loose, nothing like the personhood-at-conception garbage we get today from the right/Catholic wing. It just goes to show that a little knowledge (here, of biology) can be a dangerous thing.

It is really originalism and conservatism, however, that is the overarching and corrosive topic Mystal takes on. The founders were people of their time, and that was a white supremacy kind of time. They wrote a constitution with hopeful ideals and judicious language which insulated it somewhat (though hardly enough!) from the prejudices of their day. To say that our current interpretation of their words should be confined to whatever psychoanalysis we can make of their meanings at the time would lock our whole political and legal system into those same prejudices that they were trying to overcome. To take the second amendment, Mystal argues (I am not sure how successfully) that its "militias" were most keenly understood to mean bands of Southern planters gathering together to prevent or put down slave revolts. Southerners did not want to be dependent on Federal sympathy and arms, and thus insisted that a right to raise their own militias for their own peculiar needs should be enshrined in the constitution. Well, if we were to restrict outselves to such an interpretation, that would have significant effects on our practice of the second amendment. Gun control would be allowed in the North, just not in the South, allowing guns to white males with certain property qualifications, perhaps, and certain mental proclivities.

Even the civil war amendments would be infected with originalism, since very few people at that time envisioned the full social equality of black citizens. It is remarkable to consider the flurry of anti-miscegenation laws passed during the Jim Crow era, after the Southern slave owners had spent a century or two conducting forced miscegenation. Whence the squeemishness? Anyhow, consistent originalism would never have struck down such laws, or abetted the civil rights movement for blacks, let alone gays. Mystal imagines the nettlesome questioning of a prospective conservative justice going like: "Do you believe that Loving v. Virgina was rightly decided?" This case was about the social system of the South, which Mystal tries to separate from the legal and political aspects, and clearly on originalist principles could not be decided as it was. And much more so on Obergefell, which draws on the fourteenth amendment's due process concept to free personal choices (of gay people) from government intrusion, again doubtless totally in contradiction to the social vision and intention of any of its authors.

Instead of fixating on the past so much, in constitutional interpretation, we might think about the future more.

So originalism, for all its rhetorical seductiveness, (after one has been properly indoctrinated in the divine virtues of the founding fathers), is an absurdity for a country with even the tiniest ambition towards social progress, or change of any kind. It amounts to extreme conservatism, pure and simple. Mystal is relentlessly dismissive of the conservative mindset, tied as it is (ever more explicitly in our polarized moment) to regressive, even violent, racial anti-minority politics. 

What is the deal with conservatives? I think there is another unenumerated right that undergirds all these tensions, which is the right to win, and win by inheriting what our forebears wrought- physically, monetarily, politically, socially. America is a highly competitive country- we compete in making money, in politics, in sports, in war. In any society there is an inherent tension between the cohesiveness required to build common structures, like a constitution, or a military, and the the competitiveness that, if channeled properly, can also build great things, but if let loose, can tear down everything. The right to succeed in business, and to bequeath those gains to one's children- that is a widely shared dream. Our founders saw that there had to be limits to this dream, however. The creaky aristocracies of Europe fed on centuries of priviledge and inheritance. America was fundamentally opposed to noble privileges, but in their slaveholding and other businesses, the founders were far from averse to hereditary privileges in general.

It was the whites who won all this- won the American continent from its native inhabitants, won the slaves from their native hearths, invented the technologies like the cotton gin, devised the capitalist system, etc., etc. Who has a right to inherit all these winnings? Conservatives subscribe to a fundamentally competitive system. That is why Trump won the hearts of a rabid base. Lying isn't a bug, it is a feature, an intrinsic part of winning in a duplicitous cultural competition- and winning is everything. To conservatives, social justice is a fundamental affront. Who said the world was fair? Not us! Constitutional originalism is way of expressing this denial of social progress and justice in concrete, and superficially palatable, terms. For as Mystal reiterates, the justices are not calling balls and strikes- constitutional interpretation runs rather freely, as we can see from second amendment jurisprudence. That is why capture of the supreme court has been such a existential project of the right for decades.

Counterpoised to the conservative conception of (lack of) justice in America is that of the left, perhaps best exemplified by the California Reparations task force. If one looks back and considers the losses of enslaved and oppressed Americans, one quickly reaches astronomical levels of reparations that would be required in a just world. How to make up for death and torture? How to make up for the bulldozing of entire communities? How to make up for centuries of economic, social, political, and legal disadvantage? There is simply no way to make up what has been lost, and to do so would open up many other claims, especially by Native Americans, all inhabitants of Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, not to mention countless other victims of historical processes going back centuries and ranging world-wide. Justice is a massive can of worms, if looking back in time. But how about something simple, like affirmative action, giving formerly oppressed people a small leg up in the current system? Conservatives can't stand that either, and cry anti-white racism. 

It frankly boggles the mind, how greedy some people can be. But I think the problem of inheritance remains a central touchstone. In each generation, does everyone share equally in the inheritances from the past, or does one race inherit more, do children of the rich inherit more, do the well-connected send their children into the halls of power? The only way to insure a fresh and fair start for each generation is to, not only demolish the idea of inherited nobility as our founders did, (and which we are edging back toward with extreme economic inequality), but go a little beyond that to end other forms of inheritance ... of money and power. The meritocratic systems of higher education did a great deal in the twentieth century to advance this ideal, allowing students from all backgrounds to aspire to, and achieve, all kinds of success. This made the US incredibly powerful and the envy of the world. Liberals should continue this tradition by attacking all forms of entrenched and inherited power, from private schools to the shameful lack of inheritance taxation. The better way to make reparations is to pay it forward, with more just future world.

• Entering blackness.
• "Private jets are on average 10 times more carbon intensive than commercial flights"
• The perils of ransomware.
• The incredible and thoughtless craven-ness of Republicans.
• Our problem with futile medicine.
• Wow- lots of papers (in bad science journals) are duplicated, plagiarized, or fake ... the paper mills.

Drought Causes Cultural Breakdown

What happened to the Hittites, and the late Bronze Age?

Climate change is already causing wars and migration, misery on a vast scale. The global South takes the heat, while the global North keeps making it, pumping out the CO2. Can we adapt, or is the human population going to decrease, either gently or not so gently, as conditions deteriorate? The answer is not at all clear. The adaptation measures taken by the rich world involve highly contentious politics, and uncertain technology that, at best, requires a great deal more resource extraction. The poor, on the other hand, are left to either try developing (if they can maintain good political and economic governance) to join the rich in their extractive ways, (China, India), or migrate en masse to rich countries (Africa, Central America). All this is going to get worse, not better, since we are still at peak CO2 emissions and only beginning the process of global heating.

Our emissions of CO2 are still going up, not down. Therefore climate change will be getting worse, faster. Conflict is one likely outcome.

Well, migrations and dislocation have happened before. Over the last millennium, it was cold temperatures, not hot, that have correlated with conflict. Epic migrations occurred in the declining days of the Roman Empire, when the Huns drove a domino series of migrations of Germanic tribes that fought their way throughout Europe. What prompted the Huns out of the Asian steppe is unknown, however. Jared Diamond wrote of several other cultures that met their end after exhausing their resources and technologies. A recent paper added one more such case- the Hittites of late Bronze Age.

The Hittites were a big deal in their time (1700 to 1200 BCE, very roughly), running what is now Eastern and Southern Turkey, and occasionally Syria and points South. They were an early offshoot of the Indo-European migrations, and had a convulsive (though not very well understood) history of rises and falls, mostly due to their political dynamics. At the height of Hittite power, they fought Egypt directy at the battle of Kadesh, (1274 BCE), which occured just a little north of current-day Lebanon. This was the complex frontier between Assyria / Babylon, the Hittites, and Egypt. Egyptian history is full of expeditions- military, economic, and diplomatic- through the Levant.

The Hittites were artists as well as warriors.

The Hittites were also one of several communities around the Mediterranean that shared in the late Bronze Age collapse. This is the epic time that saw the Greek siege of Troy, (~1200 BCE), and the "Sea People's" invasion of Egypt. Its causes and details remain a long-standing historical mystery. But its scale was vast. Greece entered its dark age that lasted from 1200 to the 800's BCE. North Africa, the Balkans, Turkey, Levant, and the Caucaus all declined. Assyria and Egypt were weakened, but did not collapse. The latest paper uses tree-ring data from junipers from around the former Hittite capital in what is now central Turkey to more precisely date a severe drought that may have caused this collapse. Drought is just the kind of cause that would have been wide-spread enough and foundational enough to destroy the regional economies and prompt migrations and wars. Wars.. there are always wars, but no single war would have caused the collapse of cultures on such a wide scale, including a weakening of Egypt. Plagues are also not a great candidate, since they do not harm a society's resource base, but only its population. Such population reductions typically benefit the survivors, who rebuild in short order.

Moisture levels inferred from tree ring data, with lower values dryer. There are three consecutive catastrophic years dated to 1198-1196 BCE in this region, which is around the ancient Hittite capital. The ensuing decade was also unusually dry and likely poor for agriculture. The 20% and 6.25% levels of drought are by comparison to wider sampling, including modern data.

The drought these authors identified and located with precision was extraordinary. They note that, using modern data for indexing, the 20% level (representing about 30 cm of annual rain) is the minimum viable threshold for growing wheat. The 6.25% level is far below that and represents widespread crop failure. They developed two types of data from the tree rings, drawn from 18 individual trees whose rings spanned about a thousand years across the second millenium BCE. First is the size of the rings themselves, whose data are shown above. Second is the carbon 13 isotope ratio, which is a separate index of dryness, based on the isotopic discrimination that plants exercise over CO2 respiration under different climatic conditions. 

The same tree rings that provided the inferences above from their geometry (width) also here provided carbon 13 isotope data that lead to a similar conclusion, though with much less precision. High proportions of C13 indicate drier climate, here continuous around 1200 BCE.

The paper shows three consecutive years at the 6.25% level of rainfall, starting at 1198 BC. The ensuing decade was also harshly dry. All this correlates with cuneiform texts found in the Levant that were letters from the Hittites, bemoaning their drought and begging for assistance. But everyone in the region was in a similar position. The Hittite culture never recovered. 

So drought is now a leading hypothesis for the ultimate cause of the late Bronze Age collapse around many parts of the Mediterranean, with Greece and Anatolia particularly affected. While it is reasonable to imagine that such conditions would lead to desperation, migration, and war, there is no direct link yet. The nature and origin of the Sea Peoples who attacked Egypt remain unknown, for instance. The reasons for the seige of Troy are lost to myth. The Illiad never mentions drought, nor would Troy have been in a much better position than Mycenaean Greece, climatically speaking. But the consequences of geopolitical shifts in alignment can be unpredictable, as we continue to experience today. It is exciting (as well as sobering) to get a glimpse into this cloudy history- into a vast swath of human experience that built great cultures and suffered epic defeats.

• The planet can just go to hell.
• And so can our political system and media.
• The next Mein Kampf.
• Maybe governments should really do things themselves.

Everything is Alive, but the Gods are all Dead

Barbara Ehrenreich's memoir and theological ruminations in "Living with a Wild God".

It turns out that everyone is a seeker. Somewhere there must be something or someone to tell us the meaning of life- something we don't have to manufacture with our own hands, but rather can go into a store and buy. Atheists are just as much seekers as anyone else, only they never find anything worth buying. The late writer Barbara Ehrenreich was such an atheist, as well as a remarkable writer and intellectual who wrote a memoir of her formation. Unusually and fruitfully, it focuses on those intense early and teen years when we are reaching out with both hands to seize the world- a world that is maddeningly just beyond our grasp, full of secrets and codes it takes a lifetime and more to understand. Religion is the ultimate hidden secret, the greatest mystery which has been solved in countless ways, each of them conflicting and confounding.

Ehrenreich's tale is more memoir than theology, taking us on a tour through a dysfunctional childhood with alcoholic parents and tough love. A story of growth, striking out into the world, and sad coming-to-terms with the parents who each die tragically. But it also turns on a pattern of mystical experiences that she keeps having, throughout her adult life, which she ultimately diagnoses as dissociative states where she zones out and has a sort of psychedelic communion with the world.

"Something peeled off the visible world, taking with it all meaning, inference, association, labels, and words. I was looking at a tree, and if anyone had asked, that's what I would have said I was doing, but the word "tree" was gone, along with all the notions of tree-ness that had accumulated in the last dozen years or so since I had acquired language. Was it a place that was suddenly revealed to me? Or was it a substance- the indivisible, elemental material out of which the entire known and agreed-upon world arises as a fantastic elaboration? I don't know, because this substance, this residue, was stolidly, imperturbably mute. The interesting thing, some might say alarming, was that when you take away all the human attributions- the words, the names of species, the wisps of remembered tree-related poetry, the fables of photosynthesis and capillary action- that when you take all this this away, there is still something left."

This is not very hard to understand as a neurological phenomenon of some kind of transient disconnection of just the kind of brain areas she mentions- those that do all the labeling, name-calling, and boxing-in. In schizophrenia, it runs to the pathological, but in Ehrenreich's case, she does not regard it as pathological at all, as it is always quite brief. But obviously, the emotional impact and weirdness of the experience- that is something else altogether, and something that humans have been inducing with drugs, and puzzling over, forever. 

Source

As a memoir, the book is very engaging. As a theological quest, however, it doesn't work as well, because the mystical experience is, as noted above, resolutely meaningless. It neither compels Ehrenreich to take up Christianity, as after a Pauline conversion, nor any other faith or belief system. It offers a peek behind the curtain, but, stripped of meaning as this view is, Ehrenreich is perhaps too skeptical or bereft of imagination to give it another, whether of her own or one available from the conventional array of sects and religions. So while the experiences are doubtless mystical, one can not call them religious, let alone god-given, because Ehrenreich hasn't interpreted them that away. This hearkens back to the writings of William James, who declined to assign general significance to mystical experiences, while freely admitting their momentous and convincing nature to those who experienced them.

Only in one brief section (which had clearly been originally destined for an entirely different book) does she offer a more interesting and insightful analysis. There, Ehrenreich notes that the history of religion can be understood as a progressive bloodbath of deicide. At first, everything is alive and sacred, to an animist mind. Every leaf and grain of sand holds wonders. Every stream and cloud is divine. This is probably our natural state, which a great deal of culture has been required to stamp out of us. Next is a hunting kind of religion, where deities are concentrated in the economic objects (and social patterns) of the tribe- the prey animals, the great plants that are eaten, and perhaps the more striking natural phenomena and powerful beasts. But by the time of paganism, the pantheon is cut down still more and tamed into a domestic household, with its soap-opera dramas and an increasingly tight focus on the major gods- the head of the family, as it were. 

Monotheism comes next, doing away with all the dedicated gods of the ocean, of medicine, of amor and war, etc., cutting the cast down to one. One, which is inflated to absurd proportions with all-goodness, all-power, all-knowledge, etc. A final and terrifying authoritarianism, probably patterned on the primitive royal state. This is the phase when the natural world is left in the lurch, as an undeified and unprotected zone where human economic greed can run rampant, safe in the belief that the one god is focused entirely on man's doings, whether for good or for ill, not on that of any other creature or feature of the natural world. A phase when even animals, who are so patently conscious, can, through the narcissism of primitive science and egoistic religion, be deemed mere mechanisms without feeling. This process doesn't even touch on the intercultural deicide committed by colonialism and conquest.

This in turn invites the last deicide- that by rational people who toss aside this now-cartoonish super-god, and return to a simpler reverence for the world as we naturally respond to it, without carting in a lot of social power-and-drama baggage. It is the cultural phase we are in right now, but the transition is painfully slow, uneven, and drawn-out. For Ehrenreich, there are plenty of signs- in the non-linear chemical phenomena of her undergraduate research, in the liveliness of quantum physics even into the non-empty vacuum, in the animals who populate our world and are perhaps the alien consciousnesses that we should be seeking in place of the hunt through outer space, and in our natural delight in, and dreams about, nature at large. So she ends the book as atheist as ever, but hinting that perhaps the liveliness of the universe around us holds some message that we are not the only thinking and sentient beings.

"Ah, you say, this is all in your mind. And you are right to be skeptical; I expect no less. It is in my mind, which I have acknowledged from the beginning is a less than perfect instrument. but this is what appears to be the purpose of my mind, and no doubt yours as well, its designed function beyond all the mundane calculations: to condense all the chaos and mystery of the world into a palpable Other or Others, not necessarily because we love it, and certainly not out of any intention to "worship" it. But because ultimately we may have no choice in the matter. I have the impression, growing out of the experiences chronicled here, that it may be seeking us out." 

Thus the book ends, and I find it a rather poor ending. It feels ripped from an X-Files episode, highly suggestive and playing into all the Deepak and similar mystical tropes of cosmic consciousness. That is, if this passage really means much at all. Anyhow, the rest of the trip is well worth it, and it is appropriate to return to the issue of the mystical experience, which is here handled with such judicious care and restraint. Where imagination could have run rampant, the cooly scientific view (Ehrenreich had a doctorate in biology) is that the experiences she had, while fascinating and possibly book-proposal-worthy, did not force a religious interpretation. This is radically unlike the treatment of such matters in countless other hands, needless to say. Perhaps our normal consciousness should not be automatically valued less than more rare and esoteric states, just because it is common, or because it is even-tempered.

• God would like us to use "they".
• If you are interested in early Christianity, Gnosticism is a good place to start.
• Green is still an uphill battle.

Hand-Waving to God

A decade on, the Discovery Institute is still cranking out skepticism, diversion, and obfuscation.

A post a couple of weeks ago mentioned that the Discovery Institute offered a knowledgeable critique of the lineages of the Ediacaran fauna. They have raised their scientific game significantly, and so I wanted to review what they are doing these days, focusing on two of their most recent papers. The Discovery Institute has a lineage of its own, from creationism. It has adapted to the derision that entailed, by retreating to "intelligent design", which is creationism without naming the creators, nailing down the schedule of creation, or providing any detail of how and from where creation operates. Their review of the Ediacaran fauna raised some highly skeptical points about whether these organisms were animals or not. Particularly, they suggested that cholesterol is not really restricted to animals, so the chemical traces of cholesterol that were so clearly found in the Dickinsonia fossil layers might not really mean that these were animals- they might also be unusual protists of gigantic size, or odd plant forms, etc. While the critique is not unreasonable, it does not alter the balance of the evidence which does indeed point to an animal affinity. These fauna are so primitive and distant that it is fair to say that we can not be sure, and particularly we can not be sure that they had any direct ancestral relationship to any later organisms of the ensuing Cambrian period, when recognizable animals emerged.

Fair enough. But what of their larger point? The Discovery Institute is trying to make the point, I believe, about the sudden-ness of early Cambrian evolution of animals, and thus its implausibility under conventional evolutionary theory. But we are traversing tens of millions of years through these intervals, which is a long time, even in evolutionary terms. Secondly, the Ediacaran period, though now represented by several exquisite fossil beds, spanned a hundred million years and is still far from completely characterized paleontologically, even supposing that early true animals would have fossilized, rather than being infinitesimal and very soft-bodied. So the Cambrian biota could easily have predecessors in the Ediacaran that have or have not yet been observed- it is as yet not easy to say. But what we can not claim is the negative, that no predecessors existed before some time X- say the 540 MYA point at the base of the Cambrian. So the implication that the Discovery Institute is attempting to suggest has very little merit, particularly since everything that they themselves cite about the molecular and paleontological sequence is so clearly progressive and in proper time sequence, in complete accord with the overall theory of evolution.

For we should always keep in mind that an intelligent designer has a free hand, and can make all of life in a day (or in six, if absolutely needed). The fact that this designer works in the shadows of slightly altered mutation rates, or in a few million years rather than twenty million, and never puts fossils out of sequence in the sedimentary record, is an acknowledgement that this designer is a bit dull, and bears a strong resemblence to evolution by natural selection. To put it in psychological terms, the institute is in the "negotiation" stage of grief- over the death of god.

Science Fiction as Theology

Let's look higher than the clouds. Let's look to the stars.

I have always been rather dismissive of theology- the study of something that doesn't exist. But if one takes it in a larger sense of a culture of scripture, story telling, morals, and social construction, then sure, it makes more sense. But then so do alot of other stories. I have been enjoying the Foundation series via streaming, which is at best "inspired" by the original books, yet takes its premises reasonably seriously and grows a complex and interesting set of story lines to what by the end of the first season is a positive and promising conclusion. I would ding it for excessive adherence to Star Wars-style action and simplistic morality, compared with the more cerebral original, but that is only to be expected these days.

Science fiction is having a golden age, as a way to tell important, probing stories and consider alternative futures. The Star Trek franchise generally sticks with hopeful futures, which I certainly favor. Their world is post-money, post internal conflict, post-disease. But philosophically alive through contact with other civilizations. The theological implications are momentous, as we envision a culture very different from our own, and blessed with various magical means of deliverance, like transporters, replicators, and warp drives. Where the "science fiction" books of the Bible were mostly dystopian (Job, Revelation, Genesis), Science fiction in our era straddles the line, with plenty of dystopian offerings, but also hopeful ones. Whether Star Wars is hopeful might be a matter of debate, since bad guys and bad empires never seem to go away, and the position of the resistance is always impossibly dire.

White male mathematician Hari Seldon takes on the role of god, in the Foundation series. He calculates out the future of the galaxy, clairvoyantly predicting events, and then comes back from beyond the grave to keep guiding his flock through crisis after crisis.

Are Star Trek futures any more realistic than those of Revelation? Are they theologically more sound? I think yes on both counts. Revelation is a rather unhinged response to the late Jewish era in its apocalyptic relations with Rome, as it headed into exile and the diaspora. There is a welter of reworked Old Testament material and obscure references, turning into florid visions that have misled Christians for centuries. Star Trek and the other science fiction franchises, on the other hand, are a bit more restrained in their visionary quests and escatologies, and more hopeful, for abundant futures where some problems have been solved while other forms of politics and history continue to call for strong moral values. This is quite different than the bizarre and ecstatic culmination of Revelation at the end of history, in the last days.

We also get to live out the visions, on a small scale, as technology advances in the real world. Smart phones have transformed our lives, for instance, one promise kept from the early science fiction days. And our only real hope for dealing with climate change is to harness better technologies, rather than going down dystopian roads of degrowth, famine, and war. So there are real futures at stake here, not just visions of futures.

While our current physics totally bars the adventures that are portrayed in contemporary science fiction epics, their theological significance lies in their various visions of what humanity can and should do. They, as Revelation, are always keyed to their historical moment, with America ascendent and technologically advanced over other cultures. But they do not use their magical elements and story arcs to promote quiescence and slack-jawed wonder at the return of the son of god, who will make everything right and mete out judgement to all the bad people. (Or do the opposite, in the case of Job.) No, they uniformly encourage resistance against injustice, and hopeful action towards a better world, or galaxy, or universe, as the case may be.

• Some communities rode out the hurricane just fine.
• Loretta Lynn, RIP.
• Eye care- another frontier in predation.
• Christians can't deal with disagreement, claim oppression.
• If you need to delve further into sociopathic narcissism ...
• Essential background on Ukraine.

For the Love of Money

The social magic of wealth ... and Trump's travel down the wealth / status escalator.

I have been reading the archly sarcastic "The Theory of the Leisure Class", by Thorstein Veblen. It introduced the concept of "conspicuous consumption" by way of arguing that social class is marked by work, specifically by the total lack of work that occupies the upper, or leisure class, and more and more mundane forms of work as one sinks down the social scale. This is a natural consequence of what he calls our predatory lifestyle, which, at least in times of yore, reserved to men, especially those of the upper class, the heroic roles of hunter and warrior, contrasted with the roles of women, who were assigned all non-heroic forms of work, i.e. drudgery. This developed over time into a pervasive horror of menial work and a scramble to evince whatever evidence one can of being above it, such as wearing clean, uncomfortable and fashionable clothes, doing useless things like charity drives, golf, and bridge. And having one's wife do the same, to show how financially successful one is.

Veblen changed our culture even as he satarized and skewered it, launching a million disgruntled teenage rebellions, cynical movies, songs, and other analyses. But his rules can not be broken. Hollywood still showcases the rich, and silicon valley, for all its putative nerdiness, is just another venue for social signaling by way of useless toys, displays of leisure (at work, no less, with the omnipresent foosball and other games), and ever more subtle fashion statements.

Conversely, the poor are disparaged, if not hated. We step over homeless people, holding our noses. The Dalit of India are perhaps the clearest expression of this instinct. But our whole economic system is structured in this way, paying the hardest and most menial jobs the worst, while paying some of the most social destructive professions, like corporate law, the best, and placing them by attire, titles, and other means, high on the social hierarchy.

As Reagan said, nothing succeeds like success. We are fascinated, indeed mesmerized, by wealth. It seems perfectly reasonable to give wealthy areas of town better public services. It seems perfectly reasonable to have wealthy people own all our sports teams, run all our companies, and run for most political offices. We are after all Darwinian through and through. But what if a person's wealth comes from their parents? Does the status still rub off? Should it? Or what if it came from criminal activities? Russia is run by a cabal of oligarchs, more or less- is their status high or low?

All this used to make more sense, in small groups where reputations were built over a lifetime of toil in support of the family, group, and tribe. Worth was assessed by personal interaction, not by the proxy of money. And this status was difficult to bequeath to others. The fairy tale generally has the prince proving himself through arduous tasks, to validate the genetic and social inheritance that the rest of the world may or may not be aware of. 

But with the advent of money, and even more so with the advent of inherited nobility and kingship, status became transferable, inheritable, and generally untethered from the values it supposedly exemplifies. Indeed, in our society it is well-known that wealth correlates with a decline in ethical and social values. Who exemplifies this most clearly? Obviously our former president, whose entire public persona is based on wealth. It was evidently inherited, and he parlayed it into publicity, notariety, scandal, and then the presidency. He was adulated, first by tabloids and TV, which loved brashness (and wealth), then by Republican voters, who appear to love cruelty, mean-ness, low taste and intellect, ... and wealth. 

But now the tide is slowly turning, as Trump's many perfidies and illegal practices catch up with him. It is leaking out, despite every effort of half the media, that he may not be as wealthy as he fraudulently portrayed. And with that, the artificial status conferred by being "a successful businessman" is deflating, and his national profile is withering. One might say that he is taking an downward ride on the escalator of social status that is in our society conferred largely by wealth.

All that is shiny ... mines coal.

Being aware of this social instinct is naturally the first step to addressing it. A century ago and more, the communists and socialists provided a thoroughgoing critique of the plutocratic class as being not worthy of social adulation, as the Carnegies and Horatio Algers of the world would have it. But once in power, the ensuing communist governments covered themselves in the ignominy of personality cults that facilitated (and still do in some cases) even worse political tyrannies and economic disasters. 

The succeeding model of "managed capitalism" is not quite as catastrophic and has rehabilitated the rich in their societies, but one wouldn't want to live there either. So we have to make do with the liberal state and its frustratingly modest regulatory powers, aiming to make the wealthy do virtuous things instead of destructive things. Bitcoin is but one example of a waste of societal (and ecological) resources, which engenders social adulation of the riches to be mined, but should instead be regulated out of existence. Taking back the media is a critical step. We need to reel back the legal equation of money with speech and political power that has spread corruption, and tirelessly tooted its own ideology of status and celebrity through wealth.

• California police could use some supervision too.
• Marin- a cruel gerontocracy?

Desperately Seeking Cessation of Desire

Some paradoxes, and good points, of Buddhism.

I have been reading "In the Buddha's Words", by Bhikkhu Bodhi, which is a well-organized collection / selection of translations of what we have as the core teachings of Buddhism. It comes from the Pali canon, from Sri Lanka, where Buddhism found refuge after its final destruction in India after the Arab invasions, and offers as clear an exposition of the Buddhist system as one can probably find in English. A bit like the scriptures of Christianity, the earliest canons of Buddhism originate from oral traditions only recorded a hundred or so years after Buddha's death, but as they are slightly less besotted with miraculous stories, the collection has more of a feeling of actual teaching, than of gnomic riddles and wonder stories, not to mention Odyssean mis-adventures.

Both prophets make audacious claims, one to be god, or its son, the other to have attained a perfectly enlightened state with similar implications for everlasting life (or lack of rebirth, at any rate). Each extends to his followers the tempting prospect of a similarly exalted state after death. Each teaches simple morals, each attracts followers both lay and career-ist, the latter of whom tend to be rather dense. Each launched an international sensation that bifurcated into a monastic/ascetic branch of professional clerics and a more popular branch that attained a leading role in some societies.

But Buddhism has attained a special status in the West as something a bit more advanced than the absurd theology of Christianity. A theology that could even be deemed atheist, along with a practice that focuses more relentlessly on peace and harmony than does what Christianity has become, particularly in the US. It is congenial to seekers, an exotic and edgy way to be spiritual, but not religious.

But how much sense does it really make? For starters, much of the Buddhist mythology and theology is simply taken from its ambient Hindu environment. The cycle of rebirth, the karma that influences one's level of rebirth, the heavens and hells, all come from the common understandings of the time, so are not very particular to Buddhism. Buddhists did away with lots of the gods, in favor of their own heros (Buddha, and the Bodhisattvas), and developed a simplified philosphy of desire, suffering, and the relief of suffering by controlling desire, optimally through advanced meditation practices. Much of this was also ambient or at least implicit, as Buddha himself began as a normal Indian ascetic, trying to purify himself of all taints and mundane aspects. For his Buddhist Sanga, he dialed things back a bit, so that the community could function as a social system, not a disconnected constellation of hermits.

Bodhisattvas floating in heaven. These are Buddhists who have attained enlightenment but not entered permanent heaven, choosing rather to have compassion on humanity in its benighted state.

As a philosophical system, it seems paradoxical to spend so much effort and desire in seeking nirvanna and the benefits of lack of desire. To sit in meditation for years on end demands enormous discipline. To submit to a life of begging and poverty takes great will and desire for whatever is promised on the other side. This is not evidence of lack of desire, much less the kind of wisdom and knowledge that would license its practitioners to advise lay people in their mundane affairs (or politicians in affairs of state). And the ethical system that Buddha promulgated was simple in the extreme- merely to be and do good, rather than being and doing bad, all staked on the age-old promise that just deserts would be coming after death.

No, Buddha was clearly a charismatic person, and his insight was social, not philosphical. Remember that he was a prince by birth and education. I would suggest that his core message was one of nobility- of idealism about the human condition. In his system, nobility is not conferred by birth, but by action. All can be noble, and all can be ignoble, regardless of wealth or birth. For the mass of society, it is control over desire that allows virtue and prosperity- i.e. nobility. Those who are addicts, whether to power, to drugs, to bitterness, to sex, or innumerable other black holes of desire or habit, are slaves, not nobles. This is incidentally what makes Buddhism so amenable to the West- it is very enlightenment-friendly kind of social philosophy.

The monks and Sanga of Buddhism were to be the shock troops of emotional discipline, burning off their normal social desires in fires of meditation and renunciation, even as they were on the hook for a whole other set of desires. Which are, in my estimation, wholly illusory in their aim, despite the various beneficial effects of meditation, in this world. They provide the inspiration and template for the society at large, modeling a form of behavioral nobility that any and all can at least appreciate, if not aspire to, and model in their own circumscribed lives and ethical concerns. I think that is the real strength of the Buddhist system. The monks may be misled in philosophical terms, but they fulfill a critical social role which governs and moderates the society at large. 

The monks provide another benefit, which is population control. One of the greatest pressures on any society is overpopulation, which immiserates the poor, empowers the rich, and can ultimately destroy its resource base. While the monastic institutions are a great burden on their societies, they also help keep them sustainable by taking in excess males who might otherwise become brigands and parents. This is particularly evident in traditional Tibet, despite the corruption of the monastic system by clan rivalries and even occasional warfare.

The fact of the matter is that desire is the staff, even essence, of life. Those who lack desire are dead, and Buddhist monks sitting in endless renunciation are enacting a sort of living death. Nevertheless, they have an important function in their societies, which is one we see replicated in the priests of Orthodox and Catholic Christianity (most of the time) and other ascetics and clerics around the world. Buddha was right that the management of desire is absolutely critical to individual and communal social life. Compare his system, however, with the philosophy of the Greeks, which arose at roughly the same (axial) time. The Greek philosophers focused on moderation in all things- another way, and I would offer, a healthier way, to state the need for discipline over the desires. They additionally fostered desires for knowledge and as complex ethical investigations, which I would posit far outstripped the efforts of the Buddhists, and gave rise, though the Greeks' continuing influence over the Roman and ensuing Christian epochs in Western Europe, to a more advanced culture, at least in philosophical, legal, and scientific terms, if not in terms of social and political peace.

• Meanwhile, a Christian court makes us a Christian nation, like it or not.
•  Length of Covid infection and viral shedding is unaffected by strain or vaccination status.