When Reason Isn't Enough

The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters by Francisco Goya

SLINGS & ARROWS

Life is hard. And its slings and arrows are often difficult to rationalize into hope. We all have bad luck sometimes: traffic, bad weather, accidents, breakups. That’s not what I’m getting at here. I’m also not without hope. But it seems to me that reason itself stands meekly against a sea of troubles.

Henry David Thoreau writes about quiet desperation in Walden; or, Life in the Woods (1854). He spent some two years living in relative isolation, surviving on his own. One of his critiques is that nineteenth century New England society was complicated, superficial, and separated from nature. Strict societal expectations, too, played a part in a general resignation people felt, in Thoreau’s view, resulting in unfulfilled lives.

Today’s society is not dissimilar. With our gadgets and games and shows, we are even more separated from nature, from reality. And popular culture is consumerist garbage, mostly, more a result of maximizing profit than creative expression. Further, as in previous centuries, people trade their lives for a wage. We’ve made much progress. Children are no longer working 16 hours a day in dangerous factories. But the US has some of the most worked hours per year of OECD countries. Of course, we have it good compared to many Latin American countries, for example, such as Mexico and Costa Rica, which certainly aren’t the worse. I have family and friends in Latin America and have visited several times. They tend to describe bleak conditions: exploitation of immigrants, capitalist greed, non-stop work, poor pay, economic stagnation, and high inflation. 

To be clear, I don’t think the cause of this type of suffering is capitalism or greed or the rich or your parents or friends. It’s not that you weren’t born with this or that.

There isn’t one cause. In real life, you might be poor, a minority, a woman, a single parent, a student, working full-time for minimum wage, face discrimination, face racism, have survived sexual abuse, face violence at home, and, yeah, you might also have a problem with the cops. That’s closer to the truth of quotidian suffering than hope-filled platitudes give credit for. 

The human condition is more often faced by a set of intersectional complexities. We face identity crises, meaning crises, economic crises - all at the same time.  We try to navigate through them, as if through a Melvillian sea storm. Reason might portend an unhappy end. Our monomania threatens to lead us to ruin, like Ahab. We must see more than the whale; the whale, after all, is merely a reflection of us.

MORE THAN THE WHALE

Critical Thinking

We need a complex solution for a complex problem. Something like the power of problem solving itself. Problem solving can be taught. There are many studies on this. It’s the main idea behind formal education: Teach people to think and learn better. Of course, it takes time. But, for life, it’s imperative.

1. Be like Socrates

One of the most brilliant things Socrates ever said is “I know that I do not know.” As a result, Socrates asked a lot of questions. He didn’t do this because he wanted to “corrupt the youth,” which he was accused of and sentenced to death for. He did what he did because, as he also wonderfully said, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” The first step, then, is to understand where knowledge begins, in knowing that you do not know. It is only from this vantage point that you can then explore and discover truth, whatever it may be. If we are not open to learning, if we feel we already know, if we let our biases go unnoticed, we will learn little, if anything at all.

Understand that you are human, a soft, relatively defenseless, talking animal. 10,000 years ago, people’s biggest concern was not dying. It’s a wonder you know anything at all. You are full of evolutionary flaws, impediments to logic. You have biases and emotions. You live in a one-sided movie. You don’t feel others’ pain. So, know how little you actually know. And ask questions.

2. Solve Problems

We learn from doing. And we learn to do from watching others. We are Old World apes. And the word ape means to mimic. It’s in our genes. Learning from watching speeds up learning. This is why we watch video tutorials instead of reading detailed instructions to do many things, such as playing an instrument, juggling, singing, dancing, and so on.

Practice on small problems first. Make it a matter of everyday life, a habit, so you don’t have to think about it. Small problems are encountered in life all the time. So I don’t think you need to look for more. Rather, notice them. One thing I do is keep a journal where I reflect on the day: my mistakes, such as watching too much Netflix or YouTube, causes, and possible solutions. Use scaffolding. Start out easy and slowly build your problem-solving ability by gradually increasing the task’s difficulty. After considering everyday mistakes, I might contemplate bigger failures, such as not making enough money or not having yet found a life partner. The solution may not be evident right away. The goal here is the effort itself.

3. Teach

Finally, we learn from teaching. I’m an educator. I’ve spent my entire working life in higher education. I know better than most that teaching is an excellent way to learn. What happens, when you teach people something you think you know, is that you discover that you thought you knew much more than you actually do. Further, when we teach others, we look at things with the beginner’s mindset, also called shoshin, which is a concept from Zen Buddhism. The beginner’s mind is a blank canvas, open to possibility. The expert’s is ingrained; they “know.” Again, knowing is the enemy. Try to unknow.

Almost everyone has something to teach. Take the opportunity when it presents itself. As much as possible. Choose something you enjoy. Passion is infectious. It also tends to make you a better teacher. After your “lesson,” reflect. What did you do well? What not so well?

Now, problem solving is good. When there are solutions. When there aren’t any or when they aren’t forthcoming, we need something more, something greater, a kind of armor.

Meaning

I’m with Victor Frankl. Life is about meaning, a universal basic need. Of course, meaning is often hard to find. In Man’s Search for Meaning, Frankl explains the odds of making it out of a Nazi concentration camp were extremely low. But the ones who did survive, he shows, were those who had something to live for; they had meaning. Frankl quotes Nietzsche, “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.”

Having meaning doesn’t necessitate a belief in God or that things will work out in the end. It just means that, whatever may come, your suffering, however severe, will not have been in vain. It means something. Even if it’s just for you. Perhaps your suffering will help make the world a better place. Maybe not, but perhaps you are doing the right thing. That may be enough. Frankl writes, “. . . suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning, such as the meaning of a sacrifice.”

No one can tell you what your meaning is. It wouldn’t be meaningful. You must find your own. Frankl’s was to “help others find the meaning of theirs.” Mine is to help make the world a better place for my having been in it. It isn’t original. I derived this meaning from reading Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography many years ago. I was struck by his devotion, sincerity, and temperance. For me, a better place is one with less obligate suffering. When little else makes sense, this postulate still does. Making the world better, then, could mean to expose injustice and stand up for what’s right, despite the consequences.

If you don’t have profound meaning, it will likely take time. That’s ok. You must live. You must suffer. Not intentionally. Don’t be a masochist. But that’s why you must wait; it will come. It comes to all of us. And when it does, you still struggle and, hopefully, find meaning on the other side. Last Nietzsche quote, “What does not kill me, makes me stronger.” I’ll add, it doesn’t have to make you stronger. You can be racked with guilt or shame or trauma. Instead, take time to process. To think critically about it. And then to act. Only then may you become stronger.

Consider the following. If you were to be diagnosed tomorrow with a terminal illness, what would make your life worth living? What would be your purpose? Your ikigai? Your plan de vida? Turns out, you are in such a situation; it’s called life.

Gratitude

I’d like to end with gratitude because when I reflect on my own state of joy, after having endured a lot of suffering, including a suicide attempt and subsequent hospitalization in 2015, I can’t seem to ultimately separate the concept from gratitude. I mean joy, not happiness. In The Book of Joy, featuring the Dalai Lama and Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the difference is articulated. Happiness is fleeting and tied to external circumstances. Joy is more stable and comes from within. So, my joy is not tied to quotidian pleasures, such as exercise or reading, or material possessions, but from this. I am simply more grateful than I am not to be alive.

Here’s another thought experiment. Imagine you have the choice, before you are born (just go with it), to decide whether to live or not. (Many nihilists lament, “I didn’t choose to be born”; in this scenario, you could.) The catch is that you know you will suffer - a lot, actually. Think John Wick but less dramatic. Gratitude, then, for me, is deciding on living; it’s taking the red (not the blue) pill. (End of Keanu fanboying.)

How can you cultivate your own gratitude?

Here’s what’s worked for me. First, accept suffering. Stop running from it. I used to run and run. And that shit would chase me to the end of the Earth. Then I learned helplessness. And that sucked a lot, as mentioned. But when I didn’t die, I realized, “Wait a sec, I’m not scared anymore. I can take this.” Well, that was a game changer. In The Book of Joy, it is said that our lives begin with the suffering of our mothers through childbirth. In a way, suffering is a requirement for life.

Secondly, as Frankl states, be grateful that you can find meaning at all. Imagine that? We live in a universe in which even suffering can have meaning! The universe owes you nothing. Don’t be entitled. That we can find meaning in our suffering is a blessing.

Third, fortunately, many of us don’t live in extremely dire situations. Yes, kids get cancer, and there are even worse horrors. (Though I wouldn’t say those are hopeless circumstances.) But if you’re watching this, you’re probably doing pretty well. Here are some things to be grateful for that many take for granted:

- Having food to eat.
- Having shelter.
- Being free to love who you want.
- Living in a democratic country, however imperfect.
- Having limbs and digits.
- Not being gravely ill.
- Having friends
- Having family
- Being able to cause change in the world
- Being able to reason and problem solve
- Being able to communicate with others with language.

I am extremely lucky. I have these things. I’m also American. I could have been born in the DR, the birthplace of my mother, and spent most, if not all, of my life there. The weather is good. It would have been a good life; I would have found meaning, even if only toward the end. But opportunities remain limited there. Many relatives have come here, after years of trying. The trend doesn’t go the other way. I’ve also had a loving mother, who is still alive and healthy. Also, I’ve never gone to jail, broken a bone, or required surgery.

So, how can I not be grateful? Seriously, if I can’t be grateful despite being at the top 1% of the world in terms of basic needs and income, then I think I would look at such a person as a fucking dick.

Don’t be a dick.

In brief, reason is useful in resolving suffering. But reason alone can lead to deciding not to be. It would certainly avoid the suffering. We need more. We need meaning, which is part reason, part emotion, and part belief. And to be human, one must learn to balance the three.

Be human.

What It's Like to Write a Poem

It’s like grabbing a cloud in your hand, opening it up, and discovering it was never there.

It’s like taking the subway, getting off at random, and making your way back home on foot.

It’s like swimming in space, where the stars are up and down and left and right, or is it the other way around?

It’s like shouting into an endless abyss, and waiting for the echo.

It’s like remembering you exist as if for the first time. No how. Or why.

It’s like forgetting everything at once; like being naked and alone in a forest.

It’s like being haunted by dreams, imaginary friends; like being schizophrenic and bipolar, and having a party.

It’s like God, for a moment, conducted into your massively idiotic fingers; like Prometheus stealing fire and giving it to you, by mistake.

It’s like Death shutting the fuck up for a moment, and just watching.

It’s transcendence triumphing over biology, some 4 billion years later.

It’s what words fail to describe, and what they do at their best.

It’s what it is to be.

Everything Is Now

Photo by user pzado on Freeimages.com

Movement. It’s perhaps the most quintessential element of the human condition.

You move from one location to another throughout life. Home. School. Work. Dates. Meetings. Vacations. Retirement. Funerals. When you should, when you want, when you must.

You move, too, in time. Like a time traveler. From the past to the present. From the present to the future. From birth to adolescence to old age. One way. Like Gatsby. Unable to go back.

And there is internal movement. Your cells constantly renew. About 330 billion cells daily, about 1% of you. Over the course of 100 days or so, you are essentially a new you.

My last analogy. Notice how, for example, one thought leads into another. Try to stop it. Try thinking your last thought. Hold onto that precise mental moment for as long as you can, no interruption. I’ll wait . . .

Ok, you move. What’s the point?

The point is that you are not, as intuition hints, a driver going along a road. You are the car.

And the story is movement. A drive. Even when you stop going forward, or backward, when you are idle, still, you move. Otherwise, you are dead.

Without this knowledge, you look ahead, for yourself, but see only what you have yet to traverse. And when you look back, again, you fail to see yourself.

The perceived continuity between the past or the future with the present puts you in contrast with whom you are. Which is neither. And both.

You are not an identity. But a process.

As such, you are not one thing. But things moving together to make the thing you recognize as you, the thing of things, move.

You are kaleidoscopic. The universe. Looking back at itself.

You are everything.

Everything is now.

Movement from movement from movement . . .

(To watch a narrated short film derived from this content, click here.)

Not Yet Done - Journal 12/15

Rereading and editing my autobiographical story “Imitating Life.” It’s much better now. Like a different story. Will post soon. But it makes me think about a lot of things. Looking back at my life, all these stages. In some sense a repetition. A searching for something. In some sense I’m still that kid at the beginning of the story, listening to the other children, wondering how they happen to get along. How they do this thing. Life. No instructions. Would be nice. Life is inherently unfair. And yet. It’s all there is. Thank you. To whomever. Whatever. Even if just chance. Despite it all I am grateful for my little patch of dirt. What is unmathematically mine. A blink in the cosmic consciousness. But I still be. Still strive. To learn. To grow. Show me more. Not yet done.

Greatest American Novels - Ranked

Credit: Upsplash

The United States is where I was born, where I grew up, and maybe where I’ll die.

The US exists because its founders held the ideals of individual liberties to be incompatible with tyranny. As a result of this breaking free, it had to forge its own identity. Over the centuries, it has been a melting pot for immigrants of all types. Many have moved here for better opportunities and freedoms. Of course, it hasn’t been all good. In creating this new identity, it did so on stolen land, genocided native peoples, enslaved tens of millions, continued to discriminate against them even after their liberation, and has failed to live up to its stated ideals time and gain. Despite all this, I remain optimistic about the American struggle to live up to what it wants itself to be. It embodies the Solzhenitsyn dyad represented in the famous quote: “The line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.”

Nowhere is this more explicit than in the Great American Novel (GAN). The GAN, a term coined by the 19thC American writer John William de Forest, “paints the American soul” and provides a “picture of the ordinary emotions and manners of American existence." In short, it’s a time capsule - but not just of simple things, such as how people talked, what people did, what they wore, and so on. It tells us we are: what we care about, what we’re willing to die and live for; it encapsulates the human struggle toward something greater. That is, in a nutshell, the human condition.

The following is not an exhaustive list. There are many other books I have not read. But these are my favorite that also fit the category.  For fun, I ranked them, according to how well they capture the complex and sometimes contradictory nature of the US story, the story of us.

6. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007) by Junot Díaz

This is the tale of an overweight Dominican-American otaku named Oscar. He yearns to fall in love. But he’s caught in the fukú, a multi-general curse that plagues the de Léon family, perhaps originating with the first arrival of Europeans in the so-called New World, a moment that ushered in the literal decimation and extinction of native peoples across the Americas.

It’s a fantastically written work, one of my favorite contemporary novels. Your heart breaks for the naïve but brilliant Oscar. But how well does it fit the category?

Oscar Wao doesn’t show up as much as the others here in other GAN lists. Why?

Traditionally, we’ve had some deep-seated assumptions about what it means to be American and, thus, who should write a GAN and who such a book would be about. It’s an old criticism of English lit and how it’s been taught: too many dead white guys. But the US has changed and so has the GAN. I find no fault in Oscar Wao being an immigrant story. Such is the American story.

Oscar Wao is also partly a historical text, documenting key moments in the history of the Dominican Republic under the Trujillo regime, as told through the lives of the older characters and through many of the book’s footnotes. To be fair, it’s hard to separate the history of America from the history of Latin America, especially the Caribbean, given extensive American influence and interference, thanks to the wonderfully paradoxical Roosevelt Corollary. More, history is hard to separate from the present in any meaningful way. So, to me, despite differences with others on this list, Oscar Wao qualifies as a GAN. These differences, however, are also why I ranked the narrative 6 and not higher.

There’s another reason - the magical realism. In the story, there are a few supernatural elements, the fukú; the Faceless Man; and Zafa, the talking mongoose. This believable blending of real life with magic is a Latin American coinage. It works beautifully in the book, mixing Oscar’s science fiction and comic books with his real-life adventures and struggles, adding depth and uniqueness. I love the work. I am a bit biased, to be sure. My mother’s side of the family is from Quisqueya; I know many Oscars, Lolas, and Belis; and I love science fiction and magic realism. Despite this, ideally, I think a GAN should anchor itsself a bit more solidly in the US and its traditions.

Still, and more importantly, Oscar Wao adroitly captures the immigrant struggle to free themselves and their family from the fetters of the past, to start a new hopeful generation and break the cycle.

5. Moby-Dick, or The Whale (1851) by Herman Melville

This narrative is told by someone who prefers to be called Ishmael, an introspective crew member aboard the Pequod, a whaling vessel doomed in a revenge quest against the whale that bit off part of the leg of the ship’s captain, the monomaniacal Ahab. The tome is a mishmash of philosophy, religion, adventure, history, marine biology, and more. Not since Laurence Stern’s Tristam Shandy has a novel been this convoluted and long and weird and ineffable and - yet - kinda great. It’s almost post-modern before there was such a thing; it’s pre-post-modern.

When I first read it, I felt like it could’ve used some editing. But then it wouldn’t be Moby-Dick. Like the US, it is what it it: an amazingly amorphous collage of synthesized contradiction.

Moby-Dick is also a part of the American Renaissance, a literary movement that ran from about 1830 until about the end of the Civil War. It romanticized nationalism and generally called on America to live up to its principles.

The ship is composed of a motley crew with different faiths, tongues, colors, and backgrounds. Along the journey, over time, barriers erase. The harpooners are all minority figures: Queequeg, Polynesian; Tashtego, Native American; and Daggoo, African. Their position of harpooner disrupts traditional race narratives about white supremacy. In fact, Ishmael’s diatribe against whiteness in Chapter 42 (“The Whiteness of the Whale”) examines the complexities of such traditional narratives. Elizabeth Shultz, retired U of Kansas Professor of English, writes in “Visualizing Race: Images of Moby-Dick,” an article in the Melville-centered journal Leviathan: “Analyzing his terror of whiteness, Ishmael realizes that in addition to royalty, nobility, innocence, and benignity, the color also signifies death, aberration, desolation, alienation, and, most horrific of all, utter nihilism, utter meaninglessness.” Fitting for the voyage itself since thus is revenge - a pointless effort in the end.

In brief, to quote Childish Gambino, who’s also written about the complexities of race and contradictions of this country, “This is America.”

4. Catcher in the Rye (1951) by JD Salinger

This is the story of Holden Caulfield, a young man attending a boarding school in Pennsylvania who gets expelled for poor academic performance, loses a fight over a girl, and decides to avoid going home until Wednesday, a few days away, when his parents will have received notice of his expulsion.

He is young, lost, and searches for meaning. What he finds, though, is a superficial world. He’s always looking in the wrong places. For example, one incident sees him pursue company (not sex) with a prostitute, who later gets her pimp, who then assaults Holden.

Many early settlers came here and saw empty, seemingly endless plains before them (largely due to genocide). The land held promise. It was, to them, a new world, one that required a new government, a new people, and a new way of life. In the book Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging, the American journalist Sebastian Junger recounts the tale of early settlements who were either kidnapped by native tribes or left European settlements voluntarily to live among the Native Americans. Most preferred life among the Native American to the fetters of puritanical society. Even when recaptured by other settlers and returned to Western civilization, there were those who escaped again to rejoin tribal society. Point is, meaning didn’t just show up where ever you are. Sometimes, Americans had to go and find it.

Faced with nihilism, Holden plans to abandon everything, to run away from the phonies. It’s a tear-jerking moment when his 10-year-old sister Phoebe shows up to meet him with a suitcase, ready to leave it all behind and accompany her big brother. To Holden, she represents innocence. It’s something he wants to protect in her. In the end, he decides not to leave but to stay and make things better.

The deceptively simple tale showcases a moment in time, the mid-to-late 1940s. There was, as there has been in many countries, a desire to preserve what is sacred. We saw a lot change in the ’60s. It had its antecedents in the ’40s and before. While this desire to protect innocence, to see the contemporary world as tainting what one deems as pure, some innate human nature or virtue, is more or less universal, there is something about the US, a country that has seen every ill intent manifested, that forever struggles to keep itself from falling.

3. The Great Gatsby (1925) by F Scott Fitzgerald

This is not my number one, though it often shows up as such in many of these lists. And for good reason.

It’s a damn near perfect book. The writing may be a little flowery for a few modern readers. But the themes, despite the hundred years that have passed, are timeless. Prime among them is the idea of recapturing the past. Gatsby longs to rekindle a past flame he had with Daisy. But five years have gone by since they last say each other, and she’s now married with children with Tom Buchanan, the old money to Gatsby’s nouveau.

Gatsby embodies the achievement of the American Dream; a poor South Dakotan with no name (né James Gats) reinvents himself and accumulates fantastic wealth, with the help of a few underworld figures. Though not an immigrant, per se, he does what many immigrants strive to do. He creates a new identity for himself and climbs out of poverty.

We also see society, its hopes and faults, in the 1920’s, many of which persist, even if we’ve made progress, chiefly racism and sexism. While the novel exposes Daisy’s plight as a woman, to be treated with equality and dignity, as well as Tom’s white supremacy, it doesn’t seem to find fault in its stereotypical depiction of Meyer Wolfsheim. According to the accounts of “Frances Kroll, a Jewish woman and secretary to Fitzgerald, . . . Fitzgerald was hurt by accusations of antisemitism and . . . [claimed Wolfsheim] merely ‘fulfilled a function in the story and [his depiction] had nothing to do with race or religion.’ ” I don’t see the need in the stereotype. Many 1920s Americans were anti-semitic and few questioned white supremacy. So, we can say that, for its time, Gatsby was ethically progressive.

Despite its tragic ending, we that, as Nick states, “Gatsby turned out all right in the end.” Gatsby, who hid his identity for so long, afraid of being judged, was exposed by Tom, broken in front of everyone, killed by Wilson, and yet - and yet - turned out to be a great, after all.

America is also great, if flawed and failing at times to be better.

2. Beloved (1987) by Toni Morrison

I was hesitant about including this novel due to its use of the supernatural. The supernatural feels like almost another category of story. With Oscar Wao, the magic realism is part of why, despite my admiration for the story, I only rank it 6. But it’s a masterpiece. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 1988, and Morrison won the Nobel Prize in 1993.

What’s also different about Beloved, and shared by Oscar Wao, is that the story is authored by a minority - what’s more, by a woman. History has been told by the victors, and this biases what we read and come to know. As stated, the GAN is a category that features mostly white men. My own list bears out this bias; I can only partly blame my formal education, which focused on such writers. So, Toni Morrison’s inclusion helps the list be more balanced and diverse.

Truly, it’s hard to imagine America, as great and diverse as it has become, without the immeasurable contributions from African Americans. In a literal sense, they built this country. So, their story is our story.

Beloved takes place in the mid-to-late 19th Century. It deals with the psychological and physical trauma left in slavery’s wake. Sethe, a mother and former slave, lives with a virtual “tree” on her back, the many scars she carries from the whippings she received. She tries to move on, to find love in Paul D, another former slave from the same plantation, the so-called Sweet Home. But her current home is haunted by the spirit of her murdered eldest daughter, as if the spirit of slavery and hatred and cruelty still besieges them.

The heart-wrenching moment in the book is based on real life. To understand this, one must first know the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which gave human traffickers, racist, and torturers the legal authority to kidnap their escaped victims. It’s one of the most evil laws the US has ever had. Consider for a moment how you think such a reunion likely would have gone? What would it have been like to have been recaptured and brought back into the bloody hands of a personal tyrant? Margaret Garner, a runaway slave, having fled Kentucky and made a new life for herself in Ohio, after having been found by US Marshals, barricaded her family inside. As they approached, she did the unthinkable. She killed her own daughter. If you find it difficult to comprehend, perhaps you lack either imagination or real knowledge of slavery. It was not a life worth living. Consider the many unrelenting slave revolts in the US, destined to be put down eventually and their instigators surely to be tortured and killed. I can not fault her.

In Beloved, as with The Catcher, there is an innocence that needs to be protected and a love that overcomes. America has fought to free itself from its demons, literally via the Civil War. Morrison sheds light on the special case of the African-American plight, which has borne deeper scars than others. I think we still struggle with this dark past.

1. The Grapes of Wrath (1939) by John Steinbeck

It’s hard to argue The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck is not a great book. It won the National Book Award (1939) and the Pulitzer Prize (1940). Steinbeck also won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1962. Ok, I like Steinbeck.

The book is set during the Great Depression. Beginning with the stock market crash of 1929 and lasting into about the start of WWII, it was one of the most severe economic downturns in American history. US GDP fell by about 15%. For comparison, US GDP fell by about 5.1% cumulatively during the recent Great Recession. The period is characterized by  widespread unemployment and extreme poverty.

Grapes of Wrath is about the Joads, poor Oklahoman tenant farmers, who were hit hard by economic hardship caused by the Dust Bowl, a dire agricultural crisis centered on the Great Plains, coinciding with the Great Depression. Severe dust storms, soil erosion, and droughts were common. The Joads leave everything behind for California, which holds an almost Edenic quality to the desperate, jobless Joads and other fleeing “Okies.”

They form a mass of desperate families. Along the way, they experience exploitation and discrimination. To fight these social injustices, the characters find resilience and dignity in solidarity. The book exposes exploitative capitalist practices. Many of the characters, particularly Jim Casy, a doubtful preacher, find solace in some socialist ideals. (As an aside, during J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, Steinbeck complained of being audited every year by the IRS. A faction of the government suspected he was a communist. I don’t think so. He just cared a lot about working class people.)

Yes, one of the GANs, and my number one, promotes some socialist ideas. To me, part of what it means to be American is to criticize your country, not because it sucks or one is unpatriotic, as some oversimplifications from the right-wing tend to say, but because one wants it to be better, because there is still hope. Frederick Douglass, Susan B. Anthony, MLK Jr, the Founding Fathers - all of them fought against injustice because they felt that the country shall overcome one day.

The storytelling is masterful. The scenes, the characters, the dialogue all come to life. It’s not a story you easily forget. You see yourself in these Okies. We’re all Okies at heart, trying to find a better life, fighting off life’s slings and arrows through love and family and purpose.

Conclusion

America, despite its greatness, was and is and will likely always be flawed. It has its origins in genocide, its past in racist enslavement, segregation, and discrimination. Currently, there is economic injustice and systemic bias. As human history has shown, it’s a slow crawl to learn to walk and then to run. We will fall and cry and stub our toe. A lot. We will go back sometimes. Sometimes, we’ll be afraid to stand at all. But this young nation will grow up tall one day and move past the past. That is my hope. That is the American story.

Is It Good to Give or a Duty?

In “Famine, Affluence, and Morality,” a 1972 journal article published in Philosophy and Public Affairs, utilitarian philosopher Peter Singer argues that individuals who possess the means to prevent suffering and/or save lives, assuming no great cost, have a moral duty to do so. In other words, the traditional view that sees such acts as charity (i.e., not morally obligatory) is wrong. To illustrate the point, he asks readers to imagine walking through a natural environment when in a pond or a lake a drowning a child appears. Should they not stop and intervene, the child would die. Most would intuit that it’s morally imperative to save that child's life, even if, for example, doing so would ruin their expensive clothes; the clothes are of relatively little moral significance compared to the life that they could save. Hardly a soul would call such an act charity, laudable but unnecessary. Singer claims citizens of wealthy countries are in a similar position, capable of saving others without incurring great costs.

But most people don’t see it this way. In Singer’s view, we have placed an undue border between charity and duty largely because of our faulty empathy; we tend to help those who look more like us or who are in closer proximity than those who aren’t either. We’re more willing to help family than a stranger, a compatriot who shares our skin tone and language than a foreigner who shares neither. This intuition is likely an evolutionary by-product of being social creatures.

For Singer, the distinction is arbitrary and wrong. Suffering is suffering. Proximity alone cannot be of moral significance; if a child is drowning somewhere else, are they less worth saving? Singer, therefore, asks for a higher moral standard. We should give more. We should consider it duty and not charity. There is no excuse for inaction.

Charity and Duty

There are two ideas in the article that really struck me, the first very emotionally. It wasn’t made emotionally concrete for me until Singer quotes the theologian Thomas Aquinas. Try to contextualize the quote in your own life to feel its full effect: "The bread which you withhold belongs to the hungry; the clothing you shut away, to the naked; and the money you bury in the earth is the redemption and freedom of the penniless." It almost brings me to tears. It makes me think about how many people go about in their quiet suffering, as we would see it, when we, their brothers and sisters, capable of helping, go about our own in relative comfort. I’m not particularly religious, and religion has obviously gotten things wrong. Nevertheless, I sometimes find, when I’m open to it, philosophy and religion dovetail serendipitously, as if philosophy is catching up with old cultural wisdom - in this case, the moral obligation to give. Believing that it is charitable but not morally obligatory to give to those who are in desperate need, I think, creates a wall of apathy between us, a way of shirking moral obligation.

To be fair, there are many reasons why people put up a wall between charity and duty. If you were to come across a drowning child, you would be faced with the virtual certainty of their death should you not intervene. Look away, perhaps - but you cannot run away from that reality. In quotidian experience, however, analogous circumstances are rarely so clear in their consequences or in their appropriate requisite aid. Real life is blurry. We’re all myopic. While not saving a drowning child, rightly, would engender severe criticism, not giving your loose change to the unhoused individual you cross paths with in the street would not attract the same censure. It’s less clear if the loose change is the appropriate course of action. I advocate it, generally. But perhaps, as I’ve often heard, “they’ll just go buy drugs with it.” Or, maybe someone will steal it from them. Or maybe you don’t need to because someone else will give and all you have is loose change. There are, however, clearer consequences to not giving to starving children, say, in an impoverished country. Nevertheless, even when we know that children will die as a result of people not giving, rarely are the facts so crystal clear as a drowning child before you. It’s not just bad empathy or social norms. Maybe someone else will give. Maybe the charity is corrupt. Maybe your amount will make no real difference.

None of my arguments here are meant as an excuse for those who do not give. I’m with Singer. Again, there’s no excuse for inaction. And, to be clear, Singer acknowledges other, practical concerns, such as identifying trustworthy charitable organizations, conflicting personal obligations, and opportunity costs. But it is rational for humans to act differently when there is less certainty, both in terms of the consequences of one’s actions and how to best help. With the drowning child, the best course of action is plain.

Clarity matters. The lack of it allows us to comfort ourselves, to mask our guilt in the stochastic nature of fate and fortune. In other circumstances, where the consequence of inaction is more evident, if a house were on fire or if the starving child were right in front of you, say, people are more likely to act altruistically. Many Americans are not particularly educated on what happens overseas. Therefore, it is imperative for charities to prioritize educating the public. The onus is not solely on the charity, however. It is incumbent upon all of us to educate ourselves on the world and its crises. Otherwise, we’re shirking responsibility.

Singer’s words helped me feel, as well as see, that we are all wrong who understand helping the unhoused, or those in desperate need, as a nice but needless act.

Famine and Family Planning

The other paradigm-shifting idea in the article is equally actionable. As stated, Singer anticipates a few objections to his argument. The most salient one, to me, is that efforts by individuals of wealthier countries to alleviate famine and/or poverty in developing countries are not addressing the key cause; they are treating the symptom but not the illness. What causes famine or poverty? There are many causes, to be sure, such as armed conflicts, natural disasters, and climate change - all deserving of our attention and action to prevent or better prepare for. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, famine is worst in Sub-Saharan Africa. It is also where population growth is at its current global zenith. The objection argues that “until there is effective [family planning], relieving famine merely postpones starvation.” Singer agrees; the earth “cannot support indefinitely a population rising at the present rate.”  Again, Singer warns against excusing away action. Help no matter your cause.

The logic of the objection is appealing. To be clear, though, I don't think it’s wrong to help alleviate current famine. In “Carbon Capture,” a 2015 New Yorker article, the American novelist Jonathan Franzen, argues that long-term concerns over climate change can make our contemporary concerns for the creatures that inhabit our world seem unimportant. It struck the author as disheartening that some climate activists have been too comfortable in disregarding the well-being of extant species because “mitigating climate change trumps all other environmental concerns.” He references Saint Francis of Assisi as “an example of loving what’s concrete and vulnerable and right in front of us.”

We have a direct influence over what’s present and can do real good. That should not be forgotten. I can no longer look at birds and not think of Francesco. The point is, we can do both: help to alleviate current famine and poverty and have a big picture view of the problem. Personally, I would focus my efforts on the long-term suffering of peoples because I think I can do more good. And I don't think there's anything heartless about that, though there are similar arguments against effective altruism, which, generally, I also support. It's hard to see much of a distinction between what I'm arguing here and effective altruism, which tends to take a more long-term, utilitarian view on charitable giving. We need to apply science and reason to our compassion and empathy. Helping those close to us or who look like us might intrinsically feel more good. There is an immediate good feeling. Helping those further away (in time or space), though, might do more good.

You have to ask yourself, what is the right thing to do for you? And, again, it is not an either/or. But it is, in my opinion, a question of where to focus (not to limit) one's efforts. And the beautiful thing about diversity is that we all have different interests and causes. Thus, we can spread the love. And that is what Singer sings. Kill suffering with love. Whatever your cause, however you can, do good.

Socrates on Love and Writing

SUMMARY

In the Platonic dialogue Phaedrus, Socrates speaks with a young, somewhat superficial Athenian, the eponymous Phaedrus. The young man is a fan of speeches and tells Socrates of one he’s recently heard by Lysias, son of Cephalus, a speechwriter, on the topic of love. Socrates, who also likes speeches, with some gentle prodding, convinces Phaedrus to read the written speech. The speech argues that, contemporary ethics in mind, a boy should have “relations” with a lover (someone who is interested in him) as opposed to a non-lover (someone who may not be so interested but seeks a mutual benefit).

The main topic of the dialogue is on the nature of rhetoric and of philosophy. The former is seen by Socrates as shallow, while the latter seeks true knowledge and understanding.

The structure of the dialogue is as follows. First, there’s the written speech read by Phaedrus. It argues that a non-lover is better for a boy than a lover in that a non-lover may give the boy more advantages since he is without the passionate nature of the lover, who could be driven to illogical behavior that may harm the boy, should the relationship go south.

Next, Socrates, initially somewhat coy, delivers the first of two speeches. He argues in the speech’s favor, for the non-lover, but elaborates. There are two human guiding principles: pleasure, which is inherently selfish, and reason, which is not. Both lead to different outcomes, the former to overindulgence, the latter to wisdom.

Then there’s Socrates second speech in which, divinely inspired, he argues that, put simply, if love is madness, not all madness is bad. Madness, as he describes, is a gift from the gods. One example he gives is poetic madness, a blessing from the Muses. He argues that the lover, not the non-lover, is better for the boy. He compares the lover to a philosopher, someone like Socrates, in that love may be a type of divine madness that provides some hidden knowledge.

Finally, Socrates goes on to critique the invention of writing - yes, writing! Socrates is against it for a few reasons. It eliminates the need for an important and valued skill in memorization. In practice, it also eliminates the tradition of the dialectic, which was Socrates’ philosophy in action. With speeches, a common use for writing, one would read or hear a speech, but the speech itself was static and did not answer questions. They provided answers to questions that may be asked that may be memorized without true understanding. Philosophy, on the other hand, as Socrates would see it, lives on the tongue of the lover, the lover of wisdom.

RESPONSE

Phaedrus is a deconstructive work; it’s self-contradictory. That is, Plato through Socrates, his great teacher, criticizes writing - in a piece of writing! Many scholars have commented on this. Robin Waterfield, who wrote the Introduction to and translated the Oxford World’s Classics edition of the dialogue, argues Plato does this consciously. He is modeling the dialectic through the dialogue between Socrates and Phaedrus, having the latter perform the role of the somewhat naive seeker of knowledge who needs to be guided toward a more useful heuristic. It’s also modeled in Socrates, who humbly denies credit for his speeches, crediting the gods for their inspiration, and is reluctant to criticize Lysias’ work, merely expounding on its ideas and providing an alternative. If the philosopher is anything, he is a questioner - a questioner of everything and a knower of but one fact: that he does not know.

It’s, therefore, easy to see why writing would seem to pose a threat to the OG of philosophers, especially given the prominence of rhetoric during his time. Rhetoric was essentially marketing or persuasion. Practitioners were largely lawyers and speechmakers. People memorized speeches, reciting them word for word (like Phaedrus). To Socrates, this rote memorization led to the appearance of knowledge but was actually vapid, lacking in actual wisdom.

Socrates, like many critical of nascent technologies, especially those in wide use today, failed to see new use cases for writing that would emerge, such as philosophical or otherwise educational books, which have disseminated knowledge globally and provided a scaffold of knowledge for other writers and scholars to build upon. Hardly anyone today considers books to be anti-intellectual.

Socrates’ critique, therefore, was shortsighted. He’s hard to blame. Writing was new; people were unaware of how it would evolve and be used over time - and how society might change, sometimes because of it. Luckily, Plato saw something in writing, however inchoate. Otherwise, the world would not have these rich dialogues of Socrates’ teachings, a man who lived and died by the principles of reason and logic, wherever they might lead.

I can’t help but think that something similar is happening with ChatGPT and other large language models (LLMs). Granted LLMs provide a different risk, they make plagiarism and fraud much easier. I think they’ll always be an arms race between those who seek technologies for ill and those who use technologies to protect from the former. LLMs provide the ability to boost productivity. While the current WGA strike shows that this too can have harmful effects, if harnessed correctly, we may find ourselves once again with a technology that allows us to do more than we could before - in a sense, to be more human since we can do more and with fewer constraints. As a writer, and a human, I’m excited.

According to Microsoft, ChatGPT-4, the current model, shows “sparks of artificial general intelligence” - or human-like intelligence. The performance is impressive. I remain skeptical, however, of claims that these technologies think like we do. We create stories of the world. LLMs largely splice together - albeit skillfully - human ideas and thoughts into coherent and persuasive - and highly probable - responses to prompts.

LLMs will continue to evolve. As with Socrates, it’s hard to know how these technologies will change and how much we will change as a result. Ultimately, it’s up to us to shape these technologies. After all, they’re a reflection of us. And that, amid all the AI fear, uncertainty, and doubt, is hopeful.

Should We Kill Farm Animals We Give Good Lives To?

Peter Singer / Wikipedia

I was recently listening to a podcast titled “Talking Animal Ethics with Peter Singer,” episode 31 of Within Reason, a podcast by Youtuber Alex O’Connor, aka Cosmic Skeptic. I enjoy his philosophical content, and I’m a fan of Peter Singer, Australian utilitarian philosopher. There was a section that grabbed me; it begins at about 34:00.

When discussing “raising animals ‘humanely’ before killing them,” Singer states that it’s not wrong for theoretical humans to be killed if they would not have been born otherwise and live a good life, even if they’d be killed prematurely and used as a means and not as an end - like farm animals. (This aspect of the discussion captures the essence of the non-identity problem.)

I agree with Singer that using a person as a means rather than an end is sometimes ethical; the example he uses to illustrate this point is moving an unconscious person’s leg under a concrete block to save one’s own child from being crushed to death in a building collapse. However, even in the example, while using someone as a means is ethical, given the circumstances, the act itself isn’t ethical. That is, if you could save your child without having to move someone’s leg under a concrete block, that would be better.

(This is a good place to quickly get metaethical. My morality is based on a simple tenet: Consciousness is valuable [to conscious creatures]. Broadly, sentient creatures want to be happy and, when they are, to continue to live. When I write that something is ethical, in this context, I mean that it promotes less obligate suffering.)

Now, I understand that we live in a complex world where we have to make choices that entail both good and bad consequences. But, whenever possible, we try to avoid the negative consequences, to reduce them to zero, ideally.

It seems doubtful that we could live our lives without impacting nature negatively in some way, even in an idealized future. There’s overpopulation, invasive species, pests, limited resources, and so on. I want, therefore, to focus on animal agriculture, the focus of the podcast episode. In other words, is there an answer that reduces animal suffering to creatures bred into existence to be used as a means rather than an end?

As I pointed out, Singer finds it difficult to condemn the practice as long as, as he puts it, their lives are worth living and they are killed “humanely.” So, one answer is to improve farm conditions and slaughter methods. The incentives of feeding a growing population and profit seeking don’t often align with this altruistic goal. Further, there is no federal regulation standardizing animal care in factory farms. Also, where regulation is in place, abuse is still common and requires exposure. So, trusting that animals are treated humanely is problematic, especially with the large farms needed to feed an omnivorous, growing population.

I think there’s a clearer answer. Try not to eat or buy animal products, or, at least, to reduce consumption. Try is the key word. It is easier said (or written) than done. Animal products are cheap and ubiquitous. More, buying and/or consuming animal products is culturally acceptable, expected even. I don’t want to point the finger at someone who struggles to go vegetarian. I did, at 19. Also, I, otherwise vegan, currently eat pasture raised eggs (for health) and relax standards (to vegetarian) when interacting with difficult situations. If we don’t consume or buy animal products, there is no need to exploit animals in farms. We won’t need to breed them into existence and, ipso facto, justify a wrong. Surely, it would be better not to do the wrong. In other words, since there is no need to consume animal products, there is no need to use animals in this way. If there were, if were were obligate cannibals, for example, then I would agree with Singer that I would find it difficult to condemn such a practice. Luckily, we have a choice.

This isn’t a clean answer; plant-based agriculture has its own issues, including the unintentional killing of animals, mostly insects. I think, though, this involves less suffering. First, we aren’t breeding animals, creating an incentive for their exploitation and slaughter. Second, I believe that insects, if they’re sentient, and I suspect they are, likely, given the size and complexity of their nervous systems, are less intelligent and feel less pain than farm animals (whose nervous systems more closely resemble ours). I also think most people think this. If given a choice to squash an insect or stab a cow, I think most, if obligated, would choose the former.

In addition, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention better animal agriculture models, such as regenerative farming. I don’t know a lot on this topic. But currently it doesn’t seem to be a model that could replace factory farming. Plant-based agriculture, on the other hand, is able to do this since it requires fewer resources than factory farming. (Here is more on that.) And when comparing more ethical methods of animal agriculture with plant agriculture, the latter seems to be inherently more ethical. The reason is simple: Unless some shocking scientific discoveries occur, killing animals causes more suffering than killing plants, if I grant, which I don’t, that plants can suffer. We can also benefit from plants without killing or harming them, such as eating their fruits.

To be clear, being vegan or vegetarian does nothing to solve issues of animal suffering as a result of what Tennyson called “Nature, red in tooth and claw.” The natural world is full of death and suffering. Predators have to kill to survive. Many do it for fun. I don’t know if future ethical concerns will focus on bloody nature. It seems doubtful we will be able to do much there without dangerously disturbing complex and sensitive ecosystems. We must make the best with what we have. We must eat, if we must exist. And I choose to.

We Are in the Nexus

Dr. Soran reentering the Nexus / Star Trek: Generations / Paramount

In the 1994 film Star Trek: Generations, the first to feature the Next Gen crew, the main villain, Dr. Soran, through nefarious acts, attempts to regain access into the Nexus, an alternate reality that, as Guinan puts it, feels like being wrapped up in joy, where the goal is to make you as happy as possible, to make it so that you’d never want to leave.

Picard fails to stop Soran and gets trapped inside the Nexus. Despite the bliss he experiences, Guinan, or an echo of Guinan in the Nexus, convinces him that he must escape and try to stop Soran anew. First, though, he must find another captain, James T. Kirk, who was trapped inside the Nexus decades earlier, to help.

This takes some work. Kirk has many reasons for staying, like Picard. But Kirk makes up his mind to join Picard in stopping Soran because, among other things, “It isn’t real” – referring to the Nexus.

This got me thinking. What if it were real? Suppose we lived in such a universe where everyone got what they wanted, assuming no one wanted to hurt others. In other words, you’d live a perfect life - no regrets. Your happiness would be guaranteed.

On the surface it sounds wonderful, especially given our current reference frame. Life is full of unavoidable suffering and tragedies. It’s stressful and chaotic, much of the time. People often live with regrets. To err is human. So, the opportunity to erase all the pain or to do away with all our shortcomings sounds kinda nice, no? If there were a God, why not create such a world? Isn’t that the promise of Paradise?

Well, to me, there’s something absolutely dreadful about the Nexus. Think about it. Picture a world in which everything you’d ever want would happen. Want to have a dog or a cat? Want cake? Want sex? Want a family? Boy or girl? Sure. Anything you want! Whenever you want it!

Part of the problem is that there’s no randomness. Everything, because it’s what you want, is, more or less, up to you. To me, this feels boring. How long of this before I would want to hit the eject button or go crazy? Not too long, I suspect. It would be like getting stuck in a time loop, like Groundhog Day (1993) or the Stargate SG-1 episode “Window of Opportunity.” One of my favorite episodes from the franchise.

Sure, you could add some randomness into the equation. Let the Nexus choose at random if a girl rejects you or not, for example. To be fair, because it seems to be based, at least in part, on memories, there may already be some element of randomness in the Nexus.

Ok.

Another, bigger part of the problem, though, is that there’s no real struggle. Suffering is bad, by definition. But, man, does it make me more grateful for what I have, for when I don’t suffer. We get used to anything; that might be part of the human condition. Thus, living in perpetual joy may degrade our sense of gratitude. In a similar way, working hard for something, which entails the possibility of failure, the uncertainty of success, makes the reward that much richer. The reward represents more to us. It’s a bit cliché, but suffering allows us to understand the value of our joy.

You could also somehow add adversity to the Nexus. Hypothetically, if that would make you happy, it should do that. Make it rain, sometimes. Introduce people into the Nexus with motives that go against yours. Have some competition.

Ok. Better still.

But, ultimately, I think, the problem is that, in life, we are not the authors of our fate. The world doesn’t exist to please us. Our efforts matter. If we knew that, in the end, we’d be happy no matter what, I think most of us would probably not care much about what they choose to do since the consequences would be predetermined. The same applies to other people, who seek their own happiness; they’re not simply means to justify our ends. So how we treat them matters – for their sake. 

When we love someone, say, we understand that they are free not to love us back, to reject us – and that makes it that much more meaningful when they do love us back. When we succeed, it is not because the world conspires to make it so, but because, for better or worse, we try and triumph under the circumstances; we are free to fail. We are free. And that’s what makes life worth living.

And if you added some element to the Nexus that made it so that your happiness would no longer be predetermined, then it would cease to be the Nexus. You’d be in the real world. If the Nexus represents a better world, you are actually in the Nexus! Congrats!

Think about this the next time you recall a painful moment.

Will Tribalism Be the End of Us?

Credit: Andy Sotiriou

We live in an increasingly interconnected world, due largely to globalization and advances in technology, particularly in communications and in travel. We have always needed each other. But it’s never been truer. Perhaps we rely on each other too much. As we’ve recently seen, global supply chains alone have the power to halt the world economy in its tracks.  

At the same time, however, it seems like, especially post-Trump, we are living in the most divided time in American politics. That’s probably a recency bias; the Civil War was a pretty divisive time. Still, things aren’t what they used to be. Nixon, a crook, was forced to resign as a result of the Watergate scandal. Trump, on the other hand, having had the requisite number of Republicans in the Senate, could not get convicted, despite two impeachment trials – one for inspiring an impromptu coup against democracy!

I ask, Will tribalism in an increasingly connected world be the end of us?

Defining Tribalism

To be clear, I’m not talking about simply having a tribe. Except in rare cases, we all have at least one: family, friends, neighbors, partners. Journalist Sebastian Junger in the book Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging identifies the quintessential element of belonging to a tribe as the feeling of some obligation to take responsibility for the well-being of the group or one of its members; failing to do so makes one feel “dead inside.”

These groups can help foster a sense of identity and purpose, promote in-group solidarity, and provide much-needed support in troubled times.

Tribalism, though, is typically defined as the negative aspects of strong group loyalty. Some object to the derogatory denotation, arguing it furthers anti-African stereotypes. First, anthropological research cited by Richard Wrangham in his book The Goodness Paradox: The Strange Relationship Between Virtue and Violence in Human Evolution shows that tribes have, indeed, engaged in regular inter-group conflicts. In fact, despite their relatively peaceful natures, inter-group conflicts tend to be the only times tribal societies reliably contribute to violence. Nonetheless, for the sake of argument, I will use a broader, neutral definition: tribalism here means strong loyalty to a group. 

But what does the word “strong” mean in this case? It has to do with valuation. It would be understandable, for example, expected even, to value one’s own family more than those of others. The same goes for people we love. If we were forced to make a choice, most of us would likely save these people over others. The heritability of such a disposition from evolution’s view is obvious. But we do not make our laws favoring one family over another. We try to be objective. We value all equally under the law. It is only when we value our particular group to an extreme that we start to justify unequal treatment: slavery, segregation, nepotism, genocide, etc. But what is an extreme – or strong – valuation? I think it’s one in which the well-being or goals of an in-group are valued so much that the well-being or goals of an out-group do not matter, when we’re no longer willing to be objective. It’s a relative definition.

Now, we can begin.

Tribalism’s Problems

This tribalism is the existential threat. 

Division

It’s not difficult to understand how tribalism drives division. We identify with groups we’re a part of. In practice, this means, for many, identifying with its ideas, as well. It’s often difficult to separate the two. Therefore, attacks on ideas become attacks on people. And when it’s your group being attacked, it’s personal.  

Nowhere is this more obvious today than in politics. It’s common to see political pundits hurl ad hominems at their counterparts for disagreeing with them. Republicans consistently intimate, if not outright claim, that Democrats are demonic. Conversely, Dems often call Republicans racist, gun-toting lunatics - all this despite a lot Americans agree on, such as the need for infrastructure, education, health care, criminal justice reform, climate change initiatives, and national security.

A binary party system that benefits from discord, also, doesn’t help.

Discrimination

Despite movements in identity politics against discrimination, some of which I broadly support, tribalism may also, somewhat counter-intuitively, lead to greater discrimination. While real-world discrimination exists today, such as in policing and in housing, issues that should be addressed, forming group identities tied to immutable characteristics fundamentally divides groups in ways that can’t be reconciled. If, for instance, there’s one thing that white supremacists and the extreme Left can agree on, it’s the primacy of race. Further, such groups frequently emphasize subjective experience. Yes, it’s important to understand the struggles of others; they may be hard sometimes to notice. A young black man in the Bronx, for example, is likely to have very different interactions with the police than a young white girl from a wealthy neighborhood. Still, in our increasingly mixed and globalized world, fixation on race anchors us to the past. We’ve made much progress because of past struggles. Most of what lies ahead, though, is not a black or white struggle but a human struggle against oppression. In an ideal future, to paraphrase neuroscientist and author Sam Harris, differences in skin color or race should be as trivial as those in hair color.

Closed-mindedness

Tribalism is pernicious, too, in its ability to insidiously close off the mind itself to reason. As alluded to, tribes often come with ideas, not just people. There is usually a pull to accept these ideas and, sometimes, to not question them. The go-to example here is religion. While I find religious people in my own life to be, on net, the best people I know, displaying ideal characteristics of generosity, selflessness, moral courage, and so on, they also seem reluctant to accept ideas that, to me, are plainly obvious: such as the non-issue of homosexuality or of pre-marital sex. While there are open religious communities, accepting of LGBTQ, say, they are, for now, the rule’s exception, and few outright contradict traditional church teaching.

Groupthink

Tribalism also has the tendency of creating echo chambers. It’s comforting to be surrounded by like-minded people who constantly agree with us, who make us feel safe. Democracy, nevertheless, hinges on open discourse; ideally, the best ideas win. We need to be exposed to challenging ideas, to grow. And it’s harder to do that if we feel a strong loyalty to a particular group with a particular set of ideas. Ideas themselves then become things that must be defended.

Conflict and Violence

The most problematic aspect of tribalism is that it sometimes leads to violence. Tribalism itself doesn’t necessarily lead to violence. Jains and Sikhs, for instance, can be very tribal but rarely engage in violence. Not all tribalism is the same. Doctrine matters. Yet a wide range of doctrines may lead to violence. What do Trumpists and BLM supporters, for example, have in common? Both reacted in violence to what they perceived as a rigged system: for the former, a fraudulent election; for the latter, systemic racism. Self-defense is one thing - I support it; but violence against innocent people and property, rioting and looting, I do not. Failing to defend one’s group is often considered disloyal, which usually warrants expulsion from the group, or worse. There’s a lot to lose.

These problems of tribalism, despite the aforementioned good they occasionally engender, slowly degrade our ability to work together. Without that capacity we may, as with the Neanderthals, go extinct. Perhaps AGI will usurp us like we usurped the Neanderthals in Europe. It’s hard to say; there are many unknowns, by definition, with the future. Or, perhaps we are our own worst enemy. In a nuclear age, discourse is our main tool for preventing radioactive oblivion.

Tribalism’s Solutions

So, what can be done about all this, especially given the natural tendency to form groups?

Encourage empathy and understanding

One obvious thing is to encourage wider empathy. Psychologist Paul Bloom points out that we tend to be more empathetic toward those who are more similar to us. There is likely an evolutionary explanation; those who shared our genes looked more like us. But this a bug, not a feature. The whole point is to understand and share in the feelings and thoughts of others because we care, presumably because others are sentient and can suffer. Empathy may not be the whole answer; Bloom extols the virtues of rational compassion. But I think wide empathy is a recognition of our common humanity, and, therefore, the first step to any rational or compassionate approach.

Moreover, in this increasingly multicultural and intersectional world it is important, if we are to have empathy, to see ourselves in everyone, including those that not only do not share our race or gender but neither our politics nor religion. The most direct way of doing this is for groups to encourage diversity: in members and in thought. And smaller tribes, all else equal, are, thus, more problematic than larger ones since they are more likely to promote smaller empathy. To me, the best tribe to focus on is the human tribe. Here there is a real obligation, a shared identity. We are all we have; and we are all, as evolution tells us, the same.

Promote critical thinking and independent decision-making

Next, groups should promote critical thinking and independent decision-making skills. Here religion still needs much in the way of progress, though I acknowledge we’ve certainly made progress. I mean, we used to burn people at the stake for questioning the Church. However, not all religions are the same. While dogma or fundamentalism is the main enemy, critical thinking will always be impaired if one is bound by a deeply flawed source material – another idea I first encountered in a forceful way with Sam Harris. There is a reason many churches still drag their feet to accept homosexual love, say. Regular debate and interactions with those who share differing worldviews, should be commonplace.

Address structural inequalities

Finally, I would be remiss if I did not mention especially after criticizing some aspects of identity politics, that structural inequities are a real thing. If we do not address these, then it will be difficult to move past these issues; they hold people back. How can African Americans, for example, move beyond race issues if they are still being disproportionately shot dead by police when unarmed, about five times as often per capita when compared to whites, according to a Washington Post database? More, there is a wide range of scientific data out there about systemic racism and innate bias. I would invite anyone to learn more. Ironically, one way to fight tribalism, as defined here, is by understanding when to engage your tribe in a fight, and when to join a bigger, more inclusive one. Over time, as these issues are addressed, the latter tribe type should be favored.

Conclusion

Lastly, it’s important to note that tribalism doesn’t inevitably lead to conflict. This is the main point of “The Myth of Tribalism” by Dominic Packer and Jay van Bavel, an article published in the Atlantic in 2022; “groupishness,” a human tendency to identify with social groups, the authors claim, can, also, lead us into acting altruistically, “embracing diversity, and helping people radically different from ourselves.” They cite psychological researchers who found that “Participants [in the study] who [were] led to believe that their group normalizes fairness engage in less in-group favoritism than do people who think that their group has a discriminatory norm.” They go on: “Most people want to fit in, and the promotion of inclusive social norms unlocked their desire to be good group members.” 

What is needed is to embrace the complexity: “Understanding how group identities combine with norms to shape human behavior also empowers people—and especially leaders—to focus more on cultivating healthy norms within their group.” Yes, we can.

Are we currently moving away from tribalism?

It’s hard to tell. But one positive sign is that it seems as if Republicans are finally starting to reject Trump. According to The Hill, a recent conservative poll shows Trump might not win the Republican primary this time around. It might go to someone like Ron DeSantis, who, despite his flaws, does not appear insane. Further, according to a recent Marist National Poll, Trump would also lose in a hypothetical 2024 head-to-head with Biden, who, despite his flaws, isn’t nearly as divisive.

Or, maybe I just have Trump Derangement Syndrome and am a Libtard.

Either way, we’ll see. I, for one, will move away from tribalism and toward greater acceptance of our differences and more understanding of our commonalities. It’s a work in progress. Let’s work together.

Will Aggression Be the End of Us?

Nagasaki

The tendency toward violence is all too human. So is compassion and empathy, to be fair. But there is something special about aggression that I find extremely unnerving: it contains the potential for our eventual undoing, principally via war.

While I believe that sometimes war is necessary, in self-defense or in defense of others, it rarely is. Our political leaders in the US often propel us into conflict, as if there is always a just war waiting around the corner. Yes, there are oppressive regimes out there. But does the US, the largest military in the world, without a close second, engage in war because it holds principles of democracy and freedom so dear that it cannot tolerate despots? It doesn’t seem that way; we tolerate Saudi nobility just fine, despite their violence toward their own people for offenses that aren’t even crimes in most developed countries; and former President Trump, for example, was fond of Kim Jong Un, Duterte, Xi Jinping, and Putin - a dictator’s Mt. Rushmore. Instead, maintaining the global hegemony seems a key motivation: the Spanish-American War, Vietnam, Iraq, etc. These stand in stark contrast to the few, arguably, just wars, such as the American Revolution and WWII.

Personally, I wonder how much of my anxiety on this topic, and that of many others, is influenced by the media, in particular given our attention economy, which rewards yellow journalism, clickbait, and polemic content. These things are hard to avoid in modern life - that’s the point. Thanks to the writings of individuals like Tristan Harris, executive director and co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology and former Google design ethicist, many people are aware of how the almighty social media algos utilize our outrage and discontent to make us use these platforms more frequently and for longer. So, yes, media does seem to add fuel to the fearful fire.

And yet real-world aggression is a real thing. Russia continues its occupation and attempted takeover of Ukraine. Recently, a drone strike, likely from Israel, destroyed an Iranian weapons factory. China is threatening invasion of Taiwan, again. For some, WW3 seems terrifyingly close. Further, a casual perusal of history reveals a consistent pattern of large-scale violence. Here’s a short list: the Crusades; the Inquisition; the Age of Colonization; all wars ever; slavery; the Holocaust; and more tyranny and genocide than anyone can ever remember.

However, somewhat paradoxically, most of history is people living their lives and working together in relative peace. This contradiction in aggression is the subject of Harvard anthropologist and author Richard Wrangham recent book: The Goodness Paradox: The Strange Relationship Between Virtue and Violence in Human Evolution. Wrangham bifurcates aggression into reactive and proactive types. The former is instant and instinctual, like punching someone in the face because they stepped on your shoe; the latter is cold and calculated, like a political assassination. His research shows that, compared to chimpanzees and bonobos, our closest living relatives, human are remarkably peaceful when it comes to reactive violence. Hence, quotidian experience in society is largely amicable. On the other hand, our propensity for proactive violence has not decreased as a result of natural selection.

It is precisely this propensity for violence that troubles me because, given recent advances in technology, most notably nuclear weapons, we stand the chance of wiping out civilization the next time we collectively fight. Einstein famously said, “"I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.”

Why So Aggressive?

I’m a firm believer that to solve a problem one must understand its causes. So, why the sometimes pull toward violence in our species?

Sadly, in simple terms, as far as propagating one’s genes is concerned, the prime evolutionary drive, often, violence works. In animals, the advantage to violence, especially in a larger individual, minimizing risk, is often clear. The idea of the alpha male is essentially synonymous with being the biggest and baddest, and, therefore, having procreative dominion. Many species bear this out, including bears. But, especially with social animals, there is a mitigating risk. Wrangham’s research shows that, with chimps, resentful betas sometimes band together and take out an oppressive alpha when presented with the right opportunity. This backlash puts pressure on social animals to maintain group ties, which brings images of social grooming to mind. Chimps, though, lack the language necessary to plan an assassination. And this difference has proven to be quite significant in the evolution of aggression.

Humans evolved gossip. It seems innocuous. “Did you hear Bob clubbed his wife with a mammoth femur?” Killing a rival, writes Wrangham, became relatively easy; wait till he slept or outnumber him. Therefore, we had to build alliances and trust.

Further, language enabled us to create narratives. Research by the anthropologist Andrea Migliano et al. shows that tribal societies value storytellers; in fact, they’re more reproductively successful on average than their peers. The reason is that they, in a sense, show the tribe who they are, what they believe, and how to act; in my view, they are the proto-priests.

Thus, a strong individual sense of what is acceptable and what isn’t within a tribal society would have been crucial in maintaining order and unity. Rule-breakers, as evidenced in modern tribal societies, would have faced collective punishment. This type of societal control is what British sociologist Ernest Gellner calls the “tyranny of the cousins,” given the strong consanguinity (or relatedness) of tribal societies.

The effect of this control is remarkable and leads to what Wrangham calls self-domestication: a pacification process starting before some 300,000 years ago whereby reactively aggressive males were selected against via execution, exile, and other societal punishments impacting reproductive success.

At the same time, though, proactive aggression did not decrease. Wrangham writes, “Since proactive aggression is complementary to reactive aggression (rather than its opposite), proactive, planful aggression can be positively selected even while reactive, emotional aggression has been evolutionarily suppressed.” Proactive aggression, right or wrong, was the mechanism of self-domestication, helping us work together better. And it’s cooperation that Wrangham credits for our species’ usurping of Neanderthals in Europe, who, contrary to popular belief, had a similar level of intelligence, but whose high reactive aggression hindered their collaboration.

Following the Neolithic Revolution, the beginning of agriculture, our large numbers, a result of food surpluses, required complex planning and, arguably, centralization. Agriculture, also, would make little sense if one did not have some assurance, by settling down in one obvious, attackable spot, that one would not labor year-round in vain. Leaders would have made this a priority and would have helped organize what was the ancestor of an army. So, the tyranny of the cousins became what Gellner called the “tyranny of the kings,” ushering in a new era of violence.

In sum, physical power became cultural and then political power. Certain kinds of violence, such as sexual violence, became more socially acceptable, instead of going away, because one of the benefits of leadership is, simply put, to lead. You make the rules. There’s a reason we’re skeptical of those in positions of power, and why we pursue it. Hence, culture, religion, and laws have all been used as a means of making some violence acceptable some of the time.

When these attack vectors fail, despots use fear. Ancient and Medieval history is replete with tyrants that oppressed their people with fear. Fear works well because it makes people selfish. When a tiger shows up, everyone scatters. When the SS appeared, 1930s Germans snitched on their neighbors so as to not be snitched on themselves or be suspected of disloyalty. When people are afraid and paranoid, the survival instinct is triggered. Dictators have exploited our evolutionary survival instinct by using extreme cruelty. So-called democratic leadership isn’t too different. They sell us fear because we want a savior, a protector. After 9/11, for instance, the Bush Administration sold us the USA PATRIOT Act, which saw a dramatic decrease in popularity after the high emotions following the national tragedy had subsided.

There is more to say on this topic, surely. But these are the broad outlines of our problem with violence. All this suggests that the violence problem is pretty entrenched. If it’s in our genes, and evolution works, on human timescales, imperceptibly slowly, then is there any hope that we survive the worse devils of our nature in this age of easy apocalypse?

Hope against Aggression

Ok, let’s talk peace. There must be some hope. Otherwise, we all go boom. What about deterrents and broader trends in proactive violence?

The most critical deterrent we have to avoid nuclear bye-bye is mutually assured destruction, the idea that nuclear war would ensure that all the participants lose, since nuclear winter would extinguish virtually all complex life on earth. But how effective is mutually assured destruction? Well, we’ve had nukes since 1945. Since then, we’ve come close to annihilation about twice. Once during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 and again in 1983 when Soviet Col. Stanislav Petrov accurately believed that a computer system had malfunctioned when it had warned that the US had launched a missile toward the USSR; he had not, as was within his duty, decide to launch a counterattack, thus avoiding radioactive oblivion. So far, so good - right?

I think mutually assured destruction, or MAD, works as long as you have three things. First, the nuclear armed participants must value life. That’s not always the case. Neuroscientist and author Sam Harris argues the deterrent would fail when dealing with a suicidal religious extremist group who somehow got their hands on nukes. This is an all too possible reality, and we should guard against it. Second, the deterrent must be mutual; if one party is not at risk, it doesn’t work. Currently, we’re all sharing one world, the Earth. In the future, a hypothetical multi-planetary civilization may not have the same assurance. Luckily, we’re far from that reality. The last requirement is rationality. Appropriately, the acronym MAD foregrounds the problem of human emotion, which, however briefly, occults rationality. Many, including Senator Ted Cruz, before he endorsed him for president, feared the possibility of Trump having access to the nuclear football. While tempers have been known to flare among world leaders, there stand various people between a world leader and a nuclear launch. Hopefully, cooler heads prevail, as they did with Col. Petrov.

There is some good news.

Steven Pinker, cognitive psychologist and author, somewhat counter-intuitively, claims that we are currently living in the least violent time ever. How can we know this? He argues: “It’s only by (1) counting the violent incidents, (2) scaling them by the number of opportunities for violence to occur, and (3) seeing how this ratio changes over time that one can get an objective sense of trends in violence.” The results? Pinker charts violence (e.g., wars, genocide, homicides, sexual violence, and so on), showing a consistent, global decline over many decades and centuries.

Unfortunately, though, progress is too slow for the amount of change that is necessary. Abuses of power continue. Yes, as we learn from Wrangham and from history, tyrants do seem, sometimes, to live on borrowed time: Hitler, Mussolini, Ceausescu, etc. But why do we have to wait for death to make progress?

No, hope is not a strategy; it’s its antecedent. We must continue to fight, to expose injustice by authorities wherever we find it. In this way, we help keep them accountable. No more “tyranny of the cousins” or “of the kings”; we need democracy, which means fighting tyranny wherever we find it. The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” Admittedly, it isn’t an easy fight. Around the world, large protests for political change are often met with violence. Of course, it’s easier and safer to say, “Let’s wait. Change will come, eventually.” When King was met with the same criticism for fighting injustice in Birmingham, AL, he wrote, “There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair.”

To quote the rapper J. Cole: “It’s beauty in the struggle”; there’s hope there, too.

On the Goodness Paradox

Are humans inherently violent or peaceful?

I’ve gotten into debates about this. My readings on the topic had led me to believe that humans were quite violent in the past, that perhaps that illustrated something about our true nature. Others would argue with me that past societies were more egalitarian and necessitated such cooperation that made violence rather rare.

That’s when I came across The Goodness Paradox: The Strange Relationship between Virtue and Violence by Harvard anthropologist Richard Wrangham.

The Myth

Rousseauians, named after Jean-Jacques Rousseau, believe human nature is inherently good, whereas Hobbesians, after Thomas Hobbes, believe that human nature is naturally selfish and violent. Traditionally, the Hobbesians have held sway in the evolutionary narrative of our species’ beginnings. Wrangham argues that neither side is correct. Our evolution is complex. He divides aggression into two aspects: reactive aggression, which is instantaneous and instinctive, such as punching someone who steps on your shoe, and proactive aggression, which is delayed and premeditated, such as assassinating a political rival. Humans, compared to our chimpanzee relatives, are less reactively aggressive but also equally, if not more, proactively aggressive.

Thomas Hobbes

Today, however, I find the Rousseauians gaining much, too much, traction. They tend to blame modern society for corrupting our otherwise amicable nature. To them, our pre-agricultural ancestors, represent an idyllic, peaceful past. It is correct that true tyranny arrives after agriculture, since more resources can be amassed via what Wrangham calls “coalitionary proactive aggression” (or CPA), to refer to premeditated aggression by a group that A) affords some worthwhile benefit and B) substantially limits risk of personal injury.

Further, Rousseauians are right about hunter-gatherers – when referring to hunter-gatherers who happen to live near farmers or pastoralists “herders of mobile animals such as cattle, sheep, and goats)” (236). For example, the Hadza of Tanzania live in perpetual peace and even intermarry with their pastoralist neighbors. But we must note that they do this because the latter group is militarily superior, not because their benign nature is able to shine without the corrupting influence of civilization.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

More, during the Pleistocene, an epoch marked by its ice ages, among other things, hunger-gatherers were more evenly matched, broadly speaking, since there were no farmers – or pastoralists, since domesticated animals, except for dogs, did not exist yet. Without a commanding leader, however, hunger-gatherer societies have relied on strict adherence to social norms, what social anthropologist Ernest Gellner called the “tyranny of the cousins” (149), protecting them from “challenges to social norms, and from selfish aggressors” (153). In a sense, the relative peace of hunter-gatherers has been heavily regulated; rule breakers and other conflicting groups have often been met with proactive violence.

A study cited by Wrangham sampled twelve hunter-gatherer societies and found that per capita death rates from intergroup conflict were lower (164 per 100,000 per year) than death rates from twenty small scale farming societies, at 595 deaths per 100,000. To compare, in the US, the death rate has ranged from 5.2 deaths per 100,000 per year due to homicide in recent times to 200 deaths per 100,000 per year during WWII (pp. 238-239), a period that saw the world engulfed in a military conflict. So, while hunter-gatherers have been more peaceful than agriculturalists, they pale in comparison to how we live today.

Motivations

Rousseauian’s motivations are sometimes explicitly political, affecting how the science is interpreted. “For instance, the anthropologist Douglas Fry wrote, “One important, general, contribution that anthropology holds for ending ‘the scourge of war’ lies in demonstrating that warfare is not a natural, inevitable part of human nature” (238).

They tend to believe that “if warfare and related forms of violence are found to be important evolutionary adaptations, politicians and the general public will treat them as inevitable: pessimism will reign and efforts for political improvement will be thwarted (249).”

They are implying that “biology is destiny, an idea captured in the phrase “biological determinism.” (250-251) . It’s important to note that: “Goodall, Hinde, Hamburg, and many others did not consider that, if aggression is adaptive, war must be inevitable” (253).

What I find interesting is that “Rousseauians have been relatively comfortable with the idea that tendencies for attachment, romantic feelings, or cooperation have evolved. . . . When dealing with those positive aspects of human behavior the arguments about determinism are (quite rightly!) forgotten” (254).

Takeaway

Biology is not destiny. This is illustrated well in the story of Professor James Fallon, a neuroscientist who, while studying the brains of patients with psychiatric disorders, many of them murderers, found that his brain shared many of the same traits that marked some of them as “psychopaths.” It is remarkable the different path his life took compared to those who had had a similar brain.

Our evolution shows us that, as the dharmic religions and the Stoics teach, among others, it is only through constant training and effort that we are able to resist our more primitive urges and reach a higher level, one more determined by reason than by biology.

I really enjoyed The Goodness Paradox, and highly recommend it. Read it, though, with an open mind. Science tells us many things about ourselves. To effect the best change, it is necessary to know truth. Emotion is not an enemy to truth. But it can cloud it. So it is important to control it, not through tyrannical suppression, but with understanding.

Rewriting Twins (1988) w/ ChatGPT

I was curious about what Twins (1988) might be like if it were a horror film instead. So I asked ChatGPT to write a memorable scene. This is what it did (my comments in brackets):

The scene opens with Julius and Vincent running through a dark, abandoned laboratory. They've just escaped from the facility where they were created, and they're being chased by a group of scientists and government agents. [This was initially confusing. In the film, they grow up separately. So I wondered, Why are they in the lab? Did they grow up in the lab? Definitely a different take.]

As they run, Julius turns to Vincent and says, "We have to split up! I'll lead them away and you get to safety!"

Vincent nods, and the two brothers part ways.

Julius runs down one corridor, dodging bullets and narrowly avoiding capture. But as he turns a corner, he's met by one of the scientists, who grabs him by the arm. [This actually wouldn’t work bc Vincent in the film is super strong and knows karate and stuff. Maybe it’s not a scientist but a Fed w/ a gun.]

"Gotcha," the scientist says, with a sadistic grin on his face.

Julius struggles, but it's no use. The scientist has him pinned. [Definitely wouldn’t work. One could switch out Julius for Vincent, but there’s a particular reason, coming up, why not.]

But just as the scientist is about to administer a sedative, Vincent appears out of nowhere, his eyes glowing with an otherworldly power. He lunges at the scientist and rips his throat out with his bare hands. [Vincent should definitely be the monster, not Julius; Julius represents purity and what is good while Vincent is corrupt.]

Julius watches in horror as Vincent turns to him, his face twisted into a monstrous snarl.

"Vincent, what have they done to you?" Julius whispers.

Vincent doesn't answer. He only gives a deafening scream and charges towards Julius.

This scene would set the tone for the movie, introducing the audience to the stakes, the main characters and the twist of one of the twin being a monstrous creature. It also presents the action and horror elements that would be expected of a science fiction horror movie.

Honestly, that’s pretty good. Not very original, but decent. It’s a great writing prompt. I wonder what happens next. Maybe there’s something in Vincent that stops him from attacking Julius, a brotherly instinct; and he runs off. Next, Julius has to find him - before they do!

Have to say, though, as a writer, I hope I’ll still be able to write and sell fiction once this thing gets really good, which won’t take too long, in my view . . .

A Critique of Nietzsche's _On the Genealogy of Morals_

The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche wrote in On the Genealogy of Morals (1887):

“They who are from the outset botched, oppressed, broken, those are they, the weakest are they, who most undermine the life beneath the feet of man, who instill the most dangerous venom and skepticism into our trust in life, in man, in ourselves. . . . On such a soil of self-contempt, a veritable swamp soil, grows that weed, that poisonous growth, and all so tiny, so hidden, so ignoble, so sugary. Here teem the worms of revenge and vindictiveness”

Nietzsche goes on (and on) in the second of three essays in the book about the pitfalls of asceticism, which is, generally, a lifestyle based in abstention from earthly pleasures, such as sex and alcohol, especially for religious reasons. He argues adherents are largely driven by resentment because they are, among other things, weak and, thus, attempt to make such a shortcoming into a virtue, into submission, say, or meekness. He calls this subversion of the good the slave morality. The ascetic priests, the worst of the bunch, according to Nietzsche, divert this blame, the resentment, inwards unto the self; think of the Christian concept of original sin, for instance.

While some of Woke ideology maps onto Nietzsche’s overall description of the slave morality well, since, for example, it often acts to shame those in positions of power as inherently corrupt or evil, the most salient and problematic examples of actualized revenge and vindictiveness today derive from the powerful. Simply look around: police brutality in the US, military aggression around the world, government oppression and censorship in countries such as Iran, Russia, and China; all that is needed is a certain level of dissent.

Further, the ascetics have foregrounded key concepts that are still valid and under-appreciated today: moderation, non-materialism, humility, self-control, skepticism, forgiveness, mercy, etc. (After all, “asceticism” comes from the Greek for “training” or “exercise.”) We need much in the way of training. It is just as easy to become egotistical or entitled as it is to become resentful.

To be clear, Nietzsche is not completely opposed to asceticism, when it is sincere; it gives suffering meaning, fostering a will. The goal is not to let it lead to a “will for Nothingness, a will opposed to life.” If Nietzsche had equally critiqued his Nihilistic antidote, the Will to Power, a philosophy of self-actualization of the will, a natural expression of power, the work would be, pun-intended, more powerful for it.

Eating & Ethics

Credit: Lillyz

This post is not about judgment of others. Rather, it’s about me trying to figure something out: If I am to eat and be a moral person, then what should I (not) eat?

Morality is tricky; life is full of gray. The following are some general principles.

Rule 1: Avoid Unnecessary Cruelty

My overall aim morally is to make the world a better place. A lot of that is simply avoiding hurting others. It’s harder than it seems. Our inattention or selfishness can cause others distress or even pain. Sometimes, we do so self-righteously as in the case of revenge. We don’t just try to avoid hurting other people, though; there are laws, many of them enacted relatively recently, to protect animals from harm. Even in the absence of such laws, intentionally hurting animals in public is likely, rightfully so, to gain you some serious criticism. If you hunt, however, like with eating animals, because of culture, where, until recently, most people have derived their values, it is considered ok.

With eating, I, too, try to avoid hurting others. However, I’m not very confident that what culture thinks is ok, is actually ok. There are many cultures, and many of them say conflicting things. Which one is right? Further, most of these cultures got it wrong on slavery, on women’s rights, on workers’ rights, and so on. In other words, cultures often contradict their own norms over time.

So on what foundation, then, should I base my moral framework? Sam Harris argues in The Moral Landscape that our morality is based on the well-being of conscious creatures. This is reflected, imperfectly, in most of our laws and customs. Murdering others is wrong because other people’s lives do not belong to us; we do not get to choose when or how someone dies. (There is an exception in that some people support capital punishment, which involves a trial and is then something, that’s supposed to be, conducted in the most humane way possible. There are good arguments on both sides of this issue; it isn’t a focus here.) As stated, we care about animals, too; they are conscious. Science, broadly, has shown us this unquestionably.

 I won’t entertain religious arguments here because, again, cultures vary and contradict themselves over time. I don’t find them to be reliable or persuasive.

Clearly, avoiding animal suffering is desirable morally. But how best to do this, and to what extent?

Well, it would make sense, if suffering is what is bad, to avoid killing and eating, thus providing an incentive for their exploitation, those creatures most likely to suffer. We can’t experience their pain, but their physiology and behavior make the salience of their suffering rather conclusive. I’m no expert. But I think it’s relatively safe to assume that those who have more in common with us are more likely to share in our capacity to suffer. There’s just so much we know as a species about brains to deny its significance in this regard. So, eating apes, for example, would be out of the question for me. Dogs and pigs are not just sentient but actually fairly smart, as non-human animals go, and dolphins, whales, magpies, octopuses, and so on. Surely, I’d want to avoid eating intelligent animals, animals who appear to have more authorship of their actions and can make, seemingly, greater connections with each other and suffer more. Elephants, for example, seem to mourn their dead.

With other, less intelligent animals, it’s harder to tell how much they can suffer. My intuition here is that there is a spectrum of suffering, just as there is likely one of consciousness; evidence to this comes from not only behavior but also from the varying brain structures of different creatures and their correlation to intelligence.  

So where would I draw the line? I’d err on the side of compassion. If it has a brain, I’m not likely to eat it. This thinking, linking brains to consciousness, may prove false in the future, but it’s all I reliably have right now. I must eat something, of course. Plants, say, don’t have a brain but exhibit interesting, perhaps even intelligent, processes (though, this does not prove consciousness and, hence, suffering). Mussels and oysters, which I don’t currently eat, don’t have a brain but have clumps of ganglia. All of this is complex and nuanced. Therefore, I hesitate to condemn others for what they eat, except if they, for instance, really like eating chimp.

Another complexity comes in with animal products, such as milk, honey, cheese, and butter. Again, I try to avoid these as they involve sentient creatures. I’m not perfect, however; the following rules below help to explain.

Rule 2: Promote Physical Health

As an individual, I find it my priority to look out for my own health. That means, I must eat, or I’ll die. And I must eat well enough that I do not get sick or cannot live a quality life. The question, for me, has to do with optimization. How much will I weigh the healthiest thing I could eat versus the above criterion of avoiding animal suffering?

Let’s make this super easy to illustrate a point. If eating babies was considered the best diet a human could engage in, adding years to one’s life, I would not partake. (I know, easy to say, right?) It’s a silly example because it’s hard to conceptualize how such a practice might develop to become culturally acceptable. Jonathon Swift knew this well when he penned “A Modest Proposal.” But the example illustrates starkly how optimal health cannot be one’s main priority if one is to be an ethical person.

So, how much should health matter? This depends on, for me, how healthy I can be while following Rule 1. I’m constantly learning about nutrition, but it seems I can be very healthy with my current diet, which is mostly vegan. I do eat eggs, however. Why? I have noticed I feel better when I do. I believe I can minimize animal suffering with the types of eggs I buy. And the B vitamins, choline and fat from the eggs, limited to two per day, five days a week, help me in such a way that make it worth it. I may discontinue this practice in the future if I can figure out a more ethical and effective way to get such nutrients into my body. (Egg production can invovle some incredible cruelty; I try to be selective and stay informed.)

It’s come to my attention that eating fish, or some sea life, might improve my health due to, generally, it being a good source of essential fatty acids, iron, and B and D vitamins, things that, in vegan diets, aren’t usually highly accessible. Fish, for now, is out of the question for me. They exhibit some intelligent behavior. They seem capable of suffering. That doesn’t mean I think they’re equivalent to humans. I would kill a fish before a person without hesitation. But, again, I want to exercise caution and err on compassion. Why would I choose to inflict suffering when there is no need? Currently, I supplement and feel good. But I wonder if I could feel better. There is some sea life I am considering, such as mussels and oysters. I would like to do more research.

There is no one answer to how much you should value your health over potentially harming another sentient creature. It is a matter of personal tolerance and reasoning. I am skeptical, however, of people who say they have to eat meat or they feel bad. Maybe. But it’s an awfully convenient thing to say given how savory and convenient meat is.

I also don’t think one specific diet is best for everyone. We’re complicated. Men and women are different in some key ways. Women menstruate and give birth. So, their bodies may need more iron, say, than most men. Some people can’t eat gluten. Some get sick from eating corn. Broadly, though, eating vegetables is healthy.

Rule 3: Promote Mental Health

There is another aspect of health that gets overlooked sometimes. I want to give it the proper import. And that’s mental well-being.

I would not, for example, engage in veganism if I were living in a rural part of the Dominican Republic, my mother’s birth country, and didn’t have much means. It would be too hard; I would be limited most of the time to staple foods. Even if I were willing to sacrifice some nutrition, it would cause me a great deal of stress to not only have to find things to eat that are vegan everywhere I go but to eat the same, relatively, bland foods all the time (since I would likely be limited in variety).

Too much stress has deleterious effects on our health. Some stress is ok. It encourages us to try, to have discipline. But it being inconvenient is no excuse for someone living in a big city, say, to give up on not eating meat. 

So, how do I incorporate this rule into my diet, while still respecting Rules 1 and 2. Well, here are potential stressors: not being able to eat when hungry or share in a meal, lack of flavor or variety in food, and complexity of rules. When all these mount up, it can become too stressful. For example, if I were traveling to a developing country, I wouldn’t try to be a raw vegan. That’s just me. Here’s another. If it’s my birthday, a celebration for someone I care about who isn’t vegan, or I’m taking such a person out to dinner, I’ll allow myself to eat things with dairy or eggs and not worry about it too much because I know, every other day, I am adhering to Rules 1 and 2. I still wouldn’t eat meat, however, in such cases; I don’t really see the need to, unless I were literally starving and that’s all there was. I wouldn’t feel bad about it either. There’d be no need to.

Ethics, for me, is not about absolutes; it’s about intention. I try, every day, to be good honestly and whole-heartedly, understanding, to borrow a phrase, the flesh is weak. What more can I ask of myself or of others?

Avoid ad Hominems

 Today’s political discourse tends to be overly negative and personal. Jaded, sometimes angry pundits point to political opponents and berate them as exemplary of the other side. To be fair, sometimes they’re correct. And there’s plenty to be angry about. As a liberal, for instance, I find the willingness among some on the Right to ban abortion very frustrating - and I’m not even a woman. It’s clear that today, we, as a nation, are divided, perhaps more than ever. And I think social media plays an important role. But I’d like to focus here instead on a particular tactic employed by these merchants of division, however well-meaning some of them may be: ad hominems. If we are trying to make the world a better place, requiring us to live together in tolerance, if not harmony, then we should promote healthy discussion of ideas to let the best ones win. Instead of a battlefield, it is better to think of this contest as a marketplace of ideas. This argument, against the routine use of ad hominems, is not simply a matter of politeness. (I’m a fan of politeness. It helps to build trust interpersonally and promote order, necessities in any thriving democracy.) Rather, ad hominem is a logical fallacy, ineffective politically, and is often incorrect.

Illogical
Let’s start out easy. Or, at least, it would seem easy. Ad hominem is an example of an informal logical fallacy. Why? From the Latin for “to the man,” ad hominem is a personal attack that purports to discredit a claim made by the attacked person.

Obviously, a person is not the same thing as an idea. A person can be an incessant liar and yet tell the truth. A person can be a simpleton and have a brilliant idea. I person can be a cheat and yet have honest intentions. Simply attacking someone does not, in and of itself, tell us whether a claim made by such a person is correct, useful, or not. What disproves the claim has to do with the claim itself.  

People often conflate idea with person. Why? Well, in politics especially, ideas identify which side you’re on. So attacking a political opponent, instead of her ideas, can help one side to seemingly bring down the other, lowering its perceived status or credibility among possible voters. Many view politics as a game: gain as many points against political opponents as possible to avoid the consequences of the opponents’ policies being enacted. People don’t want to lose; politics is often polemical. A natural reaction to being attacked (either oneself or one’s side), is to attack back, creating a vicious cycle. Ad hominems are often easier, too, than dealing with complex issues and thoughtful arguments.

While an ad hominem does not, by definition, respond to the claim, a person’s character, for instance, might relate to the claim, to some limited degree. When dealing with an extraordinary claim made by a motivated pathological liar, it would be reasonable to be skeptical of the claim. For example, it would be reasonable, a priori, to be highly skeptical of Trump’s claim that he won the 2020 Presidential Election. We know he doesn’t like to lose, that he is egotistically fragile, and that he is extremely likely to lie when it serves his favor. So, while an ad hominem might correctly point out that Trump, in this case, is likely lying, it does not, however, prove the case that he is.

Ineffective
Some might say that embarrassment is a good way of persuading others. As stated, this more often makes people more reluctant to concede. We know this from personal experience; we see this on televised debates. What if, instead, one focuses on the issues, seems disinterested, and complements a bad leader, say, whenever and wherever it was honest and appropriate - and, of course, proportionately? This makes the criticism seem more credible because A) it is less likely to be distorted by emotion and B) shows some fairness in its willingness to offer some, however limited, praise of the bad leader.

For example, instead of calling Trump a dumb liar, encouraging many his sycophants to attack liberal leaders, one can consider the facts that support his claim of widespread election fraud and see if there is any need for further concern. Such a mindset would make one more likely to empathize with Trump voters, which helps one understand them better and reduce political polarization, especially if such a practice becomes widespread.   

True, when judging the competence of bad leaders, it would be useful, if honest, to call out incompetence. This informs the public on whether or not such people should be leaders. There are different ways of doing this, though. One could call the individual a moron, which we heard a lot of when Trump was running in 2015, and which didn’t work out too well. Or, one can achieve the same ends by discussing policy, the merits of ideas, and so on. Sometimes, however, a person’s character is at issue. We want honest leaders, for example. Pointing out lies is vital in a republic.

In general, though, losing a debate matters more after one’s opponent calls one a coward for not sharing one’s opinion on gun control, say. Why make it harder for people to agree with one? To embarrass them? That what it seems like to me. I get the urge. It’s emotionally gratifying. But like most such things, the feeling is ephemeral.

Moreover, these emotions can lead us astray.

Often Incorrect
Ad hominems, when expressed in heated debates, are often untrue. One common insult is to imply, if not outright say, that one’s opponent is a dunce. Really, what they often mean is that the opponent’s idea isn’t persuasive – to them. They may be right about the idea or point. But, I find, often, people who are called stupid, aren’t. For instance, many conspiracy theorists, despite saying some incredibly dumb things, exhibit a lot of intelligence. They tend to be well-researched; inquisitive; and willing to study, learn, and change their minds. There are many reasons why smart people might believe in or say stupid things: politics, religion, ideology, etc.; they might continue with a nonsensical argument because it costs too much to lose: embarrassment, being discredited, decreased political power, and so on.

Sometimes, pundits will try to justify their overly personal commentary by saying, “It’s true” and that attempts to be “polite,” as they see it, is just being politically correct. I see this on the Right and Left. Whether the personal attack is true or not is beside the point. One’s opponent may, indeed, be dumb. The utility of calling someone this, though, is low. And we risk, every time, moving others further from us. In a democracy, routinely doing this is dangerous.

In brief, being polite is important; don’t underestimate it. We must deal with other people every day. Burning bridges limits connections, which can potentially limit progress societally. Some things feel right, and may be correct, but do more harm than good, such as insulting others. What I’m advocating for isn’t easy. I’m sure I’ll be guilty of committing something that can be perceived as an ad hominem at some point, because they’re difficult to avoid, especially in reaction to being attacked personally first. But I hope to speak more constructively than not. After all, I am - like we are - only human.

Is Suffering Good?

Credit: stevekrh19

Suffering is something most of us run away from. We know it and, by definition, don’t like it. Many of us, in fact, define happiness as the absence of suffering. But a big part of life too is to seek out meaning. After all, what is happiness without meaning? If we simply try to avoid suffering, then we are, in a sense, deriving happiness from a sort of pleasure, which, as most of us know, is ephemeral. So, where does meaning come from? Sometimes, society or nature skews the directionality of meaning. Ultimately, however, it manifests from within. If we want to live meaningful lives, then, suffering is a powerful vehicle to get us there.

Unavoidable Suffering

Involuntary suffering is part of the human condition. We cannot avoid some suffering. Everyone we have ever loved, unless some hypothetical cure to death is discovered soon, will die. Half of the time, marriages don’t work out. Natural disasters, mass shootings, car crashes, cancer, incarceration – there is an endless list of potential suffering just waiting for us. Suffering is, like many things in life, information. We live our lives based on this kind of information, otherwise called experience. That is, we make decisions largely based on experience. We believe, generally, that we make better decisions with more experience. That’s why wisdom is associated with age.

The more profound the suffering, the more we want to run and hide from it. Senselessness can make suffering more profound. I think of learned helplessness, a concept from Intro to Psych. When a dog, say, gets randomly shocked in an experiment so that nothing it does has any consequence on the adverse stimulus, it learns that it is powerless and gives up; it becomes lethargic, apathetic. Even when some way to avoid getting shocked is presented, it does not stir the animal into action. We humans are not so different. Anyone who has experienced depression, for example, understands this sort of feeling well.

I was severely depressed around 2015. It took considerable time and effort to escape the inertia of negative thoughts and feelings – years, in fact, because depression doesn’t tend to pop out of nowhere. But having found an escape velocity, I find myself in a happier, more meaningful state than ever. How? Given the depth of my despair, I was either going to give up or live, and living was going to take a big change. So, I reflected. I leaned on what I had learned of the Stoics. I learned what was meaningful to me and found my resolve to not return to that gravity well of pain. What made sense was what I could control, not what I couldn’t. The senselessness, in a sense, was resolved. Like pressure making diamonds, suffering can make meaning. I think we should always strive to make the best use of our experiences to live, however briefly, happier, more meaningful lives. If we don’t, we die.

This isn’t easy what I’m advocating. You should not occult your feelings when suffering, despite temptation. Feel your pain. Process it slowly and dutifully. Understand it. It’s necessary to learn what can be learned from it. You can only grow stronger from finding the meaning within the pain.

Avoidable Suffering

Voluntary suffering is a different thing altogether. Instead of standing steadfast against the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, you are searching for a sea of troubles and diving in headfirst. There are various philosophies that find this kind of volition appealing: sadism, masochism, BDSM, mortification of the flesh, and so on. Suffering seems to break down denotatively in these examples; pain is made pleasure. Mortification of the flesh is an interesting example. Pain is meant to be pain. But the meaning, to deaden desire or to suffer like Christ, is built in. Are these examples of suffering? How much suffering (mental, emotional, and physical) can there be in a process you engage in willingly? Further, where is the senselessness that effects the search for meaning?

Something is different here. What is torture, say, if it is chosen? Exercise, sacrifice, discipline. These things are good; they can yield good health, good morals, and good routines. This idea is mimicked in the biological phenomenon of hormesis, whereby small, limited exposure to negative stimuli can generally make an organism more resilient. Working out, sitting in ice baths, spending time in a sauna, even practicing penance can help make us stronger when exposed to harsher conditions. This is a useful concept, especially when life gets too easy, when we are likely to take things for granted and could use a good kick in the pants. The goal, however, is to keep exposure small, stress limited. That’s how it works. If suffering were truly the goal, our well-being would be at risk because we would seek out maximum pain. And we know that working out too much, for example, is bad for us, that our bodies are not able to recover from the damage, that we should rest and recoup what was lost. Or, likewise, that too much heat can cause heat stroke.

Suffering can kill us. It should not be taken lightly. It is Shylock, demanding skin to give; it leaves scars, in various forms. I’m uncertain how many scars one can obtain and still have skin to give. But it’s not something I’m willing to find out. Yes, when we survive, it helps us grow, and we can be grateful for it. But we are human, and suffering is taking a risk. In taking that risk, we are not appreciating the good, because we are not protecting it. I am grateful for my suffering, for the times when I did not want to continue, though I wouldn’t want to relive them. Because of them, I am better able to calibrate my good fortune, what I have. Today, I am happier, more resilient. In the words of J. Cole, “you ain’t never gon’ be happy ‘til you love yours.”

Life 10,000 years ago, a time we are better adapted for, was not like today; it was not comfortable; stressors abounded. That doesn’t mean you’d want to go back there. I’d take living today, any day, over living in the Stone Age. We can be grateful for suffering without wanting it. It can make us better; but that doesn’t mean it does so without, at least temporarily, making us worse. There’s never a guarantee with suffering that you will make it out the other side of the proverbial tunnel. Don’t bet on that. Commit to nicks and bruises instead of slings and arrows to build resilience, gratitude, and happiness – think hormesis. When suffering does occur, and it inevitably will, you’ll be in a better place to battle it, and to find meaning. And that’s all any of us is trying to do half the time, anyway.

The Problem of Trust

Credit: befresh

The Gift of Trust

Trust is one of the greatest inherited gifts of humankind. It is a glue of sorts; it makes society, and, therefore, civilization, possible.

 In our prehistoric past, we trusted our fellow villagers enough that we could coexist in proximity without killing each other - or, at least, without killing each other to such a degree that would’ve made such cohabitation impossible or impractical. Perhaps we were inclined to do so because these others, mostly our kin, looked a lot like us. Or, maybe we were simply more biologically predisposed to trust, because communities with trust outcompeted communities without it.

You might argue, to the contrary, that trust derives primarily from logic. Sometimes, the incentives line up with how we would like others to act. People tend not to murder each other, for example, because they don’t want to be punished by society. As a result, most people walk calmly down the street, instead of run from one location to the other for fear of being killed. Or take the philosophy of mutually assured destruction, which has kept us safe from nuclear annihilation - so far. Nations do not nuke each other - that is, other nuclear-armed nations - because they understand that the response would likely be to retaliate in kind; and there are no winners in nuclear winter.

Whatever the reason, trust is something we tend to do.

Yes, there are many contexts in which we tend not to trust others, especially if we don’t know someone or if they hold no position of authority or influence. Yet, in our modern lives, trust is indispensable. All the important interpersonal relationships we have involve trust: our parents, our children, our friends, and our romantic partners. Not all of us trust our romantic partners. There are, for instance, a plethora of dating apps and opportunities in the real world to potentially fight against. And we can’t be with our significant other 24/7 - nor would we want to. It wouldn’t take too long to cheat either. So, what do we do? Well, we either learn to trust our partners, or we leave. Tragically, some do neither. That’s a choice, too. To trust someone is to be vulnerable because our trust may prove unfounded. There is beauty in that vulnerability. It is easy to see why we often trust the ones we love; they have the metaphorical key to our hearts. And when they validate our trust, by being faithful and loving back, it’s like a reaffirmation of our love for them.

Further, when we lose our trust in others, we tend to move away from them, from society. The glue degrades. Ted Kaczinski comes to mind. It’s not that we necessarily become dangerous. But we become less useful to society. I’m pro-society. Collectively we solve problems better than individually. And, biologically at least, most, if not all, of us need each other.

The Problem of Trust

We trust because we have no better alternative. It’s almost synonymous with faith; we can’t know everything, so we trust. I’m not advocating for the elimination of trust. As stated, it is terribly useful. I do believe, however, that there are some circumstances in which the reduction of the need for trust, where it would be possible and practical, would help to create more efficient systems.

Jan 6, 2021, is a good example of the problem since government is the most powerful institution we implicitly trust. Most of us had trusted in the electoral system, that the other side would accept the results, in the integrity of democracy. We survived, yes. But the problem of Trump was obvious - to me and to many others. I understand some have found him to be charismatic. People like confident people, especially if they’re rich and famous. Social media played a key role, too. Tristan Harris, former design ethicist at Google, blames social media algorithms for making people more susceptible to believe in the Big Lie in the first place and for greater polarization. Trump had said, clearly, that he wouldn’t accept the election results if they didn’t proclaim him victor. Before the election, Trump was trying to stop mail-in ballots from happening by rigging the post office, knowing that mail-ins lean Democrat). He had been building the case for years, in fact, in the way an insecure person, knowing he would lose, would do. We should have all seen it coming. And yet many of us, including the Capitol Police, were taken by surprise on Jan. 6. Trump and his sycophants came terrifyingly close to fucking up this democracy thing. I don’t know what would’ve happened if the rioters had gotten their hands on Mike Pence, who they said they wanted to hang, or Nancy Pelosi.

And what saved us? It seems our democracy was kept intact by a relatively small number of people. What would’ve happened, for example, if the man who shot Ashli Babbitt had been an avid Trump supporter instead? What if there were more cops on Trump’s side that day? What if the Georgia officials Trump had tried to coerce had given Trump what he wanted? What if Mike Pence had done what Trump had asked and refused to certify the election results? It’s not clear how many more people Trump would have had to fire or replace or coerce to get what he wanted, but it’s not absurd to think he could’ve done it with just a bit more effort. He certainly tried. And now we have in front of us, for future wannabe dictators, the blueprint: How to Destroy Democracy.

One thing seems clear: leaving democracy up to the character of people who we vote for based on a popularity contest isn’t ideal. Put another way, the necessity of trust in individuals who govern us, in place of something better, is the problem. The President can say he has no desire to destroy democracy; it would be better if such a thing were not possible, or as unlikely and impractical as possible.

Toward a Solution

In considering a solution to this intractable problem, I draw my inspiration from two key sources, both from computer science: zero trust architecture and Bitcoin.

Zero trust architecture (ZTA) is based on the principle of “trust but verify” (also: “Never trust, always verify”). It’s a cybersecurity approach that seeks to eliminate the need for trust and instead seeks out to validate all interactions. The problem ZTA identifies is that organizations’ networks have tended to assume that everything inside its corporate walls should be implicitly trusted, making it easy for malicious actors to move freely and access sensitive materials once they’re on the inside. Because many organizations today don’t have a clearly defined perimeter, due to the advent of the cloud, mobile devices, and IoT, ZTA seeks to protect a corporation’s network from anywhere and at any time.

Satoshi Nakamoto, the anonymous creator of Bitcoin, was largely motivated by the problem of trust, too - in his case, within financial transactions. He wrote: “While the system works well enough for most transactions, it still suffers from the inherent weaknesses of the trust-based model. ... What is needed is an electronic payment system based on cryptographic proof instead of trust, allowing any two willing parties to transact directly with each other without the need for a trusted third party.” How does Bitcoin resolve the problem of the trusted third party? Instead of “the fate of the entire money system” depending on who runs the mint, with “every transaction having to go through them, just like a bank. ... transactions must be publicly announced [with] . . . a system for participants to agree on a single history of the order in which they were received”; so, the payee gets proof of “the time of each transaction . . . [when] the majority of nodes . . . [agree] it was the first received.” It is resolved through transparency, through community, and through math. (More on this below.)

These two key developments demonstrate the difficulty and complexity of the issue at hand – bad trust – and, therefore, the need to be comprehensive in a solution.

Firstly, ZTA suggests an obvious utility in ensuring election integrity and efficiency, making it practically impossible for people to say they won when they didn’t. I do not see any substantial reason why we couldn’t vote digitally. Companies have endeavored to ensure you are who you say you are for decades and have many useful and still evolving techniques, such as two-factor authentication. ZTA would further help us identify critical components of the network and develop strong methods for user authentication. For example, this approach becomes stronger with more users. This means more verification, which means a safer network, which means less trust is needed in individuals, though, ironically, more trust will be gained in the process, which is vital; trust is the currency of democracy. This idea is not new; ZTA is already being advocated for use in this way.

Secondly, when possible, decreasing the size and scope of government is generally a good thing. Just like Bitcoin addresses the problem of the middleman by getting rid of him; whenever possible and practical, removing the need to trust in government officials is imperative. Obviously, many of them lie. It’s also clear that we are not trying to create oligarchs. We’re trying to live happy, meaningful lives. Bureaucracy is slow and inefficient. While there may always be a need for cops or judges, there might not always be a need for a large body of usually aloof individuals who get rich from their insider knowledge and donors, and, therefore, do not have a strong incentive to represent their constituents’ needs.

Direct democracy, having people vote for the laws they want, is one more direct path. If implemented at scale, it should encourage greater awareness and participation from the public, instead of trust in charismatic leaders. And with our modern technology, it isn’t particularly difficult to do. It should eliminate the problem of gridlock in Congress. And with ranked-choice voting, we can better make sure each vote matters, that the best option is chosen. In turn, we’d need less red tape: fewer political bodies to count votes and implement elections, generally. Obviously, such an approach would take time and some convincing. We should be talking about this. Perhaps some laws make more sense than others to vote on directly. Even so, we would be moving in the right direction: away from a bloated, slow, inefficient, and generally untrustworthy government.

Finally, one futuristic idea is to replace government, the middleman, altogether with some sort of super algorithm, an artificial intelligence (AI). Again, let’s look at Bitcoin. Algorithms enable Bitcoin transactions from one person to another without either needing a third party, or to reveal their identities, while, at the same time, enabling both parties involved to trust in the system because the double spending problem is nearly impossible to occur; in other words, they don’t need to trust each other.

AI is certainly a work in progress. But progress involves our greatest minds, community, math, and science. AI, like our children, inherits our values; we just must be careful about what our values are. Tristan Harris has brilliantly shown us, time and again, the innate problems in having powerful algorithms spurred by seemingly innocuous incentives, such as profit seeking. He writes of one powerful example, “YouTube’s recommendation algorithms, which determine 70% of daily watch time for billions of people, “suggest” what are meant to be similar videos but actually drive viewers to more extreme, more negative, or more conspiratorial content because that’s what keeps them on their screens longer.”

We must be careful. We could get this wrong. We should take our time. Bitcoin is inherently open source. It is built by community. The best ideas win. It is a good metaphor for a more hopeful future. With all our problems, we often look at technology or government to save us. These things are tools. We need tools. But we won’t get everything right. If we can be as transparent as possible, however, and increase trust in the governing system overall, by decreasing the need to trust, where possible and practical, then we can move humanity in a better direction.

No man is an island, said Donne. We rely on each other. We trust each other. And that’s a beautiful and necessary thing. It’s nice to feel you can leave your door open because you believe that nothing bad will happen. It would be better, though, if you knew, as much as it is possible to know, that nothing could.

What Is God?

Credit: andyh1988

Context

I was raised by God-fearing Latinos, mostly by my mother. So, I got plenty of the God-and-Devil talk. I spent a lot of time, especially nights, terrified of the Devil, of Hell, and of El Cucu (“the Bogeyman”). I inherited this Caribbean form of Catholicism; it was a way many uneducated people chose to keep their children from being naughty.

Around 16 or so, however, I began to question. I debated my atheist friends. Luckily, I was open-minded; I sought the truth. I realized, through educating myself, that science made more sense than religion. So, I became agnostic, not atheist, because, in the end, the point was, I didn’t know.

I grew older. I made friends with Christians and Muslims. I studied religion and philosophy in college. Both of these things taught me, among other things, the utility and complexity in religious belief.

I also went through difficult shit. I got severely depressed in 2015 and attempted suicide. I don’t like to talk about exactly what was going on at that time; it would require a lot of explanation. But these past experiences made me more open to the possibility of a God. Clearly, I wanted there to be a God because I wanted help. But I like to think, given my knowledge of science, that I remained aware of my likely bias and didn’t let it cloud my thinking. I simply held an open mind and paid attention.

Do I Believe?

If I had to wager, Pacal aside, I would bet on there being a God.

First, though, let me acknowledge that it’s a hard belief to justify purely rationally. You could try. You could talk about the beauty of the Universe, the cosmological constants, and so on. I’m not going to do that. (There are equally valid arguments on the other side.)

Let me also state that I don’t know whether or not a God exists. I believe. It’s a calculated belief, based on subjective feeling, based on my experiences; perceived possible intervention; and a few logical arguments. (For example, to paraphrase a friend, I do think there is, in contrast to the Problem of Evil, a Problem of Good, the phenomenon in which there is good in the world at all, when there need not be. In fact, many of us around the world live lives, on net, worth living, which is, in part, suggested by the global suicide rate, which is relatively low compared to the global birth rate). There’s something suggesting optimism in that comparison.)

What Is God to Me?

God is hope. He is the idea that there is some intention behind all of this, maybe in the origin of the Universe - that there should be existence at all. Perhaps He is behind the creation of intelligent life. I don’t know. I’m trying to describe a feeling that existence is better than non-existence, that this hope existed before existence, as we know it. It can also be stated thus: Somewhere some intelligence  knows I exist, and prefers that I do. (I am more certain of the first verb there than the second.) This implies my well-being is important to such an intelligence.

God is love. When I think about God, I think of eternal, unconditional love. Belief in a Creator, for me, is the feeling that someone - some intelligence somewhere - loves me no matter what, right or wrong, similar to a parent loving a child no matter what stupid shit the kid does. This is why the notion of God is so popular; it’s comforting. If I were certain that A) there’s a God and B) He loves me, it’s hard to imagine what I couldn’t live through. Hence, as we have seen repeatedly in history, people going through difficult times tend to move toward God. Despite the obvious counterargument of wishful thinking, to quote rapper Kendrick Lamar, “that’s just how feel.” I feel love. It’s not that how I feel is the best way of discovering truth. (Science is.) It’s that sometimes it’s all we have to discovery what may be.

God is also my feeling that there is an intelligence greater than mine - than all of humanity’s. This tells me that, again, there is hope beyond us; we are not limited to erroneous human cognition. Perhaps there are heights of knowledge out there that we may reach, that make us a better people. It also tells me that God gets us; that we need not explain; that there is room for redemption, for non-judgment. It sets the example for us.

What Is God Not to Me?

God is not a religious deity. The religious books are full of the telltale signs of their creators, ignorant humans. God is perhaps unknowable. If He speaks to you, let me know. Better yet, don’t.

God is not a genie I can count on to give me wishes. That’s wishful thinking. I also don’t think God meddles in the everyday affairs of humans, or other intelligent life forms in the Universe. That would probably make God rather petty, which would contradict my idea of God being intelligent. I also think this Bible-derived version of God is easily disprovable. If He existed in this way, why does He let children be routinely murdered and raped? One could argue to teach us through suffering. But what lesson did those children receive?

God is not, maybe most controversially, necessarily all powerful. I do believe God is good, as Joan Osborne sang in the ’90s. But when I reflect on all the suffering in the world, it seems to me that God would have to be committed to non-interference - at least, most of the time. This reminds me of a watchmaker. After making the watch, there only need be a few interventions every once in a while to make sure the thing keeps going. Many Christians argue that God’s commitment to free will explains the existence of evil. Yes, you would want to exist with free will, whether or not it is an illusion: to be fulfilled, to be an entity whose existence matters. Agreed. But I can’t imagine a good God not interfering at least some of the time; if God created the Universe for conscious creatures, if God is hope, then surely there are circumstances where humans take away all, or most, of the concomitant gifts from others (therefore, taking away aspects of free will). I can’t imagine a better time to intervene than before someone is murdered or raped after being tortured. This is truly a troubling thought for a believer. All I can say is that life is complicated. There are things we don’t see or know. Perhaps there are reasons that escape our myopic minds. Or, God doesn’t exist.

In the end, I choose to believe, knowing I may be wrong. A Godless universe fits with much of what I know about the universe as well. Nevertheless, I remain hopeful, if aware. Open-minded, if skeptical. If God does exist, I would like to know. Till then, I believe. Because I feel beauty. Hope. Reason. All beyond just me.

Note: God is a loaded term. It implies a personal religious diety. However, using other terms may be confusing. Keep in mind, I mean a hypothetical intelligence or creator behind the Universe itself. I also use the pronoun He, again, for the sake of clarity and ease of writing. It should not be taken literally.

What Is Happiness?

I don’t know that there is one universal answer. I can only speak for myself. And I seem unable, especially the older I get, to separate the concept of happiness from that of gratitude. And gratitude itself seems intimately tied to the notion of purpose. 

What Is Gratitude?
Gratitude, to me, in its simplest form, is the feeling that I am lucky more than I am unlucky in any meaningful way. More bad things can happen than good. This isn’t a simple comparison and contrast. I could, for example, get wrongfully arrested and spend the rest of my life in prison. That would lead to an immediate nosedive in my sense of overall happiness, of course. But, I suspect, because of the meaning I hold in my existence (more below), I would find a way to be happy even in such a circumstance. Gratitude, then, is about appreciating the good. It is easy for a rich man to be grateful, for example. That’s not what I’m talking about here. My gratitude derives not from material possessions or societal approval or even self actualization, I dare say. Outcomes cannot be the cause of happiness because outcomes cannot be controlled. Anyone who receives happiness from things he can’t control will find himself at the mercy of external factors. That is not happiness to me; it isn’t particularly useful either. Happiness derives from effort, from purpose. 

What Is Purpose?
Purpose comes from meaning. But is there meaning in the chaos of the Universe? I don’t know. Perhaps not. It’s a pretty big place and a lot happens, seemingly randomly. So, I am not talking about innate purpose, or meaning. There may not be such a thing. Saussure would approve. There might not be a God, or fate. It seems that way to me, most of the time. Therefore, I am talking about my own purpose here, derived from my own meaning. 

What Am I Grateful For? 
I am grateful for many things that happen to be in my favor; they don’t have to be so. In that way, I am lucky.

I am grateful to be alive; life is an opportunity to do things. These things have effects. Neither of these has to be so. What a wonderfully empowering thing! And, using reason, I may act in such a way that my effects are more good than bad, as I define them.

I am grateful that I have, and have shown, the ability to endure. I have suffered a lot of pain in my life; I was severely depressed for years for many reasons. But through considerable effort, I have developed into a tougher, stronger individual. It doesn’t always happen that way. 

I am grateful that I have in-built value to others, principally my parents. And that they tried more than they did not. 

I am grateful that my ancestors kept trying; that they survived weather extremes and famines and wars and pandemics and every thing the world threw at them; that I am a recipient of that effort. 

I am also grateful for the ability to learn from my mistakes, and, in that way, try to get closer to the bullseye. Ben Franklin said it well in his Autobiography, “. . . on the whole, tho' I never arrived at the perfection I had been so ambitious of obtaining, but fell far short of it, yet I was, by the endeavor, a better and a happier man than I otherwise should have been if I had not attempted it . . .” 

I am grateful that there is beauty when there need not be, that I can appreciate it. When I look at nature, I see myself, a product of natural laws working relentlessly for eons to make slightly better adapted things. 

But, truly, my gratitude is not about looking at the cup as more full than empty; it could even be more empty, for that matter. My gratitude stems from my purpose, regardless of whether or not there is a God, or fate, regardless of whether or not I have succeeded. 

What is My Purpose? 
My purpose is to help others live lives with less necessary suffering, or, in short, to paraphrase Benjamin Franklin, to make the world a better place for my having been in it. Maybe it sounds cliché. But there’s little more that makes absolute sense to me. Think about it. If the Universe has no meaning, which seems a strong possibility, this dictum would still carry weight. Let’s explore. Suffering is, by definition, not good. I do not mean meaningful pain. That can be sacrifice or growth. I mean pain that causes a lack of meaning, such as someone who is a devout Muslim being force-fed pork. The subsequent suffering here is a result of, I argue, an inability to live meaningfully for this person. Of course, suffering depends on a person’s understanding. He might reason that his suffering brings him closer to Allah. Fine. But the suffering most Muslims would feel here is due to a breakdown of the values - the meaning - they hold dear. Let’s go further now. Suffering is part of life. It’s not going anywhere any time soon. And my existence, like all those who came before me, is finite. And I am but one among a seemingly infinite number of human beings. Therefore, if I can do something, even if it requires my own suffering, to make it more probable that the world in which my fellow humans live in is such that, as a result of my existence, is less likely for more people to have more suffering, then that is good - absolutely. And I have the ability, and desire, to live my life trying to do that.  

What Is Happiness to Me? 
Happiness is this feeling: that I, who need not exist, however imperfect, am, on net, a positive force acting on the world, which itself need not exist; that good exists at all and that I am alive to witness its magic. Any sufficiently good act is indistinguishable from magic.