Rational Philosophy

The Democratic candidates’ remarks on religion.

William Kristol, in a disdainful, patronizing opinion, accuses Barack Obama of making disdainful, patronizing remarks about small-town America in his speech to a wealthy audience in San Francisco. “I haven’t read much Karl Marx since the early 1980s,” Kristol begins… How much more elitist can you get than that? Kristol seizes on Obama’s words, and, despite presenting counter-examples, claims that Obama has let slip his mask. Sadly, Kristol is working too hard to find a reason for Obama’s somewhat pandering comments. If there’s one thing we’ve had reinforced for us during this intensely observed political odyssey it is that politicians say things to attract as many to their cause as possible, while alienating as few people as possible.

For me, Clinton and Obama speaking on faith at the Compassion Forum at Messiah College in Pennsylvania has produced the worst of it yet.

Clinton: “You know, I have, ever since I’ve been a little girl, felt the presence of God in my life,” she said. “And it has been a gift of grace that has, for me, been incredibly sustaining.”

Obama: “I try as best I can to be an instrument of his work … to act in accordance with what I think are the precepts of my faith.”

Here we have the Democratic candidates touting their faith and its guidance as a means to votes. Whether we take their statements at face value or not (although they seem so carefully extruded that taking them at face value requires more faith than I, for one, possess) the trotting out of religious belief as a piece of voter fly-paper goes further than similar sticky sentiments on standard political, economic and social issues.

How far astray are these politicians, these Democrats, from the likes of Thomas Jefferson? Jefferson, in his time, when criticized for being faithless, didn’t even bother to rebut the intended insult. Jefferson also wrote the following:

“I have examined all the known superstitions of the world, and I do not find in our particular superstition of Christianity one redeeming feature. They are all alike founded on fables and mythology. Millions of innocent men, women and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined and imprisoned. What has been the effect of this coercion? To make one half the world fools and the other half hypocrites; to support roguery and error all over the earth.”

I’m not condemning Clinton and Obama for having faith, but condemning them for using faith as an implied qualification for office.

From a philosophical perspective, politics is the art and science of determining and implementing the operation of a society. Politicians take office by demonstrating an aptitude for sustaining, protecting and improving society. One could argue that the religious beliefs of American citizens play an important role in our society. And I suppose that would be a difficult argument to negate. But one wants leaders and administrators who can separate religious belief from the practical and pragmatic needs of society. We don’t elect presidents as spiritual guides. And we shouldn’t have to elect someone to the highest office who won’t say things just to win votes.

But back to Kristol for a moment. (Kristol, who hasn’t read much Marx since the early 1908s.) I looked up the preceding context of the Marx quote Kristol gives. It’s this: “[Religion] is the fantastic realization of the human essence since the human essence has not acquired any true reality. The struggle against religion is, therefore, indirectly the struggle against that world whose spiritual aroma is religion.”

It is clear from this insight that Marx was a true philosopher. According to Kristol, it’s all very well for a German thinker to speak of such things, but not for a presidential candidate. But oh, for a leader who could think like this.

In a 1929 interview, Albert Einstein apparently said: “I’m enough of an artist to draw freely on my imagination, which I think is more important than knowledge.”

In order to have an opinion on Einstein’s statement, we first need to decide what he means by “more important.” Einstein was speaking of his own process. He had been asked whether intuition or inspiration accounted for his theories. Certainly, when devising a new theory, imagination plays a very significant role, and without it a new theory can’t emerge.

Einstein’s contribution to science was creative. For him, then, imagination was more important that knowledge.

As my wife and I visited our newborn son in the ICU today we talked about the role of the nursing staff. So much of what they do is routine — they learn how to care for the newborns and follow the instructions they’ve been given. But the difference between a competent nurse and a nurse who contributes something important is the degree to which she is engaged with the baby and his parents.

The competent nurse follows the correct procedures, attends to her tasks with care and dedication. The engaged nurse does this too, but also sees things, listens, and reacts.

Artist Mark Rothko said this about art: “It is a widely accepted notion among painters that it does not matter what one paints as long as it is well painted. This is the essence of academicism. There is no such thing as good painting about nothing.”

Rothko could have been speaking about nursing. One looks at Rothko’s paintings and one could be forgiven for asking what they are about. But does this mean that they aren’t about something?

Rothko’s children are suing to have his remains unearthed and moved to a Jewish cemetery. I don’t know how Rothko would feel about this. Judged as a creative act, one imagines that he would find it rather obvious. Judged as an action in the world, one imagines he would find it somewhat depressing.

Another child of a famous person — Max Mosley, son of Oswald Mosley the notorious British Nazi — has been in trouble for exploring his imaginative world in a sadomasochistic orgy with prostitutes in London. Apparently, shades of Nazism can be detected in the role-play. Mosley is the chief of the Formula One motor racing federation and has been asked to resign.

The thread that I’m trying to mine is the concept of engagement. A nurse engaged with her role as caregiver. A scientist engaged with his role as a pursuer of new ideas. A painter engaged with the direct communication of otherwise uncommunicable ideas. And a man engaged with his legacy and its demons.

But what does any of this have to do with Bacon? Stanley Fish writes about deconstruction and Sir Francis Bacon.

Bacon predicted that rational thought would eventually win out; that we would one day have a consistent , complete understanding of the world we live in, but that we would go through tough times to get there. He predicted that language would get in the way. That the terms we use to talk about and define things would become recursively problematic.

Rothko sought to eliminate words. Bacon recognized their challenges. Einstein sought to subjugate knowledge.

There is a reason, I think, for such struggle. Rothko, Bacon and Einstein all felt painfully the distinction between ideas and reality. We experience reality, and we conceive of ideas.

Ideas can be consistent and whole and concrete. Reality must be felt and experienced and can never be pinned down. Einstein eluded language, Rothko avoided it, Mosley seeks to bend it, and Bacon wanted to wrestle with it, but found it stronger than him. Language, I would argue, can be accurate and complete when it expresses ideas, but not when it seeks to represent the world and our experience of it.

On the universal criticality of April Fools Day.

The susceptible age of four seemed to me too young for our son to be introduced to the joys and miseries of April Fools Day. My wife thought otherwise. And so it was that this morning he gusted into our dreams bright and early with a panoply of pranks all aimed at making himself happy at our expense.

April Fools Day is clearly the oldest and most significant holiday of any season, predating any other religious or secular holidays, and resonating so deeply with the very fundamental core of our existence, nay the existence of anything, that it hardly bears talking about. That being said, one still doesn’t need to share its rituals with a four year old.

For those who may not have found time to research the long history of April Fools Day, or who have delved back only so far as to the time of Chaucer and his Nun’s Priest Tale (c. 1400) or to the French and Dutch references dating back to the 16th century, I’ll touch on the foundational aspects of the holiday.

The celebration of a prank is a reference to the creation of something out of nothing. The prankster begins with a fiction, something untrue or fabricated, and ends up with an event of significance — the fooling of someone. This ritual sequence evokes the appearance of something out of nothing, which in turn recalls the origin of existence as we know it. What scientists now call the Higgs Boson — the superheavy particle the appearance of which they believe precipitated the big bang — used to be referred to as the Grande Bufon or, roughly translated, the “Large Idiot.” (This was, of course, in pre-scientific times.)

Archimedes, or the Greek’s geek, as he was known, was fascinated by the idea of the biggest prank of all time, and spent much of his middle and later life trying to perfect a trick on humankind that would last well beyond his death. He finally succeeded by calculating more accurately than any before him the irrational number Pi that relates the radius of a circle to its circumference. Archimedes would have been thrilled to know that even today, thousands of years later, schoolboys and schoolgirls the world over still tie their brains in knots trying to recall Pi to a large number of decimal places.

It was Archimedes, too, who jumped out of his bathtub shouting “Eureka!” This was not because he’d had an epiphany about the displacement of water, which is the commonly held myth, but because he’d figured out how to fool the king into thinking that he’d made him a suit out of golden thread. Hence Archimedes subsequent naked romp through the streets to the king’s palace. Archimedes was a true prankster.

Sadly today very few people think about the original significance of April Fools Day. It’s been turned into a circus of silly jokes and goofy tricks. I see this as a reflection of the times we live in. We spend too much time chasing material possessions, success, love, wealth, redeemable coupons, and not enough time focused on the essential void of meaning that underscores existence. If only we could all take this day to prank one another with a heartfelt sense of life’s irony and insignificance the world would be a better place.

 

 

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On asking the wrong question — science, religion, and politics.

The John Templeton Foundation has given the $1.6 million Templeton Award, encouraging scientific discovery on the “big questions” in science and philosophy, to Michael Heller (pictured left) a Polish Roman Catholic priest, cosmologist, and philosopher. Heller describes his view on the interplay between science and religion as follows: “Science gives us knowledge, and religion gives us meaning. Both are prerequisites of the decent existence.”

Rarely do we find someone working to integrate an open and inquisitive understanding of the scientific workings of the universe with a religious perspective on the meaning of existence. We tend either to find people leaning more in one direction or the other. And I’m struck by Heller’s impulse that both science and religion are prerequisites of a decent existence.

President Bush has today called for swift action on a trade pact with Columbia. Bush claims that Venezuela under Hugo Chavez has “squandered its own oil wealth in an effort to promote its hostile anti-American vision.” Bush, it seems, seeks to solidify an ally in Latin America (Columbia) at a time when Venezuela holds sway in a trend toward anti-American, left leaning sentiment in the region. But what is the truth about the use of oil wealth in Venezuela, and what does America stand to gain or lose if we follow Bush’s call for swift action unfettered by “politics”?

I take it that by saying both science and religion are required for a decent existence Heller means a fulfilling or complete sense of existence. And Heller must be referring to our experience of existence, since the judgment of decency implies awareness (existence without experience could be neither decent nor lacking decency).

Schopenhauer perceived that we have only an indirect experience of existence. We infer existence through our senses of sight, touch, smell, hearing, and through our direct awareness of our body and the impressions upon it. So, everything we know of existence is inferred through our senses. It would be quite feasible to imagine a decent life lived without any indirect knowledge of science or religion. For thousands of years human beings lived without formal, structured and conscious scientific or religious knowledge. Many people today live decent lives with only scant awareness of science or religion.

While Heller strikes me as an earnest and brilliant man courageously pursuing fascinating thoughts and ideas, I take issue with his statement about what makes a decent existence as a fundamental question. But I suspect that Heller was referring to the debate between advocates of science and religion, insisting that neither has a stronghold on the decency of existence.

In this though I think that Heller betrays a lack of objectivity. Since Heller, being both a religious and a scientific man, begins with the premise that a decent understanding of existence requires both science and religion, he will inevitably end where he began.

A more testing question would be to ask whether science in and of itself is sufficient for a decent understanding of existence, one that supports a satisfying and complete depth of feeling about life’s meaning. Or, to ask the opposite question, whether religion in and of itself is sufficient for a decent understanding of existence supporting a complete sense of the mechanics of the universe.

Back to Bush: The truth about Venezuela’s oil money seems to be that Hugo Chavez has somewhat recklessly grabbed a hold of and diverted oil profits toward social programs for two ends — to buy favor in his political war against America (and Bush), and to help lift his people out of poverty. While one can argue that his methods for raising the standard of living of poor Venezuelans are crude and short-sighted, it is difficult to argue that he has no real intent to help them. And, I would argue that if one looks at the degree of investment in each goal, his primary goal seems to be to help the Venezuelan people.

So, Bush is using emotional and misleading rhetoric to sway the US people and congress in support of a free trade pact with Columbia. His goal, as he states, is to ensure America’s national security and economic interest. But does it serve America’s national security interests to try to out-rhetoric Chavez? Bush is playing into Chavez’s hands by helping shape policy choices through defining them ideologically.

For more rational, science-based explanations of life’s meaning and purpose, please refer to my book: LIFE! Why We Exist… And What We Must Do To Survive.

Exploring faith’s role in everyday life.

On Saturday, NPR’s “Speaking of Faith” repeated an interview with poet and philosopher John O’Donohue, who passed away earlier this year. I was struck by O’Donohue’s very pragmatic views on faith and belief. He shared his view of god as beauty, which struck me as a very profound perspective on the concept of god. As an atheist, I am interested in the concept of god as one way that we make sense of existence. The idea of beauty conveys a sense of intrinsic wonder and appreciation that fits with the concept of god. And, as O’Donohue pointed out, beauty needn’t be confined to that which is not difficult or painful to confront.

If we start from this idea of god as beauty we can draw a conclusion about the concept of faith: Faith corresponds to a commitment to beauty. Having determined our points of reference for god or beauty, commiting to that conception becomes an act of faith.

With temperatures dipping sharply recently in many parts of the world, resulting in such phenomena as snow in Baghdad and ice reforming with a vengeance in the Antarctic, global warming skeptics have stepped up their cry against the science of human impact on climate change. Pointing to the recent cold snaps, the skeptics argue that the science of global warming is bunk. Even some who accept the underlying global warming trend say that the cold snap teaches us that we can’t base our deductions and predictions on a few years of data. The global warming trend only reveals itself after averaging out more dramatic and temporary climate swings.

To some degree perhaps this question is one of faith, too. I realize that rationally I believe and many believe that the data supporting global warming is strong enough to take on logic, but it’s not strong enough for everyone. I have cast my commitment behind the idea that burning fossil fuels in vast quantities must eventually have a negative effect on the planets eco-systems. Global warming and the evidence for it fits with that commitment. The skeptics, not stupid people, have committed to the idea that the planet’s eco-systems are unaffected or negligibly affected by burning fossil fuels. This is their faith and they interpret the evidence accordingly.

In another article we read about educators who have come to believe in the superior educational methodology of teaching in single-sex classrooms. Those who subscribe to the concept have committed to the idea and have faith in it. Those who don’t have faith in mixed-sex classrooms. Who is right? Reading the article, it’s not clear. I’m not even sure whether either side is necessarily right. If one accepts that boys and girls learn differently and respond differently to different environments and different stimuli, this still doesn’t tell you that single-sex classrooms will be superior to mixed-sex classrooms that acknowledge and respond to these differences.

Just one anecdote about an adherent to single-sex teaching styles was enough to make me very skeptical: “Sax credits Bender with helping focus a boy who was given a wrong diagnosis of attention-deficit disorder by telling him that his father, who had left the family, would be even less likely to return if all his mother had to report was the boy misbehaving in school.”

Yes, I imagine that would focus a child, but at what cost?

This brings us back to the core challenge of O’Donohue’s beautiful idea — that god is beauty. We can be deceived into thinking that we apprehend beauty when we simply apprehend our attraction to an idea. Without reflecting on the reason for our attraction, we can’t be sure that we’re committing to beauty or to folly.

It was Aristotle who said: “One swallow does not make a summer, neither does one fine day; similarly one day or brief time of happiness does not make a person entirely happy.”

Likewise, one appealing facet of an idea — be it single-sex classrooms, global warming or god — does not make it worthy of our full commitment.

For more rational, science-based explanations of life’s meaning and purpose, please refer to my book: LIFE! Why We Exist… And What We Must Do To Survive.

On the reproductive strategies of Komodo Dragons — what they tell us, and what they don’t. And a parallel in the trends of religious affiliation.

Neil Shubin, associate dean at the University of Chicago and the provost of the Field Museum, tries to shrug off objections to cloning as “unnatural” by explaining that female Komodo Dragons, and other species, can reproduce without the need for male fertilization. Shubin reasons that this phenomenon, reported in Britain and Kansas, in which the offspring have identical DNA to the mother, shows that we’re on shaky ground if we turn to nature to determine that cloning is unnatural. Since nature can encompass all kinds of odd survival mechanisms, Shubin argues, when it comes to survival, “anything goes.” But in his rush to eliminate nature as an infallible moral compass (a sensible intent, since, as he says, only humans have a sense of morality) Shubin unfortunately shuffles out of the door the question of what’s “natural.”

Shubin’s argument goes like this: Cloning happens in nature (through the phenomenon of virgin births). Therefore cloning can’t be said to be unnatural.

He has, of course, stooped to a very basic form of sophistry by taking two different ideas and equating them. Virgin birth in Komodo Dragons has evolved over millions of years as a survival mechanism when male fertilization is unlikely or difficult. When humans clone a species we deliberately achieve our means with mechanisms that haven’t evolved. That’s the whole point of applying science to cloning — to hoodwink nature.

In amongst this sophistry though, Shubin points out that male fertilization persists as by far the most likely form of reproduction in Komodos, despite the possibility of virgin birth, because it mixes up the gene pool of the offspring and in so doing allows for adaptation. (Passing on the same genes makes adaptation impossible.)

“Without variation,” as Shubin notes, “the world would be static and unchangeable, and species would gradually disappear as they failed to meet challenges…”

This put me in mind of a new survey on religion from the Pew Forum. In its survey of over 35,000 Americans (a relatively large sample), Pew found that “more than one-quarter of American adults (28%) have left the faith in which they were raised in favor of another religion - or no religion at all.” “The number of people who say they are unaffiliated with any particular faith today (16.1%) is more than double the number who say they were not affiliated with any particular religion as children. Among Americans ages 18-29, one-in-four say they are not currently affiliated with any particular religion.”

I should quickly state that non-affiliated does not necessarily mean non-religious; overall about 10% claimed to be non-religious (1.6% atheist, 2.4% agnostic, and 6.3% secular unaffiliated).

I’ve spoken at length in other posts that statistics mislead and get misused. But here I want to say something that would, I believe, hold true even if the statistics told another story; it would just lead to a different prediction.

The decision to change one’s religious affiliation requires as a prerequisite some openness to the idea of change. In making such a change one must be prepared to let go of the old affiliation in favor of the new one. In this way the process is analagous to evolution. Just as the body of an organism responds to physical impulses, so, too, our consciousness responds to mental impulses. And just as the natural world would be static and unchangeable without variation, so, too, the world of ideas would be static and unchangeable without variation.

If we take the Pew statistics at face value, they indicate that the world of ideas has begun to bring about a move away from particular religious affiliation, particularly in young people. Depending on our own religious beliefs, we may wish this to be otherwise. But we cannot argue that the capacity for change, the flexibility and adaptability of beliefs is a healthy sign — it is the evolution of consciousness.

Now for the subjective, but rational, commentary: I am not surprised by the trend that is apparently revealed in the Pew survey. It tracks with similar surveys in Europe (although charting a less dramatic move toward secularism than Europe has seen). And it makes rational sense. Relgions started out as mechanisms by which people tried to make sense of the world. Inspired by doubt, wonder, and fear, early humans invested inanimate objects with the power of deities. Once these inanimate objects were more fully understood, the sense of the divine moved ever further from the tangible world until in more recent times it became invested in an unseen, unseeable, omnipotent but ultimately elusive deity (after all, what was left?)

The more people become aware and convinced that existence can be understood without recourse to a god, the more they will be to change and even let drop their religious affiliations.

For more rational, science-based explanations of life’s meaning and purpose, please refer to my book: LIFE! Why We Exist… And What We Must Do To Survive.

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On what people want to see and believe.
“Audiences don’t want to see realistic films about the war in Iraq. They want to escape all the bad news.” So says Howard Suber (UCLA Film and TV Producers Program founding chair and author of “The Power of Film,”) reacting to this year’s decidedly gloomy crop of Oscar nominees. I agree. And then, I disagree.

Since the nominated films haven’t done well, relatively speaking, at the box office, Suber’s claim holds water; people tend not to flock to downer movies. But those who enjoy provocative, thoughtful films made with great craft and artistic vision do go to see the kinds of movies on the Academy’s short-list. The Oscars aim to reward notable artistic achievements in film, not rampant popularity. They provide much-needed counterweight to the rather less lofty day-to-day goals of the film studios.

This confusion of box office success and artistic merit masks a positive phenomenon in the American film industry — artistry can make its furtive way into movies that have no purported artistic aim, and block busters can have great artistic merit without needing to be labeled “art” movies. The movies “Knocked Up” and “Superbad,” for instance, both big draws in 2007, both pitched and consumed as “raunchy comedies,” accomplished their low, uncouth objectives while revealing flashes of superior, if uneven, comic artistry.

In the American film industry, art will out, it seems, despite the drive for popular appeal and profit. Movies can’t be divided into “art” and “popular” movies, because some popular movies involve incredible artistry and some purportedly artistic movies are mediocre imitations or approximations of art. (Big names can make seriously flawed movies and pass them of as serious.)
The Academy then has a tough job, rewarding artistic achievements where they see them, without there being any kind of reliable delineation between the serious and the silly.

Pastor Casimiro Roca also has a tough job persuading his flock to give credit where credit is due. The poor priest presides over a small church in Chimayo, New Mexico, where people come seeking to be cured. Roca despairs that many of those who come believe that the dirt in a pit in the middle of the church has miraculous powers. Roca believes it’s the Lord. (The dirt he replenishes regularly, having it trucked in.)

It seems odd that Roca enables the perpetuation of the myth by importing the dirt and keeping the shrine, as he does, as something of a destination. But perhaps, like the Academy, Roca does what he does not in support of the masses but in support of miracles that reveal themselves despite the masses.
Postscript: As a rationalist one can’t dismiss out of hand things that defy our current comprehension. Reason must allow for doubt. Science has revealed its own share of completely unexpected findings. Einstein’s general relativity, quantum mechanics, and supersymmetry, for instance, all require us to move beyond everyday reason. The term miracle misleads, though, and perhaps when we come across evidence of events that defy reason, the term “unexplained phenomenon” is more appropriate.

Economic and social aspiration in the United States of America: Spam, Gatsby, and ignorance.

I just moderated five new blog comments. All were spam. It’s easy to dislike spammers; they fill our mailboxes with junk, cause us to peruse and delete multiple messages per day, or resort to services and tactics to defend ourselves against their relentless barrage of solicitations. But spammers represent a realization of the American dream. They seize upon their chance to sieve gold-dust from dirt. Nowhere in the Constitution of the United States does it say that citizens must apologize for doing what they do in pursuit of prosperity and freedom. Far from it, the constitution trumpets not only that others should expect no apology, but that there is no need for an apology.

The NY Times, in one of its pseudo-news, liberal fluff pieces (when I read these I understand why conservatives boil at the Times’ political bias,) attempts to find meaning in various opinions on why Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby speaks to people, particularly immigrants. The story misses The Great Gatsby’s introspection — it is what it is, a particularly engaging, somewhat over-dramatic picture of an America full tilt in industrial and economic momentum. Does Gunter Grass speak to German immigrants with The Tin Drum? Does Thomas Bernhardt speak to Austrian immigrants with Old Masters? Does Camus speak to French immigrants with The Stranger? Borges, Calvino, Fuentes, Amis, Faulkner… They write what niggles them, what gets under their skin.

Fitzgerald was niggled by aspects of the American Dream. He was niggled by its shallowness, its ultimate lack of fulfillment. And he saw its allure, its lure.

It’s President’s Day. An op-ed piece on George Washington speaks of his miserable last year in office. Washington felt overwhelmed by the burdens of office, disappointment at the squaring off of Hamilton and Jefferson. And perhaps disappointment at the path that the new nation had settled upon — freed from its ties with England, established as a power in its own right. One can imagine that Washington began to recognize that defining ones-self in opposition to something does not necessarily define ones-self for the better. Before Washington’s presidency, the nation’s conceit represented boundless hope. By the end of his presidency, this conceit was locked into a battle between options and opinions — between the vision of Jefferson, the creative, wide-reading intellectual, and Hamilton, the man of vigorous industry and capital.

Susan Jacoby writes about what the Times calls a generalized hostility to knowledge in America today. She complains that Americans compare poorly to those in other countries on matters of fundamental global knowledge and general awareness. While this is undoubtedly true, it seems reasonable to assume that this is a matter of emphasis rather than aptitude. Since America defines itself as the land of opportunity (meaning economic opportunity) and indifference (meaning, if we’re #1, why do we need to know what anyone else is doing?) we should not be surprised that these traits reveal themselves. For all their lack of global know-how, Americans reign supreme in getting it done. The 100 meter sprinter does not fool himself into thinking that he can win against the marathon runner over 26 miles.

But implicit in Susan Jacoby’s frustrations, implicit in the Times’ expansive, optimistic commentary on Fitzgerald’s legacy for American immigrants is the question of whether America’s choice of focus is a good choice, a better choice than others. Just because an American idol contestant doesn’t know the capital of Hungary, or that Hungary is a country, does this mean that America is on the wrong path, has made a poor choice of focus?

It strikes me that this question shouldn’t be put to the nation. The nation has long since made the choice. The nation is far down that road. Any turning back, any deviation, would have to come through a collective decision to deviate. Plenty of people in America know that Hungary is a country. Plenty of people know the capital of Hungary. Plenty of people would ascribe to Jefferson’s view of the world as an endless wonder, worthy of our most intense attention. Only if and when the thirst for knowledge and truth outweighs the thirst for economic and material satisfaction will the American Dream begin to change. I say ‘when’ because all things change.

The American Dream that has survived these couple of hundred years has survived because its promise has never quite exhausted itself. But whether it happens in ten years or a hundred years or longer, the demographic of hope will shift. Just as Egypt, the land of Pharaohs and pyramids is today a crumbling wreck, so, too will one day the recollection of America’s youthful grasp for prosperity and power cause heads to shake in wonder.

For more rational, science-based explanations of life’s meaning and purpose, please refer to my book: LIFE! Why We Exist… And What We Must Do To Survive.

Who am I? What am I? What is that?

In New York, many people who work in corporate environments also pursue artistic endeavors. If you ask someone what she does, she may say she’s a financial analyst, but that she acts in her spare time. I have a friend who introduces himself as an artist, even though that is not what he does to earn a living. In fact, he does not try to make a living by selling his artwork because he believes that would alter his artistic vision. For him, honesty in being is paramount; declaration of identity becomes a matter of trying to live honestly.

Florida has begun to respond to an alarming increase in unprovoked attacks on the homeless, many committed by young people. Warren Messner, who is serving a 22 year sentence for his part in the death of homeless man Michael Roberts, admits his culpability, but says, “I’m not a killer. I know that. A lot of people, they see this story and call us killers. I’m not a killer.”

Interviewed for the story, Maria Foscarinis, executive director of the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty, indicates that the rising trend in violence against homeless people reflects a lack of respect for the homeless that “has reached such extreme proportions that homeless people aren’t viewed as people.”

This would explain why Messner still doesn’t see himself as a killer. He regrets his crime, but can’t quite grasp the idea that he killed another person.

John Locke recognized that the concept of personal identity rests on our consciousness. But the label we ascribe to our identity has less to do with a consistent sence of self, and more to do with our relation of self to others. It is language-based. We use words to express the person we want to believe ourselves to be in the eyes of others, or who we want others to believe us to be.

My friend, for example, prefers to call himself an artist because this word corresponds most closely to the truth he wants to convey to others. He feels himself an artist. Therefore that is the word he uses. Messner does not want to call himself a killer because this term does not tally with his sense of himself; in Messner’s mind he is not a killer because the term “homeless person” corresponds to an inferior being, something less than a person.

Homeless advocates point out that as society curtails the rights and freedoms of homeless people it devalues society’s sense of the homeless. The term ‘homeless’ becomes freighted with new and dangerous meaning; it begins to mean ‘less than our equal.’ The same things happens with the label assigned to any group being persecuted or discriminated against.

For some reason I have connected this matter of identity with a story from the world of astronomy.

Astronomers and lay-astronomers have used a new and mind-bogglingly subtle technique (micro-lensing) to detect and analyze planetary systems thousands of light years from earth. Einstein predicted that massive objects curve space-time. His theory shows that the path of light waves will be bent as they pass by a massive object. This means that as two stars far out in space become briefly aligned, the light from the more distant star will be focused by the nearer star creating a sudden increase in intensity that astronomers now watch out for. By measuring fluctuations in the brightened light, astronomers can detect the existence of any large planets around the nearer star, since they will cause some additional brightness.

A report of one such event indicates the existence of a solar system possibly somewhat similar to our own about 5,000 light years from earth. Alan Boss, a theorist at the Carnegie Institution of Washington, said, “The fact that these are hard to detect by microlensing means there must be a good number of them — solar system analogues are not rare.”

The quest to detect life or the possibility of life on other planets seems to be inspired by two motivations: To satisfy our curiosity about whether other life exists, and to confirm our own identity as being alone or not alone in the universe.

Which does find us back, I think, at language and identity. Depending upon how we define the terms, we are either alone or not alone, either in our head, in our home, in our city, on our planet or in the universe. If we cannot treat our fellow human beings with respect as equals, we may as well see ourselves as a collection of individuals, discrete and disconnected. But, if we can understand that all life and all existence emerged and congealed out of the primordial energy soup, we become aware of the oneness of everything, and the danger of labels.

For a rational, science-based explanation of life’s meaning and purpose, please refer to my book: LIFE! Why We Exist… And What We Must Do To Survive.

On postulates and their place in shaping our lives.

“Wishful thinking,” so says Roger Cohen, “often masquerades as analysis.” He’s referring to those who warn that the days of U.S. world leadership are numbered. And yet Cohen could have been speaking of himself. He refers to the United States as “the most vital, open, self-renewing and democratic society on earth.” And says that to imagine that Europe or China “can become powers of influence equal to the United States within the next half-century is implausible.” (Did he forget about the rapid decline and fall of empires far grander and more imposing than that of the present day United States?)

As the hook for his thesis Cohen uses the fascination of the rest of the world with the current presidential election. They come with their cameras and microphones, Cohen surmises, because they recognize the importance of America and America’s choice of leader. But throughout the terms of Carter, Reagan, Bush, and Clinton (twice), the rest of the world viewed American politics as uninteresting, its leaders more or less interchangable. Surely, the reporters come from far afield because American politics is suddenly interesting. They come for the spectacle of an African american man competing with a woman for the democratic candidacy, and to goggle at the spectacle of ever-more-wacky conservatives pandering to the religious right at a time when the rest of the civilized world has long since disentangled its politics from overt religious influence.

While Cohen alludes to the horror the world feels at the Bush presidency and legacy, he doesn’t dwell on it. Why? Well, I suppose because that would destroy the foundation of his argument.

What kind of leadership does Cohen think that America has been providing to the world on human rights, civil rights, education, environmental protection, and economic development? I’m sure the world can do without the kind of leadership we’ve been providing on interventionism, dissembling, torture, cronyism, intermingling of church and state, and corporate corruption.

Last week I expressed simultaneous excitement and disquiet at the news that a team of scientists had synthesized life in the form of a bacterium. This week, the Science Times ran a fluff piece about a secret message (the name of the Venter Institute and the names of those on the team) encoded into the genome of the bacterium by arranging the letters of the constituent amino acids in a particular sequence. On reading about this, the ratio of my excitement to my disquiet dropped considerably. Move over natural selection, here comes Will Shortz.

Another team of scientists, this time anthropologists, have been looking back 650 years to the time of the Black Death to try to learn something about the plague that killed millions across Europe. They have deduced that the plague, which was previously thought to have killed indiscriminately, taking the young, the old, the healthy, and the sick, in fact tended to kill those who were weakened by previous illness, age or malnourishment.

These three examples of conjecture give us insight into the philosophy of the concept.

In the first instance, we have Roger Cohen speculating from a position of fear. He conjectures that the doomsayers about American supremacy are wrong because he wants them to be wrong.

In the second instance, we have a team of scientists playing with nature, conjecturing about the boundaries of scientific achievement; the insertion of a secret message into the genome reveals a lack of gravity about their work and the seriousness of its consequences.

And in the third instance, anthropologists take conjecture and submit it to careful testing in order to help society better understand the pathology of epidemics, perhaps helping ultimately to save millions of lives.

Without conjecture we would have no progress. Conjecture lets us ask what will happen if? as well as did this happen because?

The basis for our conjecture and the intent of the conjecture determine whether the questions being asked have value and yield positive results. Or, not all conjectures are made equal. It takes little speculation to state that American world leadership will, one day, come to an end, that we will need to grapple with the troubling issues raised by the creation of synthetic life, and that the world will face the risk of new epidemics. What takes courage and foresight is to face these speculations with the integrity and seriousness they deserve.

And with that said I’m off to bet on the Giants to win the superbowl…