Rational Philosophy

On the Supreme Court’s split snub to Bush, shared childcare, and news media coverage of Hillary Clinton. (In two parts because it got really long…)

By a 5 - 4 majority, the Supreme Court has decided that this country wants, deserves and damn well should have equal rights of representation for its accused, whether they be detained at the local precinct for fare evasion, or captured, rendered, disappeared for three years and then reappeared again just in time for a Guantanamo military tribunal hearing before the election ends Bush’s reckless rampage through the fields of decency, honesty, restraint and respect for human rights. Hip hooray for equality!!

It’s a good thing, of course, that there is an odd number of justices on the supreme court. Equality in some matters — such as making decisions — isn’t helpful at all. It’s also not encouraging that the decision was so equally balanced. I would have preferred to see a little less equality in the spectrum of opinions. 7 - 2 perhaps? Or 8 - 1? How about some gross inequality? — a 9 - 0 decision in favor of upholding the constitutional rights of our detainees.

Chief Justice Roberts in his dissent said that the constitutional right of habeus corpus wasn’t really that important and that the detainees were really getting some very generous treatment. (I guess that happened while they were disappeared.) So four S.C. justices, almost half, don’t understand the fuss. This indicates a problem. The NY Times editorial frames it as a political problem, but one wonders how we can tolerate a system that could so easily politicize the court.

Without the concept of equality the world would be an odd, unendingly complicated place. And we owe the concept of equality to the orderly and consistent principles of existence. Space and time and the stuff of matter obeys laws of equivalence. The mass of a proton is the same wherever you go. (As a side note, I believe that this indicates that time and space and, fundamentally, units of energy are quantized, as I explain in the appendix to LIFE.) It is because we have this absolute equivalence that we can draw conclusions about presumptive equivalence — that the rights of one person should be the same as another, for instance.

Continued in Part II — shared parenting and the accusation of discriminatory coverage of Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

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On the conditions and cures of the personal debt culture, and the inevitability of the division of labor.

Why is it that I invariably disagree with David Brooks? He seems like a nice enough guy, smart, sensitive… But I just can’t help thinking that he is mostly wrong-headed. Today, he writes an impassioned piece about the problems with our “values,” government policies, and economic institutions that have led to an exponential growth in personal debt over the past thirty years.

Brooks hangs his argument the idea that those who founded the country embodied traditions of “hard work, temperance and frugality.” He then niftily declares that these early traditions resulted in the country’s prosperity. (Thereby overlooking any other reasons why the country might have been prosperous — such as an abundance of natural resources, the absence of any incumbent public or private institutions that in Europe complicated and inhibited growth over the same period, and the immigration of millions of people who had the drive and ambition to up and travel thousands of miles by boat to seek their fortunes.)

Central to Brook’s theme is thrift. He points out that while we’re smoking less and trying to protect the environment, we’re ever more reckless with money. I’m grateful for these problematic comparisons because they give us an insight into where Brooks is going wrong.

People tend to smoke less these days because they realize it’s bad for them. People tend to care more about the environment because they realize that if they don’t we’ll destroy it. Brooks could have also mentioned the curtailing of promiscuity (primarily because of AIDS).

My point is that our behavior is influenced by perceived cause and effect as much as it is by our values. Or, put another way, values are nothing more than nebulous, intangible codifications of cause and effect that have become untethered from their origins. The reason that some people get into debt or anything else that’s “bad” for them is very simple — they haven’t realized how harmful it can be, or they can’t help themselves.

Citing history as a finger to wag at the present, as Brooks does, seems to be a sure sign of sloppy reasoning. People are people, after all, and we’ve been making the same mistakes and smart decisions for thousands of years.

In his Freakonomics column Stephen Dubner points to a similar example about specialization. Dubner makes a pint of ice cream at home for $12, exemplifying some of the problems with small scale, local production — it’s wasteful, inefficient and uncompetitive. Dubner points out that there has been specialization of trades in society for thousands of years — long before conglomerates, and mass farming.

Dubner’s in pursuit of a rational discussion about sound environmental decision making. But his train of thought also says something about the way that society naturally and inevitably reflects human instincts, reasons and choices. There will always be some people who want to make their own ice cream. And there will always be plenty of people who don’t. And just so long as there’s a profit to be made in mass production, it will continue to exist.

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On what we choose to do and how those choices define us.

This is the best picture, make that the only picture I could find of George Bush’s White House reception yesterday for Major League Soccer’s league champions the Houston Dynamos. Although apparently Bush “brought the entire roster into the Oval Office and took individual pictures with each player.” Bush was also present a few weeks ago at the team’s ring ceremony.

But then the Dynamos are a Texas team, no matter that Bush is in the White House, and no matter that while he was receiving the Dynamos Khalid Shaikh Mohammad, the accused and self-claimed architect of the September 11 attacks, five years after his capture appeared before a military court in Guantanamo bay. And no matter that a Senate panel after five years of investigation finally released its findings in which it accused President Bush, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld and others of deceiving or misleading the American public in various ways about the link between Al Qaeda and Iraq, and about Iraq’s threat to the region and the world.

So I’ve been sitting here wondering what made Khalid Mohammad choose to plot and execute such acts of terror, even assuming that he’s taking credit for more than he should. And wondering too what would make the Bush administration take matters of such dire significance into their own hands, acting with such careless, callous and criminal imperiousness. The war has destabilized the region, killed thousands of innocents, and perhaps put us at greater risk of future terrorist attacks.

If, as it seems possible, what underlies both motives is a lack of perspective, a lack of humanity (Khalid Mohammad sees America as unholy, unworthy of compassion, Bush’s crowd sees the Islamic world the same way) why do we feel strongly that there is a difference?

(When I start to equate the two too directly I remind myself that Bush feted his home state Dynamos, Saddam’s son tortured Iraq’s soccer team.)

Khalid Shaikh Mohammad wasn’t born a terrorist. So when and how did it happen? After leaving his native Kuwait as a teenager he moved to North Carolina and studied engineering. At some point as a young adult he made a series of choices about what he believed which culminated in a single-minded dedication to acts of violence against the West in the name of his religion. If we summon up a picture of him in a sleepy North Carolina suburb, a newly minted engineer, picking up the newspaper and perusing the job listings, one can imagine him having made a different set of choices, perhaps ending up living a more or less peaceful life.

But he made a choice to believe in something bigger than himself, bigger than any act of terror he could dream up. His choice was so powerful and freeing that he seems never to have looked back, never to have doubted whether it was right.

As a young man George Bush was a screw up. He excelled only at failure as far as we can tell. But Bush too made a series of choices. He chose to sober up. He chose to go into politics. And he chose to commit himself to religious faith as an influence and guide, something bigger than himself.

The similarity then, the reason we deplore the terrorism of Khalid Mohammad and the duplicity and bloody recklessness of the Bush administration is that both have chosen to forgo personal responsibility in favor of ideological responsibility.

If ever we were to go seeking a definition of evil, this might be it — to choose to set aside one’s personal conscience, to deliberately let it go, so that one can experience the freedom of living by a creed.

While we live in the moment we must accept the uncertainty of the future… and the past.

“Prophesy is a good line of business, but it is full of risks,”
– Mark Twain (who may lose his house twice over…)

Back in the dark ages of last November I wrote about a stockbroker who, in anger, jostled the stationary bike of a fellow spin-class member. Frustrated by the man’s grunting and shouting, he grabbed the handlebars of the offender’s bike, lifted it off the ground (while he was still on it) and dropped it. My blog post on the subject sports a photograph of the purportedly injured party, Stuart Sugarman, a partner at an investment firm, wearing a neck brace. Here we are in sunny June and I read that a jury has acquitted the stockbroker of assault, having found Mr. Sugarman to be an unreliable witness, and deciding that the incident didn’t, beyond reasonable doubt, result in Sugarman’s injuries.

When I wrote my original post I was convinced that the stockbroker, Christopher Carter, was guilty of something — perhaps not a crime, but certainly of unreasonably losing his cool. The current news story casts a somewhat heroic glow on Carter’s vigilante act, blaming Sugarman for being a boar in the class, and a liar to boot.

Where does the truth lie?

Some scientists have apparently decided that wherever the truth about dark energy lies they are not going to find it. Current calculations indicate that the universe is 4% regular matter (stars, planets, pencils), 22% dark matter, and 74% dark energy (not related to dark matter as far as we know). Despite a lot of attention and investigation, dark energy isn’t yielding its mysteries, and some scientists are worried that it won’t.

Such pessimism seems unwarranted at this point in time. After all, the future could last a long time. Why give up now?

I’m reasonably sure that Ray Kurzweil, noted futurist, would concur. Kurzweil has been making predictions about the future for over thirty years, with impressive results. In the ’80s he predicted that a computer would defeat the world chess champion by 1998 (it happened in 1997). Some of Kurzweil’s current predictions:

• Within 10 years, a drug that lets you eat whatever you want without gaining weight.
• Within 20 years, all energy will come from clean sources.
• In 15 years… your life expectancy will rise faster than you age.
• And then, by 2050, the Singularity, when humans and/or machines begin to evolve into immortal beings with ever-improving software.

Still doubtful? “Two decades ago he predicted that “early in the 21st century” blind people would be able to read anything anywhere using a handheld device. In 2002 he narrowed the arrival date to 2008. On Thursday night at the festival, he pulled out a new gadget the size of a cellphone, and when he pointed it at the brochure for the science festival, it had no trouble reading the text aloud.”

From a philosophical perspective, an interesting aspect of all of this is that time, as we perceive it, is all in our minds. The past and the future, as we commonly conceive of them, don’t exist. All of existence rests on the current moment. Reality is transitional. Causality creates our perception of time. The predictable changing of things, the nudge of being from one moment to the next. Without this, time would be meaningless.

(This, as a digression, is the clue to understanding our existence. Once we have accepted that the rules of causality shape the universe we live in, we can begin to understand why we live, think and feel the way we do.)

This morning when I woke up I was the proud owner of an idea for a sure-fire business opportunity. By 9:30am, that sunny feeling of certainty had been toppled as I found out that someone already held the copyright to my idea. All was lost. By 3pm, after a brief nap, I’d regained my optimism after dreaming up a revision to my idea… Time, you faithless lover, revise me again.

Dick Cavett’s folly, guns in parks.

The NY Times grants Dick Cavett considerable space to reflect in an entry called “À la Recherche de Youthful Folly.” Proust would roll in his grave. I’m not sure whose folly bears more of the responsibility for the piece making its way into the paper. Cavett wrote it, but the NY Times published it. Cavett reveals himself to be an unapologetic jerk. He talks about stringing newspapers across the road at night so that car drivers would get spooked and brake suddenly. He talks about deliberately tripping a fat guy who was chasing him after such a prank. He talks about ruthlessly picking on one of his peers. “Distasteful but [...] funny, which to me is always the important thing,” Cavett says.

Sure, these were things he did as a kid, but I think we all knew kids like that, and we knew then that they would always be jerks.

What’s the point of Cavett’s piece? Beyond self-indulgence, it’s hard to tell. But it does give us an example of immorality. Apart from a couple of throw away comments, Cavett displays a singular lack compassion for those who suffered at his hands. Yet his actions caused them unnecessary distress and put them in danger.

“Compassion,” Schopenhauer opined, “is the basis of all morality.”

Schopenhauer himself suffered greatly through the lack of compassion others showed him. When he submitted his essay “On The Basis of Morality” in response to a contest offered by Royal Danish Society of Scientific Studies, his was the only entry, but the society refused to award it the prize because they said he’d misunderstood the question.

The Royal Danish Society asked: “Are the source and foundation of morals to be looked for in an idea of morality lying immediately in consciousness (or conscience) and in the analysis of other fundamental moral concepts springing from that idea, or are they to be looked for in a different ground of knowledge?”

Schopenhauer answered that morality arises out of our awareness that:

1. Living things strive to exist.

2. If we oppose the striving to exist of another living thing (i.e., cause it deliberate harm) we are acting immorally.

Compassion, in Schopenhauer’s moral system, is the awareness that another’s suffering is no different from our own.

Maybe the Royal Danish Society just didn’t like his answer…

The marvelous thing about Schopenhauer’s explanation for moral feeling is that it strips away all of the layers of artificial moral concepts that arise out of systems of thought (religious and social) and examines morality in a very raw and immediate form.

Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne has proposed a rule change that would allow people to carry concealed weapons in some national parks (the ones where state laws permit carrying concealed weapons). What intrigued me most about this story was the way in which the proposed rule change had come about: Kempthorne “proposed the rule in response to letters from 51 United States senators — 42 Republicans and 9 Democrats — who asked that the current rule be changed.”

So either 51 senators up and decided that despite the absence of any alarming crime statistics this was an issue that warranted a letter to Dirk, or the NRA lobbied the senators to press the Interior Secretary on the matter.

Those who run the parks oppose the proposal, saying that the guns would create more problems than they would resolve.

Which brings me back to thinking that our society suffers from a lack of philosophical instruction and education. Shouldn’t our children learn about such things? Shouldn’t those who administer our government be able to see past and hold firm against transparent political manipulation?

Dick Cavett and others like him can perhaps convince themselves that because something is socially acceptable it is not immoral. Schopenhauer’s piercing injunction reveals how ill-founded is such thinking.
Schopenhauer also said: “Rascals are always sociable — more’s the pity!”

(For those interested in the origin of moral and other feelings, my own book begins with the fundamental principles of space and time, arriving at some of the same general conclusions as Schopenhauer.)

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 Hillary Clinton’s unerring sense of footinmouthity.

Capitalizing on the tragedy of her inability to be sensitive, Hillary Clinton has once again demonstrated her supreme political aptitude for footinmouthity. Stricken with a malignant brain tumor she is not, but Hillary needs no excuse to usurp Teddy Kennedy’s tragedy and achieve her outrageous best. Is it her fault that Robert Kennedy was assassinated in June of the year of his foreshortened primary bid? Of course it isn’t. Then why are people so bent out of shape that she would attempt to make political capital out of it…?

Jeez. Anyone would think you’d never seen a man shot before.

And now, with rumors that her fellow liability, Bill, is agitating for her to be Obama’s VP, one wonders how she’ll outdo Dick Cheney (remember him?) who managed to shoot his old friend in the head with a shotgun…

Exploring the idea of rightness and wrongness in intent and deed.

NY Times Op-Ed contributers Nathan Thrall and Jesse James Wilkins serve up an interesting history of President JFK’s face-off with Nikita Khrushchev. If we accept their account, JFK fared poorly in the exchange because Khrushchev went on the offensive and handily routed the ill-prepared young president in their one-on-one meetings. Thrall and Wilkins indicate that it was during these meetings that Khrushchev formed a critical impression of JFK as an immature and weak leader, an impression that in part lead to his subsequent decisions to build the Berlin wall and establish a missile base in Cuba.

We’re being drawn to review this period of history because Obama has often quoted Kennedy’s view on negotiating with hostile powers, as expressed in his inaugural address: “Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate.” The question being asked — if Obama, also young and arguably less tested than Kennedy, is so taken with Kennedy’s philosophy, would he make the same mistake?

Mayor Michael Bloomberg will testify in court during the hearing of the city’s lawsuit against a Georgia gun-shop. The city claims that guns sold in the south too easily make their way into the hands of bad actors (no pun intended) who then use them to inflict harm in New York City. It’s clear from the story that this particular gun shop owner — Jay Wallace — isn’t prepared to give up without a fight and has fashioned his case quite cleverly to present himself as David against Bloomberg’s Goliath.

And in the high stakes world of Internet search engines and on-line advertising (ten years ago, who would have thunk it?) Google is set to defend a proposed deal that would have Yahoo! license and use Google’s superior ad technology. (The backdrop being that Yahoo! has resisted Microsoft’s attempts to buy it — this deal with Google would add about $1 billion a year to Yahoo!’s coffers.) There are rumblings that Google’s deal with Yahoo! would be anti-competitive and fall foul of anti-trust legislation. Google claims to have found a way to fashion the deal so that it won’t. (Coincidentally, or perhaps not at all coincidentally, as a Google Ad Sense and Ad Words participant I just received an e-mail from Google telling me that they now place ads from qualified third-parties. Effectively, they’ve started to do for others what they propose that Yahoo! will do for them… Smart strategy for avoiding anti-trust accusations.)

These three stories present internal conflicts for me, and perhaps some intrinsic philosophical conflicts between ideals and reality.

I want to believe that John F. Kennedy was the better man, the better person, I believe he had more good intent that Khrushchev. But in the wiles and wills of international political maneuvering, Khrushchev had him beat hands down. I want to believe that Obama wouldn’t make the same mistake if he sat down with Kim Yung Il or Assad, but I realize that part of Obama’s charm is that he’s not cunning. (I do hope he’s smart enough and strong enough not to sit down until he’s sure that the right ground has been prepared.) I believe that Obama is a better person than Clinton or McCain; hence, my desire to believe he’s better able to run the country.
I want to believe that Bloomberg is fighting the right fight against those who sell guns. I like Bloomberg. He seems to have all around good intentions. But in this situation, maybe he’s misjudged. Maybe Jay Wallace isn’t the right guy to go after, or maybe Jay Wallace is just better at crafting a sympathetic image.

And even though Google has become such an all-dominant behemoth, I can’t help having a soft spot for a company that has the motto — “Do no evil…” I’m rooting for them against the anti-trust watchdogs.

Sadly, life isn’t fair. Bad people do win.

His fellow Greeks trumped up charges against Socrates and he went on his way with a draught of hemlock. His dying words? “Crito, I owe a cock to Asclepius; will you remember to pay the debt?” Now, show me a better man.

On how and why we can be distracted.

At $3 million per mile, if the Department of Homeland Security meets this year’s target of 690 miles of border fence between the US and Mexico, the construction budget will tally about $2.1 billion, a hefty slice of the overall budget for homeland security. Before the fence project was approved back in 2006, Michael Chertoff, who is in charge of building it, had previously expressed doubts about its effectiveness, especially in remote areas. More recently he’s been criticized for using his waiver of local laws to forge ahead with construction so that his agency can meet the 690 mile target set by the senate.

Since his appointment back in 2005, Chertoff has said that the US should be spending dollars and efforts wisely by sifting out high risk from low risk targets. He’s also admitted recently that the fence doesn’t do much more than deter the least motivated border crossers.

I realize that Chertoff has to do what he’s charged with doing. But here we have a situation in which the man in charge of homeland security clearly has his doubts about whether we should be dedicating so much and effort to building a fence that won’t keep out the more determined, and therefore higher-risk crossers.

Which brings us back to the true reason we’re building a fence. It’s got nothing to do with homeland security. House Republicans pushed the idea of the border fence because they were worried about a backlash from legislation that would give amnesty and legal status to illegal immigrants. They first wanted to do something to strengthen border security. The fence was it.

(As an ironic side note the proposed path of the fence splices the University of Texas campus in two, leaving the technology center and the golf course of the Mexican side of the border.)

Building the fence is incurring huge effort, huge expense, but most importantly is causing huge distraction from the real issues of what we’re trying to achieve and why.

In a characteristically painstaking and relentless investigation of the notorious photographs taken at Abu Ghraib, Errol Morris digs into the history and context of one particular photograph of MP Sabrina Harman smiling next to a corpse:

As Morris argues convincingly, this photograph is dangerously distracting. We find it almost impossible to see past Harman’s smile. We focus on the horror and disgust of the notion that someone would pose and smile for such a picture rather than wondering why the man is dead and what happened to him.

Morris reveals how the administration and the military used our instinctive horror as a ploy to distract us from the abuse, torture, and murder of prisoners. He also reveals that subsequent to this photograph, Harman realized that she’d been lied to that the prisoner, Al Jamadi, had died of a heart attack and went back to take a series of forensic photographs revealing the extensive injuries he’d suffered during interrogation.

Morris also tells us how it is that despite the extensive wrong-doings and crimes that US forces and contractors have committed during the Iraq war, at the implicit and explicit behest of the current administration, there’s been no appropriate accountability: By launching multiple investigations all focused on narrow slices of the big picture, the administration has effectively diffused our attention and blurred evidence of the overall pattern to the wrongdoing. Only the minor characters have been taken to task, the Harman’s of the world.

Morris points out in his article that we can be distracted for many reasons. We mistake Harman’s smile, for instance, for a real smile. But an expert in facial expressions concludes that it is simply a fake smile. A social smile. And we’re typically very poor at recognizing the difference. (Less than one percent of people can naturally detect the small clues that betray these kinds of differences in facial expression.)

Morris asks in his piece why we haven’t evolved to be better at avoiding distraction. The answer given? Because it hasn’t been that useful. But why not? Why isn’t it useful for us to know when we’re focusing on a border fence rather than border security, or seeing a fake smile and not a real smile?

In everyday life, we build up an additive perspective of people and events. We tend to be suspicious of strangers and wary of new circumstances. But over time we build up a consistent picture of our lives and the people in them. A fake smile here or there is immaterial to the greater perception we have of someone and his or her motives.

Whereas, when it comes to events and people in public life, distant from our everyday lives, but nevertheless critical in some ways to the lives we lead, evolution has had far less time to allow us to adapt the kinds of skills we need to make good judgments.

Prior to the advent of democracy, decisions of any broad weight were made by a few people and handed down without any chance for recourse. In a democracy, it’s important for us to understand and act on the reasons and evasions behind the building of a marginally useful border fence, but we’re ill-equipped to crunch all the necessary information and see past the distraction. Similarly to be fully understood, Sabrina Herman’s fake smile has to be studied and interpreted, many people interviewed, information unearthed and brought into focus; a feat only made possible by the modern invention of photography and by the assiduous and dogged attention of a documentary film-maker.

When we read Morris’s account of Sabrina Harman’s photographic record we’re persuaded that rather than being contemptible, she has actually been quite a brave figure. Under difficult conditions she opened her eyes to the bad acts of the war and captured them in a way that makes us feel more than a little uncomfortable about what we’ve personally done or not done to bring our leaders to account.

On the importance and unimportance of naming things.

A new kind of ant has descended on the coastal belt outside Houston. The ant beats out other pests for food, is a prodigious reproducer, and has no known enemies (except the homeowners and exterminators who live on the coastal belt outside Houston). But there’s one thing this new ant lacks that other ants have — a bone fide name. (Locals call them running ants, but there’s as yet no official scientific name.)

But, when it comes down to it, whether those hordes of tiny insects have a name or not must seem irrelevant when they’re infesting your yard.

David Brooks picked up on the idea that Obama, obliquely criticized by Bush’s speech in Israel to the Knesset, may not have intended to espouse a philosophy of appeasing terrorists. To his credit, Brooks contacted Obama and asked him to explain more about his foreign policy ideas, and, in particular, his ideas about handling the likes of Hezbollah.

That’s where the credit ends. Brooks sounds a little like Bush in his instinctive response to Obama’s remarks. And just as ill informed and naive about the history of diplomacy. As I wrote yesterday, when it comes to achieving peace, there’s no progress without communication of some sort or another.

“Does Obama believe that even the most intractable enemies can be pacified with diplomacy?” Brooks asks. “Is Obama naïve enough to think that an extremist ideological organization like Hezbollah can be mollified with a less corrupt patronage system and some electoral reform?” (I’ve inverted the sequence of these two quotes.)

Through the seventies, eighties, and nineties, when the Provisional IRA (the IRA) carried out apparently endless campaigns of violence against other Irish citizens, the British army, and British citizens, there seemed to be no way to reach a peaceable conclusion. For a very long time, the British trotted out the line that they wouldn’t have anything to do with terrorists. And what happened in the end? In 2005, after much discussion and compromise on both sides, the IRA renounced violence. The political wing of the IRA has been integrated into Irish politics.

Is Obama naive, or are those who refuse to talk naive?

And although the courts in California have decided that gays can wed, anti-gay wedders society (epitomized by Randy Thomasson, head of Campaign for Children and Families) now seek an amendment to the state constitution defining marriage as a union between a man and a woman.

What do these three stories have in common? you may be wondering. Well, it strikes me that from a philosophical perspective these three stories pivot on the naming of something.

• The new ants have no name. This somehow makes them seem more threatening.
• Bush and others, having slapped a terrorist sticker on an organization, want to use this label to rule out anything that might be seen as legitimizing that group’s concerns.
• And the brouhaha over gay marriage seems to be more about nomenclature than practicalities. Not that there aren’t practicalities to be debated, there are, of course, but the emotion seems to derive from whether the label “marriage” can be applied to a same sex union.

But here we have the really difficult question, do names matter, philosophically speaking. Psychologically, they clearly do. But if we can narrow a concept and label it have we achieved anything more or less than narrowing a concept and labeling it?

There are two answers: Without names or labels for concepts we can’t discuss anything, we can’t communicate. But without qualifications to those names and labels, and careful use, we risk encamping behind words that evoke emotion but not reason.

On George Bush in Israel, video game workouts, and predictions of neural Buddhism.

In a bold and boldly quirky opinion, David Brooks predicts that current research into the workings of the mind will lead toward more widespread acceptance of the spiritual concepts of Buddhism, and away from adherence to the textual “patina of different religions.”

This research has shown, says Brooks, that the mind “does not operate like a computer. Instead, meaning, belief and consciousness seem to emerge mysteriously from idiosyncratic networks of neural firings. Those squishy things called emotions play a gigantic role in all forms of thinking. Love is vital to brain development.”

I can’t help but quote his pivotal paragraph whole:

“First, the self is not a fixed entity but a dynamic process of relationships. Second, underneath the patina of different religions, people around the world have common moral intuitions. Third, people are equipped to experience the sacred, to have moments of elevated experience when they transcend boundaries and overflow with love. Fourth, God can best be conceived as the nature one experiences at those moments, the unknowable total of all there is.”

I think that Brooks may have gone a little loopy. Not because what he’s saying is nutty, but he’s saying it without any seeming objectivity or pause for reflection.

To parse and unpack adequate individual responses to each of Brooks statements in his opinion would take many posts. So I’ll focus on the aspect of his opinion that represents a common thread: Conviction. Brooks writes as if he is convinced of his opinion. He writes as if others will be convinced of the research findings. And he writes as if a person who has a sense of the interrelated self, or inherent morality, or the sacred, or God, will necessarily have a belief in those same things in spite of or despite a more nuanced understanding or wherefrom and why those senses derive.

Sure, we operate less like machines than people once thought, but that doesn’t mean that life in all its rich emotion and subjectivity is inevitably mysterious and unknowable, sacred and spiritual. Just because life has evolved to include psychological and physiological responses that evoke transcendent sensory experiences, doesn’t prove that our perception of those transcendent experiences is evidence of something inexplicable.

Video games provide a case in point. Nintendo’s Wii and Wii Fitness take new steps into the realm of virtual reality. As reviewed, Wii Fitness does a good enough job of simulating a fitness regime that people found it winningly good at doing what it set out to do. The human mind nimbly assimilates virtual or perceived realities into its overall perception of the real world. This isn’t surprising. The mind needs to be able to do this in order for us to imagine different scenarios, to predict and plan.

George Bush, still president, still persisting in his perception of himself as a leader, and a leader of some weight, has said this week in Israel that talking to Iran and Syria would be like talking to Hitler.

Again, I feel I should quote him in full:

“Some seem to believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along. We have heard this foolish delusion before. As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: “Lord, if I could only have talked to Hitler, all this might have been avoided.” We have an obligation to call this what it is — the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history.”

I was left wondering on what level Bush believes this. Surely he can’t believe that anyone who would seek to talk to hostile and dangerous leaders would expect to convince them they were wrong with some “ingenious argument.” Does he believe that’s what they would try to do? Surely not. No. Not even someone as apparently ignorant and deluded as Bush.

(One would of course expect to try to convince them that they have more to gain by peaceable coexistence than by continued hostility. This is not ingenious, it’s just common sense.)

Bush’s difficulties in perceiving accurate versions of reality reveal something about what makes the human mind successful or unsuccessful in guiding us through our lives. As we’ve discussed, we need to be able to use our imagination to conceive of different versions of current and future reality, to assess possibilities and outcomes. But we also need to be able to accept as more concrete the versions that carry more rational weight. This won’t always yield truth, but it will more often than not yield truth.

Bush seems to be able to conjure up a version of reality and attach his belief to it, regardless of evidence to the contrary. This is perhaps his greatest deficiency. He wanted to believe in the link between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein so badly that he ignored all the signs that it was a fiction. He wanted to believe in rapid and easy success in Iraq so passionately that he failed to plan for the more likely scenario that it would be a long, hard, bloody war. He wanted to believe that Hurricane Katrina was a local disaster and required a local response, despite evidence to the contrary, with deadly and horrific results.

Bush is not alone; many leaders delude themselves, as do many of us less prominent citizens. The trouble is that Bush has deluded many others, too, and continues to do just that.

Footnote: As has been noted elsewhere, Bush’s reference to Hitler’s invasion of Poland and the words of an American Senator (attributed by some to William Borah) are hardly new material. Rumsfeld was spouting the same fear-mongering rhetoric back in 2006.

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.