Snow Blind

Snowblind

The cardinal at the feeder knows I’m here

Peering from behind the sliding door.

He flutters his denial that I matter--

He must eat; his voice in fact demands it

And there’s snow: cold, blank

Never mind.  The black of sunflowers cracked

And spilled, wards off all human menace

With promises of fuller green.

He is sated now and leaves me to my dream.

Let a Thousand Flowers Bloom

I've just returned from a three-week trip to Asia.  Most of the trip was a cruise, aboard the Diamond Princess, involving one-day visits to a large number of ports:  Tianjin, Busan, Nagasaki, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Nha Tranh, Ho Chi Minh City, Singapore, Bangkok.  We added extra days in Beijing and Bangkok.  Still, our shore excursions amounted to little more than brief glimpses of a city's life--sightseeing without much depth.

Superficial acquaintance, then, but still enough contact to prompt me to reflect (perhaps foolishly) on what I DID observe.

Let me begin by ruminating about Confucius, Mao, and Thomas Jefferson.  It seems to me that, when they're honest with themselves, Americans are usually inclined to equate personal happiness with the possession of wealth.  Oh, they know that money can't buy everything, but the general consensus is that the acquiring wealth is the best thing we can do to increase our chances of being happy and of obtaining status and esteem in our society.  Clearly, we tell ourselves, that is what Jefferson meant when he claimed (following Locke) that all human beings have a right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness (a pleasant-sounding synonym for Locke's more blunt "property.")

I guess Confucius, too, believed in pursuing happiness.  But he insisted that the deepest form of self-satisfaction resulted from serving an entity greater than oneself--the family, the community, the nation, the common culture (and all its traditions).  Not that he (or, at least, his interpreters) believed that acquiring wealth was not a good thing:  it's just that, for the Confucian, an individual's self-worth depends, not upon his personal fortune alone, but upon the fortune of the collectivities to which he belongs and contributes.

Hence, the aggressive, money-obsessed Shanghainsese might have motives and goals which are quite different from those of aggressive, money-obsessed New Yorker.  The Shanghainese wants to affirm his self-worth by contributing to the well-being of a unit to which he belongs, by being "good" at providing for, advancing and perpetuating this unit.  The New Yorker wants to affirm his self-worth by being "good" at providing for himself (and only secondarily for, perhaps, a spouse or a child; certainly he has virtually no interest in the community or the nation).

It's silly to assert (as Mao and the communists did/do) that the Chinese are not or should not be individualists or capitalists. They clearly ARE.  But I'm convinced that their individualism is so permeated with Confucian hierarchical values that almost no Chinese "individual" ever thinks of himself and his own self-actualization as the ultimate raison d'être of human existence--the absolute Good.

On the other hand, it's quite easy for an American, be he a businessman or an artist, to believe that the fulfillment of his own deeply subjective (and self-chosen) desires is, and should be, the definition of happiness--the absolute Good.

And so, even the greedy, grasping, avaricious street merchants in Shanghai and Guangzhou tend to regard themselves as functioning "together with others" in this struggle to get rich (even if the "others' are limited to the extended family)--capitalists with at least somewhat socialistic goals. Whereas the typical American is in the game alone--and for his own sake.

Perhaps this ingrained Confucianism is why the modern "communist" Chinese seem almost as willing as were their ancestors in the Qing, Ming, Song and Tang dynasties to submit to the authority of a central government claiming to serve the common good.  A Shanghainese restauranteur may yearn to own a car, but he understands (albeit grudgingly) why the government (via lottery and related fees) makes it nearly impossible for all but the very rich and "successful" to possess a vehicle in a city comprised of narrow alleyways and densely overpopulated neighborhoods.  He would be less accepting, of course, if this same government did not provide excellent and inexpensive public transport via subways, trams and buses.  In other words, if the government is going to LIMIT INDIVIDUAL freedoms, it cannot hope to be successful unless it PROVIDES COMPENSATION by actually serving the OVERALL GOOD.  This is what the emperors claimed to do (and what the good emperors actually did); this is what Mao claimed he would do--but failed miserably to achieve during the disastrous Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution; this is what the current regime, ever since Deng Xiaoping, has struggled to do, with appreciable success, especially in the cities--by inventing and introducing a market-based but still unmistakably socialist economic system--an odd but pragmatically effective amalgam of marxist orthodoxy and free trade entrepreneurism.

It seems to me, then, that deep down in the Chinese subconscious, the emperor still demands obedience--and still commands a measure of respect, even if, on the surface, rebellion rages and protesters cynically (or self-righteously) justify their dissent by repeating the old adage, "the mountains are high and the emperor is far away." Am I wrong about this?  Maybe.  I'm very much an outsider.

But I'm not an outsider in America, so I'm certainly not wrong about an irony I can't resist underlining, to wit:  a considerable number of Americans--undoubtedly among the most freewheeling and unrestrained peoples of the earth--complain bitterly that our mountains aren't nearly high enough and that our "emperor" in Washington is so oppressively nearby that his gendarmes are even now surrounding the houses of all freedom-loving citizens and readying themselves to deprive true Americans of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Gosh, do you think Confucius and Mao will be taking over soon?  Your opinions please: Let a Thousand Flowers Bloom.

Ignorance Is Bliss

Christian orthodoxy has a schizophrenic and ultimately self-destructive relationship with education and learning.  On the one hand, the Church has encouraged the faithful, ranging from erudite theologians to amateurish Sunday School teachers, to "think" about metaphysical subjects (i.e., things that cannot actually be apprehended/known by the operation of human senses). Indeed, Christianity's greatest minds have traditionally devoted themselves unstintingly to such speculative thinking about will-o-the wispy stuff that can never be grasped:  Augustine, Aquinas, Calvin, Tillich.  But on the other hand, the religious establishment has historically harbored deep suspicions of any intellectual activity that might weaken or discredit the supposedly physical (i.e. provable) underpinnings of their metaphysical  (i.e., unprovable) constructs and thereby bring the entire airy-fairy edifice tumbling to the ground.  St. Paul, for instance, attempting to defuse doubts about a mythology that, even in the first century CE sounded pretty far-fetched, says, in effect, that it is reason itself that doesn't make sense:  "the foolishness of God is wiser than man's wisdom" (I Corinthians 1).  Later, St. John Chrysostom urges us to "restrain our own reasoning, and empty our mind of secular learning, in order to provide a mind swept clear for the reception of divine words."*  And, mincing no words, Pope Gregory (the Great!?) loftily commands us to suppress all inquiring thoughts whatsoever:  "the wise should be advised to cease from their knowledge."*

In other words, ignorance is bliss--and knowing nothing is holy.  Amen.

The theists' conundrum, however, is the obvious fact that human beings cannot actually function without exercising their reason, without seeking knowledge.  After all, Adam and Eve, the story goes, ate of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge.  Sure, it was original sin--they were exceedingly naughty in their efforts to shed purely animal instincts and assume the godlike powers of discernment and free-will.  Still, there is just no going back--no way After The Fall that we can survive individually or as a species without learning, without understanding, without reasoning and without making informed choices based on that reasoning.  Knowing nothing may indeed be holy, but--for human beings at any rate--it is also fatal.

Thus, even the most zealous of God's fools must grudgingly come round to admitting this fundamental truth:  humans require at least some education.  And countless Christians--the medieval "schoolmen" who founded universities, the American Puritans who fostered literacy so that the Bible could be read by all, the Jesuits who recognized that education could be a formidable weapon in the war for converts--all these pious believers found some way to harmonize their need to know truth with their need to believe nonsense.  Cognitive dissonance of the first water.

For many years, I, too, practiced such mental juggling and compartmentalization.  Living an essentially reason-based life, I nonetheless continued to pay lip-service, especially on Sunday mornings, to blatantly unreasonable fairy-tales dreamed up by guys like Paul, Chrysostom, Augustine, Aquinas, Calvin, Tillich, et.al.

Until finally it dawned upon me that the essence of education was acquiring and applying knowledge of what is knowable, NOT knowing a lot of fantastical dogma about what is unknowable in the first place.  In other words, in later life, I finally picked up a few of what the psychologists call "higher order thinking skills." At last I am learning (and it's a slow and painful process) to apply my reason exclusively to that which can be known and to eliminate from my life behaviors and attitudes that are either extraneous or inimical to that knowledge.

Ironically, then, I--who so prided myself on my ability to "get kids to think critically"--must now confess that in my own intellectual life I have frequently contented myself with the sort of mechanical, survival-level thinking that Benjamin Bloom (he of the famous "Taxonomy") would characterize as mere "comprehension" or "application."  For all my bookishness, mine has been a surprisingly unexamined life (was I too afraid? probably).  Rarely have I forced myself to analyze, evaluate, create--those higher-order behaviors that Bloom in particular and humans in general--despite the fustigations of Gregory the Great--most admire.  I have been, for the most part, a "low-level" thinker, rarely questioning established order, relishing the mindlessness of religious ceremonies, plodding complacently along in the painless game of follow-the-leader.

When St. Paul invented Christianity, he must have suspected that most people are just as lazy as I, and just as inclined to low-order, undemanding thinking.  He also must have sensed that such careless cognition would guarantee success and dominion for his new religion.  He was right.

Because low-order theological thinking, even in its most rapturous and convoluted flights of polysyllabic prosody, remains inescapably schizophrenic: an attempt to use reason and logic to explain (and control) that which is unknowable--and therefore inexplicable and uncontrollable.  Not only a perversion of reason, but also a complete waste of time.

I am truly obsessive, aren't I?  Though I intended that this blog entry should be about education and the importance of critical thinking in human self-actualization, I have instead, once again, engaged in a Rant Against Religion, another KK take on "Ecrasez l'infâme."  Well, so be it.  But let me, finally, make my point about education and religious orthodoxy:  it seems to me that religion doesn't mind if you think--provided your thinking remains at the lower levels of Bloom's Taxonomy--i.e., if you learn that tomatoes will die without water and if you apply this understanding by watering your plants.  But religion--and, it would seem, today's Republican Party--cannot easily tolerate analysis, synthesis, evaluation or--above all--creativity--i.e., a global understanding of how tomatoes interact with the ecosphere.  Such high-order mental activity--because it frees the individual from blind allegiance to established authority and "fixed ideas"--threatens the very existence of all that relies upon illogic and simple-mindedness to exploit and control others.

It is no surprise, therefore, that the Republican Party of Texas (dominated by fundamentalist Evangelicals and cynical oil barons) recently formulated a blatantly anti-education plank for its 2012 platform.  "We oppose," declare the Texas Republicans, "the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills...which...have the purpose of challenging the student's fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority." In other words, the Texas Republicans have aligned themselves with the know-nothings and the holy fools:  keep everyone stupid and obedient to conventional practices (as I was for so long) so that they'll never know what they're missing.  Ignorance (in the weak and disenfranchised) is indeed bliss (for those already in control).

Dunce caps, anyone?

*cited in Freeman, Charles. The Closing of the Western Mind. New York: Vintage, 2005.

Credulity and Crap

Some time ago, thinking myself quite perceptive and witty, I made this observation on Facebook:

"People's willingness to believe a lie is directly proportional to the outrageousness of the claim.  The more improbable it is, the more willing they are to believe."

To which a Facebook friend commented drily, "Well, duh, everyone knows that." What? You mean my epiphany about human credulity wasn't quite as original as I had thought?  You mean everyone else has also noted that humans delight in fabricating, disseminating, and (ultimately) actually believing stuff that is not merely false but egregiously so?

OK, so we can all agree that a lot of the "truths" out there are, in fact, fictions invented by someone for some reason (perhaps just the pleasure of creating a good story) and then glommed onto by other people whose senses are excited or whose interests are served by believing and perpetuating the tale--with, perhaps, some embellishments and additions.

Generally, however, we don't agree that our most cherished beliefs are such fabrications.  Other people, though--God, yes, other people will believe just about anything (and, as my little trait d'esprit suggests, the more outrageous the claim, the more likely other people are to believe it).

So it's quite humbling and not a little embarrassing to realize, at age 68, that most of the unquestioned certitudes that I, personally, have espoused and preached for most of my life are also--almost certainly-- egregious falsehoods.  Because, you see, at various times of my life I have believed, more or less fervently, all of the following rubbish:  America is the Land of the Free, Democracy is the Best Form of Government, Money Doesn't Matter, You Can Be Anything You Set Your Mind to Being, Masturbation Drives One Mad, Jesus Rose From the Dead, Marriage Has Always Been Between One Man and One Woman, Blessed Mary Is Ever Virgin, Jesus Loves Me, Eggs Are Bad for You, There Are Seven Intelligences, Everyone Has Certain Natural Rights, Personal Property and Possessions Are Among These Rights, God Is Everywhere, Cleanliness Is Next To Godliness,  The Natural Approach Is the Only Effective Way to Teach Languages, YadaYadaYadaYada.

What a load of crap has been weighing me down!

After one of my pompous lectures about Greek philosophy, a student once asked me, "So what, exactly, is truth supposed to set me free from?"  At the time, I couldn't answer very well.  But now I can:  from crap.  From the intellectual angst of trying to rationalize, reconcile, and justify all of these patently irrational (but culturally consecrated, hence deeply embedded) lies.

What a relief to be able to admit, finally, that the Jesus fables aren't any truer than the far-fetched mythologies of other religions, that you can't get things by merely wishing for them, that human interactions such as economics and politics are quite simply too complicated to be systematically understood by anyone, that there are no human rights built into the structure of the universe, that any God that might exist is necessarily unknowable and irrelevant, that the only sure good is conduct that advances the well-being of humanity, even though humanity in all its glory commands less than an iota of a speck of a tittle of significance within the infinite vastness of the universe.

Oof.  Just let that all go.  Give it to Jesus--or any of the other gods in that illustrious pantheon of failed saviors dreamed up and passed on by the credulous "crap inventors" who, we really must admit it now, are not just others, but ourselves as well.

Bon débarras!

Intactivism: Somewhat of a Stretch

When I was in San Francisco, in September, Carole and I girded our loins (unlike a great many other attendees) and spent a boozily voyeuristic afternoon at the Folsom Street Fair, a celebration of all that is naughty, kinky, or merely unconventional in (mostly) gay life and attitudes.

I took lots of pictures of pot-bellied men wearing leather underwear ingeniously designed to expose everything that underwear normally hides.  I watched a naked, Brazilian-waxed woman in 6-inch heels being led about on a  rhinestone dog leash and given occasional nipple-shaped treats as a reward for licking her handler's breast. And I gaped, from afar, at a line-up of Bay Area Intactivists, many of whom were flaunting penises with foreskins stretched about two extra inches by some sort of artfully inserted bolt.

I had never heard of "intactivists" before, but there they were, in their dangling splendor, smiling broadly for the cameras and handing out colorful brochures denouncing the evil of "male genital mutilation"--i.e., circumcision. (I was, of course, all the more fascinated to discover such vehement defenders of the 'natural' state at this fair celebrating all that is artful, artificial, contrived, and defiantly anti-missionary-posture nature!)

Apparently, the intactivists are a mostly political organization,  concerned more about foreskin ethics than esthetics (though, clearly, they DO enjoy the beauty of a nice uncut dick--as did Michelangelo, who couldn't bring himself to circumcise his David, future king of Israel).  Accordingly, in 2011, they were instrumental in introducing a ballot initiative to ban male circumcision in San Francisco.  Alas, a spoil-sport judge ruled that, for the time being at least, male genital integrity was less important than the religious beliefs of parents who might seek salvation by sacrificing their sons' foreskins to Yahweh or Allah or Quetzalcoatl.  The intactivists, aroused, vowed to take their fight to Congress.  Grand bien que cela leur fasse!

So, are uncut penises superior (as the Emperor Hadrian asserted, contemplating perhaps his boyfriend Antinous)?  Is "natural" better (as Tristram Shandy must have felt after being penilely savaged by an unhinged window sash)?  Should we let the individual male decide when he has attained adulthood and has had the opportunity to "test drive" his hot rod?  Or is it all Much Ado About Not Very Much (unless "it" has been stretched an additional two inches)?

Probably the latter. Still, as I read one of those colorful brochures with illustrated testimonials, I did begin to think about how basically silly, arbitrary--and yes, unwittingly cruel-- infant circumcision is.  Parents mess up our minds quite enough as it is, couldn't they at least leave our dicks alone for us to do what we want with?  Like, you know, inserting a bolt in the preputial opening and posing thus accoutered for photo-taking voyeurs at street fairs?

Communists!

There are communists everywhere, especially in Congress.  Some of these commies are also nazis, but most are even worse than nazis because they advocate socialized medicine and high-speed trains.  Communists also support such evils as same-sex marriage, stimulus spending, wind energy and teaching evolution in schools.  Nancy Pelosi is the head of these communists.  She has had a face lift and a breast augmentation, neither of which is authorized in Leviticus.

Women should not be allowed to vote.  Extending the franchise to females was a communist plot of the worst kind, since it encouraged women (Nancy Pelosi) to run around with butcher knives cutting off their husbands' penises.  Men without penises cannot properly run the world and, if their balls are also missing, they just get fat and become rotten bowlers.

Obesity is another problem brought on by communism.  Communist overspending in Washington has funded programs like school hot lunches and food stamps for welfare queens, and these programs, in turn, have provided food for people who don't deserve to eat.  If there were less free communist food, poor people would be emaciated, not overweight.  This would ensure a much lower nationwide average in the obesity statistics and once again, the USA would be number one!

The thing about communists is this:  they want to DO stuff.  Well, doing stuff has never worked and it never will.  Look at Hitler.  He tried to do things and he got shot down by the USA.  Also, those commies in China, they're poisoning our food supply and making women abort all but one baby.  Abortion is against God's laws and against nature.  Killing should be either holy, as in ritual sacrifice (Jesus, underwear bombers) or natural (starvation, war, vigilantism).  Usually, it should be done with a gun, since guns are both holy and natural.

And that's another thing.  The commies in Congress (and in Europe and other socialist places like Iceland and Canada) want to take away our guns.  Pelosi's goons are already scheming with Obama (who was born in Communist East Africa where even the Mau Mau couldn't acquire adequate firearms) to figure out a way to round up all the guns in America and dump them in the deepest cracks of the Marianas Trench.  We must not allow this to happen, people!  It's so obvious: if we lose our right to kill, we lose our right to live.  And also our freedom to choose deep dish or thin crust extra crispy.

So I beg you: stop the communists now!  If we don't act to take back our country, pretty soon we'll be forced to marry our same-sex cousins and have breast augmentation surgery besides.  Shoot to kill and take no prisoners!  Sic semper tyrannis (or whatever).

Madness in America

Every day, I grow more aware of the limits of human reason, of just how impossible it is for our little, finite minds to grasp absolute truths (if, indeed, such absolutes exist at all).  Still, since unlike other animals we have relatively few hard-wired instincts, our reason seems to be the best tool we possess for coping with reality.

The faithful of many "true" religions will here object that divine revelation either entirely supersedes or substantially supplements the inevitably tentative and mutable conclusions obtained by the exercise of reason alone.

The revelation of which divinity, though?  As announced by which divinely-inspired prophet? As written down in which divinely-dictated holy book?  Surely, the very proliferation of gods and religions argues against the actual existence of any super-natural, super-rational authority.

And besides, wouldn't such a wonderful supplement to human reason be available--as one of those few hard-wired instincts--to ALL human beings?

Well, who knows?  I'm using rational thought to discuss something that (if it exists) transcends rational thought and cannot therefore be discussed using rational thought.  Dead end.

So I return to the only tool I can be sure of, as tentative and as circumscribed as it is:  my personal REASON.  I understand that no one can understand all of reality--and that, moreover, I myself cannot understand a great deal of what many others can understand.  Still, provided I do the best I can to inform myself and provided further that I accept the objective evidence afforded me by my senses and by scientifically provable truths, I must rely upon the revelations of my subjective thought processes, and upon these revelations only:  because how in the world could I ever decide which of the "divine" revelations is more reliable than my personal thinking?

OK.  That is the premise underlying (and, I hope, justifying) this blog entry:  according to my personal thinking, much of what is going on in the world--and particularly in my own country--is absolutely contrary to reason, absolutely irrational, absolutely MAD.

As I recall, when Alice told the Cheshire Cat that she didn't want to "go among mad people," the Cat just purred sardonically, "Oh, you can't help that.  We're all mad here."

Well, perhaps we ARE all mad.  But I wonder if some people aren't just a wee bit MORE mad than I am.  For instance, I can make no sense whatsoever of the following notions/ ideas/ theories/ practices that I read about or witness on a nearly daily basis in the America of 2012 CE:

• Cutting government jobs will save the government money and will thus help create jobs;
• We can shrink our way to growth; 
• The more guns everyone has, the safer everyone will be;
• Not talking about homosexuality in schools will make homosexuality go away;
• Evolution should not be taught because some people "oppose" it;
• The poor don't pay their fair share of taxes;
• Cutting taxes for the rich will create more jobs, because the rich will automatically want to spend their additional wealth on hiring poor people;
• America has to support Israel because Israel is "democratic."
• Democracy is always the best system of government for everybody;
• Banning same-sex marriage will save opposite-sex marriage;
• Banning same-sex marriage will save the Caucasian race;
• Overall health care costs will decline if we insure fewer people;
• Corporations are people and have the same rights as an individual citizen;
• Fertilized eggs are people and have the same rights as an individual citizen;
• American wars in the Middle East are defending American "freedom"
• The Constitution was divinely inspired;
• If we make their lives miserable, illegal immigrants will "self-deport";
• Socialism is evil and anti-American;
• Socialized medicine, indeed anything "socialized" is inferior, inefficient and dangerous;
• The left is conducting a "war" against Christianity;

• The world is going to end on December 21, 2012 because that's when the Mayan calendar ends;
• Religious freedom (especially that of the Catholic Church) is being threatened by Obama's health care policies;
• Too many people have the right to vote:  limits need to be imposed;
• Social Security and Medicare and other social programs are misguided because in "helping" people, they encourage dependency instead of self-reliance;
• The War on Drugs is working;
• The war in Afghanistan is winnable (and necessary);
• Government spending on wars and defense should be increased; government spending on infrastructure, health, education, etc., should be decreased or eliminated;
• Government austerity is the solution to financial crises created by big banks;
• Homosexuality can (and should) be cured by prayer and aversion therapy;
• Christian fundamentalism is true; Islamic fundamentalism is false;
• Social Darwinism is a legitimate political, economic and ethical stance;
• Obama was born in Kenya;
• Illegal immigrants are stealing jobs from "real" Americans;
• Marriage has always (and everywhere) been between one man and one woman;
• The Civil War had nothing to do with slavery or racism;
• The only legitimate and efficacious form of birth control is abstinence.

You will notice that most of the foregoing ravings are favored especially by Republicans.  That's because it appears (to me, anyway) that the majority of regular Republicans have been bitten by rabid demogogues within their ranks and have begun, almost literally, to foam at the mouth.

But some of my fellow Democrats are also spouting (and posting and tweeting) stuff that my common sense must repudiate.  Here are a just a few examples of Democratic twaddle:

• All cultures and all civilizations are of equal merit and are equally "good";
• All people have a god-given right to get married, to whomever they choose;
• Public service unions, teachers' unions, etc., are primarily interested in serving the public;
• Capitalism is a corrupt system and cannot be made to work;
• It is not necessary for all Americans to be fluent in English; let people use whatever language they want;
• All is relative.

No, I'm quite sure that all is NOT relative, though my unaided (because there IS no aid) reason cannot equally illuminate and appraise the moral landscape of all portions of reality.  Many gray areas persist, much ambiguity remains.  Still, the insanity (and inanity) of the reasoning cited in the foregoing lists seems so egregious that I will, Cheshire-Cat-like, maintain that "we're all mad here"--at least until I'm proven (with genuine evidence) to be wrong.

Meanwhile, what do you make of this sign on a hotel wall in New York?