#304 / Town And Gown

In "Merry Olde England," relationships between those attending Oxford University and the residents of the town of Oxford were, apparently, none too good. In fact, according to an engaging article appearing on the BBC website, physical confrontations between the residents of town and gown were common; murder was not unknown. Military intervention was sometimes required.

Aren't we so much better off, today?

Well, there haven't been any town-gown murders yet, here in the City of Santa Cruz, and the National Guard hasn't been turned out, but feelings between town and gown are certainly strained. In a recent Santa Cruz City election, almost 80% of City voters said the University should stop accepting any more students, in view of the incredibly negative impacts that growing student enrollments have had on the local housing market, traffic congestion, and water security. Fact is, those growing enrollments have undermined the quality of education at the local campus, too.

So far, the University has given no significant indication that it would be willing to terminate future student enrollments at UCSC and maintain the current enrollment level, which is approximately 19,000 students. The Chancellor's semi-official proposal, which has not yet been made final, and which has not yet been subjected to environmental review, is to add about 10,000 more students to the local campus, on top of the 19,000 students currently enrolled. That number doesn't count faculty and staff, of course. The local community is officially not pleased with the Chancellor's number of 10,000 new students (in fact, you could say the community is "outraged"). Unfortunately for the City, which otherwise does get to plan for its future growth, decisions about student enrollment are not made by the community. Outrage won't be enough.

In my view, since the people have spoken locally in such an emphatic way, this would be a good time for some local political leadership to take this issue to the UC Regents and the State Legislature. A claim that the University should be permitted to do whatever it wants to with respect to increasing student enrollments, without any responsible reference to the adverse impacts that the University's actions might have on a local community, is a claim that needs to be disputed. There is no reason to abandon hope that such a dispute can be resolved in favor of the local community. No murder or military intervention should be necessary. It won't be easy, however, to win this debate.

If our local political leaders will commit time, money, and energy to an effort to achieve what 80% of the local voters said they want, I think they can win the battle for us. It is irksome to have to expend lots of energy to achieve what should be obvious, but such is the way of the world. Unless the community mounts the effort, mobilizing every community resource we have, future student enrollment growth will give us an even bigger housing crisis than we already have, a housing crisis on steroids, and we will all be spending our time on gridlocked streets. 

As James Herndon, who writes on education, has put it: that is not "The Way It Spozed To Be."

Image Credit:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/local/oxford/hi/people_and_places/history/newsid_9158000/9158705.stm

#303 / God Talk

Jonathan Merritt is a contributing writer for The Atlantic, and he is the author, most recently, of “Learning to Speak God From Scratch: Why Sacred Words Are Vanishing — And How We Can Revive Them.” What I assume is a shorthand version of his entire book appeared in a newspaper column in The New York Times on Sunday, October 14, 2018. Click the link provided in the next sentence if you'd like to read it. The column was titled, "It’s Getting Harder to Talk About God." 

I think Merritt is right about that. It is getting harder to "talk about God." That judgment is based simply on my own observations, but Merritt has statistics to back up his assertion. 

I do these blog postings mainly for myself (to "take notes" about my thoughts and observations and to be sure that I write something each day, which I think is a good discipline). I do know that some people read what I write, and of course, I am delighted if they do. For any of those, and especially for those who would resist "talking about God," which includes a number of my closest and dearest friends, let me say that I think it is imperative that we all start "talking about God" a lot more - and particularly in the way that Merritt defines "talking about God," since he focuses on the use of "sacred words" in our ordinary conversations.

By our use of "sacred words," we admit, ipso facto, that there is a "sacred" reality that is different from the down and dirty realities we live in day by day. Recognizing this, in my opinion, is profoundly important. The future of human civilization hangs on our ability to make contact with that sacred realm and to call others to it.

Any long-term reader of this blog will remember my "Two Worlds Hypothesis." I suggest that we live in two worlds, simultaneously. Most immediately, we live in a human world that we create. This is a "political world." In the world we create, "possibility" is the watchword. All human arrangements, like all human laws, can be changed, thus transforming the realities of our immediate existence. So often, we disempower ourselves by acting as though what "is" is somehow "inevitable." And in the political world, the opposite is the case.

However, we live not only in the "political world" that we create; we live also, and ultimately, in the World of Nature, A WORLD THAT WE DID NOT CREATE. This is the world that God created. As marvelous as we are, and as wonderful as our human creations are, we are not self-sufficient. We are absolutely and utterly dependent on the World that God made (that is, the world that existed before us, the entire universe, all of reality). The world that we did not create is a mystery, and it is, thus, sacred. The outrages of religion, through the ages, perpetrated by human beings who assert that they are somehow in charge of the world of mystery, are all duplicitous efforts to acquire power within our human world. 

The outrages of religion, in other words, are blasphemies against the genuine world of mystery that has, very mysteriously indeed, determined that there will be life at all. 

That world is sacred. That is the world in which Nature is to be respected and worshipped, not plundered for our projects. That is the world in which we know, despite all our human divisions, that all humans are related, and that life is sacred, individually and collectively.

We must find the words to talk about this sacred reality, upon which we depend. The latest report says we have twelve years to change the course of human civilization and to recognize the reality of the World of Nature as the ultimate truth, and to acknowledge the world of human interconnection and love as the ultimate reality. 

We need to learn to talk about God. 

Really, really soon.

Image Credit:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/13/opinion/sunday/talk-god-sprituality-christian.html

#302 / Jane Fonda On Citizen Activism

I shared a stage with Jane Fonda once. It was at the Louden Nelson Center, in Santa Cruz, California, and I forget the exact occasion. Jane was visiting Santa Cruz in connection with a campaign of some sort, and I think I introduced her to the audience.

As a draft resister during the Vietnam War, I have always been deeply grateful to both Jane Fonda and Tom Hayden for their efforts to stop that horrific conflict. 

In the New York Times article from which I captured the picture to the right, Jane quotes a veteran who said, during a recent gathering in New York City, “If I had a Congressional Medal of Honor, I would present it to you. I am so grateful that you helped end the war.” 

My sentiments, precisely!

The Times article announced a new HBO biopic covering Jane Fonda's life, Jane Fonda in Five Acts. What struck me most in the article was the following exchange:

What’s the focus of your activism today? 

Grass-roots organizing. The organizations that are going door to door and helping people understand that the white working class is not the enemy of people of color, and vice versa.

Jane is right on target, once again! My sentiments, precisely!

Image Credit:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/21/arts/television/jane-fonda-five-acts-hbo.html

#301 / The Cure

An article on Gandhi that appeared in the October 22, 2018, edition of The New Yorker suggests what we must do to restore and revivify our failing political order:

Activists fighting for the environment, for refugees’ and immigrants’ rights, and against racial discrimination and violence continue to be inspired by satyagraha, Gandhi’s neologism meaning nonviolent direct action. The aim of satyagraha was to arouse the conscience of oppressors and invigorate their victims with a sense of moral agency.... 

Satyagraha, literally translated as “holding fast to truth,” obliged protesters to “always keep an open mind and be ever ready to find that what we believed to be truth was, after all, untruth.” Gandhi recognized early on that societies with diverse populations inhabit a post-truth age. “We will never all think alike and we shall always see truth in fragments and from different angles of vision,” he wrote.... 

No one would be less surprised than Gandhi by neo-Fascist upsurges in what he called “nominal” Western democracies, which in his view were merely better at concealing their foundations of violence and exploitation than explicitly Fascist nations were. He thought that democracy in the West was “clearly an impossibility so long as the wide gulf between the rich and the hungry millions persists".... 

True democracy, or swaraj, involved much more participation from citizens, he believed; it required them to combine self-rule with self-restraint, politics with ethics. Turning his back on his middle-class origins, he brought millions of peasants into political life. To him, the age of democracy—“this age of awakening of the poorest of the poor”—was a cause for celebration, and he conceived of democracy as something that “gives the weak the same chance as the strong,” in which “inequalities based on possession and non-possession, colour, race, creed or sex vanish.” .... 

His unabashed invocation of quasi-religious values in politics and his key value of self-sacrifice are also likely to disconcert many readers today. Such assertions as “Just as one must learn the art of killing in the training for violence, so one must learn the art of dying in the training for non-violence” set him in stark opposition to the utility-maximizing premises of Western political economy. But Gandhi’s radically different conception of the human being, and its relationship with others, gives his ideas an inner coherence.... 

At every point, Gandhi still upends modern assumptions, insisting on the primacy of self-sacrifice over self-interest, individual obligations over individual rights, renunciation over consumption, and dying over killing.... 

Karl Polanyi, a refugee from Fascist Europe, became convinced that Fascism, “the most obvious failure of our civilization,” was the consequence of subordinating human needs to the market, and he called for “freedom from economics.” Gandhi likewise argued that, “at every crucial moment, these new-fangled economic laws have broken down in practice. And nations or individuals who accept them as guiding maxims must perish.” 

Gandhi was obsessed with the dangers to human freedom from hyperorganized states, economic calculus, and technocracies, and he anticipated the many mid-century American and European intellectuals who grappled with the most obvious failure of their civilization: the eruption of barbarism in the heart of the modern West.... 

All this seems far removed from the rational debates and discussions that we assume are the way to build public consensus and inform government policy in democracies. But Gandhi realized that democratic politics, as the philosopher Martha Nussbaum has pointed out, “must learn how to cultivate the inner world of human beings, equipping each citizen to contend against the passion for domination and to accept the reality, and the equality, of others.” Moreover, a profound philosophical conviction lay behind the communal endurance of pain and the refusal to retaliate. Gandhi believed that society is much more than a social contract between self-seeking individuals underpinned by the rule of law and structured by institutions; it is actually founded upon sacrificial relationships, whether between lovers, friends, or parents and children.

What is wrong with our politics? It is not the fact that we are "divided." We are inevitably "divided," and politics is the arena in which we seek to make collective decisions notwithstanding the fact that we do not agree, and must nonetheless live together, despite our disagreements. The secret to a decent politics is that our struggles must be motivated by that "neologism," satyagraha, "holding to the truth." We must respect those with whom we have differences, and acknowledge that we may be wrong about our own position, but never stop clinging to what we believe - unless and until we are convinced that it is we, not those with whom we disagree, who are in error.

Are we willing, in fact, to sacrifice our own lives to advance what we believe to be the truth? By that I do not mean, primarily, our contiued physical existence, though Gandhi did counsel that we should be prepared even for that. By "our lives," I mean the conventionalities of our existence, our "routines," our normal expectations and assumptions.

It does not take much by way of research to realize that we are in extremis. Our human civilization, which respects no limits (also mentioned in the article about Gandhi) is destroying the Natural World upon which our human civilization depends. Our willingness to allow the incredible productivity of our organized human efforts to benefit not most of us, but only the smallest slice of us, those 1%-ers at the top, will lead to violence, repression, and social and economic breakdown. It is already leading to death and disease around the world, and in our own country, too, the richest nation in history.

The cure for the life threatening political sickness that afflicts us will require radical change. Those who see a way towards a truth that can change our current realities must cling to that that truth strongly, and give it "agency" within the human world we share in common.

That does mean me. That does mean you.

Image Credit:

https://www.nextbigwhat.com/gandhi-brands-297/

#300 / Faith In Higher Ed?

The Cecil H. Green Library on the Stanford University campus in Stanford, California.

On October 12, 2018, the online magazine Pacific Standard published an article on higher education, titled, "Of Course Public Confidence in Higher Education is Down." Pacific Standard asks, "Why?" It then pretty much says, "oh, just let me count the reasons":

As Americans' faith in higher education reacts to rising costs, mounting debts, and the growing sense that preparation for the workforce need not take a four-year degree, the post-World War II ambitions of higher education—to affordably be everything to everyone —may prove to be a noble failure [sic. There's a split infinitive in that sentence].

I would have to admit that the serene picture above, of a library facility on the Stanford University campus, doesn't look much like a place where a high-powered focus on "preparation for the workforce" is going on. I would like to think that such library facilities would also be found at virtually all colleges and universities, though hopefully with some students making use of them! At any rate, the picture that Pacific Standard placed with its article does seem consistent with its idea that we are wasting a lot of money, needlessly. That library pictured clearly cost big bucks (of course, Stanford can afford it), and there is not much "workforce preparation" going on inside that library. If "workforce preparation" is what "higher education" is all about, then we've got a problem.

Let me just say something, though. The purpose of "higher education" is not to provide "workforce preparation." The idea that workforce preparation is the purpose of higher education suggests that bolstering ongoing commercial enterprise is the most important thing that education should do. Let me dissent. I think that education is to bolster "individual persons," not commercial enterprise. Criticisms about costs and student debt are right on target, but let's try to remind ourselves that we want education to build better informed, and even inspired, citizens. 

As for "workforce preparation," we don't need to be spending the big bucks to tell people how best to compete with robots!

Image Credit:

https://psmag.com/education/of-course-public-confidence-in-higher-education-is-down

#299 / The Constitution Of Truth

Pictured is George Will, who writes opinion columns for The Washington Post. The main purpose of my blog posting today is to "rebroadcast" and reflect upon a phrase from one of Will's columns. The column I want to comment upon appeared in The Salt Lake Tribune on October 10, 2018, and was titled, "Trump’s trolling vs. the ‘constitution of knowledge.’"

Will's column discusses the implications of what might be called the "Gresham's Law" of public discourse. Low-quality and untruthful discourse tends to drive out high-quality, truthful discourse, and that's not good! The state of our polarized and paralyzed politics provides a clear example of what happens when people abandon the idea that they are only supposed to say things, in public debate, that they believe are actually "true." 

The need to preserve "honest" political debate and discussion is a topic I return to from time to time, since it is my idea that we most immediately "live" in a political world that we create, initially, through vigorous debates, which debates are then resolved by political decisions, and which political decisions then result in the laws that govern and define our world. 

If our debates are corrupted at the very start, becoming nothing more than "trolling," to employ Will's characterization, then the result will never lead to the kind of  "constitution of knowledge" that can serve as the foundation for sound decision making.

One of my recent blog postings on this topic was published just before the 2016 election, and was titled, "Living In A 'Post-Fact' World." That blog posting, like Will's recent column, considered the impact that Donald J. Trump was having on political discourse, noting how Trump's "populist" approach to politics is driving normal policy-based debate out of existence, substituting "rallies" in which "trolling" is the norm. Here is how Will puts it:

Modernity began when humanity “removed reality-making from the authoritarian control of priests and princes” and outsourced it to no one in particular. It was given over to “a decentralized, globe-spanning community of critical testers who hunt for each other’s errors.” This is why today’s foremost enemy of modernity is populism, which cannot abide the idea that majorities are not self-validating.

It is that last phrase I particularly want to highlight, the idea that "majorities are not self-validating."

In fact, there is an inherent power in numbers, and those who have the power of numbers, the "majority," always want to claim that truth actually derives from power itself. In Will's phrase, that  claim equates to a belief that "majorities are self-validating." 

The Quaker phrase, "Speak Truth To Power," acknowledges that such claims by power should be expected, but that such claims must be resisted.

Here is the difficulty. It takes genuine courage to speak truth against power, but it is absolutely something we must do. It is only by speaking truth to power that we can preserve our human world.

Image Credit:

https://grist.org/article/memo-to-post-if-george-will-quotes-a-lie-its-still-a-lie/

#298 / Bugs In The System

A recent news report says that bugs are disappearing. Does that seem consistent with your own observations? Famed Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson suggests that you employ the "windshield test" to gauge the realities where you live. 

If you live in Germany, the chances are that your windshield will not be besmirched with the remains of any insect-vehicle collisions. Reports from Germany indicate that insect populations have plummeted by about 75% over the last thirty years.

I can imagine that many might applaud what The Guardian calls an "ecological Armageddon." Bugs ruin picnics. Cleaning them off your windshield and the front of your car was never a welcome task. However, if you believe E.O. Wilson, bugs are "the little things that run the world." It turns out that we need "bugs in the system." 

No bugs? No system!

This is just a reminder, folks, that we ultimately live in the World of Nature. The "political world" that we have created for ourselves, and that we most immediately inhabit, can't survive without the Natural World. We definitely did not, and do not, create the Natural World, and yet human survival depends on it. 

Maybe there are still a few years left before it's "game over" for human civilization. While we wait to see, let's think a few nice thoughts about bugs!

Image Credit:

https://www.turbosquid.com/FullPreview/Index.cfm/ID/720549

#297 / Civil War II?

Do you think that our politics, today, can properly be denominated as "Civil War II?" Thomas Friedman, The New York Times pundit, does suggest something along those lines. Friedman's October 2, 2018, column was titled, "The American Civil War, Part II." Here is a brief excerpt:

I began my journalism career covering a civil war in Lebanon. I never thought I’d end my career covering a civil war in America.

We may not be there yet, but if we don’t turn around now, we will surely get where we’re going — which was best described by Senator Jeff Flake on Monday: “Tribalism is ruining us. It is tearing our country apart. It is no way for sane adults to act.” ...

When I look at all the people today who are propelling their political careers and fattening their wallets by dividing us, I cannot help but wonder: Do these people go home at night to some offshore island where none of this matters? Do these people really think their kids aren’t going to pay for the venom they sell and spread? Don’t worry, I know the answer: They aren’t thinking and they aren’t going to stop it.

What stops it? When a majority of Americans, who are still center-left and center-right, come together and vote only for lawmakers who have the courage to demand a stop to it — now, right now, not just when they’re leaving office or on their death beds.

David Brooks, another New York Times pundit, wrote a column a couple of days later that agreed with Friedman, though Brooks didn't use the Civil War metaphor.

The Daily KOS, which provides a consistently left-leaning political commentary, thought that Friedman's column left out something important; namely, that the two "sides" in our Civil War II aren't just groups with different political preferences, and they are not just different "tribes" in our world of identity allegiances. One side is essentially representing those who have cornered the market on wealth, and want to keep it that way. The other side is almost everyone else.

The picture at the top of this blog posting, and the following quote, show the way The Daily KOS is seeking to depict and describe our Civil War II:

While Friedman is recognizing how bad things are (and he’s not wrong on that), he’s still not clear that the real enemy is people with power and wealth who care about nothing but their own self interest.

I think The Daily KOS is right in what they're saying, but I don't believe their picture does this insight justice. Their "description" of our situation is correct, but their "depiction" of our situation has a flaw.

Since the days of Occupy Wall Street, those people identified by The Daily KOS as "the enemy" have properly been called the 1%. If that is a more or less accurate estimate of their numbers, and I do believe it is, then it is clear that there really isn't any "civil war" at all. In a civil war, there would have to be two sides, roughly equal in number, who must fight out their differing desires on the battlefield of politics. That's what the picture from The Daily KOS is suggesting, but if those coming in from the righthand side are actually only 1% of the entire civil society, the picture is wrong. There should only be a few soldiers on the righthand side - maybe two or three soldiers - along with that important dollar sign flag, intended to represent the immense wealth of the 1%. On the other side is where all the numbers would be. There would be an overwhelmingly large army coming from the lefthand side of the picture, all of them ordinary folks, but without any money, of course. 

If the battlefield is politics, and if our government is supposed to reflect the will of the voters, what is the problem? Since a significant portion of our population is not getting decent medical care, guaranteed higher education, worthwhile employment, decent pay, or adequate housing, why hasn't an army of ordinary folks overwhelmed those few "soldiers" whose power isn't their number but their with gigantic wealth? If democracy worked the way it's supposed to, you would think, we should have straightened out our national priorities long ago.

Back in the day when people were not afraid to be called "socialists" (that time may be coming back), this problem was identified as "false consciousness." In other words, lots of people are confused about what side they are actually on. Industrial workers vote for Trump, and he then guts the already-paltry protections they have been provided in the past. They are fighting for the wrong side. Political education should solve this problem, you would think. Somehow, though, that has never actually worked. The reality is that money seems to win every time. How do we escape from the politics of division, which is perpetrated, as Friedman says, by those with the money? 

I don't think that the "Civil War" metaphor is very helpful in getting us there. As I often proclaim in these blog postings, most people tend to act the way they think they are "expected" to act, and to see things in the way they are told they should see them. Wealth controls media, and the media is telling us that we are massively divided into warring tribes. But if we want to overcome the divisions that are crippling our society (something that both Friedman and The Daily KOS say they want), then postulating a "Civil War" in our society sends exactly the wrong message. 

The "Civil War" metaphor says that we are, in fact, "divided" as a society. And if "division" is the diagnosis, then we are all properly seeing ourselves as separate, tribe-like groups. Friedman's plea is that those who find themselves near the center of these perceived divisions should seek to make friends across the dividing line. That sounds like a completely ineffectual prescription (and this is exactly The Daily KOS complaint about what Friedman said). 

My suggestion is that we need to begin elevating the very opposite idea, the idea that we are "together in this." We need to build a new politics, in other words, on the idea that we are "unified." Real projects of real social and economic consequence would require us all to work together, and so we would learn, through our personal experience, just how much our individual and personal differences are of little import, in the context of our overall connectedness.

My specific suggestion is that we must organize at every political level to fashion a new national movement to achieve national goals that will have broad acceptance, and that will provide meaningful economic benefits to the 99%. I see the WPA as a model.

How many trees do we need to plant to combat global warming? Millions. That means jobs and a common purpose. How many solar panels should be installed wherever rooftops get sun? Millions. That means jobs and a common purpose. How many pre-kindergarten child care centers do we need to give every young child in our society a good start in life? How many drug outreach program do we need to undo the damage we see on the streets every day? How many new homes, price-restricted to be affordable to ordinary working families, must we construct? You get the idea! This is not, by any means, a total list. Millions and millions, and millions of good jobs. All such projects making clear our common purpose.

We need to redirect our political demands in a positive direction. If you don't mind me bringing up past mistakes, Hillary Clinton ran against the "deplorables," and Bernie Sanders ran on the idea of Medicare for All, and a free college education for our nation's youth. Bernie's idea was the better one, politically. Positive, not negative. But perhaps even Bernie didn't get it completely right. Bernie was advocating programs that the government should be providing to us. I say we need programs in which we ourselves will be engaged in doing what we know this nation needs to do. That's why I like the WPA model.

To pay for all this? Well, those three or four soldiers on the right, with their money flag, won't beat the majority if the majority actually begins demanding that our society make it possible for us, collectively, to achieve what we know we need to do. The selfish rich will have to disgorge. That is how they can contribute to the common project!

We can get on the right track by starting to work together, positively, to confront and overcome the challenges that will determine whether or not human civilization, and American democracy, will survive.

Image Credit:
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2018/10/3/1801131/-Thomas-L-Friedman-Acknowledges-The-American-Civil-War-Part-II-but-omits-a-key-element?detail=emaildkre

#296 / Why Rent Control Is An Issue

The latest edition of The Sun magazine (pictured) just arrived in my mailbox. The following observation by Kin Hubbard, an American cartoonist, humorist, and journalist who died in 1930, was included in the "Sunbeams" section of the magazine. The "Sunbeams" section always appears at the end of the magazine, and so tends to be the place to which I turn first. "Sunbeams" contains brief quotes of relevance to contemporary life.

Hubbard's quote does seem relevant to Proposition 10 on the state ballot, and Measure M on the Santa Cruz City ballot, both of which relate to rent control: 

The hardest thing is to take less when you can get more. 

Image Credit:

https://www.thesunmagazine.org/issues/515

#295 / Our Bodies Know

In "Look Up From Your Screen," an article published in Aeon, the online magazine, Nicholas Tampio mounts a compelling argument against computer-based learning. Some call it "personal learning," or "personalized learning." Tampio says that efforts to tie education to computers, the definition of "personalized learning," is undermining genuine education. 

People like Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and Betsy DeVos, our current Secretary of Education, are all in favor of letting children immerse themselves in individual work on computers, as a way to help them learn. DeVos calls personalized learing "one of the most promising developments in K-12 education."

The phrase in Tampio's article that first drew my attention, as I scanned through it quickly, was his statement that "our bodies know things we can’t articulate." We "learn" with our bodies, in other words, not just with our minds. This has definitely been my personal experience. Tampio makes a good case for an educational system that is based on a whole body involvement in learning activities.

As I read further in Tampio's article, though, I ended up thinking that a profound philosophical issue is involved in this debate about the value of "personalized learning," and that the political implications are enormous. As part of his argument, Tampio cites to French Philosopher Merleau-Ponty:

To better understand why so many people embrace screen learning, we can turn to a classic of 20th-century French philosophy: Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception (1945). 

According to Merleau-Ponty, European philosophy has long prioritised ‘seeing’ over ‘doing’ as a path to understanding. Plato, René Descartes, John Locke, David Hume, Immanuel Kant: each, in different ways, posits a gap between the mind and the world, the subject and the object, the thinking self and physical things. Philosophers take for granted that the mind sees things from a distance. When Descartes announced ‘I think therefore I am’, he was positing a fundamental gulf between the thinking self and the physical body. Despite the novelty of digital media, Merleau-Ponty would contend that Western thought has long assumed that the mind, not the body, is the site of thinking and learning. 

According to Merleau-Ponty, however, "consciousness is originally not an 'I think that,' but rather an 'I can.'" In other words, human thinking emerges out of lived experience, and what we can do with our bodies profoundly shapes what philosophers think or scientists discover. "The entire universe of science is constructed upon the lived world," he wrote. Phenomenology of Perception aimed to help readers better appreciate the connection between the lived world and consciousness.

The "Mind-Body Problem" is fascinating, and it's an ancient one, but here is what got me thinking about politics, as I read the discussion I excerpted above. The statement by Merleau-Ponty that "consciousness is not an "I think that" activity, but an "I can" activity, correlates with the fact that we can see ourselves either as "observers" or as "actors." So often, we observe, think about, and analyze the [political] world in which we most immediately live, but forget that we are not only "observers" of that world, but that we, in fact, "create" the realities which define it.

In other words, an education that conditions us to think that we are "educated" when we can "observe" and thus know about the world, is an education that will tend to convince us that we are "observers" not "actors." In the world of politics, that means that we would be receiving an education that tell us that we are "subjects," not "sovereigns."

The kind of whole-body learning that Tampio is urging is really the only kind of education that is consistent with democracy, a political system that is based on the claim that we have the power to, and do, create the world in which we live.

So, there is an important political  issue involved in this "personalized learning" debate. Do we want to educate our children to see themselves as "observers" and "subjects," or do we want them to learn of their creative power to change the realities they find around them? A desire to teach our kids the power of democracy, instead of telling them that they are subject to authority, is a good reason not to let our kids "learn" by getting their lessons from "personalized" sessions with a computer.

Out and about in the real, physical world. That's where we find out who we really are.

Image Credit:

https://aeon.co/essays/children-learn-best-when-engaged-in-the-living-world-not-on-screens

#294 / A Little Theology

I noted in a blog posting some time ago that Michelangelo, in painting his wonderful "The Creation of Adam" on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, might really have been engaging in a highly subversive exercise. The painting suggests (once you see it this way you won't forget it) that the God so thrillingly depicted, giving the gift of life to Adam, is really the product (along with all those other celestial characters) of something happening inside the human brain. 

The lesson that Michelangelo seems to be teaching is that our whole idea and picture of God is a human creation. We have created God, in other words, not the other way around. There is no God outside ourselves. 

This idea, of course, is definitely subversive of the tenets of religion, and I tend to think of Michelangelo as an artist of great courage, advancing this thought, so contrary to Christian doctrine, inside a temple located within the heart of the Vatican, command central of the Catholic Church.

The suggestion that our idea and image of God is a human creation is, of course, a "modern" notion, widely acceptable to what may well be a large majority of those who ever think about theology. 

There are some other ways of trying to figure out the truth about the Creation and to understand our place in it. The Old Testament claims (in Exodus 3:14) that God is beyond any human naming or definition. When asked his name by Moses, God makes that abundantly clear: "I AM WHO I AM." The Holy God of the Jews can never be named, in witness to those words spoken to Moses. 

The New Testament idea, of course, is a pretty radical departure from that. Jesus, undeniably human, a person who bleeds when pierced and who dies on a cross, essentially claims that the Old Testament idea that we can never know God must be modified in a significant way. Jesus himself, so human, claims to incorporate God in his human form: "I am in the Father and the Father is in me" (John 14:11). When we wish to see God and to comprehend his being, Jesus suggests that we should look into the human face.

I do think about theology (quite a bit, as a matter of fact), so I have naturally puzzled over these thoughts about the nature of God, and whether or not God "exists," in any sense different from the obvious fact that God exists as an idea that human beings have developed. I cannot, in the end, come down on the side that believes that we have "created God," though I admit that our "ideas" and our "pictures" of God are all human creations. Inevitably, since we are human, they would have to be. 

In my opinion, the Old Testament gets it right in saying, as Moses tells the story of his personal encounter with God, that the one true claim about God is that God is beyond naming and claiming. I happen to think that Jesus gets it right, too, by suggesting that we should look for God within ourselves, within each and every human person. The Quakers have a little phrase that gets to this: "There is that of God in every person." 

The bottom line theological truth, for me, is that "something is happening here," and we don't know what it is. We live, we know not why, but being alive is serious. Naturally, as we try to explain the unexplainable, we conjure up pictures (like the one on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel), but the important truth is to recognize that the things that we have done, and that we have created, are all subsidiary, and wholly dependent on the existence that "God" created. Failure to admit our dependence upon the Creation, and to recognize our status as creatures in a world that makes our life possible, is the very definition of sin. That's what I learned from Professor James Sanders, at Union Theological Seminary, in 1971.

And sin is a serious mistake. Forgetting that we are utterly dependent on the Creation is a fundamental error in understanding, and will have serious consequences. As the Bible suggests, "the wages of sin is death" (Romans 6:23). 

The global warming crisis that threatens to sweep away all of our human creations in flood and fire is the perfect example, it seems to me, of how we need to have a right relationship with the Creator of all life, however depicted, and however unknowable. 

This is just a little thought for a Sunday, aimed at those who like to think about theology from time to time.

Image Credit:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Creation_of_Adam#/media/File:Creación_de_Adán_(Miguel_Ángel).jpg

# 293 / The Great Equalizer

For them that think death’s honesty
Won’t fall upon them naturally
Life sometimes must get lonely

  --- Bob Dylan (It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)

The Nation recently published a review of Barbara Ehrenreich's latest book, Natural Causes. The book is a personal and philosophical statement about death, and about how we should deal with death, and the review makes it seem like the book is well worth reading: 

Natural Causes was inspired by a particular moment in Ehrenreich’s life: her acceptance of her own mortality. But that moment gives way to a broader inquiry into the biological, social, and political implications of the American denial of death. In fact, one reason the book is so compelling is that Ehrenreich moves fluidly back and forth between discussing our physical limitations, our social and political limitations, and the relationship between the two. 

Ehrenreich begins with microscopic observations of cell behavior to paint a detailed yet accessible picture of the body in conflict with itself. Macrophages, she tells us, are the “blue collar workers” of the body, cells that dispose of dead and injured cells and eat microbes that have made their way past the barrier of the skin—so it’s easy to see them as the good guys, “the vanguard of bodily defense,” as Ehrenreich puts it. But more recently, scientists have discovered a sinister role played by these cells, at least “from the point of view of the organism”: They can serve as “cheerleaders on the side of death,” accumulating at the site of cancerous tumors and encouraging their growth. 

Macrophages—and the cancers and autoimmune disorders these cells promote—increasingly seem to be not just an error or mutation, but something happening within the natural responses of the body. For Ehrenreich, this opens up a much more philosophical question about the very nature of human autonomy and control: “If cells are alive and can seemingly act in their own interests against other parts of the body or even against the entire organism, then we may need to see ourselves less as smoothly running ‘wholes’ that can be controlled by conscious human intervention, and more as confederations, or at least temporary alliances, of microscopic creatures.” Just as our efforts to control our individual bodies are doomed, Ehrenreich argues, so are our efforts as individuals to uplift ourselves. The interdependence and chaos created by the body also lead to the same conclusions as the interdependence and chaos created by modern life: We can’t just go it on our own.

The "bottom line" here is a lesson we need to continue to relearn. In politics, and in life (and death): "We can't just go it on our own."

Image Credit:

https://www.thenation.com/article/the-great-equalizer/

#292 / Say Goodbye To WCA

Robert P. Jones has written a book called The End of White Christian America. Jones is the Chief Executive Officer of the Public Religious Research Institute. PRRI is a non-profit, nonpartisan "think tank" that is dedicated to "conducting independent research at the intersection of religion, culture, and public policy."

And what does PRRI find at that intersection (the one with that nice old church on the corner)? Well, you have to read the book to get the full report, but the title does rather sum it up.

It used to be, according to Jones, that our political, cultural, and social life was dominated by a paradigm directly related to Christian religious principles (and these were, by and large, "Protestant" religious principles, and those Protestants were, almost overwhelmingly, White). Now, even Muslims are being elected to political office. So, if you thought that WCA was the "way it spozed to be," you had better say goodbye to all that. That is Jones' message.

White Christians (including evangelical Christians, who came somewhat late to the party, but then had a pretty good run, in terms of their cultural, social, and political impact) are now being forced to deal with the "Three R's": Remembering, Repentance, and Repair. 

Jones does an Elisabeth Kübler-Ross style analysis of how WCA must now face the death of its past cultural and political dominance. "Religion," per se, doesn't come into the book very directly; the emphasis is on how White Christians have taken for granted that it is their prerogative to decide what being an "American" is all about. No more!

While I am both White and a Christian, I identify with being "American" more than I have ever identified with either of those other aspects of my personal situation. Thus, I did not much "see myself" in any of the descriptions that Jones painted of the now-disappearing WCA. To the degree that there has been a concerted effort, backed by money, to assert the political and cultural dominance of White Christians (and Jones makes a pretty good case that this has, indeed, been an intentional project since the early 1800's), I can only say, "it is high time for that effort to be terminated." Those who agree, but who might wonder what's happening now, will be comforted by Jones' "Afterword," which discounts any idea that WCA is making a comeback, in connection with the election of our current president.

If someone were to focus on what the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution have to say about religion, one would find that the very first statement in the Bill of Rights makes clear that the whole idea of a "WCA" is totally at odds with what this country is supposed to be all about: 

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof...

This is the very FIRST statement in our Bill of Rights. Let's read that document as if it were a Protestant prayerbook. It has a lot to teach us as we leave behind a WCA that never should have existed in the first place.

Image Credit:

https://www.vox.com/identities/2017/7/18/15958214/age-of-white-christian-america-over

#291 / Let Them Eat Cake

According to someone who has posted the graphic above on the website for the "Nextdoor" group covering my neighborhood, various proponents of Measure M, the rent control initiative measure that appears on the City of Santa Cruz ballot this November, are using this graphic in connection with the "Yes on M" campaign. The "No on M" group labels the measure, "Too Expensive, Too Extreme." According to this Nextdoor posting, here is a "Yes on M" come back.

I can't remember which of Shakespeare's characters said, famously, "the first thing we have to do is kill all the lawyers." As a lawyer myself, this idea of how to solve society's problems never quite warmed my heart. A proposal to kill all the landlords, the implication of this graphic, isn't going to warm the hearts of the landlords, either, many of whom (like many lawyers) aren't really the kind of bad people who should be marked for extirpation.

In other words, if this graphic is actually being used in connection with the "Yes on M" campaign (and whether or not that is true, I don't know), it's not what I would call "good politics." Kind of consistent with the Donald Trump approach to his political opponents: "Lock them up" (or, take them to the guillotine, if one happens to be handy). Saudi Arabia seems to have put this concept into current practice.

Besides providing my "this is bad politics" reaction to the graphic, I do want to make a substantive comment about rent control. The excesses of the private market are destroying the lives of the average and below average income members of my local community. I mean those who are employed here in Santa Cruz County in "ordinary" jobs. You know, the jobs that make the world work.

High-tech workers and others whose employment by Silicon Valley firms gives them salaries that are often double (or more) what ordinary workers here can earn are using their "gold" to "get the goods." That is to be expected, of course. Everyone wants to live in Santa Cruz, and if landlords set their rents to what the market will bear, and to make the most for themselves (and that is, exactly, what the private market suggests that they ought to do) then those with more income get the right to occupy the scarce real estate available in the community. Make no mistake, this is the "Golden Rule" of politics. Those who have the gold make the rules, and they get the benefits.

A good antidote for the bad effects of out of control individualism is collective action. In two words, "government regulation." That is tried and true. When private markets start having truly detrimental social impacts, the community as a whole can step in and establish a set of rules that makes things a bit fairer. That is what the Measure M proponents are suggesting. Some think the measure is "too expensive and too extreme." There's a judgment call there, of course, but the need for some kind of intervention in our current circumstances seems very clear to me.

I would like to remind any California residents who might be reading this blog posting that a YES vote on Proposition 10 could give the elected officials of Santa Cruz, as well as the elected officials of other local communities throughout the state, the right to craft a rent control approach for their local community that is neither "too expensive" nor "too extreme."

Whatever a Santa Cruz voter's view might be on the specifics of Measure M, if that voter agrees with me that some sort of collective response to our out of control rental market is absolutely needed, I urge support for a state measure that will return to local elected officials the ability to take action locally, in a way that they determine their local communities will support.

One final thought. When people get desperate enough, they do resort to violence. Marie Antoinette had advice for those who couldn't afford bread - and the popular reaction to her "let them eat cake" statement was, in fact, the guillotine. A society's continuing failure to make things "a bit fairer" will lead to violence almost every time.

We do know that - so we should know better. A resort to violence by those who are desperate is an observable phenomenon, throughout history. Wealth and income inequality is a national problem, and our national leaders, in giving ever bigger portions to the wealthy while cutting back on support and assistance to those who have little, are making things worse, and are daring the oppressed and distressed to try to do something about it.

"Politics" (and politics even at the local level) is how we can do something about it, without killing all the landlords (or the lawyers, or anyone else). Measure M is one attempt to do something about a real problem. We need to be sympathetic to those who are so graphically bringing the problem to our attention. If it's not "M," what's it going to be?

Just remember, by voting "YES" on Proposition 10, you will be giving our local elected officials an opportunity to try to answer that question in a positive and locally-acceptable way!*

_______________________________________

* An article in today's San Francisco Chronicle indicates that current polling suggests that Proposition 10 is going to lose, even in the politically-liberal Bay Area. Those opposing Proposition 10 are quoted in the article, saying they "believe in a free market, free economy. Rent control may help certain people, but it disadvantages others." That is, of course, true - and that's the point; rent control advantages those who are being driven out of their homes. A "free market" means those with the most money get things; those who have less money don't get things, including basic necessities like food and shelter. Americans have always believed that it is both fair and appropriate for the government to step in to level the playing field when the "free market" starts having socially destructive effects. Minimum wage laws, for instance, are an example. When it comes to housing, which is a basic human necessity, the operation of the "free market" in Santa Cruz is resulting in a catastrophic housing crisis, in which ordinary working families are being thrown out of their homes. If you think local communities should be able to use their local government powers to try to make things a bit fairer, a "YES" vote on Proposition 10 is what's needed.

Image Credit:

(1) - https://nextdoor.com/news_feed/?post=93713537
(2) - https://voteyesonprop10.org/news/yes-on-10-launches-rent-is-too-damn-high-bus-tour/

#290 / It Started With Sputnik

Roger Berkowitz, the Academic Director of The Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College, has published an article titled, "The Human Condition Today: The Challenge of Science."

The article is brief, only six pages long, and it is not necessary to have read Arendt's book, The Human Condition, to make sense of what Berkowitz has to say. Of course, I do recommend that you read Arendt's book, but reading it is not a precondition for understanding the issues that Berkowitz discusses.

As outlined by Berkowitz, Arendt slightly disagrees with the quotation from Bob Dylan, which I featured in my blog post yesterday. 

Dylan suggests that our human doom began with "touching the moon." Arendt, as Berkowitz notes, says that the successful launch of Sputnik 1 was the key point. And Arendt doesn't use the word "doom," either, but she might just as well have. 

Berkowitz' article explores, without ever using the term, what I call the "Two Worlds Hypothesis." I recommend the article. I do note, however, that both Berkowitz and Arendt seem to believe that when we say that "everything is possible" this should be taken to mean that everything is possible in both the human world and the World of Nature. 

I don't think so!

In our world, as Arendt's seminal book, The Origins of Totalitarianism, showed us, "everything" is indeed possible. Horrible things beyond imagining are, in our human world, a possible outcome of human action. "Progress" is not inevitable, as was more or less taken for granted before the Holocaust, and the future of our human world will be determined by our own choices and actions. This truth about our human situation is why, to quote Bob Dylan once again, "we live in a political world."

Of course, "good things" beyond imagining are possible, too, as well as "bad things." As Arendt has made clear, perhaps most directly in On Revolution, every new human being coming into the world has the gift of freedom, which means the ability to do something that has never been imagined or thought of before, and by taking such action, in cooperation with others, to transform reality. 

But the Berkowitz discussion, and presumably based on Arendt, who was a secular and not a religious thinker, seems to indicate that "everything is possible," not only in our human world but in the Natural World, as well. 

There is no doubt, as Berkowitz' article makes clear, that we do think that having escaped the Earth, we are now free of earthly, natural constraints. The picture below shows one manifestation of the arrogance of this kind of thinking. Elon Musk seems truly to believe that we are no longer "confined" to the Earth and that we will, one day (if we are rich), be able to drive our spacecraft into the far reaches of the solar system (and possibly beyond), the same way we drive across the country, today.

I don't think so!

The difference between the human world and the World of Nature is this: WE create the human world within the World of Nature. We did not create, and cannot modify or replace, the Natural World,  a world upon which we are utterly dependent. For those who think that "science" has turned us from creatures who live within a world that we did not create, and that science has transformed us into some species of the  Creator, let me quote Bob Dylan once again. 

What Dylan said to Columbus, in Dylan's 115th Dream, is what I would say to anyone who thinks that Elon Musk and Ray Kurzweil are correct in their claim that we will soon have the ability to "transcend biology."

The funniest thing was
When I was leavin’ the bay
I saw three ships a-sailin’
They were all heading my way
I asked the captain what his name was
And how come he didn’t drive a truck
He said his name was Columbus
I just said, “Good luck”

Image Credits:

(1) - https://www.chopshopstore.com/products/sputnik-from-the-historic-robotic-spacecraft-series?variant=9586945027

(2) - https://www.businessinsider.com/starman-elon-musk-car-orbit-collision-risk-calculations-2018-2

#289 / First Step Was Touching The Moon

Man thinks ’cause he rules the earth

He can do with it as he please

And if things don’t change soon, he will

Oh, man has invented his doom

First step was touching the moon

Now, there’s a woman on my block

She just sit there as the night grows still

She say who gonna take away his license to kill?

These lyrics are from Bob Dylan's song, "License to Kill," which is found on his Infidels album (1983). They are particularly relevant to my "Two Worlds Hypothesis," which I continue to believe is worth thinking about. 

The idea is simple enough. Though we assume and act as though we live in a single, unified "world," and that pine trees and the U.S. Capitol Building are congruent realities, that is not actually the case. 

We live in two different worlds, simultaneously. Most immediately, we live in a human world that we create. Ultimately, however, we live in and are dependent upon the World of Nature. Humans may "rule" the Earth, but that doesn't mean that we can "do with it as we please." At least, we can't do what we please with the Earth without paying the price!

Humans do tend to think that we can do whatever we want to do with the World of Nature, but that is a big mistake. Let's take another look at those California wildfires (one of which is pictured below), and try not to fool ourselves about global warming. We are destroying both our human world and the Natural World by ignoring the laws that govern the World of Nature.  

We have acted, as Bob Dylan says, as though we can do as we please with the Natural World. I guess,  literally speaking, we "can." But if we do as we please, and ignore the laws that apply in the Natural World, we will suffer the consequences: 

Some thoughtful observers have already declared "game over" for human civilization, based on our continuing human refusal to confront the global warming limits that ultimtely determine whether or not human life on Earth will continue. The fact that there are such limits is becoming ever more apparent. Is it really "game over?" This might be true. 

But whether or not we are already at the end of the game, did it really all start with "touching the moon?"

I think that this assertion could be a kind of poetic license on Dylan's part, but a human determination to escape the limits of the Earth is definitely connected to the kind of human arrogance that continues to ignore all kinds of limitations imposed by the World of Nature.

I was intrigued by a recent article by Barry Vacker, writing in Medium. Vacker says that the picture at the top of this blog post is the "original" of the famous NASA "Earthrise" photo, the first photo of the Earth from space. Here is how we are used to seeing this picture: 

That isn't actually the way the photo was taken, according to Vacker. NASA "tilted" the picture to give Earth preeminence, something that Vacker says turns the photograph into "NASA’s Icon of Human Narcissism."

Rather than illustrate our actual place in the universe, the photo was altered by NASA to maintain the illusion of human centrality amid the cosmic void surrounding Earth. Five decades later, NASA’s move has proven prophetic for post-Apollo culture. Earthrise is the first “Earth selfie” and points directly toward the Anthropocene, social media culture, and humanity’s deep narcissism—still pretending to be the center of the universe, the center of all value, purpose, and meaning on Earth and beyond.

I think it is time to stop playing "let's pretend." Let's not pretend, anymore, that we are not utterly dependent on Planet Earth, and the World of Nature. 

Who gonna take away his license to kill?

Image Credits:

(1) - https://medium.com/explosion-of-awareness/nasas-icon-of-human-narcissism-the-50th-anniversary-of-earthrise-and-what-it-means-for-the-21st-155082710212

(2) - http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-lopez-climate-action-08122018-story.html(3) - https://medium.com/explosion-of-awareness/nasas-icon-of-human-narcissism-the-50th-anniversary-of-earthrise-and-what-it-means-for-the-21st-155082710212