Category: Education

Community

Attention! Um….attention?

This weekend past I attended our local science fiction convention, Archon. I was on a number of panels and something of a theme started to emerge. More than one, actually. A couple of times the discussion came around to our lack of attention. And I coined a phrase.

We live in a Fractured Attention Ecology.

I’m keeping that. It was off-the-cuff, but the more I think about it, I think it’s something worth exploring. I’m not equipped to do that, not clinically. I’m a writer. But I realized that we keep trying to label the chronic short attention span that seems to plague contemporary life, to fit it into a manageable file to be dealt with by the appropriate expert. Everything from ADHD to a general lack of discipline. Occasionally someone points out that we have too much information to manage, but that doesn’t always explain why we can’t simply ignore the enormous quantity and just pick a few things.

For one thing, for people who apparently are inflicted with ever-shortening attention spans, we sure consume a lot of big thick novels and tune in to extended series and even movies are getting longer. We see people scrolling through their phones for hours at a time and the hours spent going through internet connections…

But then it becomes apparent that the depth of our knowledge on average is getting shallower. Many of us know a little bit about a great many things, but not much about any given subject.

Humans adapt. We adapt very well. Over the last forty years, since cable tv appeared just to pick a starting point, we have been adapting to an ever-expanding range of choices. We have been training ourselves to try to pay attention to more and more, which means we’re absorbing less and less. The urgency to try to stay abreast seems to drive us to simply not spend much time on any one thing. Added to that, the range of things we have to pay attention to is widening.

I grant you, some of the problem is organic, but it may be self-inflicted. We adapt. We’ve adapted to a changing ecology. We haven’t done so very well. But then the ecology itself has not yet stabilized.

Fractured Attention Ecology.

Now, this may be something already being studied, so I won’t suggest I have a brand new idea about this, but no one else recognized the term, so for the time being I’m taking credit for it. It does suggest a different way to look at the problem.

More information for us to deal with.

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Just To Be Clear…

Just to be clear…

I will be voting for Kamala Harris in November. Nothing radical or shocking in that, I intended to vote for anyone who had a chance of winning who is not Donald J. Trump. It helps this time that the candidate I’m voting for has some policy positions I can support unreservedly. 

We like to dismiss political ignorance in this country by attempting a blasé pose that “really, there’s not much difference between the two parties.” There may actually have been a time when that was largely true, but we have been watching a divergence of positions of tectonic proportions for the last 40 years. One could make an argument for the last 70, but I think it became alarming with the election of Ronald Reagan.

Disclaimer: I voted for Reagan the first time. Like too many people, I was swayed by the optics, by the substanceless bluster. And Reagan made the usual slew of claims that he would not do this or that, to mollify those who, conservative as they might have been, were content with a great deal of what was in place since FDR. 

But Reagan put our economy on the track to suffer recurrent bubbles, resulting in higher paydays for those who knew how to play the market, and increasing disparities in income, and a degradation of middle class security. He was the first Republican president whose policies left us with a huge debt and a deficit that became a political football for the next 9 election cycles, a problem no one in the GOP wanted to solve because it was too good to run on.

Reagan brought a religious element into national politics that has brought us to a point of division as bad as the one that caused the Civil War, all in order to leverage a particular kind of political opportunism that pumped ether and adrenaline into issues that had never been controversial before, issues which went on to become talking points no one wanted to actually solve because they were such excellent campaign issues.

Reagan started the whole denigration of a federal government that had till that point worked miracles in terms of public service since the 1940s. All in the name of dividing the states and permitting a partisan war that served the interests of Big Money.

After Reagan, the allowable agendas shifted to the right and even a centrist like Clinton found himself unable to veto the repeal of Glass-Steagall, which took down the last bulwark between commercial and private banking that led directly to the 2008 collapse. The weak legislation passed to make up for what had worked perfectly well since the 1930s received death blows in the form of Supreme Court decisions on the side of Money, primarily Citizens United, which in the 1960s and 70s would have looked like sheerest nonsense to D.C.

All of which brought us into the era of politics which saw unbelievable increases in campaign spending, an environment in which the primary job of an elected official is always the next campaign (perpetual running), and a deterioration of reliable information sources which has given us a toxic media ecology that has very little to do with substantive policy.

Hillary Clinton was buried under an unrelenting media avalanche which should have had no traction. They kept bringing her back for Benghazi. She never pleaded the Fifth (one of her aides did, but Clinton herself never did), and the last time she sat for 11 hours. The fact is, if the Republicans, who were in charge of these investigations, could have found something, why didn’t they? Because wrapping it up would have taken one of their campaign issues off the table.

We are living in an absurd period. 

It is perhaps a legitimate question to ask, how is the average citizen supposed to know what to believe?

In specific, it’s a huge task. But when it comes down to identifying legitimate issues from bullshit, it shouldn’t be that hard.

We have politicians railing against tampon distribution in schools. Really? Are you that hard up for a campaign issue?

This is simple, at least for me. Those who continually attempt to deny voting rights to various groups are the enemy.

Those who seek to strip rights from otherwise legitimate groups are the enemy.

Those who continually tell you who to fear, especially with no evidence to support their positions, are the enemy.

Those who support book banning, under any circumstances, are the enemy.

Those who refuse to acknowledge the chief components of violence are the enemy.

Those who reject science are the enemy.

Those who back corporations instead of neighborhoods are the enemy.

We can go on. And, unfortunately, there are people who wholeheartedly support the enemy. In the absence of a larger perspective, their personal intolerances and knee-jerk fears supplant coherent thinking. All of these things are the trademark today of one party. For the first time in my life I am rejecting any Republican out of hand. The GOP is, in my opinion, on the wrong side of history—indeed, civic morality—on every issue.

And for the moment it appears they are finally beginning to implode from it.

The cherry atop the sundae is Trump. I have never been so dismayed by the categorical blindness of so many of my fellow citizens over something which should be obvious to a child. The man is a trash fire. He managed to accomplish two things during his presidency (three if you count packing the Supreme Court with ideological drones): another enormous tax cut for the top 1%; a tariff program that set the stage for all the distribution nightmares triggered by a pandemic he then refused to take seriously until the situation was dire (which set us up for the inflation we are still trying to contain); and, though this was unofficial, chaining the GOP to him in such a way that he is still telling them how to vote even though he is out of office…which led directly to one more failure in congress to deal with the immigration problems he exacerbated. Why? Because, like so much else, it is too good an issue to solve.

He has stated pretty much unequivocally his desire to be a dictator. For a day or life makes no difference to me, he treated it like a joke, but his actions around January 6th show clearly that he’s one of those politicos who believe he only has to win one election and he should be there for life.

It is part of the incoherence of his supporters that they will not understand reality. Biden has performed incredibly as president, and yet none of the MAGA camp can tell you what he has done much less why it should be seen as bad. The repeated canard that Biden has and is destroying the country is so blatantly untrue, yet people—many of whom have benefited from Biden’s programs—believe in their bones that we are about to collapse, when the opposite is true.

And then there are those who like to position themselves as somehow morally superior who refuse to consider voting for either because, a pox on both houses. This is little more than a refusal to accept how politics function and an excuse to not compromise, without which we have the gridlock we are all so justly tired. Third parties never do anything but sow chaos, at least when they come out of the gate going for the top prize without having done the decades long work of grassroots community building. People like that keep their gaze fixed on the presidency while their local school boards end up run by religious zealots who prefer a high teen pregnancy rate and rising STDs to actually dealing with the problems as things which can be solved and, oh, while they’re busy with Abstinence Only nonsense they’re trying to ban books and shove the Ten Commandments into the classroom. They don’t, by the way, do that because they think these things will help, they do it because they want the problems shoved back in various closets, the costs notwithstanding.

I want more people to vote and for it to be easier for them.

I want books of all kinds available to everyone.

I want women to be equal not just before the law but before the community.

I want wealth to remain in communities.

I want us to stop burning the planet down in the name of a few more points on the Dow.

I want people to be cared for without it bankrupting them.

And I want Being American to mean everyone, not just code for Being White.

I want the stupidity to end.

Now, that last one, I realize, may be hoping for too much. But we might start by actually educating kids rather than just trying to make them conform.

We might start by getting rid of those who traffic in intolerance just to hold office.

Big job. Maybe we should actually start by stop mistaking political expediency for being fair.

So, yeah, I’m voting for Kamala. Not because I expect her to magically solve all the problems. If she solves one it will be an achievement. But the other guy—the other Party—seems uninterested in solving anything. Rather, they’d like there to be a few more, so they have something to get their base stirred up and keep voting for them.

See you in November.

Art

Anniversaries

Permit me to take a moment out from the current world mess to indulge a bit of personal nostalgia. Thirty Six years ago I was at Clarion, working hard and hoping I could become a writer, in company with some of the finest people I ever met, a number of whom are to this day among my best friends. It was the first time I had given myself over to such a program, had gone out of state to attend school (sort of) and had found the humility to know I couldn’t achieve my goal all on my own.

Did I achieve it? Well, I have a body of work: several novels, nearly 80 short stories, a bunch of reviews, opinions, screeds, etc. I’ve lectured, taught workshops, and even managed an agency for the support of reading and authors. The trail of evidence leading back over three decades would suggest that I am.

Since then, Clarion itself has moved (from Michigan to California) and those people I mentioned? I’ve lost track of some of them, but among those I am still in touch, they’ve done all right. A few of them have achieved more than I have. I’m proud to be affiliated with them. They write cool stories. That was what we all wanted to do, write cool stories. Publish them, share them, write some more, rinse repeat.

But I am not the same. Not in many things. I did not anticipate having to guard myself against cynicism. The thing is—and they can tell you this as plainly as possible and you still won’t fully accept it—the profession of writing can break your heart. In large part because it is so glacial in its machinations. It takes so long to get things published. I look back over my work and I can name only one novel (not a franchise) that did not take close to a decade to find a publisher. Many of my short stories languished in the files before someone picked them up. You have to be patient. Patient. And you have to love doing the work.

But hey, I got to do what I wanted to do.

Thank you. Clarion. And good thoughts to the friends and colleagues, that core bunch I met at Clarion and those I have met along the way. See you in the Future.

Community

Root Division

In all the debate and analysis and angst over what those behind Project 2025 are doing and why, it is easy to get lost in the bog of details and motivations. A better question is why do so many people who would suffer under these proposals support them. When you look at the list of things they want to end, it boggles the mind that anyone who has to work for a living, who is dependent on a weekly paycheck, many whose expenses outstrip their income, and those who otherwise would wish to give their children an edge for the future would want any of this.

Let me step back from the details and indulge a little speculation about the deep motivations behind this otherwise bizarre conflation of working class reality and the dreams of oligarchs. What underlies the desire to do this much to destroy entire sets of dreams and undermine the ability of so many people to have something even close to a stable life?

Go back several decades. Look at the 1950s and 1960s, at the almost complete overhaul of social relations. Everything, from the civil rights movement to the counterculture to the sexual revolution to all the spin-off movements all demanding a seat at the table, all shared one basic interest in common. One could reasonably show that all of those movements—those revolutions—were about one thing: freedom of association.

Class boundaries, ethnic boundaries, gender boundaries, educational boundaries—the order of the established norms were all challenged and largely overturned. The common thread was people refusing to be kept in “their place” anymore. All the equal access challenges, the educational reforms, the equal employment opportunities, all of them—freedom of association. For a time, the assumed walls keeping groups of people apart became porous to a degree they had never been before.

Freedom of association. When you think about it, the lack of such freedom underpins the basis of all segregation sentiment. People refusing to have anything to do with people they consider “not my tribe.” People, frankly, frightened of having to interact with strangers.

The entire conservative movement since the Sixties has been a desire to put those barriers back in place, to keep all the disparate groups separated, to somehow prevent the possibility of their children being exposed to those they consider undesirables or bad influences or simply foreign. All the programs that are targeted in Project 2025 are designed to bridge those barriers. Programs that provide a basis and, in some cases, the means to enable people to cross boundaries.

All this upheaval over immigration is nothing more than the same fear of mingling that kept people segregated before the civil rights reforms. People in one corner looking with fear at people in the other and saying “We don’t want to have anything to do with them!” Panicked at the thought of their kids attending school with kids from the “wrong side of town.” The advent of private schools to make sure no mixing happened.

The thing is, such group isolation results in a loss of resources for many groups. It has a physical cost. But it starts there, with an unadmitted (or not) desperation to Keep Them Out.

This is neurotic. 

But this is what has to be recognized and addressed if there is to be any hope of this ever being healed. So many people feel threatened by having to be in the same room as people they don’t know, don’t like, don’t trust, in fact hate because they’re different.

That’s the basis of the economic divide. It drives the cost of higher education, I have no doubt. It informs the absurdities of policy positions which admit to no solution because any solution will not give them what they want, which is to shut those people (whoever they are) out.

Fear.

If civilization is to be saved, if we are to go into a brighter future, we have to end the arbitrary assignation of people into enclaves designed to keep them apart. This is not airy idealism, this is survival. We’re going to destroy ourselves to enable a small group of people to keep themselves apart from those they see as inferior. 

Look at this time and these issues. That is the basis for so much insoluble polarization. But we don’t talk about it, not that way, not so nakedly. Every divisive issue we have, I believe, has its roots in that marrow-deep fear of having to cross the boundary and know about people we think will harm us.

One party right now is doing everything it can to establish the old ghettoes. The other needs to work to end them, but it seems not to be able to articulate it clearly enough. Well, for what it’s worth, there it is.

Keep this is mind when you listen to the rhetoric and good luck.

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Freedom and Its Contingencies, Part One

Many words get thrown around with too little regard for their actual meaning and intent. Love, friend, truth…a long list. There are two languages, it seems, operating most of the time. One we could call Colloquial Usage, which basically is the common application of a blanket term to cover all possible manifestations of a subject. Friend is a case in point. we blithely label everyone with whom we have more than casual acquaintance of a positive nature a friend. We do this without thought, mainly because it’s easier than teasing apart the various components of what A Friend may really be. A friend is more than someone you might be glad to attend a barbecue with. A friend is someone with whom a complex lattice of support, sufferance, and deep connection makes them vital to one’s sense of self and well-being. You would go to the mat for a friend, walk (metaphorically or otherwise) over broken glass to help. Most people we label “friend” do not rise to that level, nor should we expect them to. A friend is special.

But language is what we make of it. It’s handy to have one word for a convenience when the nature of something might require a chapter in book to really explain—or even a whole book.

Such a word, it seems to me, is Freedom.

I grew up during a time when that word ramified in its applicable meanings in too many ways to codify. The cry of Freedom during the Sixties covered everything from the Civil Rights movements to the Sexual Revolution to the Cold War to Intellectual Revisionism to rejections of community expectation and onward. What it meant to Be Free for one group was occasionally anathema to another, yet the demand seemed the same across all forms. A prominent, if not necessarily widespread, meaning was to be completely without constraint of any kind. As a rejection of social conformism, one could see the source of this demand, but it reached a point where the very means by which such a condition was sought imposed different sets of constraints which resulted in a loss of viable action.

One of the more useful definitions I heard back then was the “responsible use of form.” This is a useful axiom. Unpacking it yields a myriad of conditions and leads to configurations of what we might mean by freedom that apply across diverse expectations.

We have first to understand those instances when a parochial expectation is at work that displaces a more universal application, and in this we must be concerned with the tension between Expectation and Application. It is in this where we find the failures of manifestation that plague history.

I recall seeing an interview with a Mujahideen fighter during the Russian occupation of Afghanistan. He was talking about his reasons for fighting and he said “We fight because we love freedom so much.” I was puzzled. Any cursory look at the society from which he came at once shows that what he meant by freedom was certainly not what I understand as freedom. For himself, it may have meant what he claimed, but as a country? What about the women? (And I don’t even mean the tragic malaise that descended on them once the Taliban took over.) And even in the aftermath, I’m sure you could ask those now in charge if they believe they are free and they would likely say yes. The apparent contradiction brings you to the assertion that freedom is a constrained thing that rejects acts regarded as outside the reasonable expectations of what freedom means.

But that’s there. What about here? It does not require much observation to see that different definitions are at play. What is freedom for one is anarchy for another.

How to square this circle?

Immediately we must accept, from example, that the concept is highly individualized. Freedom is a subjective concept. 

Or is it? Clearly, many species exhibit an innate urge to be free of constraint. Escape is a common response to captivity. Perhaps we can attribute this impulse to some Darwinian imperative to maximize opportunity to reproduce (which captivity would severely hamper), but it’s impossible to know what other factors feed into this response.

So if it is based on a freedom from constraint, then the next question is, why do we then seek to constrain others? If it is a shared impulse, why do we in so many instances fail to recognize it as such? Is it a failure to recognize alternative expressions?

Or is it more a question of adaptation? These are the circumstances we have come to maturity within and because we are comfortable with these delineations we define living in those conditions with freedom. Change in those parameters increases a level of discomfort and if the changes are significant enough we begin to chafe and the talk of loss of freedom begins.

The question then is, are these changes actually oppressive or are they more unsettling? It makes a big difference, I think. Take for instance the current assertion among certain evangelicals that they are being oppressed. It is legitimate to expect an explanation as to how. Are there new laws in place that bar them from practicing their religion? Or is it just that they find the shifts in common practice unsettling? If their next door neighbor stops going to church and then puts a political sign on their lawn supporting someone who is seen as a secularist, how is that oppressive? 

Within their own conception of freedom, living in a community that privileges their faith, which allows an expectation that they are part of a culturally dominant ideology, it may well appear that the scaffolding of those expectations is being dismantled and leaving them without a previously unexamined support. In other words, more and more it appears that, in this particular instance, they’re on their own.

Again, is this oppression?

Assuming the support you have till now enjoyed was built in by fiat—a community declared privilege which required support from all members of that community, regardless of personal disposition—and now that support is being withdrawn, then perhaps an argument can be made. If, on the other hand, what support there had been was simply assumed, without any codified commitment to back it up, then its loss is less a matter of conscious oppression than it is evidence of a shift in common priority. Naturally, this will upset many people who based their conceptions of living within that community on the erroneous assumption that their perspective was a fundamental right. 

Let’s move this example to a different (though in many ways related) area. Women living independently of so-called traditional family structures.

In this we have competing claims of oppression and demands for freedom. 

If we accept that “freedom” is based on an assumed right and ability for action within a given form, then it becomes clear that when a group, for whatever reason, is denied an opportunity for said action by another group, we may plausible label such denial oppression. If such denial of action is done for the presumed benefit of the dominant group, then we can see how oppression can edge into a deeper form, even slavery, especially if the benefit claimed is the justification for the continued oppression. 

Now we have a basis on which to evaluate claims of oppression. Range of available action combined with the comfort of assumed privileges constitute the rough parameters of a particular claim of freedom.  The constraint of said actions for the maintenance of said privileges for a dominant group constitutes oppression. We have a term that usefully sums up the net result.

Denial of agency.

What do we mean by “agent”? I will refer to a definition, from the Oxford Guide to Philosophy.

Agent: a person (or other being) who is the subject when there is action. …the property of an agent is (i) possessing a capacity to choose between options and (ii) being able to do what one chooses. Agency is then treated as a causal power. 

This is fairly neutral. When applied, the question is who can act and who cannot. It follows then to ask why one who cannot act cannot do so.

A further question relevant to this discussion then is: does one agent’s freedom to act require the curtailment of another’s equal freedom? If it does, then it must be asked if the former is asserting a legitimate claim for freedom.

Being inconvenienced is not oppression.

People who are not used to being inconvenienced unsettle easily.

When confronted with a claim that “my freedom is being taken away” it is always necessary to ask how? Basically, what can’t you do now that you could before [fill in the changes being challenged] occurred. If the response is that one’s assumption of dominance is being constrained, then perhaps it’s not “freedom” being taken away but privilege.

Still, freedom is in this sense a very personal thing, a feeling perhaps more than a set of objective conditions. To say one is free when that sense of being encumbered unfairly occludes clear assessment is difficult to get past. To this extent, we construct (or yield to) our own internal metrics.

But this is a problem of preference. Choosing the metrics by which you claim freedom or lack of freedom would suggest, since they are your own and you can choose them, you are, to that extent, free. The question then is, why doesn’t this contribute to your sense of freedom?

It may seem that this is playing games with the idea, that deconstructing the parameters in order to change a perspective which may or may not be valid is insincere. But I refer back to that statement by the Mujahideen fighter, who was clearly self-defining, on some level, his own metrics of what freedom meant. The consequences for his view prevailing may well have validated his sense of freedom, but by broader standards it did nothing for those bound to his view who did not meet his criteria.

There are two elements involved, one metaphysical, the other political. They are entangled, of course, but for many people the differences present no distinction. Metaphysically, though, we are dealing with determinism. Questions of Free Will stem from questions of what aspects of our apparent will to choose are in fact matters of unfettered choice and which are defined by all the other factors which constitute lived reality. In other words, what does it mean to Be Free when we are not able to choose actions closed to us by virtue of being both inconceivable and undoable. We might wish to choose to fly without artificial assistance, but we have neither the biology or the environment to do so. It becomes a matter of wishful thinking. A question of whether we are free to fly on our own is meaningless outside the imagination. Further, we may wish to transcend our mental limitations, but without knowing what that might look like, how that might manifest, it is a choice without a conceivable goal. Again, in the realm of imagination, we might come up with a variety of scenarios in which the consequences of such transcendence might be imagined, but the core transcendence itself is too incoherent to “see.” Likewise “interdimensional” travel. We have the term and popularly might imagine it much like moving from one room to another, but we have no basis for knowing what it would look like to actually do so.

We can spin scenarios endlessly, but I think the point is made. (Note though that conceiving the ideas can result eventually in some manifestation that conforms to our expectations—hence airplanes, subatomic physics, AI…)

Setting that aside for now, we come back to the question of what it means to be free to do what we want in a world where what we want is not doable. Are we not free, then?

While this kind of thing can be fun as a game, it is a good way to lose the point of the question. Besides, we are here more interested in the political aspect of the question. They are, however, conjoined. In that sense it comes down to a question of what criteria does one use to define freedom and are such criteria legitimate?

To an extent, this can become an inversion of the previous state of being unable to do what is inconceivable, wherein one establishes what cannot be done (or, in many instances, what is not allowed to be done) and then using that as justification for claiming a loss of freedom. The question slips back and forth between legitimate restrictions and imagined constraints. And of course the paradox arises when we ask whether or not we are free to imagine whatever we like. 

To a great extent, it’s a silly question. How can anyone stop us? But at some point the freedom to do so bleeds over into actions. Are we free to act on anything we conceive?

It is within those two states—conception and action—that all political questions of freedom reside. (Perhaps, as an amusement, it might be fun to compare this to the above notion of interdimensional travel.) 

Clearly, we are not free to act on just anything we might conceive. There are many reasons, both metaphysical and concrete, but the chief one is that we must be mindful of how such actions impact and impede others.

Which brings us back to the question of form. The responsible use of form. This goes to the question of determinism in key ways, but basically it is the ground upon which a social contingency to enable the optimum manifestation of freedom may be constructed. Insofar as it impinges on Agency, the question is one of compromise before all else based on a recognition of Other Minds. In other words, room must be made to accommodate others who have the same interest in finding a field of action consistent with a sense of freedom.

I’ll leave this for now and come back later. For now, some things for consideration.

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The Unrealized Dream

I’ve gotten to the point where I nearly tune out when someone in the public eye starts going on about the Founders and what they intended. Pro or con, it’s a surmise, and cherrypicking is rampant, though some pick bigger cherries than others. A few don’t even bother, they just make up whatever feels right and layer it over a 10th grade understanding of history. They can do this because we Americans in general couldn’t care less about history. That has always been the case, just as we, who have freedom to do so, read very little on average.

Some things have emerged from what I’ve read over the years pertaining to what the good folks in 1787 intended, not so much what they wrote down (though many of them did) as to what a reasonable assessment of the history of the times tells us.

The first thing I conclude is that the vast majority of Americans, once the ties were severed from England and the nation established, went on to pay precious little attention to the Constitution or the intent of the Founders. They were too busy doing what they then felt at liberty to do, which was carve out a bit of something for themselves and their descendants, legally if they could, by whatever means they had at hand. To live their lives as they chose. Adhering to the vaunted principles set forth by the framers of the Constitution was not top of their agenda. Not that they paid no attention to what was going on in Philadelphia, seeing that whatever emerged from that august body was bound to affect them directly. But I believe their interest was largely self-directed. They had just gotten one pest off their back, it would be annoying if another took its place.

And I’m sure they were fine with the results as far as it went, probably proud of it, since the majority voted for it, but it was not about to change how they saw or made their way in the world. For one thing, it did not seem to require that they change. Those few passages in the Bill of Rights which later in our history caused some upheaval just didn’t seem all that big a deal then. As far as the self-defined audience for the new Constitution was concerned, it was for their benefit and any restrictions applied to someone else. From all appearances, especially the Bill of Rights, it was designed to interfere as little as possible with the aspirations of the average citizen.

That average citizen/settler came here or migrated west in order to succeed at some form of self-sufficiency. The “dream” here that attracted so many from Europe and other places was that you, whatever your origins, could actually own something, and the law was there to see that no one could take it away arbitrarily. This was not unprecedented—English common law offered something similar, and the 13 colonies were overwhelmingly English—but the opportunity to actualize that goal seemed far more possible here. Enough folks managed a degree of it to give real force to the idea. And the new Constitution was by and large a set of restrictions on government, to keep it from acting arbitrarily.

This goes to one of the questions about the American revolution that teases people from time to time, which is out of all the revolutions that followed, why did this one work and the vast majority of the rest did not?

Simple. Our revolution—the war, the severance from England—was done in order for the people living here to continue doing what they had been doing all along. With relatively minor modifications (initially) the institutions already established had been up and running for over a century and in the aftermath very little changed. They had been doing fine and wanted England to butt out. Likewise, the Constitution seemed designed to guarantee the same continuity. The ones that followed, almost all of them sought to completely change the institutions and machinery of their countries. They were trying to do things differently, from top to bottom. We, by contrast, had it easy in the aftermath. (Plus, it there was something you didn’t like that the new establishment was doing, you could pick up and head west, out of reach, at least for a while.)

The idealism of a freedom of the press, the separation of church and state, the guarantee of due process, all could be regarded not as radical instantiations of a new communal ethic, but merely as a promise that the government—specifically the federal government—would not intrude upon local custom. 

The big problem left on the table, of course, was slavery. Every high-minded phrase from the Declaration of Independence on talked about individual liberty, and yet the necessary changes to guarantee that were not made. Things, as I said, went on much as they had always gone on.

Aside from slavery, other problems continued. Newspapers were burned down, the presses smashed, when they disturbed local sensibilities. No one prosecuted the perpetrators on the basis of the first amendment, but on property destruction and, in some instances, assault and murder. The “Constitutionality” of the acts were not taken into account (naturally, since such actions were rarely if ever instigated by the government). The people doing the smashing and burning likely never considered the higher ideal involved. They only knew they were offended by the newspapers in question and felt they had a right to shut the down. Vigilantism overrode juris prudence and due process. And, per the early supreme court, contracts were held to be more important than individual circumstance and rights.

And of course the “rights” of indigenous peoples were almost never considered, even though the founding ideas of the country aimed at All Men. (Of course, that left women out as well.) There were several “oversights.”

It has been pointed out that the Founders didn’t think much of democracy, which is why they established a republic. Aside from educational assessments, I suspect they knew fairly well that for too many of their fellow citizens, the ideals they had managed to enshrine in the Constitution mattered very little. They knew, though, that they could not just mandate the new structures, because that would have caused many of the same problems they had just finished fighting a war with Great Britain over. So the ratification was an open vote, universal, one man one vote. The first time and for a very long time the only instance of allowing an open plebiscite. The population voted for it, en mass. It was a fairly literate population and the campaign to get it all approved resulted in the Federalist Papers. (There were also opposing viewpoints, the Antifederalist Papers, which I suspect most people today know nothing about, but it was a debate, a very public one.) People had a chance to vote no.

So did they not approve of all the highmindedness? I mean, they voted yes, they had to know.

Well, yes and no. We’ll never know for sure, we can’t, but I have a feeling that many if not most looked at what was being proposed, saw it as a set of restrictions on the federal government, and believed none of it would apply to them. It was a legal framework that gave them freedom to live the way they wanted.

No matter at whose expense. 

And it’s not that they had ambitions to do bad things, but exclusivity was seen as natural. The idea that the privileges and rights held by a white male in 1790 should be shared with everyone else…well, perhaps the theory may have sounded fine, but to actually establish that in his own neighborhood? 

By the the time the Civil War came around, a lot of people were probably thinking what a nuisance this whole All Men thing was. That perhaps the Founders had pulled a fast one on them. It had never occurred to too many of them that there was a slow bomb in the thing they had agreed to.

That slow bomb was an idea let loose from the beginning, which is at the heart of all the Constitutional controversy down through to today. Equality. Perhaps they thought it wouldn’t matter—after all, they had said that All Men were created equal, which by implication left women and children out. But Native Americans are men (those who are not women) and so are African Americans, Latinos, and so forth. Once the claim was made, it was only a matter of time before all those groups who were denied equal regard would begin pointing out the disconnect and others would agree. But it likely never occurred to those who in subsequent generations grew angrier and angrier by the assertions of rights from groups they never themselves considered equal on any grounds that what the Constitution said would actually mean things would have to change. 

(Perhaps if they had written All Humans, it would have been clearer. But as we know from history, people here and there have no problem designated Others as Not Human.)

Now, on the other side, no doubt many people knew very well what they had just voted for and liked it. Which is why they were so angry about the degree to which their country had failed to live up to its stated ideals. These populations were not monoliths. And they fought with each other. The Founders—some of them—had, in the old aphorism, put the cat among the chickens, quite intentionally.

The fight over equality has been about an assumed right to acquire the power to dictate to people with less power. Not overseas, although one can hear that being argued among certain people, but right here. The unquestioned right to accrue wealth and power which can then be used to control those with no money and no power. The argument? That this is not a right, but a privilege that has the drawback of impacting actual rights. 

That one is still being argued. Of course, there’s nothing in the Constitution about that, other than that implied mandate for equality in several sections and in a good deal of the Bill of Rights, that these freedoms and protections are meant to be applied equally. We’re having a difficult time with that. The first successful skirmish after slavery over that was back during the Trustbusting days, which was an ethical fight using the commerce clause of article V to base the federal government’s legal right to interfere in financial systems. FDR nearly finished that job, not quite, and here we are again.

(Consider how often an obvious argument about equality has been side-stepped judicially in order to avoid certain ramifications. Reproductive rights, for instance, has been mainly argued as a right to privacy rather than an obvious matter of equality. When gay rights came before the courts, attempts were made to put them in the same category, but the decision was made to argue them as matters of equality. It should be noted that in the subsequent decades, reproductive rights ended up more and more vulnerable while LGBTQ rights have only gained valence. When arguments that are best made based on equality are set aside it is almost always because someone is afraid of losing a perceived privilege.)

Because that was the aim, to find a system wherein everyone had a share, a say, and no one could take away their voice. Wherein everyone had an equal right to the possibilities of community.

The American Dream has for too long been characterized as a materialist fantasy—money, property, etc. True, much of the dream requires a material component, but only in service to the larger dream, which is for each of us to be able to live in the world as who we are without arbitrary limits imposed for reasons that have nothing to do with the principles upon which we were ostensibly founded. 

But living that way requires we respect everyone else’s right to live their way. The unimagined (but perhaps not unanticipated) varieties of tolerance necessary did not have so many challenges to the people then who felt it was simply and exclusively all about them. They probably knew that at some point there would be a reckoning, between principle and reality, certainly over slavery—in fact, they did know since the argument was built in to the Constitution (the 20 year delay in allowing the issue to be addressed in congress), so some of them might well have had an inkling that there would be more and for them stranger examples of the meanings they had set to emerge.

My point? Well, the obvious one with regards to the nonsense foisted on us about Originalism. Even if philosophically there were some validity to the idea of Originalism, it’s an impossible argument to make, because we continually refuse to address the obvious, that people then were not much different in key respects than they are now. They did not go forth to conquer and settle this country spurred by the vaunted ideals of the Founders, but to make as much money and guarantee as much security as they could, and were quite happy to have a legal structure—they thought—that approved of their personal ambitions. The Founders knew that and some of them managed to create a guiding document intended to open up and emerge with more and more force as circumstances arose to trigger those inherent meanings. This would be the very definition of a Living Document.

But for the sake of argument, let’s suppose Justice Scalia was right when he dismissed the idea of the Constitution as a living document. It doesn’t matter. Because it is a document based on an idea and ideas are useless without a living mind to embrace them. Assume then that the Founders, some of them at least, knew what they were doing when they put all those bits about equality into these various instruments, that in the future the living minds that accessed the underlying principles of those documents, the ideas, would have to unpack them and interpret them. (Alexander Hamilton said there was no need for a Bill of Rights because the structure of the Constitution would force people to oppose each other over ideas, issues, and rights.) There are only so many ways to interpret Equality. The document may not be alive but the ideas cannot be otherwise. Many of the Founders likely had a constrained idea what equality meant. Or maybe not, maybe they just had a limited notion of who they intended it for. But they likely knew their understanding of it would not be the only one through time. And they put it in there anyway.

Meantime, we’re having the same fight. Between people who wish to live in a better, more equitable society, and those who wish to be free of any interference so they can get what they can, preferably without having to be brutal, but certainly prepared to be if they can’t manage any other way. The latter group are the ones complaining today about Wokism and frankly terrified of education. Born of the previous generation who hated Political Correctness, something they misunderstood and/or mischaracterized then. And they came from those who hated Civil Rights, because they thought they’d lose power if actual equality were established. They’re the same sorts who back in the day thought nothing of wiping out native tribes and stealing their land because of some nonsense called Manifest Destiny. The idea of actual equality would have sounded…foreign…to them. Certainly frightening.

Imagine what it would be like if we actually did embrace equality…

From 1789 on we have had two Americas. The one we like to brag about, but which too many people really don’t want. And the one we live in, which is still stuck in an anti-idealistic struggle engineered by people who have a stake in keeping us frightened of each other. It’s troubling to me how eagerly we seem to embrace our fear, even while we often sing praises to the unrealized dream.

blog

Intellectual Parasitism

This will be brief. Sometime around 2010 a term entered common usage—Woke—which basically meant be alert and aware of racial prejudice in all its manifestations. It took hold and came to stand for general awareness of discriminatory conditions and practices across a wide range of social interactions. Being alert and aware and, a step further, choosing to speak out about a variety of all-too-commonly held beliefs that slowly, deeply poison our daily discourse, from anti-LGBTQ statements to all manner of anti-Progressive resistance from certain quarters. In the short decade since, it is being weaponized as a pejorative on behalf of the very attitudes and mouthpieces the term was intended to call out. The Right is very good at this sort of thing. Look what happened to the term Liberal. To some people it’s another word for devil-worship and pederasty.

And people who repeat the detractions and attack Wokeism (as they call it) seem blissfully unaware that what they are railing against is merely a call to vigilance. They throw the accusation of Woke as if they know what it means. Well, they know what it means to them, perhaps, but it always puzzled me that they themselves would have to be functionally Woke in order to even recognize the thing they’re opposing. I don’t believe they are. I don’t believe they understand what they’re denigrating at all.

I’m reminded of Ophiocordyceps unilateralis.  Someone, somewhere, has gifted them with the intellectual equivalent of that delightful fungus and they go forth issuing challenges and putting up barriers and challenging anything that runs afoul of their pet aphorisms and they do so at the behest of the parent organism that has infected them. The basic scenario is this: Person A makes a blanket statement about Those People. The statement is worse than useless, it parrots something they may have heard growing up, but they’re comfortable with it because most of their life it has gone unchallenged. Person B says “That’s not true. In fact________”  What follows is a string of actual data which shows the original statement to be a load of dingo berries. Person A responds “That’s a load of Woke B.S.” and triumphantly withdraws from any potential dialogue that might threaten the comfortable zone of thoughtless categorization they use in lieu of actual intellection.

I have witnessed this. Almost never is any substantive rebuttal offered and direct engagement is refused.

Someone like Ron DeSantis told them Woke is evil and, unquestioningly—because the hapless ant walks around with a host of substanceless heuristics that allows them to walk through life without doubting their own intelligence—they go forth and refuse to learn. Instead they have a new heuristic in their arsenal of defenses that prevents any possibility that they might reconsider a longheld prejudice and rethink their attitudes,

Zombies in service to ignorance. And rather than take any steps to find out if that is the case, they will simply turn it around and accuse those questioning them of being exactly what they are—zombies in service to ignorance.

Look: even if you end up reaffirming that thing you believe, doing a little work to find out if it’s true never hurt anyone. But refusing even to look in the evil telescope or open the forbidden book is the kind of behavior that leads to the collapse of civilization.

But it may not be your fault. Poor little ant, you’ve got a parasite.

Community

Imperial Theology

I made an off-hand reply last week on FaceBook to a question that has become so common as to almost be meaningless. How can so many people who claim to be christian follow an exemplar who is the exact antithesis of everything Jesus stood for? The usual response—well, they aren’t really christians—will not serve. Because it overlooks too much of what is going on and what has preceded it. My response was that they are Imperial Christians, adhering to what the religion became after 313 C.E. Prior to that date, it was pretty much just one of dozens of religions, having no better claim to relevance than any other. After that, it became the state religion of Rome, thanks to Emperor Constantine’s mandate.

That changed everything. What Jesus said (may have said, the other inconvenient fact being that we really do not know, even if he existed*) played less and less a part of what then unfolded, because it became then an arm of the government, and governments are never pacific. At best, governments are pragmatic. In this case—and it can be argued—Constantine was a pragmatist with an eye toward posterity. (Also there was this little thing called the Battle of  Milvian Bridge, which Constantine won and took the throne under the sign of the cross, which he then parlayed in his justification for being emperor; right there Christianity was inextricably tied to military victory and an imperial mandate) The constant tumult that had emerged with the advent of a faith that had the temerity to declare that it was the One True religion and had an obligation to convert (Judaism had a similar claim, but it was never an evangelical doctrine and kept pretty much out of politics, except in the question of a homeland, so they actually caused little trouble for Rome) had created a degree of civil unrest that made governing difficult. Time to settle things. Constantine’s mother may have had something to do with it. In either instance, Constantine decided it would be best for there to be a single state religion and decree that the others should get in line.

The details comprise several bookshelves of historical research. We can try to analyze the whys and wherefores, what was he thinking, and so forth, but the fact is christianity ceased being what it had been and became an imperial tool, which meant conversion with the backing of the Law. Not Yahweh’s law, but Roman law. That aspect—that character—of what has come down to us has pretty much corrupted the whole thing. When people refer to the New Testamant and the red letter sections to try to point out the hypocrisy of certain people, they unfortunately overlook the real world aspect of christianity, which is that is a colonial movement, an occupier, a set of principles designed to privilege a single worldview even to the destruction of all others. It is a Roman artifact. So when a Leader steps forth who holds up the sceptor of that movement and declares that it will triumph, whatever Jesus might have said is utterly irrelevant to those who follow. They adhere to a conquering religion. (That’s one reason right wing christians almost never refer to the Beatitudes. What a lot of weak-chinned, namby pamby pacifist nonsense! You have to force people to believe and all that tolerance and empathy will gain you nothing!)

All religions that become aspects of government end up evolving into something other than their presumed intents (or almost all, since some religions are designed from the start to be governments). What we’re seeing in the screeling irrationality of so-called fundamentalists (so-called because if they truly were “fundamentalists” they would adhere to what Jesus presumably said—indeed, they would first know what he said, instead of regurgiting updated takes on Old Testamant Angry God theology—but instead they are soldiers in the march to be religious imperialists always with an eye on the “reward”) is a revelation of what christianity has become for them. They are christians, but they are Constantine’s not Yeshua’s.

Personal aggrandisement, either of wealth or reputation, and a need to silence detractors are the hallmarks of this brand. Naturally they will follow a leader who promises both. We should stop trying to shame them into reason and get some explanation from them as to why they aren’t christians. They are. But they belong to an 1800-year-long tradition of an imperial theology that doesn’t really take Jesus very seriously.

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*No, we actually do not. Not concretely. This is the fly in the ointment in all this. We have no “original” documents, only copies of copies, and none of them agree with each other. It’s a morass of supposition. But. My own personal view is that Yeshua bar Joseph did exist. Someone said some things that have come down to us as his words and whoever that someone was, he was a serious philosopher. There are some radical things in those attributions, and if taken seriously would have posed a threat to the status quo at the time. Whether we call that man Jesus or Sam, it doesn’t matter. Ideas came down to us that still have resonance. The pity is that such a large number of people won’t really look at those words in any but metaphorical and ritual terms.

Art

Simpler Complexities

There are times I wonder why I do what I do. I mean, the thought occurs that there are simpler things in life. How did I ever convince myself that I could be a writer?

I cannot retrace the steps, not at this point. Somewhere back in the restructured haze of youth I had this idea that it would be cool to tell stories and get paid for it. I can do that, I can make things up, I do it all the time, all I have to do is write it down and send it in.

Well, I will not retrace the learning that showed me how wrong I was about my abilities. Death by a thousand rejection slips.

I’ll admit, I was baffled. I don’t know about others, but for a time I honestly could not see a difference between what I read in the magazines and what I was putting down on paper. You just tell what happens next. What does logic have to do with it? Life doesn’t follow rules like that, why should fiction? And this is science fiction, so rules should apply even less. I mean, what does it mean, it doesn’t make sense?

Because I did not know any of the rules, not even the rules of submission, I received no feedback in those early attempts, and drifted away into something else. Something I thought would be simpler. As much as I appreciate complexity as such, I was not good at creating it or dealing with it. How I managed to reach adulthood with any capabilities at all is one of those mysteries never to be fully—or even partially—answered. It was never that I thought the rules didn’t apply to me, it was that I never recognized the rules.

And still I managed.

It’s remarkable that I’m even alive.

But there were guardrails. My parents, other adults in my life, the rough outlines of general rules, a certain unexamined caution in my approach to daily life. And limited opportunities to get in over my head. In many ways, I had a sheltered upbringing.

That and I read. (One of my favorite films is Three Days of the Condor and one of my favorite scenes is the one where all these CIA operatives are discussing Robert Redford and how dangerous can he be. He has no field experience, why are we worried. “He reads,” Cliff Robertson tells them. Clearly most of them don’t get it. I loved that. He reads.

I read. A lot.

Not as much as I once did, but I retain more now, so it balances out. While I can’t point to a specific example (other than in a debate or argument) where having read something made a difference in a given situation, the cumulative effect has been like a form of experience.

I grew up at a time in a place soaked in the kind of received nonsense that requires outgrowing. At one time or another I have believed a great many false narratives, especially about the relative value of different people, different kinds of people, and like most of the people around I would let proof of my beliefs dribble from my mouth from time to time.  Some of my contemporaries, no doubt, never grew out of that. For whatever reason, I was fortunate in a disposition that made it impossible for me to categorize anyone I personally knew according to prevailing stereotypes, and by extension whatever group they supposedly represented. Little by little, over time, I left a great many prejudices behind. Can I take any kind of credit for that? I’m not sure. The simplistic veneer of easy discrimination always gives way to the complexness underneath, and I have always preferred to embrace the complex—even when I didn’t understand it. And what I eventually understood is that prejudices, especially towards people, are products of simplistic thinking. The defense of such thinking, when pursued far enough, results in complicated structures that ultimately will not even support themselves. That genuine understanding results in simpler structures that allow us to see clearly.

Because I have learned (eventually) that complex is not the same thing as complicated and that often, perhaps usually, complexity manifests in simple forms. When we examine the properties of a nautilus shell, we see something quite simple in presentation. We can take it in at a glance and appreciate what it is fairly easily. It is a simple thing. But the layers of complexity is contains and offers up with investigation amaze us and lead to a trove of questions which, pursued diligently, offer up a glimpse into the underpinnings of the universe. A simple tune, easy on the ears and elegantly comprehensible in its performance, yields up myriad mathematical, harmonic, and even cultural aspects, an onion in its layers, beautiful complexity that manifests in simple melody and harmony. As noted by Samuel R. Delany, a simple declarative sentence—The door dilated—unpacks in ways that suggest an entire civilization beyond the threshold, all the assumptions necessary to result in the logic of that sentence and what it tells us.

Learning to see the two in collaboration can give us a more satisfying experience of life itself.

As a youth, I was dazzled and delighted by the complexities. Sometimes I mistook complications for complexities. Detail can fascinate, even when it might not add up to anything coherent. A consequence of age and continual observation is that I learned to see the whole where before I might only have seen the components. The art of recognizing and assembling complex ideas and details to create a comprehensible something is the art of recognizing that elegance, truth, and understanding should not confuse. We strive for clarity, which usually presents as simplicity.

But like the misidentification of complexity with complication, we have to learn to tell the difference between simplicity and the simplistic.

Thank you for your attention while I did some sorting.

 

 

 

Community

Belief and Other Matters

By now it should be obvious to everyone that the so-called Pro-Life movement is not interested in confining itself to abortion. They have a definition of it so flexible that some designate birth control as a form of it. The line is not clear. Not to mention that in individual cases there is an evident record of hypocrisy. It’s all right for me, but no one else. It should not be legal.

It makes me uncomfortable.

I do not wish to get into the gears of the matter. I have a couple of observations about the framing issues.

Firstly, the division is largely (though not wholly) a consequence of Belief. At base, if you believe that the fetus is fully human, separate and distinct as a person from the woman carrying it, then you established a moral line difficult if not impossible to cross. There can be no compromise over that. Like other questions of assumed rights, it will not matter what counterarguments are made, the reality is you believe this and there can be no fact that will persuade you otherwise. For a change to occur, you would have to abandon your belief. That would not alter the substance of the belief, only your position in relation to it. Either it is a belief you embrace or it is not.

And no reasoned argument will alter that.

If, in other words, somehow it could be demonstrated that the fetus is not a person, it would change nothing. That would have no validity in the face of your belief.

(To move this out of the abortion arena for a moment, take for example the debate over the Second Amendment. For some, what the framers of the constitution actually meant would now make no difference—the belief in the right to personally own firearms is unassailable, regardless of what facts may be shown to the contrary.)

In any confrontation between deeply-held belief and fact-based alternatives, the latter has no purchase.

However, the chief flaw in the overall Pro-Life argument lies in its deployment as a feint. Again, this is connected to a species of belief, but since it was for so long buried in the rhetoric of “unborn rights” it only recently emerged. Given that a fairly substantial number of those who align themselves with that movement have proven to have feet of clay—namely, many who talk the talk end up availing themselves of the services they so loudly decry—it becomes clear that abortion is not the main issue. They are now going after contraception.

To my mind, going back to those with marrow-deep commitments to the Second Amendment, the reasons for such positions emerge only later. The why of such positions. We should all know now that a sizeable cadre of such gun rights advocates are not insisting on them for matters of self-defense or sports, but because they believe they have a right, even a duty, to overthrow the government. They are nascent revolutionaries. Along with this, there are those who seem to believe they are in an unacknowledged war for the supremacy of one tribe over others. The philosophic issues surrounding the constitution and its presumed properties are secondary to their assumed “right” to defend themselves against the boogeyman of potential oppression. Often in the guise of other ethnicities, immigrants of all stripes, and even political opposites. The insistence on personal firearm possession is part and parcel with an ingrained paranoia that holds that a presumed set of cultural privileges is sacrosanct and will have to be defended against abrogation. We do not have to go far to find historic examples—the entire history of the KKK is based on exactly this kind of thinking.

Such duplicitous thinking underlies many otherwise insurmountable divisions. Within a given group, the supposed “purity” of purpose can be seen to break down on closer examination. It is not a monolith.

Curiously, the one thing that seems to offend them all within their group is the idea that it should be left up to the individual.

So the two issues I’d like to address are conjoined in this instance—firstly, the presumed sanctity of Belief, and secondly the shell games that come about when belief runs into politics.

Let me clear up first the potential pitfall—belief vs Belief. In order to navigate the day, we all have to base certain actions on a level of belief. You have to believe certain things just to get by because there is simply no time to verify every single thing we take on some species of faith. We have to believe that the food we buy from the grocery store is safe. When something goes wrong and there’s an outbreak of e. coli, we have to believe the agencies responsible for our safety will do their jobs. We would go insane to act otherwise. And as a consequence of statistical reality we are right to do so.

(For me, one of the most important things to cultivate in life is a healthy skepticism and an appreciation of doubt. Doubt is essential. I was asked once by someone, quite sincerely, why they should doubt that which they know to be true. The only answer that serves is that while the thing being believed may well be innately true, it is our ability to understand and interpret what it is that we must always doubt. That we have it right is the necessary question. I have no doubt the universe is real and operates according to certain principles. What I must always doubt is my ability to know and understand what those principles are and how they operate. What the True Believer seeks is to eliminate doubt altogether. I do not know if it laziness or impatience or insecurity, but I find this the most baffling aspect of such a position.)

In the back of our minds, though, it is conditional. Under certain extraordinary circumstances, we are also right to suspend our belief in all this, at least temporarily.

I’m not talking about that kind of practical assumption of reliability.

I’m talking about the moment belief becomes Belief, which is a different order perspective. It is the conviction that in all instances under all conditions, Something Is Always True and Reliable, regardless of any evidence to the contrary. With Belief comes intransigence. With Belief comes a conviction that one is being lied to by those who do not share said Belief. With Belief comes a rejection of evidence arbitrarily, based on how it may or may not conform to the scaffolding of Belief.

With Belief comes a vein of conviction, often constrained but always there, that anyone living otherwise is a potential if not actual enemy. And because of the presumed lies and the nonconformity and the absence of like-mindedness, any level of duplicity is justified because this is a war. In other words, Crusade is an acceptable response to differences of opinion and an insistence that there is more than one way to live one’s life.

Most of the attributes of a personal view of life well lived have long since subsided into minor things that cause little friction between people. All that is required for social harmony is a modicum of attention and respect for differing choices. We do not see seismic convulsions over dietary differences (although it may be possible to imagine one over the omnivore vs vegan question). We simply recognize differences and do not impose a monolithic preference.

Underlying and permeating this level of Belief is a deep and often unexamined insistence that the world conform to our expectations. That contrary positions be extirpated. That differences over key issues be eradicated. That everyone should be the same. And underlying that is the assumption that the Believer has the right viewpoint and has not only the right but the obligation to impose it on everyone else.

Mostly, this rarely rises above an ongoing anxiety that things do not conform.

But the central tension resides in a refusal to acknowledge that those who do not share your Belief have a right to hold their own.

We come now to where it erupts into conflict, namely social policy.

We’re seeing another example in Oklahoma right now, where a debate over the opening of a new—religious—charter school is unfolding because public funding is involved. I understand the concerns of both sides of this argument, and have felt personally for years that this is a conundrum with an easy solution, at least in terms of policy. My solution, however, would have the added consequence of driving partisans into the open to declare their actual intent. People have a tendency to camouflage their true desires, probably because a bold statement will be met with bold resistance. We live in an era in which major policy demands are too often couched in euphemism or hidden inside secondary or tertiary issues in order to slip the real goal in like a trojan horse. To state baldly that you want a school where children are spoon-fed religious ideology is a non-starter. So all the other reasons for establishing a separate, non-public institution are given. (My solution? Include religion in public schools, as part of history or even separately as a class on World Religions. Teach them all, give them all equal time. I suspect the howl of protest would quick strip the veneer of First Amendment concerns touted by partisans of a given creed.)

This is where Belief comes into conflict with the World. Belief dictates a preferred state, a template of how things ought to be, and where possible informs a drive to make the world conform. Giving equal time and respect to competing Beliefs is simply nonsense against such deeply held desire.

In a democracy, it is the back-and-forth that we recognize as the Will of the People that undermines any and all such attempts at enforced conformity. This is a brute-force method, of course, and too often satisfies no one, but it allows for the one thing that does effectively alter Belief—experience.

Even a cursory look at history shows that once deeply-held Beliefs have changed significantly, that the unquestioned givens of one period are the subject of bewildered speculation now. The only thing common to all this is experience, which erodes the details and eventually forces what we know to be true to change to accommodate a world that apparently had never been what the Beliefs of the Day said it was. Time and experience work like tides to alter and sometimes obliterate Beliefs.

Which understanding serves only to underscore the impermanence of them. We are taunting fate to insist that we must hold fast to ideas in the face of a reality that cares nothing for our wishes.

But then we come to the most intransigent aspect of Belief and that is where it coincides, reifies, and validates Identity. Our Beliefs, we imagine, are who we are.

What we have done historically in this country could be described as a series of holding actions, one part of the community erecting barricades to another until something new emerged from the confrontation. This has happened repeatedly and rarely without pain. The one thing that makes it all seem different now is our ability to see it as it happened, even if we are not directly involved. And that seeing elicits an opinion, a stand. The buffer of long communication has eroded to almost nothing. In many ways, this is a good thing. We have no excuse being surprised by injustices happening somewhere else. But the erosive effect on Belief has also accelerated. We are trying to establish that which will not change, under the assumption that principles are eternal. Well, perhaps some may be, but their formulation and the conditions in which they are expressed are not. What they are is water. Water is always water but the way it flows, where it rests, its very manifestation is mutable.

What makes this all the more difficult is the fact that there are dispassionate forces willing and able to take advantage of these differences to exercise power. I say dispassionate, but only in very specific aspects—those who crave power could actually not care less for the specifics of a given Belief. If they could get what they want by fostering and manipulating completely different sets of Beliefs, they would. All they want is the chasm between partisan advocates into which they may step and benefit by the conflict.

And we let them, because we are blinded to that by the nature of the Beliefs they exploit to their advantage.

I’m examining all this in order to find a way to navigate the current landscape. It has always bothered me when reason, backed by fact, fails to persuade. It took a long time for me to realize that I was not facing a reasoned position, but an expression of Identity that cannot yield, not without fundamentally changing its own nature. That is a tremendously difficult ask. It may or may not help to understand that eventually, the separation itself will yield to the erosion of experience. When some one or some group thrusts their Belief into a question that bears on people with whom they disagree, such disagreement a consequence of those same Beliefs, it comes down to a matter of assertion alone. Commonalities go by the wayside until—finally—experience erodes the division enough that some kind of compromise or altered perspective has a chance to manifest. In the meantime, other factors enter into the argument that most of time alter the question sufficiently that it becomes a new issue.

This is not conclusive. I’m still working all this over. But my inclination is to reject the assertions of those who offer only the testimony of their Belief as sufficient argument to impose their views on everyone.

I’ll come back to this in future.