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You Can Talk All You Want

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My middle-school put on “The Music Man” when I was in eighth grade, and my big moment was over before the main action started. I was one of the salesmen on the train, and my lines were:

You can talk, you can bicker.
You can talk, you can bicker.
You can talk, talk, talk, talk,
bicker, bicker, bicker.
You can talk all you want:
But it’s different than it was!”

To which an ersatz peer replied:

Not it ain’t, not it ain’t,
cause you gotta know the territory!

It’s so easy to put an opinion out into public today, and given the trauma we’ve had with the Muslim world over the last fifteen years, there’s certainly a lot to be said.

When I engaged in this analysis, the first step that I took was to go to an Islamic Center and talk to the faithful. Up in Livermore, the president shared that, after getting over the hurdle of pride that made him reluctant to bow his head to the ground, the challenge he faced was practicing the morality of the Qu’ran at work, where he often found himself getting run over by his peers. In Newbury Park, I stayed after to read the book itself, and was given a copy as a gift. I read sixty percent of it, and am unashamed to reveal that it is a truly magnificent and beautifully poetic testament of faith.

Of course, what was being put around at the time was that Islam was a perversely militant religion. This came up when I was sitting idle in a juror’s waiting room on Yom Kippur. I struck up a conversation with another juror, who began to relate that the Qu’ran used the word “war” more times than any other book of scripture. I simply asked him “Have you ever read it?”

“No. I read a report by a Canadian academic.”

“Who was that.”

“Oh, I forget.”

Here’s a universal fact: men are designed to change things, and the easiest way to change something is to break it. There’s a rush that comes with destruction of a person, an idea, or a culture. So there are men that go around looking for reasons to destroy things. Making their targets as frightening as possible makes them sound strong, attracting the attention of the “weaker sex.” After a while, it’s the adrenaline and testosterone boosts that rule their logic: it doesn’t make a difference what the facts are. They’ll make them up to suit their destructive urges.

Thus was borne the modern culture of Islamophobia.

Of course, we can serve up counter-examples from the other side: the fatwas against van Gogh and Rushdie, and the murders in France and Texas in reprisal for satirical drawings of the prophet. These incidents are terrible abuses of clerical power and perversions of faith.

But we should ask: whose opinions did Charlie Hebdo change? When the French government asked them to refrain from publishing an incendiary article, did they really have to do so knowing that workers at French embassies around the world would be endangered? Does the right to talk all you want really trump the safety and well-being of others? We forbid people from crying “Fire!” in a crowded theater, after all.

The work of healing the divides that bring us to violence is not done by the Pamela Gellers of the world, but by Pope John Paul II with his convocations of religious leaders. It is done by the Shia and Sunni who pray together in my colleague’s office at work. It is done by people that take the trouble to read the books and share how they relate to their common human concerns: how do I create a better world for my children? What happens when we die? Why does faith (in god, or science, or spaghetti) give me relief from fear, and a sense of peace and purpose, even though I’ll never see the problems solved?

I would be impressed if Charlie Hebdo could claim to have inspired just one person like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali woman who stood up for female rights in Belgium when she discovered that her sister expatriates were being abused by their husbands. I would be even more impressed if they dug deeper into the root cause reported by Ali: radicalism driven by the inability of fathers to provide for the well-being of their families in the European culture that they lacked tools to navigate.

Did anybody from Hebdo go down to the schools to tutor Islamic youth? Did they understand deeply the problems of the displaced, and contribute to their solution? Or did they simply indulge their egos? The families of the police officers slain in the attacks surely deserve an answer.

You see, it’s not about the fine distinction between free speech and hate speech. It’s about doing the work of moving people from sensibilities driven by fear to those enlarged by confidence. That requires, I’m afraid I have to say, a certain self-control. Insulting people only adds volume to the echo chamber.

“See, I’m allowed to insult you” is not evidence of cultural superiority. Rather, it’s the attitude “See, I respect you – and also the people that you fear. Let’s sit down and work out our differences.”

Separation of Witch and State

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During the 2004 campaign, NPR put up a fascinating juxtaposition of the two candidates on the campaign trail: John Kerry speaking before a thoughtful gathering of the League of Women’s Voters, and George Bush standing with sleeves rolled up and arms raised in front of a crowd of raucously cheering Republicans. Rationality versus emotion. As a Christian, the choice was obvious: John Kerry was the right man to be president.

In the subsequent months, I had a number of dreams about Ohio, the key battleground state in the election, and clearly projected my preference. A young woman showed up at a dance club I enjoyed a few months later and asked me: “What if George Bush was president in 2004 and you were president in 2008?” I held my laughter, but let loose the thought, “I happen to know that I’m not qualified to be president.”

It wasn’t the first time I ran into the Bush machine, nor would it be the last. While I was writing everdeepening.com, a mute woman showed up in the library, the ex-wife that the Bush clan had silenced. The president himself showed up in my dreams one night to beat his forehead on mine. I simply stood back from the confrontation, shrugged, and announced “I’m not impressed.” And when I returned to LA during the second term, I noticed a room across the parking alley filled with electronics gear, and one night my son announced “Dad, those guys in the other building are shining a red laser on your window.”

Women tend to complain about conservative institutions as being “male-dominated”, but my mother told me when I was a child that all the great religious figures of the day were “propped up” by women. When I heard that the pastor at Saddleback Church “spoke to Jesus every day”, I went down and poked around to discover that it was his wife that was putting up the counterfeit. During Easter observances, I was sitting in the stadium seating at the local mega-church when the pastor observed that Jesus was rejected by the religious leaders because he “wasn’t what they expected.” I found myself frowning out of the corner of my mouth, but when I tried to break in on his train of thought, a wall of sorts came between us. It was his wife and her girlfriends trying to protect him.

Protect him from what? The truth?

The book of Genesis is about men breaking out of this trap – the trap of being the tool by which women work their will on the world. Nancy Reagan lives in a mansion just adjacent to the Reagan library, and when I stood out on the lawn overlooking Moorpark, the message I got from that direction was “This is a strong man” – not “Wow, another man like Ronnie.” And when the Obamas couldn’t figure out why Boehner kept on blowing in the wind, I looked through him and saw his wife in the background. It’s not just the conservative men that are upset at a minority presence in the White House.

It’s started up again now that Neil Bush has thrown his hat into the 2016 race. A sexy young thing showed up at the café, claiming at one point to have attended SMU (“You know, where Laura Bush went to school”, she observed). Once I got all the pastors’ wives and Bush women out of the air, we had a productive conversation concerning the use of technology to help people with mental disease validate their experience and find support.

During W’s second term, Laura Bush showed up to ask whether I could help her husband with the pressures he was under. I was direct: “Not until he’s out of office.” What hurts your men, ladies, is the Peter Principle. Your support of their oversized egos pushes them to heights that they can’t manage. Take a page from the Obamas – it’s not the success of your men that matters. It’s the success of the people they lead. When those two things align, your man will be lifted up.

Should I be concerned for the men propped up by the women of our political elite? Intrinsically, no: they have enormous resources at their disposal. It’s the children in the inner city that I push on the swings on Saturday: those are the people that most deserve my concern.

And if Neil Bush wants to be president, I start with this: what’s he done to prepare Florida for global climate change? When is he going to stand up to the Koch brothers? When is he going to avow that government is the practice whereby we solve problems too big for us to solve alone, and that when the rich avow “no new taxes”, they’re simply pushing their problems on down the road to my children?

When Physics Breaks Down

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Firmly convinced – as I am – that modern theories of physics are fundamentally flawed, I tend to cringe when reading articles such as “How Do Gluons Bind Matter?” (Ent, Ulrich and Venugopalan, Scientific American, May 2015, p.42ff). The authors consider the observable properties of the proton (one half of the hydrogen atom, the other being the electron), maintaining that theorists using the Standard Model of particle physics have been unable to explain:

  • The proton mass (only 2% of which is due to the Higgs mechanism)
  • Why it doesn’t fall apart
  • Why it doesn’t leak
  • Why it doesn’t have more stuff inside
  • Why it seems to rotate so much

This list could actually be summarized as follows:

The only thing the Standard Model explains about the proton is its charge.

Note that this is after more than 30 years of theoretical effort, including construction of special-purpose supercomputers. The failure is explained away by the mathematical complexity of the underlying model, quantum chromodynamics. As I see it, however, the conclusions are pretty pathetic. It’s not enough to say “it’s hard and we’ll keep on trying.” At some point, an honest person has to say, “Well, I guess that we need to consider other alternatives.”

I’m going to try to explain why I think the failure is so great using a simple analogy.

Imagine that you have a swimming pool with two boards in it. If you push one board up and down in the water, waves will travel to the other board and cause it to move as well. Think of the boards as particles and the waves as the fields that cause the interactions of fundamental physics.

What happens as the boards get smaller and smaller? Well, there will still be an interaction between them. What we will see, however, is that the waves get to be more tightly packed (their peaks will be closer together). Eventually, though, we reach a limit: when the boards are the same size as the spaces between the water molecules, they become like bats knocking around baseballs. We can no longer describe the interaction between the boards using the model of waves – we have to think of the structure of the water itself to get the right answers.

Einstein actually won his Nobel Prize, in part, for changing his mode of thinking about the interaction between small impurities and water. Microscopic studies of the motion of the impurities showed that they were not swept along smoothly, but seemed to bounce around, as though they were being struck by rapidly moving balls – the water molecules, in fact.

Modern particle theory assumes that the fundamental particles have no discernable structure, and that space is an empty vacuum that does not disrupt the motion of the waves created by the particles. What I have proposed here (see the “New Phyics” page on the banner) is that the vacuum is not empty – it is full of something, much as a swimming pool is full of water. The failure of modern theories to explain the properties of the proton suggest, just as in the case of Brownian motion, that the substance that fills space creates structures comparable in size to that of the proton.

My heartburn comes because the authors of the article propose that the right way to resolve the difficulty in understanding the proton is to build machines that explore the proton at very small scales. This is like trying to study the tensile strength of Kleenex by probing it with a pin rather than a pencil. Tissue paper has lots of little holes, and will pose little resistance to a pin, but significant resistance to a pencil.

There is already plenty of evidence that the Standard Model is wrong. I believe that the machine proposed by the authors will do little to cast light on the situation, while costing the taxpayer a great deal of money.

What’s After “Separation of Church and State”?

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One of the principles enshrined by our founding fathers was to prevent government from being used to create privileged elites that were protected from the criticism of their peers. Voting is part of that process, and the Bill of Rights articulates a number of other protections of this kind. A popular one – though toothless, in this day and age – is the “right to bear arms” (which I’ll make a pun about in regards to Vladimir Putin in a couple of days). And honestly, I find a bullet to be a rather blunt form of argument. Another is separation of church and state enshrined in the “non-establishment” clause of the first amendment.

The first amendment has been interpreted fairly strictly in modern times. Court cases have found against Ten Commandments displays and prayers at the beginning of public meetings. Those subjected to such restrictions argue that they’re not trying to establish a religion – they’re just trying to practice theirs. However, when a faith heralds the arrival of a Messianic ruler, non-adherents have a right to be a little skeptical.

However, there’s a fundamental issue in governmental process that may be lost in these debates. It harkens back to George Bush Sr. with his “Thousand Points of Light” program, though that was much reviled. Governments categorize people in order to administer programs. Unfortunately, that categorization creates classes of privilege, and makes it difficult to respond to situations of individual need.

Private charity addresses these issues, and religious belief is one of the primary motivators of charitable giving. The Catholic Church rose to prominence in Rome not because of political maneuvering, but because it provided charitable services to those that the government considered disposable.

And of course we all know how power corrupts. Invoking faith may be seen as a means of reminding people of the source of their authority: compassionate service to the people of their community.

Simply quoting “separation of powers” or “separation of church and state” may not resonate with people with that believe that compassion should be front-and-center in every civic forum, and invoking Christ or Muhammad or Buddha is the best means they have. Conversely, secular approaches seem to lead to ever-larger systems of control that then become populated by people that have to bring in a trophy every now and then, which creates pressures that cause new forms of injustice.

I think that these are real problems of governance, and I would like to see the proponents of strict secularism address them in a meaningful way. This complexity of government and the depth of its involvement in our lives is not something that the founding fathers could have foreseen. We need new thinking on the matter.

He Will Reign – Won’t He?

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One of the challenges in building a brand is to ensure that prospects receive a consistent message concerning value proposition. The Church fathers and Emperor Constantine addressed this problem in the fourth century, establishing the Nicean dogma and creed that the Catholic Church and its heretical variants enforced through preaching, training and – in the breach, until recently – torture and death.

Normally, we’d talk of offended authority as “spinning in the grave.” In this case, given the last, we must be glad for Jesus’s resurrection, because otherwise the globe would have been whirling around his tomb.

The early Church fathers, confronted with the evidence of civil decay following the decline of the Roman Empire, seem to have concluded that empire was a part of God’s plan of salvation. They spent the twelve centuries following Nicea working to centralize political authority in Europe. At the end of that era, Renaissance Europe sprouted a dozen kingdoms capable of reproducing the accomplishments of Rome. Their response to Church meddling was to interfere in Papal selection, and when coming out on the losing end of that struggle, to support the rise of reforming heresies.

So what might Christ think of that?

In Scripture, I see three high points in the relationship between Humanity and God. The first is in Eden, where Adam and Eve experienced the ravishing grace of a direct relationship with God. Next is the era of Judges immediately following the entry into the Promised Land. The Hebrews as a people lived in gratitude for the Father’s gift, and when their occupancy was threatened, God found heroes to guide them through danger. That era ended with the people throwing their trust onto the human institution of monarchy. In the final act, Jesus arrives to expose the iniquity of the human institutions of his day, and proclaims that redemption is not bound by any contract or tradition, but is available to all the peoples of the Earth.

The modern Dominionist interprets this proclamation as a call to spread the institutions of Christianity across all the globe. The question is: what is the true church? Or is it simply enough that each individual should recognize Christ as lord and master in his heart?

Jesus is a little coy on this point, stating [John 10:14-16]:

I am the good shepherd; I know my sheep and my sheep know me — just as the Father knows me and I know the Father — and I lay down my life for the sheep. I have other sheep that are not of this sheep pen. I must bring them also.

In The Soul Comes First, I consider the parallels between the spiritual trajectory in Judaism (culminating with Jesus) and Buddhism. In Islam and Christ, I examine the choices made in the formulation of Islam, choices made to facilitate such developments in cultures still practicing polytheism.

These insights, supported by the evolution of the covenant recorded in the Bible, lead me to the conclusion that Unconditional Love reaching to us from Christ meets us where we are. It does not care about structures and institutions, and in fact idolatry is often evident in human attempts to sustain those forms. Rather, as Jesus says, it enters into our lives in twos that grow into threes, thereby empowering us to care for one another.

Witnessing the end of this process, John testifies of the “New Jerusalem”, that {NIV Rev. 21:22]:

I did not see a temple in the city, because the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are its temple.

Remember that Jesus does not ask us to submit, but to learn [NIV Matt 11:29]:

Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.

And [Math 20:28]

…the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.

The temple of God is the individual human heart. His age is consummated when we allow his sensibility to enter into us. As I said recently to a priest:

Sometimes words serve no purpose, and the only thing I can do is to allow the broken heart of Christ within me to speak for itself.

It is when we offer our hearts as he did, offering them in the service of supporting the weary and burdened, that his will for us is achieved. This is a service beyond understanding, for we cannot explain all the suffering in the world. It is beyond us, having its origins billions of years ago, and woven into our living through the predatory competition that is Darwinian evolution. All that we can do, as Jesus did, is to offer ourselves in the service of healing the wounds it has created.

So is the modern fragmentation of Christianity – exposing contradictory messages that erode faith – is that fragmentation a problem? Or should it be interpreted as the process by which Christ dissolves the human institutions that stand between the seeker and Unconditional Love? If Eden was the ideal, should we not be seeking to recreate that ideal for every man and every woman? And if that is the goal, how can we doubt Christ’s word that he will gather all of his flocks – all of those traditions that declare a covenant and discipline that opens our hearts to the power of Divine Love – how can we believe that any one of them will be unreconciled to Christ? Or judge any of them as inferior to our own path?

Loving Ourselves For Who We Are

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My first encounter with transgender reality came when I was in graduate school. I worked on the top floor of the physics building at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory. This was not a stuffy community – facility announcements were prefaced by a breathless woman asking “May I have your attention please? May I have your attention, please?!” But on the floor just above, at the end of a long dark hallway, the only female technician in the building had her workroom. Nobody seemed to spend much time down there, and a machinist finally clued me in “He went away one summer and came back a woman.”

I have to admit that this choice is problematical to me.

Here’s a less extreme example: I met a man who explained that he felt like he had two personalities, one male and one female. He was a large man, but felt compelled on occasion to wear women’s clothes. What I eventually came to understand was that as a father in a previous life, he had gone down in a ship with his young daughter. The girl had hidden herself in him as they drowned, and part of the work he was doing in this life was to give her the opportunity to work her way out again.

There are men that spend all their lives trying to get into a women’s bodies, and often they do so using methods that are psychologically or physically abusive. There’s a certain symmetry in being reincarnated as a woman. Should we have sympathy for their desires to become men again? That was the opinion expressed by a Unitarian Universalist minister. The UU movement famously supports LGBT choices, and the minister asked us on that day to try “walking in his shoes.” I had to hold my tongue, knowing that she wouldn’t understand, but what came to mind was: “But that’s just what he’s doing – learning what it’s like to be a woman so that he can have some respect for their needs! How is that end going to be furthered by supporting him as he – yet again – mutilates a woman’s body?”

Carlos Castaneda described the view of the Yaqui sorcerers regarding gender. Masculine and feminine souls have different topologies – one projecting and one receiving. His adherents evolved a discipline called “tensegrity”, and believed that the womb gave women enormous spiritual power, power that a man’s genitals could never challenge. But the Yaqui view was that all such power originated in the soul – in fact Castaneda encountered a masculine sorcerer that had turned himself inside out, and so presented as a woman.

If the soul is what matters and persists, then a man like Bruce Jenner will find himself back in a woman’s body again. In this life, why not get as much benefit from being a man as he can? He was put here in a man’s body for a reason.

But his struggle to become a woman may be of help to the rest of us. Science can’t really explain our sense of gender identity. Maybe Jenner’s choice creates another opportunity for society to recognize that gender is not simply about biological form.

Sexual arousal is a consequence of a yearning of one spirit for another that causes blood to pool in the parts of our bodies that feel most pleasure. That yearning is complicated by procreation, which at this point is overburdening the carrying capacity of the earth. Perhaps homosexuality is a way of freeing our ecosystems of the physical side-effects of the deepening of our spiritual relations?

But isn’t that a distorted view of life – that our sexuality defines our deepest relationships? In my thirties, I was taken aside on two occasions and warned that gay men weren’t accepted in the top levels of the institution that I was working in. Being someone that dreamed every night about women, I never got the message: my failure to engage sexually made people assume that I was gay. That I was committed to a relationship built upon intellectual and emotional compatibility seemed to escape them.

I know that my workmate in college was a terribly unhappy person – their physical transformation was incomplete, and therefore unsatisfying. It also came with terrible social ostracism. Why do doctors then pursue this craft? Is it merely so that the superficial external presentation matches the internal reality, so that those that see sex as a mechanical activity will not be surprised when the inner personality – the very soul of the man or woman they are loving – comes to the fore? Wouldn’t it just be better to prepare people to recognize the nature of the soul that they are pursuing, and thus to learn something about their inner selves at the same time?

In spite of all of my questions, I feel no hostility to the transformation being pursued by Jenner and others, unless that it seems to involve an enormous investment of energy. I guess that as long as they can afford it, it’s just another experiment in living. Let us know how it works for you!

Golem

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This post celebrates submission for production of my next book, Golem. Here’s the preface:

When in 2000 I resumed my journey into faith, I found myself wondering whether people had any sympathy at all for Jesus. It wasn’t enough that he had to suffer the pain of all the wrong-doing on our planet – no, he had to be responsible for everything, everywhere.

It has been painful for me to witness the success of escalatory monotheism in public debate. Even the atheists buy into it, blaming religion for all the magical thinking and selfishness that infects the world. The contradictory evidence of the natural world seems to escape their attention – predation has an enormously long pedigree. The anti-religious seem to have no sense of just how difficult it is to heal creatures that nature has programmed to hurt each other. Religion has no magical talisman to protect us from the prejudicial instincts of our neighbors – that requires us to relate to them.

Because life is so complex, every generation seeks solutions for the problems that are immediately obvious, often failing to realize that those problems are the cracks in the solutions to uglier problems addressed by their ancestors. The misguided impulse to sweep away rules and restrictions brings a satisfying sense of activity, but it also polarizes public debate. Both sides of the struggle advertise the proclamations of hysterics, impeding rational discussion and informed problem solving.

In this famous dictum, the Catholic philosopher George Santayana characterized the problem:

Those that cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

In Three Philosophical Poets, Santayana marshaled his wisdom to illuminate the difficulties of living well. His source material, spanning two millennia, are the writings of Lucretius, Dante and Goethe. The first extolled the virtues of reason, but Santayana observes that complexity runs reason into the ground with “analysis paralysis.” Dante upheld faith in Divine Love in his allegory of universal redemption, but reliance upon forces beyond our control leads to passivity and dependence. Goethe celebrates the accomplishments of forceful will now trumpeted by the elitist libertarians of the Republican Party, but a failure to negotiate with our peers generates ever mounting resistance that eventually crushes the solitary man, and brings the pyramid of tyranny crashing down under its own weight.

My first work of fiction, Ma, celebrated the feminine virtues of intuition, anticipation and compassion as a means of escaping these traps. It chronicled the psychological struggles of men caught in the limitations of Santayana’s world-view, and their liberation through submission to the caring of their women. The parallel story of Leelay suggests the psychological experience of a woman learning to support such men.

The deus ex machina of Jesus’s appearance at the end of the book was jarring to me. I rationalized it at the time as an assertion that Christ is called into being by the harmonization of masculine and feminine virtues. But it suggested to me that there was still more to be said.

I was also aware that Ma left many unanswered questions. The strategy of its construction was actually to overwhelm reason, forcing the reader to focus on the psychological experiences of the characters. When readers complained that I left a lot of loose ends dangling, I found myself playing with ideas that would tie them together.

Thus was born Golem. As a firm believer that love is universally redemptive, the work expands upon the dysfunctionality of digital technology, still characterized here as a unique manifestation of Earth’s unstable ecology, and then imagines its applications in reconciling the divide between gods and mortals.

But at the heart of the writing is a plea for sympathy for our great religious figures. In the crushing grip of the enormously destructive forces that oppress humanity, to be a seed of light can be both humiliating and painful. Adherents to faith may seem foolish or misguided, but ultimately they serve to dissipate those contrary forces, allowing the pure light of love to be liberated for all to see.

Two Conversations

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Down in Carson yesterday, I was trying to teach a young Hispanic girl how to shoot set-shots. I kept at it for a half an hour, and she just wanted to prance and play, so we didn’t get very far. That’s not true – she did get better over time, and seemed to improve in her accuracy. But after twenty minutes of encouragement and silly dancing around, she asked me:

How old are you?

Well, that didn’t seem fair, so I asked her how old she was. Then I told her I was more than five times her age. She kept on going with guesses until she learned that I was fifty-four. When I asked her why she asked, she said:

You act like you’re younger than that.

So I asked: “If I came here all serious and stuffy, would you be shooting baskets with me?”

“No.”

“But that’s what I’m here for. It doesn’t make a difference what you think about me – this is all about you. I work five days a week writing software and doing mathematics. But when I come here, it’s all about what works for you.”

My father says that if her parents find out, they’ll never let her come again.

And then this morning, to the priest who had just announced that he was leaving religious orders because his out-spoken passion for Christ had caused too much friction in the community:

As someone who has been told that his expressions of faith frighten people, my experience has been that sometimes I have to choose to say nothing, and let the broken heart of Christ within me speak for itself. Sometimes words will not do – we just have to let others feel what we feel. We have to take people into our hearts. It is as Jesus said: ‘Take my yoke upon you and learn from me. For my heart is humble, my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.’

The Abuses of Tyranny

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As I considered in The Uses of Tyranny, communities lacking experience in self-management often call forth people with over-sized egos to lead. Even when they are reviled, as was King Juan Carlos in Spain, the psychological bond is deep. Many Spaniards wept upon learning of his death, for fear of what the future might bring.

In the case of monarchy, at least there is some institutional structure passed on from generation to generation, which means that the monarch is bound, at the very least, by dependency on people who actually know how to get things done. This is something seen in growing up, and helps to check the ego of the ruler.

For nations undergoing dramatic social change, such as occurred after the retreat of the colonial powers, no such institutional checks exist. Leadership is established through visceral struggle, and held largely through intimidation and fear. Once the opposition has been beaten down, there is no brake upon the ego of the ruler, who may even imagine himself to be a divine favorite. Witness, for example, Idi Amin of Uganda.

Of course, it is rare for such nations to be able to project much power on the international scene. This can make them dupes for more sophisticated partners, such as negotiators from multi-national corporations. The convenience of the dictator as single point-of-contact are tempting to those negotiators. It is little known that militant Islam actually was born in Northern Africa, where the people used the ethics of the Qu’ran to structure their criticism of exploitative resource extraction. When Western governments and multi-nationals propped up the abusive regimes, jihad was declared against the West as a whole – and deservedly so, under the circumstances.

So perhaps the grossest abuse of tyranny is the tendency of tyrants to form privileged clubs that prop each other up. The ultimate downfall of such clubs is that they devolve into echo chambers, with the tyrants agreeing upon self-serving policies that cannot actually be implemented by the communities they control. This occurs in two parts: first, the tyrants become divorced from reality, and then they destroy social cohesion and resilience in their attempts to coerce their impossible outcomes. Such was the downfall of the planned economies in China and Russia.

It was this realization – that institutional structure was the ultimate victim of tyranny – that prompted Western philosophers to concern themselves with the creation of institutional forms that mitigated against tyranny. This has manifested not only in the constitutions of governments, but in the legal framework of corporate governance. Separation of powers is visible in the three branches of US government, but also in the allocation of responsibilities between corporate boards and executives. One of the primary benefits of these arrangements is survival of institutional memory, which means that situations that seem new and exciting to the surging tyrant are just old hat to the grey-beards in the institutions.

It is amusing to watch this psychology unfold in Putin’s relationship with the West. Putin paints Obama as his primary adversary, and broadcasts propaganda that projects the image that tensions will dissolve when he leaves office. As a tyrant, Putin does not understand that the West has a huge number of historians and policy analysts in corporate, academic and governmental circles that have studied Russian history, and recognize this view as the view of Stalin and Kruschev and Brezhnev and Andropov. Attack Obama all you want, and circulate as much propaganda among the European public as you want: our institutions have played this game before, and will win it again.

Understand, Putin: you are who you are because Western nations agreed to trade with Russia, providing you with the opportunity to siphon hundreds of billions of dollars into your personal accounts. Do you really think that they don’t have the means to discipline your international adventurism?

And what our institutions also remember is that, following Juan Carlos and Stalin, their nations adapted to the experience to establish systems that regulated tyrannical behavior. When that occurs, the tyrant’s legacy is erased. Yes, Vladimir, you are a big noise now in the world. You’re able to force a lot of people to think about you. But you’re on the wrong side of history. Your destruction and perversion of the institutions of the Russian state ensure that you will leave no lasting mark.

And hear as much, Koch brothers! How much money are you spending to force people to do what makes you money? And how much more could you make if you invested, as did Henry Ford, in their capacity to participate in new markets and opportunities?

Jon-Rolled

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When I first put The Soul Comes First in front of readers, one was a young Jew working in the coffee shop at Barnes and Noble. I began summarizing the book, and got as far as Moses before he broke in to challenge, “Yeah, well, I’ve concluded that no Bronze Age religion has anything to offer us in the 21st century.”

A couple of months later, he agreed to read the book (it’s only 70 pages or so), and came up to testify:

This is the only thing I’ve read that makes sense of the Bible.

So my jaw fell open when, following an advertisement from the Freedom for Religion Foundation, Jon Stewart introduced a satirical skit on Christianity by saying “I can do this because, as a Jew, my religion is thousands of years older than yours.”

An appropriate comment, because in the entire skit, the only serious criticism of Christianity was a reference in Exodus to ownership of slaves. Argh! Christ promised to fulfill the law, which means that the old contract with God was concluded, and a new one begun. The covenant of Christ supersedes the Covenant of Moses, and it says simply:

‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’

As for the Freedom from Religion Foundation, the ad draws upon the authority of the Founders, many of whom drew their moral and ethical philosophy from Jesus, which includes:

Render unto Caesar those things that are Caesar’s.

I find satire to be a lot funnier it is rooted in understanding of the basic tenets of the culture. So, if the FFRF and Jon Stewart show really want to have an impact on Christian fundamentalism, they could try teaching Christianity while making fun of the way it’s presented to society. As they have succeeded so well in attacking the political hogwash served up by the elitist, libertarian right, that might actually get Christians to recognize and challenge false teaching.

As it was done, they merely come off as tediously shallow.