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Bushmongering

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Trapped between a rock and a hard place by the legacy of his brother’s War in Iraq, Jeb Bush delivered a speech at the Reagan Library in Simi Valley (I wasn’t invited) that followed the pattern of all self-rationalizing bullies: blame the victim.

Hillary was First Lady during the transition to Jr’s Administration. The Cole destroyer had been holed by a floating IED, and the Clinton team had determined that Al Qaeda was certainly the culprit. The defense briefings implored the Bush team to send a strong message to the perpetrators, but Karl Rove’s political calculationn was that the incident was something that could be painted as a Democratic legacy.

Instead, the Bush team set about antagonizing both allies and adversaries with strong-armed attempts to modify the interpretation of arms limitations treaties to allow deployment of a nuclear missile shield. The week before 9/11, Tom Daschle, leader of the Democratic majority in the Senate, called a press conference on the Capitol steps to voice his concerns that the Bush team did not understand the geopolitical threat posed by Islamic extremists. Later reporting indeed revealed that American withdrawals in Beirut and Somalia were capped by the failure to take action after Cole. Osama bin Ladin believed that America was morally weak, and that one further blow would cause us to curl up and hide from the world.

The Bush team’s incompetence and short-sightedness was compounded in the run-up to the Iraq War. The false claim of yellow-cake trading with Niger was the linchpin of the “weapons of mass destruction” case against Saddam Hussein. When Joe Wilson, former Ambassador to Niger, stood up to dispute the claims, the Bush Administration outed the CIA’s head of nuclear threat control – Valerie Plame, who happened to be Wilson’s wife.

While the conquest of Iraq was a military masterpiece, the weakness of the planning for the peace was evident. Despite the “Mission Accomplished” announcements, the tangled web of Iraqi ethnic resentments provided rich soil for Al Qaeda sympathizers. The nation began to collapse, and the Bush team kept National Reservists in the theater and called up large numbers of additional troops in a “Surge” that finally allowed Iraq to return to self-government.

Since then, the Obama administration’s policy has been to disengage slowly, providing time and incentives for the Iraqi nation to stand on its own two feet. It hasn’t been a pretty picture.

At root, what Jr’s Administration revealed was the danger of disengaging from reality – of treating all foreign policy decisions first and foremost as domestic political decisions. The Democratic response was to serve as the loyal opposition to the nation’s commander-in-chief. They swallowed their complaints and criticism, and focused on trying to ensure that damage was minimized and lessons were learned.

So what about Jeb’s claims that the Obama administration was culpable in the rise of ISIS? How sophisticated a view of foreign policy do they represent?

Well, I would assert “naive to the point of dangerous.” Bush calls, for example, for arming of the Kurds. That can only antagonize Turkey, which has seen 40,000 casualties in a decades-long struggle for Kurdish independence. Turkey’s president Erdogan was apparently a supporter of IS until attempts to control the activities of Sunni extremists lead to a number of bombings. So, no, he’s not a reliable ally, but there’s no reason to push him into the arms of IS.

Or the claim that the Obama Administration didn’t take strong initial action against Islamic State (IS)? Far enough, in 20/20 hindsight. IS grew out of the Syrian civil war, which started as a rebellion against a leader guilty of crimes against humanity, but became a global lightening rod for militant extremists as it dragged on.

The nature and ambitions of IS were not obvious until defectors revealed that operations were actually being guided in secret by Sadaam’s Baathist generals. The initial IS surge was so successful because it exploited Sunni resentment against Shia dominance of Iraq’s government, with many of the early atrocities committed against Shia troops guarding the peace in Western Iraq.

The policies stated by Bush would be to bring additional American troops and material back into the region. That makes sense, except that the most potent weapon in the IS arsenal are suicide bombs crafted from Humvees captured from Iraqi bases. Until the Iraqi security forces demonstrate the resolve to engage the enemy, unless American commits indefinitely to a military presence, IS will simply fade into the civilian population, only to appear again after we leave to take advantage of the resources we leave behind.

And the final charge that Clinton didn’t visit Iraq during her tenure at State: well, there was no State Department presence. The entire operation was run out of the Department of Defense. What would have been the point of starting a turf war?

I understand that in domestic politics, the best defense is always a strong offense. It was perhaps to be expected that Bush would mount his attack against the Democratic front-runner. But what the tone and substance of the attack reveals is a dangerous lack of understanding of the issues. Given the documented history, Hillary will clean his clock in the run-up to the general election, or we’ll find ourselves suffering at the hands of the government we deserve.

Rude is Not the New ‘PC’

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With the Trump campaign only now announcing that they are going to bring in experts to craft policy positions, it is easy to fall into the cant adopted by Hillary Clinton. In a press briefing in New Hampshire today, Clinton observed that “Megan is a strong woman and can take care of herself,” and dismissed the Trump candidacy as “entertainment.”

But it’s far, far more than that. Trump stood up at the Fox debate and threw his money and ego around. The other candidates came off as a coterie in short pants, each one talking over the other as they sniped in the background. The goal was to make Trump sound silly, but it was obvious who had the strongest personality on the stage.

The image that comes most clearly to mind when I think of that scene is a photo of Hitler and his high command that my family came across in the effects of my grandmother’s last husband, who served on Eisenhower’s staff at the end of World War II. In the photo, the warriors are ranged behind Hitler in combat dress, but none of them looked half as tough as the Fuhrer in shorts. Despite the pout and over-coiffed hair, the same was true of Trump on the debate platform.

I’m not going to suggest that Trump is another Hitler. The man seems affable, and genuinely concerned about the “little people.” But he is obviously unwilling or unable to recognize that the jibes and threats he bandies about on the stage are a dangerous model. Every time Trump shoots off his mouth, a team of lawyers scurries in the background, evaluating whether they have leverage to impose his will on adversaries (as appears to have occurred at Fox News today through Roger Ailes), or whether to backtrack, turn on the charm, and make nice.

I don’t think that Trump understands that when he tells a woman “I’m nice to people that are nice to me,” many women in America hear echoes of an abusive boss engaged in inappropriate groping. And of civil servants, covered by a blanket assessment of idiocy, I can’t help but remember Newt Gingrich and his anti-government rhetoric during the Clinton era, rhetoric that morphed into ridiculous tales of “UN Black Helicopters” preparing to enforce a “New World Order,” whipping up hysteria and paranoia among civilian militias that peaked with McVeigh’s truck bomb murder of the children at the Murrah Building day-care center in Oklahoma City.

And as for the claim that illegal immigrants are “rapists” – we’ve heard things like that about minorities before. What was the epithet? “Christ killers?”

Trump is unsuitable for the Oval Office because he doesn’t realize that the President fires the imagination of the public with an authority presumed to be vetted by the federal bureaucracy. People without his sense of nuance and balance are going to emulate his conduct and manner of speaking. Rude men will run with his claims of oppression under the doctrine of “political correctness,” and be emboldened by his use of raw power to intimidate others. They may not have his resources, but they will emulate his conduct, and hurt a lot of other people in the process.

So, no, we shouldn’t consider this entertainment. It is dangerous. Trump needs to learn to control his mouth, or get off the political stage.

On Pro-Creation

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Upon realizing that Darwin was half right – that life is the co-evolution of spirit and biological forms – I set out to re-read the Bible front-to-back in preparation for the writing of The Soul Comes First. What I came to appreciate was the enormously disciplined purpose that is manifested in that history. The Earth was provided to us, the angels, as a place upon which to do work on our souls. The hope is that nothing will be destroyed, only repurposed in more functional configurations.

There are formulations in the Bible that still baffle me – one is the “made in his image” concept. As science and engineering has progressed, it is harder and harder to imagine that we could ever emulate the source of this creation. But I am enamored of the idea that we, too, possess the creative spark. We too can be constructive and disciplined in the creative choices that we make.

It is from this perspective that I find the whole framing of the fetal rights debate to be distasteful. In the aftermath of Roe v. Wade, the religious right propagated the dichotomy of “pro-life” versus “pro-abortion.” I am offended by the claiming of the former by a community that supports unrestricted gun rights, capital punishment and the destruction of the middle class through the reallocation of wealth to a financial elite. The proponents of parental responsibility, realizing that they had allowed themselves to be tagged with an ugly label, took up “pro-choice.” This is no less tendentious to me: what woman would ever choose to be subjected to such an invasive surgical procedure, except under the most humiliating and desperate of circumstances?

As the years have passed, it is clear that “pro-life” has a powerful emotional force to it. Doctors were assassinated and facilities were bombed. By being recorded surreptitiously, clinicians are made to fear discussing medical procedures with their colleagues. Protesters stand outside clinics to abuse verbally the women that enter them. A local pastor, having felt obligated by his affiliation to attend one such event, admitted to me that he realized half-way through that “this is not how Jesus would address this issue.”

I concur.

What truly offends me, however, is the use of this issue for political purposes. The 2012 Republican campaign came across as offensively anti-woman. The tone being adopted in this election cycle is decidedly more nuanced: candidates are testifying as to the power of the paternal bond that was awakened by viewing an ultrasound, or the joy that they have received as grandparents of a 20-month premie. It is hard to argue that this isn’t the way that it should be. Parents should anticipate joyfully the arrival of a child. Grandparents of means should be committed to the survival of their descendents.

But is that the reality faced by most women seeking abortions? How many of them have a father to share the ultrasound with? And how many of them could have enjoyed a major-college education on the million-dollar investment made on that one baby?

But this is still the wrong tone, because being born into the world is not principally to serve the needs of a parent or a grand-parent. It is to serve the needs of the soul that is bound to the fetus. And here is where things become far more complex. Given that human souls did not exist for the first four billion years of evolutionary history, how does a human soul evolve? Only through the slow accretion of virtues and attributes. As the human population grows, where do new souls come from? Well, from among the spirits of other species. I have encountered bears, wolves, musk oxen and praying mantises, not to mention serpents.

The meshing of disparate body and soul is a fragile process, and sometimes just doesn’t come off well. Sixty percent of all pregnancies abort spontaneously and naturally. A twenty-month miscarriage may be only a more delayed manifestation of a dysfunctional integration. If the fetus chooses not to come to term, who are we to play God with its life?

And so I come back to the original issue: God was, is and will continue to be conscious and incredibly intentional regarding the process of our spiritual evolution. As we have chosen the path of the knowledge of good and evil, so must we. Stop talking about gestation as a mechanical process. Stop using the law to project your experience of life onto others that lack your resources. Start paying attention to the spiritual consequences of being born into a world that denies you comfort and security, where the volunteer in the inner city is told “thank-you for coming down and letting these children just be children for a while.”

Rather than punishing children for the poor choices of their parents, invest in ensuring that every act of conception is consummated with a life that serves to advance the self-creation of the spirit that is brought into the world. Stop judging people that prefer to wait to have a child until they can do a proper job of caring for it, and stop trying to destroy the organizations that provide the services that support their decision making. Choose rather to participate in the divine purpose: be pro-creation.

Trump Ratings Soar on Rewrite of Iran Deal

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In a majestic coup that recasts real estate deal-making finesse as international diplomacy, the Donald announced today that his mediation of negotiations between the “First Birther” and “Ayatollah Satani” had brought a “permanent solution” to the political ills of both nations. “Never send a bicyclist up against a camel trader. I’ve tossed that Kerry-on baggage.”

The deal pivots around the repurposing of Iran’s nuclear weapons complex (encompassing all of its nuclear enrichment centrifuges and several ICBMs concealed as Teherani mosque minarets) for creation of a Muslim-themed Kenyan resort complex, “ObamaIslama.” Both Obama and Khamenei have announced their intentions to retire from public life to take on wildlife conservation roles at the facility.

“I hear there are plenty of monkeys in Kenya,” Trump offered, speaking of Mr. Obama. And as regards Khamenei, Trump admitted that “He’s got a somewhat different idea of ‘wild life.’ Anyone know where I can find a steady supply of virgins? Wait – scratch that thought. I’ll talk to the producers of ‘The Apprentice.'”

Trump’s thunderous oration pre-empts the surprise announcement planned for the POTUS visit to Kenya. The White House admitted that an elite Seal squad had been sent to take down the media center at Trump Towers, hoping against hope that Trump would be chastened into honoring executive privilege. Speaking for the President, Josh Earnest credited the sartorial celerity of Trump’s hair stylist. “They just got the announcement off way earlier than we thought they would.”

Republican lawmakers on Capital Hill could not be reached by cell phone.

Deadly Meaning

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From Herbert’s Dune Trilogy, among the most disturbing images is that of a Fremen Mujaheddin crashing his flitter into an Imperial troop transport. The observer recognizes it as the completely rational act of a warrior in the service of a greater purpose.

IS is reliant, it appears, on similar behaviors among the ranks of its elite fanatics. Infiltrating as civilians, they kill indiscriminately, and then detonate a suicide charge when security forces arrive. The ensuing chaos is exploited by a conventional assault that seizes the target.

The common refrain in public media is that religion is the common thread in such events. Certainly the Fremen were incited by faith in their Messiah, Maud’Dib, born Paul Atreides. IS fanatics surrender themselves in the belief that they are engaged in a jihad, their death thus gaining in the afterlife the boon due to a holy martyr.

The chorus of the anti-religious is composed of people with many good reasons to want to live. They have people that want to listen to them. Among that audience are those seeking to understand IS, primarily for the purpose of destroying it. Others simply wish to disengage from the problem – if Muslims do not hold any value in life, what are we to do? All too often the answer is, “Go to the Met and pay someone to keep the evil out.”

The talk show hosts, ushers and garbage men protect us from becoming cut adrift. They create a sense that we mean something, that the world will order itself to our needs. They make life worth experiencing. But what of them? Do we really imagine that they find deep satisfaction in serving that purpose for us? Does the garbage collector sweeping the streets of Los Angeles at 2 A.M. float in visions of the latest triumph at Disney Hall? Or does he just see a used condom in the gutter?

It is from those forgotten by the elites that IS recruits in the Western world. A house-bound girl recounts her experience of posting a question about Islam online, and being taken into a community of people that were devoted to her psychological needs. There was nothing concrete exchanged – she was brought in simply by the ready attention that provided a sense of meaning something. She abandoned her church and converted.

Strangely enough, that is what religion is supposed to do. People are supposed to take the time to be present for one another. Ultimately, that simple human attention is overtaken by direct relation with the divine presence. Our need for human validation decreases. We become, instead, a refuge for others.

But those initial stages are terribly vulnerable: the hope of receiving love is formed in the soul of the seeker, but not yet anchored to God. In that state, tyrants can enter and substitute their purpose. The sacred community, threatened from without by reprisal for violence organized by their leaders, spawns martyrs committed to protecting the source of meaning in their lives. The immediate and practical realities of conflict drown out the tenets of scripture written by people wiser but at the remove of centuries.

As the gap in wealth yawns ever wider in this country, I wonder whether the elite sees beyond their immediate circle of servants to concern themselves with how to connect the society as a whole to a sense of purpose. Herding people around with fear isn’t enough. Neither are the theories of capitalism or science, no less mysterious to most than the Qaballah. If we fail to fill this vacuum with meaning, sooner or later people will grasp for meaning in the only act that any longer has significance – their death.

Amartya Sen on the Necessary Distinction Between Austerity and Economic Reform

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Awarded the Nobel Prize in 1998, Sen is widely recognized as the leading moral voice in the field of economics. The New Statesman carries his analysis of debt and its relationship to economic reform and growth. He points out that debt levels were far higher in the aftermath of WWII, but confident and intelligent investment in growth steadily reduced debt even while social services expanded.

The New Statesman has published his remarks.

Sen’s most heartfelt cry is against the destruction of human capital: in Kansas and other “austerity” states, educational levels and consumer spending are collapsing. In Greece, half of all young adults have never had a job (or at least a job that generated tax revenues). As Adam Smith pointed out in his writings, it is human capital that underpins the ability of nations to generate wealth.

While Sen decries his inability to influence policy-makers imposing disastrous austerity on their constituents, I don’t have any need to be politic. I’ll just follow the money.

As described in The Grand Pursuit, the Great Depression was an existential threat for free market economics because it revealed that the financial elite would not invest in long-term growth when falling prices guaranteed increased purchasing power for their accumulated wealth. It was in their short-term interest to exacerbate unemployment, thereby reducing both demand and wages. It was Keynes who convinced the governments to stimulate demand with deficit spending that brought Europe and America out of the Depression.

In the current era, government debt is in the short-term interest of the financial elites. It is the ready stream of bond placement and foreign exchange fees that fuel the financial system. Reducing debt is against their interest. That they fund candidates that have implemented policies to reduce tax revenues while expanding debt is no mystery.

Sen points out that most electorates suffering under austerity are beginning to recognize that growing poverty proves those policies wrong. Whether they can organize themselves to restore intelligent fiscal policy is another question. There are so many other issues to distract them, and voter restrictions in many states disenfranchise the working poor. (Fundamentally, I don’t see why elections should be on a weekday: anyone for a constitutional amendment to move them to Saturday?)

In the United States, we have been propped up by the Federal Reserve, which has kept interest rates low and pumped cash into the economy. However, that is no substitute for governmental action: when interest rates rise, that cash must be soaked up lest inflation run out of control. This will suppress growth. However, in Europe things have been far worse: the Central Bank has been part of the system of austerity, and is only now beginning to follow the lead of its American counterpart.

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?

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.

The Uses of Tyranny

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Given the libertarian cachet of the software “Open Source” movement, I was taken aback, when reading through the Git source-control system manual, to discover that the model used to prevent incoherent updates was labelled “Dictator and Lieutenants.” Linus Torvalds, the acclaimed “Dictator” of the Linux kernel, is famous for abusive tirades on the discussion boards. I guess that it fits.

The Greeks used the word “tyrant” without any negative connotations. Tyranny was a practical response to the fact that most people are going to do what feels good to them in the moment. If a society is going to grow, somebody has to take charge and force them to move in the same direction – what we typically think of as getting them to “work together.” That’s going to make some of them unhappy, and unhappy people complain, and eventually band together to defend their liberties.

The reaction of the tyrant is often to interpret such claims as a threat to the society as a whole, which justifies brutal suppression. That has led, in the modern era, for us to view “tyranny” as an evil thing. But if consensus (the alternative to tyranny) really generated more power in ancient times, then we wouldn’t have had a 2000-year gap between the democracy of Athens and the democracy of the United States of America. Even so, the latter nearly failed the transition from tyranny during the distrustful era of the Confederacy.

What are the preconditions for a transition from tyranny to consensus? Widespread understanding of the forms and practices of government is one, which requires universal public education. Codification of citizen rights and creation of institutions to defend them are others. We might also uphold renunciation of political aspirations by the leaders of the agencies that manage coercion, such as the police and military.

Even in modern societies, these preconditions are somewhat tenuous, and the rights of freedom are all too often abused as libertine privilege. For this reason, many institutions still revert to the model of tyranny. Someone has to be in charge, and preventing the dilution of that individual’s authority is often critical to the success (or even survival) of the institution as a whole.

This presents a real problem to women, I believe, who are often psychologically predisposed to consensus. They tend to get people talking, find out what they need to be happy and effective, and raise alarms against the practices that prevent those results. They undermine the practices of tyranny, and so are pushed aside in order to preserve the integrity of the institution and its tyrant.

The cracks in human tyranny are becoming impossible to ignore, however. Controlling the thought processes of the creative knowledge worker is to contradict their purpose – they are supposed to come up with new ideas. The growing number of women in the workforce has already been mentioned. And the political strategy of non-violent dissent, which became so pronounced in the Communist countries, broke down all the practices of tyranny by pushing responsibility for failure back up to the leadership. “I’ll do it if you show me exactly what you want done” eventually left many with time to moonlight in a second job.

But pushing tyranny out of our lives, I believe, is going to require a sea-change. For the average citizen, we need a moral framework that enables people to regulate the assumptions of rights as privileges. I raised my sons with the mantra that my goal was to make them “able, healthy and happy”, and that to have all three was almost impossible. When we got down to negotiation of “I need”, I clearly articulated the difference between needs (healthy) and wants (happy), and declared that unless I saw a personal commitment to “able”, I was unlikely to accede to their desires for the latter. In the long term, happy depends on health, and both depend upon the ability to create value for others.

And for those at the top of the food-chain?

As a scientist and engineer, I am privileged to work among a community that does not require political structures to arbitrate consensus. Nature is its own tyrant, with its diseases, predators, and disasters. It also has a set of unalterable rules that beat down our most narcissistic flights of fantasy. It provides plenty for us to struggle against.

I believe that we are entering an era in which that struggle will be unavoidable for most of us. This means a change from “extensive” social orders, that grow through predatory acquisition of resources, to “intensive” social orders, that require effective performance from every member to avoid universal hardship. In that future, the imposition of will by the tyrant will no longer be enough to ensure institutional survival, unless couple with compassionate concern for the well-being of individuals. The indulgence of privilege by individuals will be punished by nature, requiring of each of us a commitment to our fellow citizens. The combine constraints on tyranny and anarchy will make the destructive political dialog of our era a luxury that we can no longer afford. Loud-mouths will be told to pick up a shovel and work, or go and shout in the wilderness.

Into the Garden

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On the weekend of my 45th birthday, I woke at 2 AM and drove from Livermore to Yosemite. The summer sight-seers were still in their beds when I parked at the Swinging Bridge. As I neared the far bank of the Merced River, I spied a circle of sunlight among the redwoods. A feeling of joy came to me, like unto an encounter with a long-lost friend. I stepped into the circle and raised my arms to the sky, and felt the whole valley singing with happiness.

I don’t know if I can ever convey what it is like to enter fully into Christ. In the official biography of Pope John Paul II, there’s a picture of him sitting on the stage in Manila, alone amidst a throng of tens of thousands. His forehead is pressed into his palm. When I saw the picture, I felt the weight of their sorrows pressing against him in that moment.

To be in Christ is to feel all the anguish of a world that suffers from our inattention. It is to shoulder the burdens shirked by those that have the power to make a difference. As Jesus says [NIV Matt. 11:28-30]:

Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. 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. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.

This is the paradox: those that seek power seek this same freedom – freedom from fear, freedom from weariness, freedom for sorrow. And yet they seek it in material things, when only Christ can grant them that freedom, and even then only when they accept the burdens that love lays upon them. So they are forced to choose between their desire for freedom and the love of Christ, and most choose freedom.

Fundamentally, it was this contradiction that brought Jesus to the cross.

When I thought on this last night, lying awake in the dark after Mystery had once again tried to corrupt me, I remembered that moment in Yosemite, and I thought of Gethsemane, were Jesus testified [NIV Mark 14:34]:

“My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death,” he said to them. “Stay here and keep watch.”

Where did that sorrow come from? Well, from the Garden itself, acknowledging the man that brought words of peace and healing into its midst, celebrating the hope that maybe finally mankind would stop warring against Nature, and grieving the knowledge that the impending response was his destruction.

God, how I miss the gardens of the world – the trees and scrub, the birds, foxes and deer. I have walked the hills here in Southern California as they dry up and burn, and my heart can hardly bear it any longer. Please, God, send me someplace where the garden and I can delight again in one another.