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Looking Ahead

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It’s such a beautiful experience, moving through a crowd of gentle people, and then getting hooked on life, stretching out a hand and feeling the pulse of the Amazon, caressing the Andes and then making the leap from Tierra del Fuego to Cape Hope, gently cupping the Congo and pausing before merging into the thrum of Ethiopia. Stuck there, I reached across with the other hand and felt the rainforests of Southeast Asia, roamed over the Russian tundra, and then slowly squeezing inward around the pustule that is the Middle East, soaking it with the healing energy of life and love.

And later she said, hesitantly “It seems that it’s going to get worse.”

“I’m afraid that is what I see, too.”

With the air of one surrendering innocence, she hazarded “But it’s not going to affect people like us.”

I had to look away, trying to find a formulation that did not take air out of the joy she was sharing with me. “Well, in order to bring healing, we have to make a diagnosis. That means getting close enough to feel their pain.”

It’s the last hurrah of selfishness. It knows it, and so figures there’s nothing to lose.

As Matt Maher promises in “Hold Us Together”:

It’s waiting for you knocking at your door
In the moment of truth when your heart hits the floor

And you’re on your knees

And love will hold us together
Make us a shelter to weather the storm
And I’ll be my brother’s keeper
So the whole world will know that we’re not alone

Abuse and Authority

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IB writes really beautifully regarding the heartbreak that comes from the power struggle raging in our families today. When I struggled with this, I ended up with the following definitions:

Power is the ability to make reality conform to our will.

Love is a desire to see its object grow in power. The priorities are health, ability and only then happiness.

Authority is granted by a subject when the ruler’s power is validated by manifestations of love. Jesus ultimately reigns not because he destroys other claimants to power, but because those he loves learn to ignore false claims of authority.

Strength is power over the self. To offer power to someone trapped in anger or fear is self-defeating – they are not in control of themselves, and so we have no idea what the ultimate manifestation of our power will be.

This worked pretty well for my children. At one point, my elder son began to lecture me on these points, as he had forgotten that I had introduced them when he was in elementary school.

insanitybytes22's avatarSee, there's this thing called biology...

I hesitate to write this post simply because the world we live in today has a tendency to define everything as abuse, and when everything is abuse, nothing is anymore.

I spent many years working for our domestic violence sexual assault program so I know what abuse is, but at the same time I was also observing our culture’s plunge into insanity, to where the system began to see abuse everywhere, in everything. I remember someone threw a piece of banana at a spouse and it was deemed 4th degree assault. Kids started threatening to call the cops on their parents, take away my toys, that’s destruction of personal property, ground me, that’s unlawful imprisonment. What started shifting was power and who held it, and authority and who had it.

Our own kids reflected these cultural shifts too, and often hubby and I were left either outright laughing or scratching…

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Rush, Roger and Rove – er – Trump Come on Over!

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After the loud conversation back and forth across the floor of the Barnes & Nobles Café, the extollers of Trump’s strength and the virtues of Chinese authoritarianism had settled back into their seats. Suddenly the one at the table next to me stood up and made his way across the floor. He was excited about the Asian gentlemen who had stood on a bench to take a photo of the floor layout, and then probed around under the magazine racks. “That’s just what they do – case the target, looking for places to hide bombs, then they come back spraying bullets.” Five minutes later, the store manager came by with a note written on receipt paper: “He’s our shelving maintainer.”

Shortly thereafter the gentleman’s wife arrived to guide him out of the store, offering me a pleading look.

Fear is such an easy tool to use to suck power out of people. It’s not just Donald Trump – the strategy was perfected in modern American politics by Lee Atwater and picked up by Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh and Karl Rove. It’s the world-view of Roger Ailes at FOX News, a man that maintains a second entrance to the building so that the terrorists don’t know where to wait for him.

There is indeed a lot to be afraid of in the world today, but Roosevelt’s observation still holds true: “The only thing that we have to fear is fear itself.” Those that heed people like Rush Limbaugh and Donald Trump are subscribing to a mentality that divorces them from reality. It is a mentality that they propagate because it is only through that effort that the mentality survives. While there is comfort in the weight of its presence, as its adherents lose their ability to generate value in the world, the mentality must continue to spread in order to keep its power.

I confronted this for the first time back in 2002. Kevin told me that he had a dream in which he was walking to school and entered a secret tunnel that led into the White House. I asked him which backpack he was wearing, and he said “The one from Mom’s house.” I decided to go spelunking in her one night, and just bore down into the fear. I finally broke through into a psychic fog. Feeling my way through it, I discovered that it covered the entire nation. Curious, I put my ethereal hands under it and lifted it off the ground for a few seconds, then let go. It settled back down to earth.

It seemed that people found comfort in it.

Donald Trump’s popularity reflects the realization by the Republican base that their fear-generated loyalties haven’t brought them strength. Well, that’s not going to change until they choose to ally with authentic strength. It’s waiting there for them, what Christians call The Holy Spirit, that eternal repository of the wisdom of loving. It’s a mentality that finds beauty and joy in all things – particularly the weak and wounded that focus its attentions. It’s coming closer to us, and when it arrives, Ailes, Limbaugh, Rove and Trump will discover that all they have done is gather together those that need it most. It will sweep through the ranks of the fearful in an instant, because those that maintain fear have stolen the strength that once allowed pride to insist that it could go it alone.

This is what was meant by “like a thief in the night.” The mighty will trumpet their virtues, and convince the weak to tender loyalty for false promises of relief. But finally the weak will have nowhere to turn but toward love, and the mighty will realize that Christ had been there all along, waiting quietly in the background for truth to dawn in the heart.

And so what would I do, if I was on the stage with Donald Trump, when he begins spouting inane fear-mongering nonsense?

Ha, ha! Ha ha ha ha ha! Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!

Laugh for a good thirty seconds.

Inflorescence

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I’ve begun reading Lewellyn’s Spiritual Ecology, a collection of essays by those representing the unheard voices that suffer from human exploitation of nature. The authors’ shared diagnosis is that we are rushing towards the limits of the Earth’s restorative capacities, with the prescription that we must regain the spiritual bond with nature that we once had as tribal peoples.

I have provided some reaction to this perspective in my review of The Lost Language of Plants. I believe that the history of tribal peoples is far more complex than the celebrants recall. This myopia tends to cause them to forget that Western civilizations, propagators of the twin “evils” of scientific reductionism and monotheism, also arose from tribal cultures. Whatever defects they possess arose from seeds sown in humanity’s past – which is also part of nature.

To my understanding, the important factors are testosterone and feedback. Testosterone is the hormone that stimulates aggression. It is most powerful in males, but also influences females. Aggression facilitates change, and when that change is rewarded with success, our bodies are designed to amplify the biochemical signals that generate the success. What this means is that aggressive people tend to produce more and more testosterone until something checks their behavior.

As I see it, this primitive biological drive is the root cause of the ecological crisis we face. Once we learned to fashion tools, humanity freed itself from Darwinian evolution. There was nothing to check our behavior except perhaps the Earth itself. Aggressive people then turned every tool at our disposal to gather power to themselves. That included not only machinery and oil, but also rationalization of aggression through  selective and context-free application of the wisdom passed on through our intellectual and spiritual authorities. Jesus did say, for example, “No man can serve two masters. You cannot love both God and money.” And long before Marx, Adam Smith advocated for governments to secure workers’ rights against the destructive efficiencies of capitalism.

What was perhaps different in tribal cultures is that the feedback provided by nature was immediate. Do not work at harvest, and there is no food in January. In almost every society in which those constraints were removed aggression rose. This was true in African cultures, as well as in the Aztec and Mayan cultures of Central America.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, paleontologist and Catholic Philosopher, published a synthesis of Christian and evolutionary ideas in 1955 titled The Phenomenon of Man. Teilhard observed that whenever a species arises with a new competitive advantage, it spreads as far as possible across the globe. In recent times, this is true not only of man – European songbirds brought with the settlers have largely displaced their smaller Native American cousins. But once the spread is complete, the parent species refines its occupation of the inherited territory through a process called inflorescence. This was visible to Darwin in the variety of the Galapagos finches, each of which had evolved from a common parent. Some had beaks adapted to crack nuts, others to fishing insects out of holes.

Teilhard observed that man was the first species to dominate the globe in its entirety. He predicted that in our inflorescence we would create a noosphere – an emanation of our thought that would allow us to manage not only the local environment entrusted to native tribes, but the planet as a whole.

It is in this process that I find hope – a hope echoed by Jeremy Rifkin in The Empathic Civilization. There is no going back. Rather than rejecting the insights of our dominant culture, we must amplify them. The subculture of testosterone will immolate itself on the altar of its own greed. The quiet, calm, thoughtful successors will marshal understanding to the service of sustainability, and bring healing and peace to the Earth.

Faith and Intellect

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The atheist’s complaint against religion is frequently rooted in charges of anti-intellectualism. This is evident in Nicholas Baker’s article in this quarter’s Skeptic (Volk. 20 No. 4), Christianity’s Negative Impact on Modern American Education.

I must admit to being befuddled by these charges. Upon encountering atheists decrying intellectual incoherence in the faithful, I often invite the critic to come out and respond to the writings under the New Physics page of this blog. I have also offered the material to scientists through various forums. So far, I have received no response.

A colleague at work invited me down to the atheist Sunday Service in Santa Monica. In the event, a couple of sarcastic remarks regarding faith rankled, but for the most part I found a group of well-meaning people that seemed to have no interest in their spirituality. I confirmed this with my friend later, saying that I didn’t think that I would fit in to the community. When I offered that my experience was that my very presence forced people to confront their spirituality, he confirmed my decision.

It is the anti-spirituality of atheism that concerns me most. Until it is recognized, I am afraid that it is going to be impossible to reconcile the two communities.

An anti-spiritual emphasis is not entirely unique to atheism – I had a Kabbalist tell me that men were not to enter spiritual experience until they were forty. The violence outbursts of nationalism that rocked the world in the 20th century may be symptomatic: where once European politics was dominated by the egos of kings, public education may have facilitated the formation of gestalts that were driven by the masculine urge to power. Jung’s work on the collective unconscious may have been an attempt to understand the dynamics, and he writes in his biography of looking up at the mountains before World War II and seeing a tide of blood pouring over them. I sometimes suspect that, in the aftermath of the war, psychologists settled on denial of spiritual experience as a necessary practice of quarantine to prevent future epidemics. I have encountered some that say they diagnose schizophrenia only if the voices create fear in the patient. And when I sought counseling to deal with family-related stress, once the therapist determined that I was stable, she began asking me questions about reincarnation and process theology, with a focus on understanding why so many of us are immature spirits.

Unfortunately, any policy of denial creates a context of conspiracy that feeds a revolutionary counter-reaction. I believe that this is probably the basis of the anti-intellectualism that Mr. Baker confronts.

The illustration for Mr. Baker’s article shows Jesus whispering a test answer into the ear of a struggling student. This is a point made explicitly in the article: “When it comes to academic achievement, helping a student solve a math problem, using math and the student’s actual brain, displays better family values than does teaching the student to distrust intellect while pleading for an answer to fall from the sky.”

Mr. Baker’s attitude is rooted in the conflation of the brain and mind. While I did not force my children to read the Bible, I struggled against this prejudice with making them aware of the nature of intellect. As I perceive the operation of my mind, the brain is not a logic circuit, it is an interface that ideas use to become invested in the world, and an anchor that they use to create new forms of association. Ideas are spiritual constructs. As possessors of brains, we are their dance partners.

The most painful part of parenting my children through the prejudice of scientific materialism was when my younger son, struggling with his studies, attempted to engage me in discussion only to have his older brother come downstairs and tell him how wrong he was. For years I had attempted to open Greg’s mind to the world of ideas that Kevin had gained access to as an infant. Before Kevin’s intervention, I had felt the door finally opening, and it broke my heart to have him slam it shut. I dealt with the matter pretty harshly, telling him “If you don’t stop abusing your brother, I am not putting a single cent into your college education.” In later conversation, I told Kevin that “ideas are strongest when they are shared.”

This is known among mature scientists. Edward Teller’s office at LLNL had pictures of all the great scientists of his era, and I could feel their personalities reaching out through them. In another incident, I saw a divorced father at dinner with his son, the beautiful mother, and the wealthy man she had married. The son had asked a technical question, which the father answered after a pause. The child challenged him “How do you know that?” To which the father could only answer “I was informed.”

Personally, I had the experience in high school AP Biology of working in a classroom of collaborative students. During the AP exam, I became stuck on a couple of questions and found the answers arriving during final review. The teacher reported that to her surprise – given the brilliance of students in prior years – we had achieved the highest average score on the test in all her years of teaching. And in discussing morality at work, I have shared that when I reach a road block, I frequently open my mind and  an answer comes to me. At times that has been as explicit as having a person’s voice come into my head and say “Do it this way…”

Baker does not articulate this experience, and given his reaction to Christian values, I think that he may not be conscious of the operation of his own mind. If he was, he would understand the preconditions for sustaining such exchanges. It requires surrender of the ego (something that nature often forces upon scientists) and a genuine concern for others. This is the teaching we find in the Bible. In denigrating the value of the book’s moral teaching, Baker and his colleagues are undermining the attempts by Christian parents to open the door to the gestalt of civilized ideas known to the faithful as “The Holy Spirit.” That is no small matter.

Until they arrive at an alternative technology, Baker and others might do well to be more gentle with their public pronouncements. The emotion they attach to their crusade is going to make it extremely difficult for them to reconcile themselves to Christ when those investigations force them to confront his existence.

They’re All Crazy

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In explaining my difficulty of focus yesterday at work, I mentioned San Bernardino and a friend averred that his vote for president would go to the first candidate to stand up and take mental illness seriously.

This while the Republicans in the Senate vote to repeal the Affordable Health Care Act. Spear-headed by the segment of the insurance industry that made money by excluding coverage for sick people (I was denied coverage because I was once prescribed anti-depressants for situational depression).

This while we had the Bureau of Land Management faced down in Nevada a couple of years ago by a rancher who used “state’s rights” theories to justify non-payment of land use fees. Not that Nevada didn’t cede land to the federal government because they couldn’t afford to secure the desert occupied by the Native Americans.

It’s not about crazy people – follow the money. It’s that people that are emotionally unstable are easy to sell nonsense to – like the idea that you’ll be safer if you and everyone else buy more guns.

Is ‘God’ Low-Entropy?

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When I was in college, my professor in Introductory Physics rebutted an argument for God that touted life as a violation of the Laws of Thermodynamics. The devout claimed that life preserved order against the inevitable tide of entropy. My professor responded by asking us to consider the poop vs. net body weight ratio for babies. Life does increase entropy – (male) physicists just tend to hide from the fact.

Now researchers are discovering that “funny” words, such as those invented by Dr. Seuss, have a “low” entropy – they use combinations of unusual letters. It strikes me that ‘God’ may be one of those combinations. There’s the old atheist snipe “‘God’ is ‘dog’ spelled backwards.” And of course we have Sam Beckett’s intellectual tragicomedy “Waiting for Godot.” Are these funny simply because the letter combinations in ‘god’, ‘dog’ and ‘Godot’ are risible?

Maybe there was something in the old convention: “Elohim”, which became “Allah.” As “‘Allah’ Akbar!”, I may be allowed to paraphrase Christopher Hitchens: as a designation, “‘God’ is not great!”

Or maybe the low-entropy proof for God has simply eluded us. Maybe a low-entropy name is just what God would want – you know, bring smiles to our faces?

Abuse in the Linux Kernel Community

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Proclamations of concern over the abusiveness of the Linux Kernel Community of been growing louder in the open-source world. Steven Vaughn-Nichols summarizes the concerns in Computerworld. My comment on the matter?

Ancandune remarks wisely on the problem that “rude and hostile” imposes to the transmission of knowledge. I do not necessarily subscribe to his characterization of the motivating psychology. Perfectionists are driven by their own set of hostile interior voices. They don’t just produce something and throw it over the wall – they lie awake at night thinking about all the ways it can blow up in their face. What Linus may be attempting to demonstrate in his communications is how he goes about thinking when he writes code.

Is Linus a healthy person? That’s for him to judge.

The important question is whether the community is healthy. Steve Jobs and Bill Gates had boardrooms filled with over-sized egos to help them manage their succession plans. What is Linus going to do? Anoint a successor? Or will the community devolve into a WWF RAW! donnybrook with the last man standing holding the belt? Another possibility is that the corporations that finance many contributors will step in and appoint a successor.

Linus’s authority arose organically over many years. The community allows him the right to be critical. But it is not being critical of others that conditions his success – it is his ability to think critically. The community should recognize that distinction, and mercilessly criticize and purge those that emulate his style without bearing his gifts or responsibilities.

To illustrate my point regarding self-criticism, here’s the content of an e-mail characterizing a problem we had with the build at work recently:

It’s the usual stupidity – I don’t even remember why I created this file, but it’s just a copy of MotorIDCommander.cpp. It was probably intended to link AutoCommCommander with MotorIDCommander, but I never modified the contents.

Anyways – it’s excluded from the build in debug mode but not in release mode. Khalid is off at physical therapy today with the project file checked out, so I can’t publish a fix. If you can do it locally, that would get you moving forward.

Sorry

Brian

This is like the fourth or fifth time I’ve done this – left a file in the build for release mode after excluding it in debug mode.

Please Help Me Understand

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After reading the summary of the today’s mass shooting in Roseburg, Ore., I made the mistake of opening the comments. The posts were dominated by Second Amendment prattle – you know, “prying my gun out of my cold, dead hands.”

Not a word of sympathy.

Not an offer of support.

Does a heart beat in your chests?

Or is it that it beats too hard, that you face anxiety every day, and the only way to cauterize your fear is to go out to the gun range and shred a silhouette with automatic weapons fire?

I guess it boils down to this, for me: America’s Gun Lobby is a mechanism that we use to prove that we can’t use the threat of violence to protect ourselves from pain. It binds us to wander in fear through the valley of the shadow of death.

Wandering until we turn our faces upwards to the healing light of love.

How often does a gun clutched to a chest serve any purpose other than to prevent us from “baring our arms” to help each other? To clap shoulders in welcome? To offer and receive an embrace?

Freedom from Government through the Governance of Love

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In explaining the necessity of God in Tragic Sense of Life, the Jesuit philosopher Miguel de Unamuno asserts that it arises when every man, naturally desiring to control the world, confronts the inevitability of death. As the latter treads on our heels, even the most powerful are pressed to the conclusion that the only way to live forever is to embrace a God that loves us enough to grant us life.

Atheists are inclined by this logic to conclude that faith is a delusion. Marx certainly saw it that way, declaring that “religion is the opium of the masses.” But the underlying pressure is evidenced in the pronouncements of some technologists, among them the man I described yesterday who saw our digital sensors, networks and software as empowering us to build God. Others are more humble. At the ACM fiftieth anniversary symposium in 1997, Nathan Myhrvold, then chief architect at Microsoft, envisioned (somewhat playfully) a future in which we could escape death by creating digital simulations of our brains. The video skit included Bill Gates rubbing his chin as he thoughtfully considered the reduction in Microsoft’s benefits budget.

But if delusion is pathetic, oftentimes in the powerful avoidance is grotesque. We have Vladimir Putin, assassin of Russian patriots, proclaiming that Jesus will find no fault with him on Judgment Day. Or the effrontery of Donald Trump who, protected by his army of lawyers, knows that so long as he asserts righteousness, no one has the means to contradict his claims of competency and benevolence. Thus he continues to assert – in contradiction of the actual birth certificate – that his lawyers have compelling evidence to reveal regarding President Obama’s citizenship. Both of these men suffer from the same affliction, the tendency of our bodies to respond to successful acts of aggression by manufacturing more and more testosterone, the chemical driver for aggression. This is a positive feedback loop that was broken only by death in the cases of Hitler, Franco, Mao, Stalin, Kim Yung Un and so many other tyrants. In the prelude, millions of people were sacrificed on the altars of their psychological invincibility.

This dynamic is writ small in the lives of many businesses, congregations and families. People addicted to the rush of adrenaline and the power of testosterone manufacture experiences that stimulate their production. This is why it is said “absolute power corrupts absolutely.” The desire for power arises from the biological thrill of success, and to continue to receive that thrill, the addict must continue to risk his power in ever greater contests. In the heat of passion, the suffering visited upon others is ignored.

There are three antidotes to this dynamic. The first is popular rebellion. Paradoxically, this is the very force that pushed Putin and Trump to prominence. At a stump speech yesterday, Trump opened the floor to questions, and the first person to the microphone began to rant hatefully about President Obama and an imagined domestic Muslim threat. Trump did not defuse the situation, instead responding “We need to hear this question!” But often rebellion is merely another manifestation of the drive to power. Unless tempered, it rages out of control, as happened in the Jacobian tyranny following the French Revolution.

The second antidote is reason. Reason builds discipline that forces us to reconcile our actions with their consequences, thereby disciplining our aggression with objective evidence of failure. The tension between reason and will is not just moral, however: heightened levels of adrenaline actually degrade the higher thinking centers of the brain. This creates a terribly contradictory dynamic, perhaps manifesting itself in the fact that most academics do their greatest work in their youth. While testosterone serves the reasoning mind in creating the thirst to conquer and claim ideas, as the successful mind expands, so do levels of testosterone and adrenaline, which destroys the power of reason. In that context, the methods used to sustain power are not as brutal as those used by the social tyrant, but have their own unique form of cruelty, and leave lasting scars on the psyche. Isaac Newton, cheated of credit for a scientific insight by his predecessor as head of the Royal Academy of Sciences, had the satisfaction of burning the man’s portrait. Most victims of intellectual tyranny are consigned to obscurity.

It is natural for supporters to gather around the social or intellectual tyrant during his rise to power. Claiming benevolent intention is a great way of rallying support from the oppressed. Unfortunately, this dictum holds: A man will change his beliefs before he will change his behavior. When that behavior is organized around aggression, enemies must be created when there are none left at hand. All tyrants eventually turn on their lieutenants, often using hallucinatory rhetoric to justify their actions.

A peer once offered to me that all the greatest scientists were lovers of humanity. This brings us to the third antidote: love. This arrives upon us through many pathways. It can be through sex and maternity. It can be when an infant first grasps our forefinger. It can be through service to those in want. In those moments a bond is established, a linkage that makes palpable the suffering we visit upon others. That can be rationalized in material terms: tears on a beloved face or cries of shame are evidence of our failure. That breaks the vicious cycle of success and aggression.

But there is another aspect that goes beyond negative feedback. Aggression stimulates the loins and the mind, but barely touches the heart. Exchanging love with someone just feels good. It opens us up to a world of experience that can be touched in no other way. Ultimately, its rewards are far greater because no one that loves themselves objects to being loved. They do not turn on their friends for satisfaction, because their friends offer them satisfaction every day.

Democracy attempts to combat the urge to power by institutionalizing rebellion. In America, the two Presidents that were awarded most authority were George Washington, who gracefully surrendered power after two terms of service following universal acclamation by the Electoral College, and FDR, who literally worked himself to death through four terms in office. Both those men were governed by a sense of duty and love for their country, a commitment affirmed by the popular voice that is expressed in elections. At the end of the 20th century, those that seek the freedom to act always as they please (the ultimate manifestation of power) responded to electoral constraint by attacking our faith in government. Driven by testosterone and thus unable to govern themselves, they have invested huge amounts of money creating personalities such as Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly. As visible in the Oklahoma City bombing and the events surrounding the Republican nominating process, the end result has been to stimulate the resort to violence by others.

Thus we have the wisdom of Jesus: “Render unto Caesar those things that are Caesar’s.” We have the promise of Jeremiah: “For I will write my law on their hearts, and no man will be told ‘Come learn about my God’, because all will know me.” And we have Christ’s summation of the Jewish experience with law (the rule of reason) and governmental control: Love God and your neighbor.

It is through self-regulation that we discover truth and peace[NIV Matt. 7:13-14]:

Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.

But what other government would we choose, except the governance of our hearts? And to what other authority would be choose to submit, other than the authority of compassion in another? Why do we delude ourselves that there is any other way?