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California Seeks New Answers in Drought Struggle

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Governor “Moonbeam” Brown announced that he would tap the skills of former Governor Davis to lead the state’s drought initiatives. Waiting at the State Capitol for an Uber connection, Brown enthused that the state needed a “Gray Water Czar.”

This blogger has obtained papers outlining the nascent strategy. In a “farms for schools” swap, teachers unions have agreed to convince students to shave their heads. The schools would be credited with 15 gallons of water per bald student per day, reflecting both the water saved in the shower and the decreased chemical load on treatment facilities. These credits would be traded on a state-wide water exchange to raise money for education.

Davis and his advisors, observing the success of the California Raisins and Dairy Cow marketing campaigns, have licensed the “Cabbage Patch Kids” trademark and reserved the #BaldEagles hashtag for shaming of non-participants. Recognizing that more extreme measures may be necessary if the drought conditions prevail as the children age, the Czar’s office has entered into negotiations for the rights to the “Arid Extra Dry” trademark and is planning to register “Seche Pistols.”

In related news, in the St. Louis area, former energy traders have pooled their resources to fund a water exchange. In honor of the profit potential created by California’s two most famous governors – one famously libertarian and the other famously forward-thinking – the concern will be called “MoRon.”

Capitalism: Friend or Foe

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This is a response to Kiss Me On a Burning Barricade and other recent post at Gods and Radicals. I do sympathize very much with the intentions and energy of this forum. I would just hope to see it focused more precisely on human behavior, rather than abstract ideology.

A speaker at a recent conference exhorted liberals to reclaim Adam Smith, whose concerns regarding abuse of workers under the system of capital have been ignored by the “Greed is Good” and “Invisible Hand” libertarians that took over the Republican Party during the Reagan era. Smith saw capitalism as simply the use of wealth to invest in technology that would amplify the effects of labor. It was this process that finally overturned Malthusian poverty (see The Grand Pursuit) because while the cost paid per shirt went down, the cost of a shirt fell even faster.

Under your definition of productivity, the core problem in the situation that you describe is psychopathy, which is subtle and seductive and has infected many of our institutions. In Smith’s work, this is articulated as the problem of the Commons: well-meaning people create value for one another, accumulate wealth, and then the psychopaths come in and steal it from them.

For example, the sleepy Savings and Loan industry of the ’60s and ’70s allowed the middle class to pay itself interest at 6% while borrowing at 7%. Reagan deregulated the industry, allowing raiders to take the assets it had accumulated and transfer them to high-risk instruments. Now the middle class borrows at 18% and gets interest on deposits of 0.2%.

Regarding the specific situation you outline, there is a movement among the restaurant workers to establish humane working conditions in an industry that exploits mercilessly. Among the industry’s crimes include lobbying against a general working wage increase in order to protect an extremely low minimum wage for their industry. As agitators document, in many states the tips we leave are in fact the bulk of the worker’s wage.

Abstracting from Smith, the theory of Capitalism and productivity is a means for organizing information about economic activity, including work practices. While proponents of capitalism cite the benefits in increasing productivity, the information they gather can also be used to identify psychopathic behavior. The reason that you have the numbers to criticize the workplace practice is because of that theory. Don’t blame the messenger – attack the root cause.

Terrorism: The Use of Pseudo-Sociology to Foment Cultural Hostility

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One of the lynchpins of the Third Reich was the “science” of eugenics. The conflation of genetics and culture justified an organized assault on disadvantaged minorities that spread to those that spoke out against their annihilation.

I find it hard to escape this precedent in reading Kenneth Krause’s “Religion, Violence and Terrorism” (Skeptic Vol 20, No.1, pp 48-56). The primary defect of Krause’s analysis is to reason backwards from his conclusion, which is militantly anti-religious. This leads to pseudo-sociological analysis that ignores the historical context that inflames conflict between the Muslim world and the West. Moderating those passions is going to require analysis that is both better and more honest than Krause presents.

For example, on page 49, Krause advances David Eller’s theory of violence as a basis for an argument that religion contains all the characteristics that foment violence. However, Krause fails to notice that the characteristics of religion are generically characteristics that cause believers to “expand both the scope and scale of their activities.” In my reading of history, that has included much that must be upheld as good, such as caring for the disadvantaged and speaking out against injustice all over the world.

What matters, then, is what religious leaders actually teach their followers, and whether scripture provides a sound basis for exposing immoral teaching. In substantiating his opinions (pp. 50-52) regarding the uniquely perverse nature of the traditions of Abraham, Krause cherry-picks from the most objectionable passages, failing to recognize that the exhortations he decries, when implemented methodically, are reported in scripture to have resulted in the destruction of the community of believers. Applying the discipline of anthropology, honest treatment of the religious edicts of the Old Testament would also recognize numerous occasions on which God decried the extent to which he suffered from the perfidy of the religious and political elites. This should be taken, by the mature reader, as an indication that human political ambitions corrupted the practice of the religion, which obviously would best be implemented by subordinating scripture to political ends. This is known to have occurred in documented history – so how could we not expect it to have occurred when the elites had complete control of the holy word?

Finally, Krause avoids the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, who overthrew the religious justification for violence and eviscerated all dualistic systems of judgment (not only “good and evil”, but all legal codes that purport to categorize us as “guilty” or “innocent”) with edicts that we are to treat every interaction with people as an opportunity to create strength in them. Jesus’s exhortations reiterate the wisdom of the judgment upon Cain: our Darwinian heritage makes moral conduct difficult. Rather than destroying those that fail, we should give them the opportunity to pass on the lessons they have learned.

In summary, Krause’s scriptural analysis of the traditions of Abraham suffers terminally from confirmation bias. He seeks out passages that support his thesis, and ignores all others. Worse, he advances his selections and interpretations as typical dogma, when in fact I have never heard these passages used as moral guidance in any American church, synagogue or mosque. At least in the developed world, the religious have moved on. So should Krause.

The remainder of the article presents survey data that substantiates the oppressive opinions of the populations of largely Muslim nations. The glaring defect of this study is its failure to consider other factors that might contribute to the attitudes expressed by the sampled population. For example, at the recent Skeptics Conference, Ian Morris noted that foraging societies tolerate violence to a far greater degree than do fossil-fuel cultures. Islam is the religion of the poor: many of the nations in the survey data lived at or near foraging levels until last century. That lifestyle was obliterated when a large number of these nations were granted enormous oil wealth, which has given their monarchical elites the means to propagate their social codes in an attempt to secure stability in the face of sophisticated social critiques brought back by youth educated in Western universities. We should not be surprised that these nations, granted sudden and enormous wealth, should use it to propagate their social standards. That includes, as happened during the Spanish Inquisition, support for religious “scholars” willing to corrupt scripture to justify violent oppression (Wahabbism, which foments the most virulent extremism, is a recent construction of the Saudi monarchy). I would argue that the failure to consider this and other social factors (such as the organized attempt by Western-educated elites to uproot Muslim culture in the 20th century) leaves readers of Krause’s article vulnerable to the classic misattribution of “correlation as causation.”

My disappointment is that this shoddy piece of analysis was published by an organization that claims to promote science.

In a Nutshell: Separation of Church and State

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Any law can be corrupted, and each individual has needs that cannot be addressed under laws covering multitudes. Religion closes those gaps. Government must ensure the stability of the social order in the face of predation. Religion must create community that erodes predatory impulses. When religion succeeds at its work, government fades into the background. When religion fails its work, government grows in importance.

So a religion or religious leader has lost their way when exhorting the government to coerce people to abide by religious precepts. That is to authorize, rather than erode, predatory behavior.

A political leader can turn to religion for inspiration, but the final formulation of law must be in secular terms. Otherwise arguments of state are brought necessarily into religious forums, undermining their amity.

In the Year 2525: Big Science, Big History, and the Far Future of Humanity

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I went out to Pasadena yesterday to Caltech, where the Skeptics Society held its annual conference. The theme was set by Michael Shermer, whose latest book “The Moral Arc”, framed the conversation.

Shermer’s basic premise is that charting the course of science shows that it correlates with an improvement in moral decision-making. I would tend to caution that correlation does not imply causation. But let’s look at how the conference speakers responded to that framing.

The first speaker, Don Prothero, raised an alarm about the dangers of science denial. We are skating on the edge of ecological disaster. Species extinction is occurring at a rate never before seen in the history of the planet, and global climate change threatens human survival as well. Prothero pointed the finger at science deniers who have impeded the implementation of policies such as those pursued by Germany and France to reduce their fossil fuel dependency. But where did the power to extract and consume so much fossil fuel come from, Dr. Prothero? From science, of course. In conversation, I also pointed out to him my sense that the political investments made by the Koch brothers probably reflect a basic understanding of the science of economics.

Ian Morris did not look deeply into the future, but commented on the correlation between social moires and energy consumption in foraging, farming and fossil fuel societies. He noted that the citizens in the last stage consume nearly 100 times as much energy as those in the first stage. Only farming societies tend to accept hierarchical structure, while foraging societies accept violence. The fossil fuel culture has created a kind of “sweet spot” for citizens that are largely free from violence and also allowed personal liberty (although that conclusion seems weaker if we look at what we’ve done to the rest of the animal kingdom – pigs, chickens and cows might beg to differ). The future depends greatly upon discovery of alternative sources of energy.

Jared Diamond framed his comments on the perception of danger against his experiences among the natives of New Guinea. His charming vignettes included the wisdom that parents in New Guinea allow their children choice. While I agree that far too much of our children’s time is prescribed for them, I found his admission that his household ultimately held 150 or so reptilian pets to reflect more an allowance for children to decide for their parents. The overall flow of the presentation, however, seemed to argue against Shermer’s hypothesis: the medical benefits of advanced cultures comes with emotional disassociation and irrational anxiety that is unknown in tribal cultures.

Carol Tavris offered an amusing and enlightening look at gender and sexuality. Mostly it was directed towards disassembly of social stereotypes regarding gender and sexuality. The most significant revelation for the attendees should have been the debunking of studies that suggested that sexual orientation was a biological predisposition rather than a choice. The intervening years have demonstrated that there is no biological factor that determines sexual orientation, and sociologists have described societies that have age groups that engage in homosexuality before entering into hetero adulthoods. Tavris also emphasized that feminine rights (with a focus on the frightening practice of castration and mutilation) depended upon economic opportunity for women. Both observations have significant political consequences, and led to turbid discussions regarding Western cultural imperialism.

John McWhorter was on far safer ground in considering the future of languages. Many languages will die, and attempting to preserve languages that are dying is a lost cause – their structure is simply too irregular for anyone to master who hasn’t learned them from the cradle. In fact, the relative elegance of many modern languages is related to the need to bring adult learners (emigrants) into the social system. The language had to be “dumbed down.” For this reason, McWhorter confidently states that Chinese, although the language spoken by the most people, would not overcome the tide of English. The tonal and contextual subtleties of Chinese make it impossible for an adult to master.

After the lunch break, Shermer and Richard Dawkins had a conversation that was advertised to consider the future of religion, but became rather focused on the suitability of Darwinian theory as a moral weathervane. It was nice for Dawkins to admit that he would allow for an advanced alien species (a type of “God”), but that it would have to have arisen out of evolution. I found the discussion to be frustrating, and stood up in the Q&A to offer that human behavior and evolutionary success is driven by Lamarckian processes (due to the enormous plasticity of the brain, human adults pass traits acquired during their lifetimes on to their children). While competitive selection still applies in human society, attempting to use Darwinian processes to explain human morality is a broken proposition.

Esther Dyson gave humble and uplifting introduction to the work that she is doing in trying to change the systems that cultivate poor health choices in the economically disadvantaged segments of our society. She shied away from any claims to scientific process. I had to stand up and applaud the empathy demonstrated by her choice to feel the pain of these people, and respond by wading in to do something.

My assessment of Leonard Krauss was summed up in person to him. Since I left the field of particle physics in 1990, I have become concerned that physicists talk about mathematical constructs as though they were observed physical fact. Krauss agreed that was an issue, but when I asked what the corrective was, he simply said “people lose their funding.” I did try to introduce some of the concepts I’ve outlined here. The conversation was an experience that hopefully will prepare me to do better in the future.

David Brin was to talk about privacy and security, but ended up developing a philosophical framework for political action. I found his presentation to be fascinating, in that I think that he was actually trying to deal with moral complexity that the others escaped by narrowing their focus. However, it wasn’t terribly scientific: Brin’s claim that developed nations have a “diamond shaped” power structure (a broad middle class) ignores the third-world critique that we’ve merely exported our poverty (globally, the pyramidal structure still applies). Brin did characterize the war on the middle class as an upper-class “putsch”, and considered that a reflection of behavior held over from our Darwinian past. I was heartened by one particular marching order: liberals need to reclaim Adam Smith, whose thinking has been corrupted by the neo-conservatives.

Gregory Benford spoke about the future of space travel. He echoed Prothero with an alarm that if we don’t start pulling our space junk out of orbit, the gateway will close: we won’t be able to launch rockets through the debris generated by colliding fragments. He then considered economic models for resource extraction from the asteroid belt, which are apparently related to long-term (100 million years) plans to boost the earth from its orbit so that it won’t be dried out as the sun heats. As for the prospect for travel to other solar systems, Benford invoked the lack of foresight of Thomas Jefferson, who thought it would take 1000 years for Americans to settle the continent, and the importance of the explorer spirit to human culture: politics, rather than science.

Returning now to the framing set by Shermer, I offer this: science is the study of the behavior of things that lack personality. It has long been recognized that the stepchildren of political and social science struggle because the participants don’t sit still long enough to be studied – introduce a change in the system, and they’ll change their behavior. So while trying to manage morality must be a rational exercise, this conference offered weak indications that scientific practices are going to have an impact. Where the question of the basis of morality was addressed, it was in gross abstractions that were often contradicted by the evidence offered by other speakers.

The lesson that I would hope a skeptic would draw from this is that they should have far more sympathy for the struggles faced by leaders of religious and political organizations. St. Augustine, for example, was a rational philosopher whose thought shaped moral discussion for more than a thousand years. His writings might be worthy of consideration.

The danger of convocations such as the Skeptics’ Conference is that they create an echo chamber. The fact is that most of society cannot keep up with the developments described by these worthy speakers: we lack either the mental capacity or the time. In that context, ritual and mystery are essential and valuable props to social development. So don’t tell Christians that they are unscientific. Tell them that we need intelligent design, and since they are exhorted to be Godly, why not get into the game ourselves?

Pope Francis Submits to Scientific Materialism

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Last week, the Irish Republic, long dominated by the Catholic Church in its management of public morals, stood up on its feet and granted marriage rights to same-sex couples.

Hallelujah!

The response of the Pope is to claim that humanity “lost” on that day. That claim is rooted in a Biblical passage that asserts marriage is between a “man and a woman.”

As I have discussed before, many same-sex couples involve a masculine personality and a feminine personality. Since I hold that the domain of religion is the soul, I see such pairings are sacred before God. Actually, I would assert that any relationship that brings love into the world is sacred to God, because as we were taught by John, God is love.

Pope Francis, unfortunately, has submitted to a philosophy known as “scientific materialism.” In that world view, it is only the material presentation that matters in judging right and wrong. A “man”, in that world view, possesses a penis that is used to penetrate the vagina of a “woman.” And, of course, God’s primary purpose is in seeing to it that the global ecology is destroyed by human overpopulation.

Yes, Francis, humanity has lost something indeed when even the Pope holds that what we do with our bodies counts more than what we do with our souls.

The Path of Peter

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Having completed my journey home (The Road Home: A Contemporary Exploration of the Buddhist Path by Ethan Nichtern), I found myself looking at Peter’s exhortations at church on Sunday. I’ve shared these before (Robbing Peter to Play Paul), but stimulated by Nichtern’s detailed description of the Buddhist path to healing, I saw them in a new light.

Let me present them again:

For this very reason, make every effort to add to your faith goodness; and to goodness, knowledge; and to knowledge, self-control; and to self-control, perseverance; and to perseverance, godliness; and to godliness, mutual affection; and to mutual affection, love. For if you possess these qualities in increasing measure, they will keep you from being ineffective and unproductive in your knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ.

So how does this path evolve?

Faith is simply a posture towards existence that asserts it is constructed to allow us to find well-being. Faith in the Old Testament was most often associated with the exhortation “Fear not” – which is the most common phrase in the Bible. It is to take comfort that a greater power guides us into a meaningful purpose, and that purpose includes our well-being. The story of Lot is the most dramatic parable of that process.

Once we make the leap of faith, we then open ourselves to recognition of goodness in the world, and allow it to fill us. Yes, I am saying that Peter’s exhortation is not to be good, but to allow the goodness of the world to enter into us. That means not consuming things and experiences, but allowing them to enter into us, and giving recognition and gratitude for the good they bring. So when we eat food, when someone cares for us when we are sick, when someone pays us a fair wage, we should offer our gratitude and recognition of their goodness. This attitude protects our goodness and the goodness of others from corruption by divisive attitudes. It allows goodness to grow in the community of the faithful.

Given the experience of goodness, we turn next to understanding of the world and its operation. We seek knowledge. But we do so with an innate sense of how knowledge relates to goodness. When told a lie, we can feel that it’s corruption deep in the heart. When told how to exploit the bounty of the earth, we feel the land crying out in pain. So we filter knowledge and uphold that which creates and sustains good.

Once we have a base of knowledge regarding the working of the world, we can predict the consequences of our actions. We apply that understanding to constrain our actions. It is not just goodness that guides us at this point – we adopt the practice of self-control. We are now set on the path of the knowledge of good and evil. We expose ourselves again to temptation, and as Cain, seek to master sin.

Sin is subtle and alluring. It offers us pleasures without great cost to ourselves. So we fall prey to its siren song. We make mistakes. We have to try, and try again. We should not beat ourselves up too much, but persevere. This is not an easy journey!

As we grow along that path, we find that we obtain skill in creating good among the community. Thus we become godly, in our own little way. We create circumstances in which the powers held by others are channeled to the benefit of all. We attain stewardship, just as God has stewardship over us.

Now there will be arguments over the allocation of resources. We need to avoid taking those arguments personally. That is accomplished best by opening our hearts to one another in compassion. When we speak, we speak not only for ourselves and our perceptions. As stewards, we allow those we guide to express their needs, fears and hopes to us. When we represent them in decision-making councils, they then speak through us. It is through mutual affection that the needs of the community can be expressed and resolved without rancor or ill-will.

And finally, we learn simply to love. That means to focus all of our energies outwards, realizing now that we are fitter in caring for others because they have not yet learned to care for one another. We invest in their growth, knowing that while we might be able to do a thing better than they, in the end that investment empowers them to love us in return.

From this, I see indeed the truth in Peter’s claim: this is how best to be effective and productive in our knowledge of loving.

Visualization Aids

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I have been walking through my response to Ethan Nichtern’s The Road Home. The first two entries end with a “compare and contrast” to Christianity, though I recognize that the threads I emphasize are not typical of most Christian commentators. Given the power to frame the debate, the critical reader might assume also that I have tilted the playing field. For myself, I have been astonished at the degree of compatibility between Christian and Buddhist thought. I have not sought to diminish Ethan’s authority. I feel a great love for him, for reasons that will be revealed below.

Nichtern identifies three distinct stages along the Buddhist path: personal, interpersonal and cultural. The last is the realm of Vajrayana or Tantric practices of visualization. As Nichtern describes it, after having recognized our poor programming and having learned to harmonize our existence with others, in the final stage of the journey the practitioner does the greater work of revitalizing the stories that we tell about the lives that we lead, replacing myths of helplessness with tales of creative accomplishment.

Nichtern’s description of the first two stages of the path are firmly rooted in psychology. In his description of the Vajrayana practices, however, I felt the language to be beautifully poetical — that is to say, inspirational and aspirational rather than logical. I attribute this shift as a reflection of his rejection of mystical experience. Nichtern almost apologizes for the ancient Buddhist practitioners who asserted that their visualizations were personalities resting out of time. To the modern commentator, the ancient view is just not “scientific.” (Of course, here I have dispute that “scientific” consensus.)

While Nichtern claims to remain open to mystical possibilities, in considering the role of Buddhism in social action, he asserts that our struggles are rooted in a human culture that stimulates “scared, selfish and solitary” behaviors (the three S’s) to the detriment of “courage, compassion and connection” (the three C’s). Drawing upon Solnit’s A Paradise Born in Hell, Nichtern observes that in the aftermath of disaster most communities exercise the three C’s until leaders arrive to assert control — as Solnit documents, often with the goal of securing property. Nichtern then advances a variant of original sin, a la Rousseau: primitive man is noble, but human society corrupts that nature. The problems that we confront are self-made, and can be resolved by coordinating personal expressions of mindfulness in social action.

But does the problem originate with humanity? This is consistent with Christian dogma. However, upon careful reading, the book of Genesis clearly indicates that evil did not originate with mankind. The serpent existed before the fall, and in managing Cain’s struggle with selfishness, God says “Sin waits at your door. It desires to have you, but you can master it.”

When we awaken fully to the reality of mystical evolution, it can be terrifying. The forces at play are enormous, far beyond the capacity of any human mind to resist. An accessible analogy is the condition of the citizen in the modern nation-state: the government can easily destroy the individual. So where is hope to be found? In the United States, the liberty of the individual is protected in the construction of our Constitution, which safeguards individual freedom through tension between the three branches of government. So on the chessboard of mystical confrontation: life exists where spirit enters matter. In that melding, spirit is capable of propagation and adaptation, but also runs the risk of becoming mired. The protagonists proceed slowly and deliberately, pursuing their conflict with methods that may wound life, but never desiring to annihilate it, because that would be to annihilate themselves.

The long struggle for justice, extending back to the construction of this reality, has been to secure the fruits of creative collaboration against the destructive whims of predators. Once that is understood, we recognize that while we are hunted, we are also supported, and that support comes from entities that have creative capacities that are being organized to liberate us from evil.

So why reject that reality? Because it hurts. To take a turn of phrase from Madison: “Life is the worst form of experience – except all the other forms.” But before we lose hope, we should invoke Roosevelt: “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” The three C’s unlock the powers of the creative mind. When we embrace them fully, there is nothing that can hold us in check, not even death itself. Humanity has the privileged opportunity to facilitate the expression of the creative powers. We should embrace it.

I have met Ethan twice in person, and had the same unusual experience on both occasions. When I approached to shake his hand, his fingers folded inward. I had the strange impression that they were bending around a wound received in a past life. He seemed unable to control his reaction, even when my hand arrived as a brace.

Oh, my brother! I have tried, in my visualizations, to pull those nails from your palms. That burden was not yours. There are greater powers at work than ours. Trust them, and embrace the greatest of human privileges: dispelling the shadow of shame and fear not only from individual human minds, but from human nature itself, and eventually all the sentient minds populating the world that we both love so deeply.

It is, indeed, an honor to walk the road with you.

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?