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The Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything

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When I need to disconnect from the world, I play Runescape (which, believe it or not, I first parsed as “run – escape”). I always play on world 42, which is the “role-playing world”. I don’t know how to role-play (I always think of J. Edgar Hoover), but I play there because of Douglas Adams.

Douglas Adams is the author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, a science-fiction satire that was recently mashed up as a movie. The premise of the movie is this: an anxious alien race designs a computer to calculate the answer to “life, the universe and everything!” The computer first calculates the time required to produce the answer, then goes into millenium-spanning hibernation. When the instant arrives, a huge throng of ecstatic onlookers is treated to the result.

42.

Now Adams says that this was a completely random number: just the number that came into his head while out in the garden.

You can imagine our disappointment.

The alien race complains that the answer doesn’t mean anything, and the computer explains that it still has to calculate the question. The mood of the crowd brightens as the computer announces that it will design an even bigger computer to calculate the question.

In the end, it turns out that the computer is the Earth. The hero of the series is ultimately trapped with the representatives of the alien race, manifesting as mice, who threaten to cut open his brain to get at the question.

Now, as a literary critic, I have to say that this entire story line is absurd. The question was already asked: “What is the answer to life, the universe, and everything?” So the problem was that they didn’t understand the answer. The answer is here on earth. So let’s see, what can we make of 42?

Well, 42 = 6 x 7. In Genesis, ‘6’ is the number of man. ‘7’ is the number of god. “seven times six” can thus be read as “god elaborated as man”. In other words, the answer to “the meaning of life” is the little baby Jesus!

Douglas, were you entirely innocent in bringing this wisdom to the world?

Merry Christmas everybody!

Just don’t ask me to explain what this means with in re: the recent book by W and the Clinton presidency.

Containment

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In the ‘90s, following the fall of the Iron Curtain and the liberalization of China’s economy, Francis Fukuyama wrote The End of History. From the reviews, I gathered that his proposition was that the competition between centrally planned societies and free-market societies had been decided decisively in favor of the free market. With that settled, Fukuyama argued, all that was left was the working out of the practical details in specific situations. The world would be mercifully free of the paroxysms born of ideological conflict.

The realists pointed out that, in fact, the Cold War era had been relatively free of conflict. With the loss of the dichotomy that pitted Russia and China against the rest of the world, history would in fact resume its messy march. The problem of foreign policy in new millennium would be to prevent generalized conflict on a global scale. We are seeing that borne out in current events.

At root, I believe that the prescience of the realists reflected the falseness of Fukuyama’s dichotomy. The true dichotomy is between societies that commit a significant part of their resources to the protection of human rights, versus those that allow the powerful to exploit human capital. In the extreme, exploitation is visible today in the slavery of child farm laborers in Mexico, and in sex trafficking on a global scale. But it is also seen in the rather more subtle exploitation of educated workers in the developed world, bound by lop-sided employment contracts and forced by income inequity to work and commute long hours that inhibit their investment in the maturation of their children.

With these miserable expectations, I was heartened in the ‘90s by the democratic transition in the Philippines. The methods deployed by the US were a fascinating contradiction. Over the decades, the Philippine armed forces had been reorganized around the use of advanced US weapons systems that require ongoing maintenance. At the strategic level, true mastery of these systems required training in US military academies. That training came with indoctrination in the democratic theory of military service. Thus, when the dictator called upon the military to prevent the installation of a freely elected government, General Ramos would only patrol the streets to maintain order. The Marcos regime had no option but to quit the country.

It has been with some trepidation that I have watched this and other methods deployed by first-world nations over the years to contain the spread of exploitative practices around the globe. The foremost tool has been the creation of plutocracies funded by the sale of natural resources. We see this at play in Russia. Secretary Kerry warned that the invasion of Ukraine would be an “expensive” adventure for Russia. President Putin scoffed that the US could not project power into his back yard, but now can only watch oil prices plummet as the US and other nations opened the taps at their oil fields. It may take some time, but the West must hope that eventually the zeal of the Russian people will wear down under growing poverty.

We see something similar happening in China, which has concentrated wealth in the hands of the very few not only by exploiting human capital, but by failing to contain wide-spread environmental degradation. The problem for China is that its lack of respect for human rights is not limited to the public at large. It extends into the oligarchy as well. Fearing that their wealth will be seized by political opportunists (including, by many accounts, the police), Chinese entrepreneurs are taking their money and talent overseas.

The counter-examples to this pressure are Iran and North Korea, both nations with rigidly controlled ideologies that beat down the will of the people. More disturbing to me is Tibet. The Dalai Lama has indicated that he would rather see the fall of his religious tradition than to have China choose his successor. The Tibetan natives are being overwhelmed by Han resettlement. It appears that the nation is going to succumb to rapacious greed.

The recent debacle over Sony’s The Interview has reinforced my gloom. The United Nations is now building a case against North Korea for widespread human rights violations against its citizens. The details include prison camps containing up to 120,000 people, summary executions and rape. Obviously this is not a situation that occurred overnight. Why has the world been silent? What precedents are we following in this case, and what lessons may be drawn by tyrannical leaders elsewhere?

In formal political theory, the only hope is in the tendency of dynasties to collapse. In the early stages, this is often a matter of cannibalism among the elite. As in China, they seize wealth from each other. When the unprofitability of that course is established, the next stage is in the realization that their ambitions are bounded by the incompetence of the people they depend upon. This results from a number of factors, perhaps foremost being the paranoia of thieves that leads them to surround themselves with people that they can control. When the cost of incompetence is grasped, a competition begins for access to creative talent, which over the long run leads to devolution of power to the middle class.

The lie to this hope is found in feudal Europe, where the middle class was allowed to accumulate wealth only until it created holdings that could threaten the ruling class. Then taxation and royal writs of monopoly were used to restore control to the nobility. Capitalism took hold in Europe only because the War of the Roses diverted the attentions of the nobility during the early stages of the industrial revolution in England.

In the face of these apparently implacable social and political pressures, I trust in faith. Not blind faith, but belief fused with scientific understanding. There are sources of power that beggar the military might of nations because they turn the will of warriors; there are methods of communication that no media barriers can block; there are mechanisms of justice that make the rapacious accumulation of wealth an exercise in self-destruction. Tyrants can frighten and exploit their people, but they can’t repeal the laws of physics.

The Unitarian Universalist minister Mark Morrison-Reed wrote, in Black Pioneers in a White Denomination, that the negro slaves of the American South, having lost all control of their physical existence, turned inwards and discovered an abiding presence of love. Grasping the power it offered, they developed strength to control the will of their masters.

Predators beat a single drum: they use fear and greed to seize wealth, rather than creating wealth through disciplined creativity. It is there, in the fundamental psychological weakness of the predator, that the faithful will find the chink in the armor, and subdue their oppressors.

If at First You Don’t Succeed…

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I grew up on Rue de la Pierre in Palos Verdes, California. The development was a young professionals’ haven. The street up and down the block was overrun with children, and the school yard was only a hop over a barbed chain-link fence. We had the run of the street, my siblings and I, when we weren’t running up and down the sage-brush hills between the school and the golf course.

About half-way through fourth grade, I realized that I was losing my connection with that crowd. I would come out of the house after studying and discover that the kids had already divided up into play groups. I’d hunt them down the street or hop the fence and discover, more often than not, that I was the odd man out.

It was then that the epithet “Brain” was first donated to me. You see, I was staying in after finishing my homework to read ahead in my history book. Given the social consequences, I found myself wondering why I felt such a strong compulsion. Sure, curiosity was part of it, but more than that, I just felt that it was really important to understand how we had arrived at this place with all of this stuff made available for our use. Not that I considered myself to be blessed in any way, I was really just amazed. Cars, houses, teachers, jobs: I mean, how did it all get here?

So in spite of the fact that I am an iconoclast and an out-of-the-box thinker, I’ve always considered it important to maintain contact with the world of the past (though not with my own past: that’s entirely different – somehow I have trouble considering myself to be at all important). So when I found myself with a working physical framework for explaining spirituality, I was driven to figure out how it related to the great religious teachings of the world.

I didn’t need long to realize that complete reconciliation would be impossible. Just look at the great religious divide between east and west: one embraces the idea of rebirth (or reincarnation), the other rejects it. Clearly, one or the other has to be wrong. It was an easy judgment to make: I’m firmly convinced that reincarnation is a natural consequence of the physics. But recently, I’ve begun to realize how fundamental that decision was: everything about my ability to resist fear is rooted in my belief that I’ll have another chance to try again if I don’t accomplish my goals in this life.

In the interim, I’ve come to identify very strongly with the “Process of Christ”, as I call it. I’ve been blogging and dialoging on-line with people that follow the official Christian teaching about rebirth, which is that it doesn’t happen. My own reading of scripture seems to find strong evidence for reincarnation, though it’s not a central issue in Jesus’s ministry. The first is the identification of John the Baptist as the returned Elijah. Another is the teaching that the rich that do not care for the poor will themselves be poor. This is so much in contrast with the way the world works that it can only be reconciled through the Eastern concept of karma, which brings balance for greed in a future life.

Given that reincarnation as a spiritual reality comes directly from Jesus’s lips, you have to wonder how it was drummed out of Christian dogma. The turning point, as with so many issues with Christian dogma, was the council of Nicea. The central issue for Emperor Constantine, as well as for many of the Church fathers he gathered, was to protect the authority of the Church. Today, we take a somewhat jaundiced view of that imperative. If we believe that we only get one chance to get it right, those that claim to offer us reliable guidance gain social leverage which can be turned fairly easily to personal advantage. This avarice is often held out as the explanation for the council’s rejection of reincarnation, which was represented by Origen.

But the authority of the church is not a trivial matter (see The Conservative Agenda). The church offered the sacraments to its flock: baptism, marriage, confession, last rites. In offering those rites, the priest is using ritual to prepare the recipient to receive the divine presence. So what happens, as is all too often the case, it turns out that the priest is a sinner? Are all the sacraments he offered now null and void? This is the Darian heresy, which held that only a saint can administer the sacraments. This led to a certain elitism in that movement, as well as a lack of respect for the Church as an institution.

To deal with this problem, the Church fathers upheld the Divine commission of Jesus, who founded the church in Peter. If that commission was to be unassailable, then Jesus must be a unique spiritual figure. It is for this reason that the Creed says that he was “begotten, not made.” His relationship with God is absolutely unique, unlike those beings made in Genesis, and so the authority of the sacraments rests with the Church that he specifically commissioned, not the priest.

As for the rest of us: we are like Adam. God breathes his spirit into us at the moment of conception, and we return to him at the moment of death.

Taking away the hope of future lives to achieve redemption does cast the great mass of humanity into a desperate situation. Most of the world has very few resources to devote to spiritual improvement, and it seems contradictory to say that a loving God would only give them one chance to get it right. But there’s a flip side, and that’s in the pressure “one life” focuses on those with the resources to do some good in the world. There’s a lot of teaching on this as well, including not least the young man of wealth that asks how to enter the kingdom, and is told “sell all your belongings and give to the poor, then come follow me.” Conversely, if reincarnation occurs, then why not just enjoy this life? If you do wrong, you can always make it up again later, can’t you?

Sadly, in our secular age the belief in one life actually works the other way. Those that exploit the world around them believe that they won’t have to clean up the mess that they’ve made. Eat, drink and be merry, for God doesn’t really exist anyways!

I tend to believe that today the moral balance supports recognition of the truth of reincarnation that will be obvious when we fully understand the physics of spirituality. I believe also that this is most consistent with my faith in a loving God. It will be interesting to see if I can square that with the Church that Jesus founded, or whether, as with Galileo, they will resist science in misguided attempts to secure their authority.

I have some reason to believe that the Church understands the dynamics in a practical sense. I went up to Valyermo a couple of times to visit St. Andrew’s Abbey, a Benedictine Monastery. After Mass one Sunday, I went for a walk on the grounds, and found myself on the flat above the Monastery where they maintain two graveyards.

The first was for the public, and as I walked among the graves, I had a strong sense of walking among their spirits. A voice came into my head: “Please leave our dead alone.” However, I didn’t intend to disturb them, I was just fascinated by this strong sense that they had chosen to take a rest from the vale of tears that is human life. They longed for Christ’s return, and one of the gifts that the Church offers the faithful is a sacrament that allows people to rest until he does.

The second graveyard was a short way off, and was for the priests. As I walked past them, I had a strong sense of them as guardians. They were ranked in order by burial date.

It was a long walk around the rim of the plateau to get back down to the grounds, so I thought it would be worth looking for another route down. As I walked along the rim towards the front of the Abbey, I encountered a Wiccan woman sitting cross-legged with her yoni pointed at the priests. She was trying to entice the youngest back into life. I circled her once (“Not on my watch!”), and as I did so spied a trailhead that led back down to the amphitheater below.

Religious Intolerance in the Military

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I’ve been active on the Religious Tolerance group on Facebook. I declared my position fairly early on in a posting that stated “all great religious teachings serve to transform an existence driven by lies, fear and death into an existence guided by truth, hope and life.” However there are those that see me as a Christian proselytizer, largely because I quote scripture. This makes me sad. I write there because I believe that “Christian intolerance” is rooted in false teaching, and that if we look in scripture, we will find evidence to that effect. I quote scripture because I believe that it is the best tool that we have for combating intolerance masquerading as Christianity.

This is nowhere more evident than in those that use death threats in order to conquer institutions in “the name of Christ.” I have been made aware recently of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, and the death threats issued against its members and their families by Christian militants.

We don’t have to attain much depth of spiritual experience before we become aware that spiritual evolution did not begin with humanity. The dominant personalities in the spiritual realm, prior to our emergence, were the predators that stand atop the biological food chain. These would have been the dinosaurs (which appear as the serpent in the Garden of Eden and the dragon in Revelation) and the bear and great cats (the mammalian predators) that appear in Revelation and Daniel’s Dream of the Four Beasts.

Revelation is best understood as the history of the unseating of predation as the driver of evolution in favor of intelligent engineering that is informed by unconditional love. This is not a clean and simple process, and is made more difficult because humanity has only a dim perception of the spiritual dynamics. What transpires in Revelation 13:11-15 is that the dragon dresses up as the lamb and empowers the mammalian predators to religious dominance. As it is written: “All inhabitants of the earth will worship the beast – all whose names have not been written in the book of life belonging to the Lamb that was slain from the creation of the world”, that lamb being Christ. Clearly, those that follow the beast do not follow Christ.

The beast continues to promulgate teaching that “anyone that does not worship the idol must die.” The beast famously bears the number “666.” While John points out that this is the number of man (who was created on the sixth “day”), six is also the number of the “day” of mammals that attained evolutionary dominance after the fall of the dinosaurs.

So what is directly written in the Bible is that the use of death threats is false teaching, and actually anti-Christ.

That this teaching is particularly strong in the military, which is an institution organized to harness the forces of predation, is not at all surprising. As I see it, those that resist this process, such as Mr. Weinstein and his colleagues, are agents of truth and life, and regardless of their profession of faith, are held in the heart of Christ with the most tender concern and honored regard.

The Conservative Agenda

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Today, I got a teeny glimpse of what it’s like to be a blog star. I responded to an MSN editorial that supported the Republican agenda on the grounds that lower property taxes and denial of global warming would encourage us to have more babies, which would prevent our economy from being overtaken by higher-growth cultures. I surveyed the realities of living in high-growth nations, and offered that maybe if the ultra-rich had kept the manufacturing jobs on-shore, the middle class would still be able to buy houses. Furthermore, California’s experience with property tax cuts has been that it’s made it really difficult to educate the kids we have now to the competitive standards in the 21st century. I had three-digits in likes by lunch-time.

The Republican Party likes to position itself as a bastion of “conservative” values and practices. You know, prudent fiscal management, results-driven policies, and stable families. But, looking at the record, I find it hard to escape the conclusion that it is actually driven entirely by the financial industry, which loves budget and trade deficits because federal bond issues and currency trading brings them a tidy guaranteed income. That, at least, appears to be the principal difference, since the Reagan era, between Republican and Democratic administrations. Republicans: tax cuts, deficits and off-shoring. Democrats: budgets brought into balance, and a focus on workforce and ecological sustainability.

Now some will complain that I’m just declaring my biases, and I am a registered Democrat. But I’d really like to see conservatism reclaimed as a political philosophy. I did encounter a coherent definition in Kirk’s The Conservative Mind.

For much of human history, institutions were not only hard to create, they were almost impossible to sustain. That’s because running them requires time away from basic survival, and when that is threatened, people think first of themselves. That results in disbanding of the institution, and often looting of its assets.

In this context, conservatism is aptly named: it creates value by preserving institutions. Those most suited to that defense often take a prejudicial view of the public they are meant to serve. They assume that the public should be denied power until it can explain how it will organize institutions to provide sustainable solutions to social ills.

Unfortunately, as suggested in my survey of Republican policies, that is a rationale that all too often simply caters to greed. To the ‘80s mantra “greed is good”, I always riposted with a gibe at the neo-conservatives’ “Tinkle-down Theory” of economic growth.

The antidote to conservatism is liberalism. A liberal recognizes that power can get trapped in institutions that prevent its spread to those that need it to solve problems. They advocate methods, such as taxation or regulation, to reallocate power to those that are motivated to create a better society. The disease of liberalism is the slippery slide from reform into destructive revolution.

The psychosis in modern American politics was born in the New Deal government set up by Franklin Roosevelt during the Great Depression. All of a sudden, the liberal Democrats had control of extremely powerful institutions that were designed to preserve the welfare of the common man.

Across the aisle, the Republican party of business was committed to dismantling those institutions. This created a kind of schizophrenia for them. They were to defend the institutions that existed prior to the New Deal, and try to destroy those that came with it. The mantra that finally produced policy leverage in the ‘80s was the ideal of corporate innovation. Unfortunately, corporations aren’t designed to innovate: for the most part, they suffer from the same organizational lethargy as government. Rather, corporations disseminate solutions created by others.

With these glaring breaks between theory and reality, conservative philosophy was open to corruption by those with a simple will to power: people with a strong motivation to get what they want, no matter the cost to others.

And so we have the kind of analysis that I responded to this morning: raw manipulation of the public’s hopes and fears, with nonsensical segues into policy prescriptions.

I work in control systems, and this kind of output is known as “open-loop.” It occurs when the feedback provided by the affected elements of the system (in this case, the public) has no meaning to the controller (the ultra-rich that are buying our political system). The moneyed class no longer has any vested interest in the public well-being. In fact, public misery produces larger and larger deficits that correlate directly with their financial success. It’s like a heater running with the thermostat temperature sensor wired backwards: the hotter it gets, the lower the temperature reported by the thermostat, and the more fuel pushed into the heater. Things are just going to get worse, until the heater explodes.

What’s the solution? Well, I think that it’s to put all of this conservative/liberal division aside. George Santayana wrote a wonderful little book called Three Philosophical Poets, analyzing the work of Lucretius, Dante and Goethe. Santayana say them as representing life lived according to reason, faith and will (respectively). His closing hope was that someday a poet would come along to merge the three. I don’t know if that is possible, but I would hope that our political leaders would try to find some balance between them.

Loving Women

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For the last two years, I have been frequenting a restaurant down in Calabasas that has live music Friday and Saturday nights. One of the owners decided on Friday that I couldn’t dance there anymore. The band had come back on stage, and the floor that the DJ had filled up was emptied. I went out, as I usually do, and danced by myself, filling the floor up with joy. When I walked off, the party of twelve at the front table began applauding wildly. That’s when he walked up and told me to never dance that way again. I frowned at him, and asked “Why?”, and he just stalked off.

The bouncer came up and told me that, while he didn’t agree with the owner, he had been told to tell me that I couldn’t dance there. So I took my sweater and left. The manager intercepted me at the parking lot and made his apologizes as well. I asked him not to worry about it, and to have a wonderful holiday season.

The thing that cracks me up was that people have approached me and said that they had seen videos of me dancing on YouTube. The bands have approached me, too, just to say how wonderful it is to play when I’m there with them. So here I am, generating trade for this venue, never having hurt anybody in two years, and they basically throw me out.

While some rationale was put forward about liability in case of an accident, I have a sense that something else was going on. There’s a group of four gigolos that hang out there, and they’ve been really proud to make a point of setting the owners against me. One of them in particular is actually dangerous: his “come-on” move on the dance floor is to trip the lady and throw her over into a deep back bend. I’ve actually seen girls walk off the floor in pain. Recently I had a woman ask to dance with me, and the first thing out of her mouth was “no back bends”. I had a pretty good idea who had put that into her head.

Their problem is that they can’t pick up women when I’m on the dance floor. We just get this glow of joy going. While I’ve had women come on pretty strong, for me it’s not a sexual thing. It’s just the joy of feeling what women feel when they no longer have to fight off the dirt that the world heaps on them.

There’s a “Freedom From Religion” group out on Facebook that cross-posts to the Religious Tolerance group. I decided to go out and see what their dialog is like on their home turf, and the first post quoted a male sympathizer of the women’s suffrage movement. In summary, the quote said that the Bible was a piece of trash that never taught anything of value to anyone. The issue of the day, of course, was the admonition in Paul’s letters that women should be “submissive” to their husbands, which was used by some to justify the denial of voting rights to women.

I have to admit, until you get to Luke, the Bible is really not good to women. When I was at Torah study one day, a young lady got really upset about that, and I leaned over and whispered: “You know, you’re right. But the Bible is all about men’s problems.” We weren’t good enough for you ladies, and that’s part of why Daniel 11:37 describes Jesus as “the one desired by women.”

So what is the problem with men? Well, we’re designed to change things. Unfortunately, the easiest way to change something is to break it. I see so many men struggling with this, and I have to say, I have submitted myself. What’s kept me steadiest is the strong sense of feminine approval I receive when I try to fix things. Mostly, of course, that’s fixing people’s hearts, and women bring me a lot of opportunities. Not just to work on them: women feel things deeply, and carry people around with them.

So: thank-you for being what you are. Please just try to remember that you’re supposed to feel that way all of the time. And grant me the benefit of this testimony: the example of Jesus is what made me what I am.

The Philosphical State

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I studied my moral and ethical philosophy with Albert Tussman at U.C. Berkeley. He taught there well into his 70s, I believe, and resolved to give it up when a coed popped her bubble gum before his lecture. I guess that her action crystalized his sense that nothing was sacred to the generation he was teaching.

His wisdom to me was granted one Spring day when he broke out of his office hour to take me out on the lawn under the clock tower. He allowed me to unburden myself of my concerns for the future. When I finally realized what a great honor he had granted me, I asked what he considered to be the most important source of philosophical understanding in our age. His response is relevant to this discussion: the decisions of the Supreme Court. He supported the judgment with the observations that they decided matters that had to be implemented by systems that were critical to the survival of the citizens of the nation, but that they had absolutely no power to effect change. Thus their decisions had to be crafted in a way to build consensus between the parties in the matter.

“Philo sophia“, indeed.

So what about academic philosophy? Well, these are people involved in far more abstract issues regarding the accessibility of truth and the nature of human experience. These become esoteric for at least two reasons.

The first is the categorization problem. As in the sciences, we start with coarse categories of experience and then, when that coarseness frustrates our powers of explanation, we refine. That means a never-ending progression of inventive vocabulary that ultimately leaves the common man standing out in the hallway (metaphorically). What becomes even more interesting is when thinkers in two traditions of philosophy try to reconcile their categorization schemes. Ach! Me noggin!

The second is the desire to maintain lineage so as to preserve as much from the past as possible. Now the Supreme Court is going through an activist stage in which this principle is less important, but in general philosophers are wary of throwing anything away. This means that they tend not to reclaim words used in the past, but rather to invent new ones.

My clearly stated intention at everdeepening.org was to buck this latter trend. I set out to reclaim words in common usage to try and help people out of the moral and ethical morass that imprecision of everyday use has bequeathed to us. First and foremost of those words was “love.”

Imprecision in everyday use is mostly a problem when power is conditioned upon avoidance of responsibility. When the shit hits the fan, a typical sound bite is “Well, that’s not what I understand the word to mean”, or “But that’s not what I meant.”

I was put onto this by the confusion regarding the phrase “I love you”, which I realized meant, in most usage, “I love myself.” In other words: “I feel good when I’m around you – let me  use this token to bind you to me.”

While the power of precision has been valuable to me in managing my personal relationships, it’s been essential to me in surviving my spiritual engagements. When we know what it means to love others, we know what it means to love ourself. That understanding has protected me from a lot of harmful associations that presented themselves with a great deal of shiny glitter.

Interstellar

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Christopher and Jonathan Nolan’s meditation on the meaning of love is a heartening departure from the “shock and awe” tendencies of modern science fiction. The oversight of executive producer and theoretical physicist Kip Thorne ensures that the semantics of the dialog is coherent. While I don’t believe that the theory of wormholes is going to hold up in the long run, that consistency does ensure that audiences will not be too confused to grasp the central message: there are experiences that are accessible only to people joined in loving relationships.

While there is a great deal of beautiful deep space imagery in the film, the dramatic tension comes from the human response to a terrible crisis: the loss of agricultural productivity to wide-spread blight. At the low end of the social scale, the desperate struggle of farmers develops, over the years, into a stubborn determination that extinction, when it comes, must be faced in the company of those we love. At the opposite end are the privileged scientists and engineers of a “Noah’s Ark” project, launching explorers through a worm hole into another galaxy – explorers that, despite the nobility of their intentions, suffer very natural moral and psychological collapse due to the futility of their lonely efforts.

On the one hand, I am disappointed that it is the most violent and destructive of all astrophysical phenomena that is advanced as the backdrop for the discovery of the subtle power of love. I could complain that the team of explorers could not possibly have survived the challenges they faced. However, that would detract from the main proposition: they succeed because they care. Ultimately, that caring links into a chain of causality that loops back in time when human consciousness escapes the confines of our familiar reality. I guess that I would have to admit that it is no more difficult to swallow than the Savior returning to life after his own journey through time.

On the other hand, the film pays homage to Earth in subtle ways. I waited through the end of the credits and learned that the movie was shot in film. The beautiful planetary settings can be enjoyed right here.

But, of course, so can all of the sublime miracles of loving. Let’s hope that this film helps to open the minds of a generation that has been fed on destructive pap that preaches success through balls-out aggression. They need to spend more time understanding the nature of personality. I am a firm believer that we shouldn’t abandon the Earth, nor do we need to. We simply need to restrain our selfishness and apply ourselves to helping it heal itself. There’s far more power available to us than is required – we simply need to surrender our personal concerns and use it to love the nature that we’ve wounded.

It would help if the behavioral psychologists would stop telling us that it’s improbable, not to speak of the physicists who believe they have proven that it’s impossible.

Executive Privilege, Restrained

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One of the challenges in ruling ancient Rome was that, as a Ponzi scheme run for the benefit of the senatorial elite, the government was often unable to meet its obligations to its veterans. This could lead to some unruliness. One of my favorite images is that of Octavian strapping on his armor to confront an angry mob demanding compensation for their service. He was rescued by Marc Antony and the Praetorian Guard, but I have to admire the courage Octavian demonstrated in choosing to come face-to-face with the people affected by his mismanagement.

At the other end of the scale we have the touching image offered in Revelation 4. Unconditional Love sits on a throne in heaven, surrounded by angels that channel the gratitude offered by all the living creatures on earth. The isolation of love is tragic. Remedying it seems a likely goal of Jesus’s promise to “remake heaven and earth.”

Somewhere between these two extremes of executive authority we have the modern CEO and head of state, in whom are gathered all of the defects of power, remoteness and corruptibility.

America’s constitutional system was designed to limit the power of the head of state. One of the principle abuses of royal authority in Europe was the use of charters to transfer control of markets to the nobility. This inhibited the rise of institutions with the wealth to defend the common man in disputes with the nobility. To guard against that in the new federation of US states, three branches of government were established with distinct powers.

George Washington, the first president, observed that his principle function was to encourage development of the nation’s resources. He was a booster for private business. The Native Americans bore the worst of this link between development and government. In one particularly egregious instance: The Cherokee of Georgia had actually begun to assimilate when gold was discovered on their land. Greedy speculators supported passage of the Indian Removal Act in 1838, and the Federal Government forced the Cherokee from their lands.

The cozy relationship between business and government became abusive in the late 1800’s. Deflationary policies ensured that the purchasing power of idle capital continued to increase, with the side-effect that farmers could not pay their obligations and were thus forced off of their land. Attacking these hypocritical policies was made more difficult because the Federal government lacked the financial means of the interstate corporations. Unchecked, the robber barons of the period, with their company stores and abusive working conditions, lined their own pockets at the worker’s expense.

Breaking up this social disaster was largely the work of the Roosevelts, Theodore and Franklin. Theodore was an army officer, and associated with men who were forced into the army by the loss of their lands. He was the president that stood up against the banking system and supported unionization against the violent resistance of owners. Franklin, who as governor of New York had witnessed the worst of the industrial hygiene crisis that beset the nation, betrayed his own class to ensure that a federal safety net was secured for vulnerable workers when the Great Depression paralyzed industry.

Roosevelt’s “New Deal” posed a challenge to our constitutional system with the creation of federal agencies administered by the executive branch. Congress no longer had the means to check executive power when so much money was allocated to agencies under the President’s control, and the courts were required to wait for whistleblowers to step forward with a complaint before they could intervene.

While you would think that it would be the liberal parties that would step forward to check this imbalance, in our day it is actually the conservatives leading the charge. This is because they share the agenda of business leaders seeking to limit the influence of the government on their operations. This is particularly strong with oil industry executives that want to prevent regulation of CO2 emissions. The power of business in the party was evidenced in 2012, when the flood of tea party money from out of state cost the Republican Majority Leader his seat in the House of Representatives. His crime: negotiating with Democrats on budget and immigration issues.

What bemuses me is that there’s another way to solve the problem besides trying to shut the government down. The mechanism of modern corporate structure are designed to ensure that majority shareholders don’t abuse the rights of minority shareholders. Corporate policy is set by an elected board, with implementation by a professional staff serving at the pleasure of the board. The public record-keeping required of the board ensures that abused shareholders have the opportunity to seek redress.

To ensure that the President did not abuse his powers, the constitution could be amended to make the president’s cabinet the chair of departmental boards, with the remaining members selected by 2/3 vote of Congress. Implementation would be through career civil servants. The president would retain his unilateral authority as command-in-chief. While limiting the opportunity for misdoing by the executive, this program would also reduce the political value of Congressional witch-hunts, as Congress could no longer say “we didn’t know.” They could invest the recovered with the business of the legislature – which is to debate and pass bills.

As for the corporations: they’ve come quite close to restoring the halcyon era of the late 1800’s. The injustice, as in the era of the Roosevelts, is that they acquire their wealth under the auspices of the government. Government, after all, is simply a system for negotiating the rules that control the distribution of power throughout the society. That can include procedures that seem somewhat abusive. For example, when a board awards a huge stock option to an executive, a legal transfer of wealth takes place from the shareholder to the executive – without the direct consent of the shareholder. The government enforces the legitimacy of that transfer. It’s seems reasonable that the people should have the option to recover that ill-gotten wealth through progressive taxation.