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.

Ma

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Seeking an avenue to express my admiration of women, in October of 2013 I laid it all out in 140 pages.

One of the more culturally sophisticated commentators decided that I was the “Thomas Pynchon” at my current place of employment. I didn’t mean for the book to be inscrutable. I meant for it to be about the deep creative emotions that become our passions. But in exposing myself in that regard, all the complexity of my concerns for the future were mashed together in a narrative that is probably impenetrable to understanding.

I hope that you read it with your heart open.

There’s several aspects to the impenetrability of Ma. First is the complexity of the social forces that propel the characters across time and space. The principle male protagonist, Corin, summarizes the history of human nature and its current condition in four pages. On the planet of Trialle, his father, Erendur/Random, surveys his collaboration with Zenica (the “Ma” of the title) in empowering spiritual maturation using mystical technologies. This is all set against the backdrop of an interstellar competition between two communities – Random’s “Order” and Corin’s “Friendship” – to spread peace throughout the galaxy. The process is endangered by a predatory cabal within the former.

As if this wasn’t enough of a challenge, the characters are entrained deeply in mystical experience. This means that internal and external worlds mesh. Those transitions aren’t always clearly defined in the narrative. We can be sitting in a shrine in Guandong one paragraph, and then in the next shift 200 million years into the mind of a saurian raptor. We do have Leelay, a woman of the Congo who represents Life, to lead us into that aspect of experience as she developers her strength. But, as a neophyte, she doesn’t have the terminology to explain the process, so much is left to inference by the reader.

I was conscious of this complexity, but believed that it didn’t really matter. Most of us struggle through life against forces beyond our control and understanding. We seek and cling to relationships that provide us assurance of mutual support. I find incredible beauty and surprising power in those human emotions and loyalties. While it is indeed possible to make sense of Ma’s back story (it’s all based upon the model of physics that I laid out in the generative orders research proposal), I hoped that people would realize that they weren’t supposed to understand it all, and focus on the relationships.

The key to the relationships is in the first chapter. The opening scene relates Corin’s traumatic separation from his mother, and I tried to manifest its consequences in the hotel room when Corin wakes up next to Leelay, the stranger that will become his soul-mate. The choices made by Zenica – choices driven by her immersion in the process of trying to love worlds full of people – left deep wounds in the intimates that she was trying to protect. They struggle against transferring that pain to others, and fail. Inspired by her service to others, they deny their own needs, and simply compound their loss.

I say that the book is a celebration of women, and it is in the hidden workings of the title character, a woman that until the final pages does not appear explicitly in the book except in memory, that I indulge my amazement in them. Zenica appears incongruously in the thoughts of her men throughout the book, reflecting her intervention, from her place of mystical sanctuary, in guiding them to healing and love.

Recognizing that in Ma I impose on the endurance of the reader’s compassion (I did try to put some bright moments in before the end!), I’m now working on a sequel that makes explicit, in reflection, many of the hidden forces that propel the characters. Then again, that exploration requires an elaboration of detail that has blossomed into a host of new characters and experiences. I’m having a lot of fun with it.

The Soul Comes First

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Particularly during life’s difficult moments, religion is a source of comfort for us. When a child dies, when we lose a job: we are sustained by the relationships and wisdom that we develop in worship, study and charitable work.

Because this aspect of religion is so important to us, we seek in scripture for meaning that applies to us in our lives as human beings. We tend to emphasize that part of the story, and when we don’t find what we’re looking for, maybe even expand our searching into parts of the story that don’t really apply to us.

But if spirit is a part of the natural world, a form of consciousness woven into the very fabric of space, why should intelligence have manifested only here on Earth, in humanity? If spirit began evolution when the universe formed, or even earlier, it stands to reason that it’s got a long history of its own. What would coming to a planet be like? How would spirit go about learning about a new world? How would it go about improving itself through that investment?

When I re-read the Bible after developing a physical model of spirit (not really a theory, because the mathematics needs to be elaborated), I saw it in this light. The Bible made a whole lot more sense to me than it did when I turned away from it as a teenager.

That understanding is captured in The Soul Comes First, which you’ll see as a link on my sidebar.

Now the Bible is a complex book, with a lot of ideas in it. Summarizing it in seventy pages, even when looking at it from 30,000 feet, means compressing a lot of ideas into very few pages. So it’s heavy going. Here’s the short skinny:

  1. This reality was designed as a place of healing for souls infected by selfishness.
  2. The creation myth in Genesis records the investment of a collection of such souls as they explored the Earth through the evolving senses of living creatures.
  3. The founding of monotheism through Abraham is about creating masculine strength in a culture dominated by powerful women.
  4. The Old Testament, from Exodus on, records the expansion of monotheism as a national culture. The investment made by God at this point was in creating a capacity to reason through adherence to the law. The experiment failed for various reasons – the most significant being the desire of the people to centralize human authority. This eventually led to demotion of spiritual leadership in favor of political leadership, and destruction of the nation.
  5. Jesus came to demonstrate that love will overcome any system of tyrannical laws. Not only did he demonstrate the power of love through miracles, he trained a collection of men (the Apostles) to emulate his mastery.
  6. The Book of Revelation is exactly what John said it was: he was taken up to heaven, where the angels shared with him their relationship to and experience of Christ.. The visions of the seals are interpreted as the forms of selfishness that the infected angels brought to the Earth with them; the trumpeted disasters are the extinction episodes revealed to us by paleontology; the bowls describe the exhaustion of the natural resources humanity is exploiting.

Items 2 and 6 establish that paleontology and evolution science have revealed things that were known to the ancients long before we had the science to study them.

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.

Mary, Contrarily

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A statue of the Holy Mother at St Paschal’s has been a soothing presence to me for the last 18 months. I typically stand on her side of the sanctuary, as it puts me across from the children’s choir whose invocation has such a compelling simplicity. But the calling that reaches me through her image has become a compulsion of its own.

“Come here. Rest in my peace for a time.”

This confident and generous assertion of self contradicts the popular image of the young virgin. It began nagging at me this Christmas. Was she simply the passive, albeit perfect, receptacle for her nation’s Messiah?

I cannot reconcile that with the Gospel of Luke. The song that he records she sang to Elizabeth was not a literal event, but rather a way of placing into context the spirit that moved her into the tide of events. It reads, in part [NIV Luke 31-33]:

He has brought down rulers from their thrones but has lifted up the humble.

He has filled the hungry with good things but has sent the rich away empty.

Would these have been the words of a 14-year old? Obviously not, but would they have been far from her concerns?

What is it like to be a child in a state ruled by tyranny? We in the developed world forget, but it is to be told to look to the ground when the tyrant’s men appear, to hide when they come with weapons at the ready, to whispered news of families taxed into poverty. Not lessons shared idly, but as a parent’s moral necessity to ensure that children survive.

Would it have been unexpected for an empathetic and intelligent girl to contrast this reality with the promises of her faith? Would it have been a surprise for her to conclude that this was a time for God to honor his promises to his people?

There are two ways to fall on the edge of this dilemma: into doubt, and onto certainty. What I feel is the presence of certainty in this young lady. Certainty that God would honor his promises. Certainty that holy men always came into the world through a woman that loved their God. Certainty that such a woman would be found, perhaps a woman like her mother or a beloved aunt. Certainty expressed in prayer early in the morning and before laying down to rest at night.

And through that expression of faith, the angel that had waited, as angels must, for the day of their service to Love, awoke in heaven, and came down to explain: “Yes, it will be done, and this is how.”

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 Gift I Would Give

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Just this awareness I have of being surrounded by spirits that want so much to participate in my loving of myself and the people around me. That sense of them preparing the moments for me, of guiding my words and my hands, of giving gratitude for the opportunity to enter the world through me.

Such an amazing kaleidoscope of them, of all interests and persuasions, just seeking a place in which they fit, in which they are welcome, in which they are useful, in which they can experience the joy of a fulfilled purpose.

I would give you the gift of yourself, and the beauty of the angels that support your living.

Believe in you! It breaks my heart when you do not.

The Body-Mind Connection

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When I started my current job at age forty-eight, I was just beginning to get heavy on my chest and abdomen. The primary impact on a software developer is lower back pain that steals the last two hours of the work day. I ran a few miles a week and played tennis with my sons on the weekend, but I could see myself starting the long, slow slide into flabbiness.

The general manager at the company was in far worse shape, having decided to take up golf for exercise. After ruining his back with all that hyperextended twisting, he decided to bring in a yoga instructor. I took a few classes with her, but with zero-period drop-offs for the son that was taking AP chemistry, I couldn’t make more than one session a week.

My introduction to Bikram Yoga was incidental – the studio is next door to the music shop where I took flute lessons until last month.

At this point, I can’t say enough about the discipline. To tell the truth, though, starting it at age fifty was really hell. I was riddled with tissue and joint alignments that had evolved to support my defective posture. Then there were the untreated stress injuries and left-right muscle imbalance from basketball and tennis. I’m also a long string bean, and was just really embarrassed to collapse half-way through the balancing poses held by all the little 5’2” ladies. Finally, I’m a walking bog monster: I drop ten pounds of water weight over the ninety minutes in the heated room.

So I was a train wreck for the first eighteen months. Between aggravating my stress injuries by straining too far in the poses, to just collapsing in the heat, I really drove the studio owners crazy. I still remember the first time I really compressed my gut in wind-removing pose. After the twenty-second squeeze, I uncurled to lie in corpse pose, and I could feel my body reeling as fat was released into my blood stream. Yuck!

Along with the physical challenges were some serious psychological challenges. I’m a really open and supportive person, and there are predators that come into a collective effort like group yoga and just suck energy out of people like me. Some of them don’t realize what they’re doing: they’re just hypercompetitive people that have always taken energy out of others in accomplishing their goals. Some of them are fully conscious of their abuse of people that they consider to be weak-willed. And some are just struggling with the discipline of staying in a heated room while exercising at the limits of the ability. After learning to recognize and reclaim my energies from the first two groups, most of the second year was spent learning to manage the last group. I put a lot of thoughts like “Breathe”, “Just rest” and “It’s OK. Do the best that you can” into the room. Every now and then someone comes up after class to thank me.

Some of the experiences I don’t even know how to categorize. The most intense was when lying down after an deep back bend on the floor. I felt a spark, pretty much like an electric spark from finger to metal, emanating from my liver. Everybody in the class froze, and the teacher stopped and asked “Is everything OK, Brian?”

This last year has been about building strength in the left side of my body. As I got closer and closer to balancing out the poses, I was overwhelmed by feelings of intense loss and sadness. Sometimes those feelings seemed to be related to having a specific person or persons in my vicinity, but I eventually realized that they were coming from somewhere deep inside of me.

I was exhausted last Tuesday just coming into class, and spent the first half of the floor series trying to catch my breath. The sadness was powerful, and I had to hold my breath to keep from sobbing. I finally got back into the postures, focusing this time on the left side of my neck and upper back. Suddenly, I had an amazing sensation, as though the right side of my head was filling up with energy.

I mentioned that I have a spiritual tenant on my right shoulder, something that was waiting for me in my mother’s womb following a six-month miscarriage. I realized that I had forced him out of my mind. He was a little upset, but resigned. The intensity of focus I had invested in activating the muscles on the left side of my body had worked back into the right side of my brain (the right side of the brain controls the left side of the body).

The impressions that I drew from him, regarding the sadness I had been struggling with, were related to memories of the agony he had suffered as his little fetus succumbed to death. Honoring the sacrifice that he had made, I spent the rest of class working out how to supply him energy without renouncing the right side of my brain.

What’s been amazing is the impact on my relationships. I’ve been seized by fear of rejection all my life. That’s evaporated. And the people that rely upon emotional connections to drive their relationships no longer find me to be so needy.

Of course, it’s not just me and my tenant in this situation. One of the things that I’m conscious of is that predators consider humility to be a form of weakness. I’ve been letting a certain class of them get twisted up in the right side of my mind. It’s time to infect them with the strength that comes from loving.

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.