Compassion

Talking with a friend today about compassion. Her view is probably closer to Tibetan Buddhism than mine.

Seems to me compassion ultimately boils down to an awareness of how it all is. By “all,” I mean life, death, the universe, and everything. I also think one needs not to be caught up in one’s own drama in order to have compassion. If I’m busy interpreting “how it all is” in the light of my own boring little drama, I won’t have compassion for others.

The idea “I’m nobody special” is part of compassion.

John Donne said, “No man is an island.” That sums it up, as does the old adage, “Walk a mile in my shoes.”

An essential problem with the conservative world view — the reason why conservatives lack compassion — is that they view each individual as an island. You can see this very clearly in the work of Ayn Rand, who is a sort of sage among

A Vision of Battlements

Wandering around in the public library the other day, I picked up a couple of books on Bosch and Bruegel. I knew very little about them, other than that their imagery was vivid, dense, realistic, phantastical, and disturbing. Now I want to know more.

According to the book on Bruegel, the almost overwhelming fear of the Devil, which was pervasive in Northern Europe at the time, may have had a lot to do with what we see in the paintings. This was the era when witches were burned at the stake. The very human propensity for perversity in the name of purity may never have flowered more fully.

Bosch’s real name was van Aken. He may even have been a distant relative of mine! Now I want to know more.

Home Schooling

I have no kids of my own, which makes me an automatic expert on how other people should raise theirs. (Not.) This morning the topic of home-schooling came up in a private email, and I realized I have some opinions. As the day wore on, I realized my opinions were different than what I thought at first.

My first thought was, If people home-school to provide their kids a better education, then fine. I’m aware that public schools in many parts of the country are in desperate disarray.

My first thought was, If the public schools are filled with gangs and violence, again, home-schooling would be a very reasonable choice. The idea that kids have to walk through metal detectors is appalling. I wouldn’t want my kid to go there.

But I soon realized I was kidding myself. The real reason home-schooling is wrong is this: It allows the parents who are most concerned about their kids’ education, if they’re rich enough and well organized enough, to opt out of the public school system.

The kids who are left in the public schools, then, are those whose parents (a) are working desperately at menial jobs to make ends meet, and don’t have the leisure to indulge in home-schooling, or (b) don’t care enough about their kids’ education to actually do anything about it.

If home-schooling weren’t allowed, those rich, articulate, well-organized parents would damn well have an incentive to pitch in and improve the quality of the public schools, and that would benefit all kids, not just their own kids.

There’s another facet to the question: If parents’ real agenda is to keep their kids from being exposed to ideas (such as evolution) of which they disapprove, then they’re actually home-schooling in order to keep their kids ignorant. And that’s morally wrong. Parents who inflict bizarre, irrational beliefs on their children are practicing child abuse.

And yes, failing to understand that evolution is a fact is bizarre and irrational. You can choose your own opinions, but you don’t get to choose your own facts.

I hate to see kids being victimized. When rich parents opt out of the public schools, for whatever reason, it’s the poor kids who suffer the consequences.

The core concept is this: Good public education helps everybody. Lousy public education hurts everybody, not just those who end up badly educated. Home-schooling is anti-democratic. It perpetuates a class system and class oppression.

But then, so does Harvard. And I’ll bet you’d love it if your kid got into Harvard. Striving for personal advantage is human. Not even human — it’s biological. No doing away with it. So go ahead, home-school. Nature red in tooth and claw, right?

Music & Witchcraft

Last night I started re-reading Truth or Dare, a book of politics, spirituality, and magic written by San Francisco witch Starhawk. The book is kind of a mishmash, but she has some awarenesses that are worth mulling over. It’s been sitting on my shelf for 20 years, and I find that the me of 20 years ago underlined lots of stuff in pencil — some of which has since trickled down into my basic world view.

I picked the book up on a whim, because I need a fresh perspective on how to manage my alleged career. My usual view of things just isn’t working. My usual view is that everything sucks, and nothing can possibly make it right. Rather than simply succumb to rampant negativity, I’m willing to consider even off-the-wall or off-the-chart inputs.

It quickly struck me that the way musicians (and especially talented local musicians) are treated in this culture has everything to do with the patriarchal, hierarchical power structure within which we live.

Meditation for Today

There is, within the compass of human experience, no reason even faintly credible to believe in God. But if there were such a reason, it would surely be the piano music of Bach. Nothing that is known comes as close to that ideal.

Online Interview

Through the wonders of digital technology, I was “interviewed” (via email) on the subject of a story called “Run! Run!”, which is in the Sept. issue of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Phenomenal magazine — buy many copies. Send them to your friends!

Anyway, the interview is now out. You can read it here.

Empiricism

Never having studied philosophy, I have a seat-of-the-pants definition of empiricism: It’s the process of deriving truths from observed phenomena.

Religion is by definition non-empirical. That is, religion starts with the idea that certain things (notably the existence of “God”) are known to be true even though they can never be observed.

The reason why religion has no place in government is because public policy should always be based on empiricism — that is, on a close observation of what actually works and what doesn’t, rather than on faith.

But empiricism isn’t enough. A government could be founded entirely on empirical principles and yet could be vicious and brutal. Effective governance, it seems to me, rests on the twin pillars of empiricism and compassion.

To the extent that religion counsels compassion, it can be an effective advisor to government. To the extent that religion counsels intolerance of any kind, it should be barred from participation in governance.

If you want to practice intolerance within your own church, go right ahead. (Whether you have the right to teach intolerance to children … we’ll talk about that some other time.) But if you expect the government to enforce your intolerance using police and the courts, your religion is an enemy of freedom.

Recent Prehistory

Trying to maintain a skeptical stance when talking with religious people is, in the main, pointless. They’re hard-wired not to get it. But while getting nowhere attempting to discuss current events with respect to Judaism and the Middle East, I got curious about the historical roots of the whole mess. That’s more interesting, and less contentious too.

So I ordered a couple of books from Amazon on Bronze Age prehistory in Europe and the Mediterranean basin.

The period from 5000 to 500 B.C. was one of extraordinary changes, I know that much even before the books get here. At the beginning of that period, agriculture had been invented, but the use of bronze for weapons was still far in the future. As far as we know, there was only one “city” (today it would be counted no more than a town) of any size in the world — Eridu. Everything else was mud huts. Actually, Eridu was mud huts too, but there were a lot of them.

Based both on the descriptions in the Bible and on the remains that have been excavated of walled towns, it seems likely that as population increased throughout the region, there was a whole lot of raiding going on. The capture and enslavement of the Hebrews would hardly have been unique at the time. Nor would their tendency to overrun towns like Jericho, when commanded to do so by their priests, have been unique. Pretty much everybody in the region would have been doing the same thing. For thousands of years.

History is written by the winners. The sheer tenacity and strong sense of tribal identity of the Hebrews, both of which were rooted in their unusually fervent religion, probably did a lot to insure that they were among the winners. You don’t have to believe in God to see how effective such a belief system would have been.

At a somewhat later period, the Hebrews got into a head-butting contest with the Romans. The Romans, at this period, had nothing resembling a fervent religion. They had something even better: A great big army. Today’s struggles in the Middle East can be traced directly to the fact that in 70 A.D., the Roman Emperor Titus got peeved with the Jews’ stiff-necked intransigence (which was directly due to their religion), destroyed their capital city, and decreed that they no longer had a homeland.

Rome was the first truly modern multi-cultural, multi-ethnic state. It was extremely successful for a very long time. Its success was rooted in a secular, democratic belief system, which placed a high value on civic duty, on reciprocal social bonds, and on competition for prestige in worldly things.

But that was later. Rome was founded in 753 B.C. The Bronze Age was ending and the Iron Age was beginning. Right now I’d like to know a lot more about the cultures that moved across that area between the founding of Eridu and the founding of Rome.

This Land Is My Land

Because James Fenimore Cooper wrote a novel called The Last of the Mohicans, I used to assume there were no more Mohicans. Actually, there are still a few. After being displaced from their ancestral homeland centuries ago, they were repeatedly cheated by the U.S. government, but survived somehow. Today they live in Wisconsin.

For purposes of our thought experiment, though, we’re going to pretend that the wandering Mohicans settled in a remote part of Saskatchewan or Manitoba, and that subsequently vast reserves of oil were found on their land. Today, my imaginary band of Mohicans is both numerous and wealthy. They have decided to reclaim their ancestral homeland, whose landmarks are mentioned in their legends as the sites of miracles.

The current residents of their ancestral land having proven resistant to the idea, the Mohicans have purchased helicopter gunships, and have undertaken to take and retain their land using military force.

My question for you is, would you support the Mohicans in this quest? But before you answer, I have to give you one other piece of information:

The ancestral homeland of the Mohicans is the island of Manhattan.

No matter how badly we might all feel about the shameful way the Mohicans were treated, it would be insanity to insist that the current residents of Manhattan should make way for the returning natives. Any rational person would say to the Mohicans, “That’s not your land anymore. Get over it.”

Of course you can see where I’m going with this. By any reasonable measure, the Mohicans have a better (because more recent) claim to Manhattan than the Jews have to the chunk of real estate they choose to call Israel. The Jews were booted off their land in about 70 A.D., by a Roman emperor who got fed up with their intransigence. The Jews living today have no rational claim whatever to that land. They stole it from the Palestinians who were living there within living memory, and whose ancestors had occupied the land continually for centuries.

The only possible claims that can be made today for the supposed right of the Jews to the land they call Israel are based not on the politics of 70 A.D., but on religion. And no worldly claim that is based on religious doctrine has the slightest validity.

If you claim that the Virgin Mary visits you daily in your private room at the local mental hospital, that’s your right. No one can dispute that claim. But if you claim that the Virgin Mary told you you had a right to take my home away from me at gunpoint, a mental hospital is the right place for you.

Knowledge Is Dangerous

Warning: Atheist ideas ahead. If you’re not comfortable with that, click elsewhere quickly!

I’m not an authority on the history of science, but I’ve read that modern science began, 400-odd years ago, with the idea that because God had created the Universe, we could learn about God by studying His handiwork.

As an operational theory, this hasn’t panned out so well. Based on the best available evidence, we can now confidently assert the following:

1. There is not the faintest shred of convincing evidence for personal immortality or the existence of the soul. When you’re dead, you’re dead.
2. Most of the world’s so-called holy books are a mishmash of good advice, bad advice, weird myths disguised as history, outright mistakes, and self-serving interpolations by ignorant scribes. Also, the translations are unreliable.
3. At least 99.9999% of the Universe is utterly hostile to any form of life.
4. There is no detectable moral force at work by means of which good is rewarded and evil punished. It’s all pretty much a crap shoot.

What sort of God would create a Universe like this? That’s an uncomfortable question.

Rationalists who retain a sentimental attachment to religion sometimes proclaim that there is no real conflict between religion and science. They’re wrong. When the pope tried to shut Galileo up, he knew exactly what he was doing. Scientific knowledge does indeed render religion untenable. At least, it renders all existing religions untenable (with the possible exception of Buddhism, about which I don’t know very much). Possibly a better crafted religion will arise in the future.

You can live a life of faith, or a life of reason. The life of faith is probably more comfortable; I wouldn’t actually know. The life of reason is certainly terrifying, but it does have certain faint consolations.

You don’t have to let your daily activities be ruled by ancient taboos, for instance. That’s a plus.