Strange Boots

I've struggled to place myself in the shoes of Republicans who disliked Trump, but voted for their party anyway.

I start with someone who believes in my core progressive ideology -  pro-choice, government services for the poor, regulations, climate change, healthcare, higher taxes, etc. - but then expresses paranoid, racist and misogynist sentiments.  I can kind of imagine it, however there's really nothing like that on the left, where on the right you have an entire culture devoted to it (the 50% polled who seemed to express similar feelings to Trump - the "deplorables").

I find it hard to imagine.  Much of what is frightening about Trump is not just his bigotry but his authoritarian tendencies, seemingly born out of a hyper-masculine machismo which I am also allergic too, yet which is also a popular disposition on the right.  By itself, machismo isn't necessarily problematic, but in the context of larger retrograde attitudes, it takes on a bullying, chauvinist quality.

So I imagine these non-Trumpist Republicans as disgusted by his racial bigotry (the homophobic policies I'm assuming they're quite amenable to), embarrassed by his dim-witted bloviations, his crassness making them wince.  But he's also likely much more of a recognizable type, the kind of fellow not uncommon in right wing circles, be it leather-upholstered backroom offices or at the opposite end of a construction yard.  They are used to seeing him, tolerating him, even appreciating his git-r-done brashness all-the-while shaking their heads and rolling their eyes.

So now he's been nominated and, well, as long as he's surrounded by enough good old boys, he'll generally continue policies we want: dismantle Obamacare, cut up climate change regulations, stand athwart the gun rack, appoint conservative justices who might just finally end the fetal holocaust, and with any luck nuke ISIS.

I take solace in the fact that, while I disagree with these policy choices, they don't necessarily represent moral monstrosity.  They don't actually want to violently march into neighborhoods and rip apart undocumented families.  They don't actually want to ban Muslims.  They don't actually want to waterboard-and-then-some.  They don't believe in crazy conspiracy theories.  They don't read Breitbart.

However, their party nominated someone who does.  They have to live with the fact that they are in bed with this movement, which has consumed them.  At what point do you decide to leave?  We'll see.

Rabbit Morphine and the Building of the New Compassion

Humanity is on a collision course with destiny.  It has been said that the arc of moral universe is long, but that it bends towards justice.  When speaking of morals we are speaking of the mind and heart of man.  And when speaking of man we are speaking of the tiniest sliver of one species of evolution.  If one were to extend an arm as a representation of geological time, with life's earliest appearance over 3 billion years ago, the history of man would take up less than the tip of a fingernail.

In nature, there exists vastly less morality than we are able to muster.  Apart from a paltry kindness expressed between kin of some higher order species, nature on whole is a cauldron of relentless violence.  We are the sole creature who has evolved sentience, the ability to consciously reflect upon our world in a significant way.  With our highly evolved minds, we have ironically developed both the ability to experience profound and prolonged suffering, and again to witness and recoil from it in others.  For millennium we have fought one another bitterly, summoning our extraordinary cognitive powers to concoct amazing spiritual universes within which we live out our short little lives, experiencing the beauty and tragedy that is work, love, and death.

But within our lonely fingernail, it is only a tiny fraction thereof in which man has had anything like the profound resources of reflection that science has provided for us to pursue meaningful progress towards our ultimate goal of happiness and fulfillment in life.  The moral arc of the universe, expressed most fully in man, has been a slow and plodding slog.  Yet we are just now finally reaching the shores of a biological promised land of sorts, in which we are finally able to deliver to our feeble selves, on a universal basis, a platform from which true happiness is possible for all.

The Present Does Not Exist 
One way to the think of the mind is as a razor blade, demarcating past from future.    What we call the present is merely a useful conceptual illusion intended to create for us a sense of purpose.  In the time it takes for us - our mind - to create a thought and then experience it, what was the future becomes the present for a split second, and is instantaneously the past.  For most of us, the present is generally rarely experienced at all.  Even in our most quiet moments, our minds are aflutter with mental commotion.  When our thoughts are composed of little more than say, the oddity of the way a beam of light is glancing upon the kitchen counter top, or the strange motions of a pet in dream, there is no present.

The less neurotic among us likely experience more moments where no conscious thought is present at all.  At these times we simply seem to float upon a bed of emotional reverie,  vacantly indulging in the vague sensations of existence.  The present is actually quite rare.  We only genuinely experience something like it when we are actively reminded for some reason to turn our gaze markedly inward toward the passing seconds.  But even here, we are not really perceiving a present.  Rather, we are anticipating the seconds as they come and then noticing that they have passed.

Garbage In, Garbage Out
What went before determines what will be.  What we think of as the future is simply a projection from the past.  And as we are not in control of the past, we are not in control of the future.  We simply experience its transfer.  Our ability to predict our future (our actions) is only as good as our ability to project our past (our experiences) into the future, whether consciously or via processes that are unavailable to us as a coherent force yet are nonetheless a driving force behind decision making, if not often the sole determining force.  The array of choices I see before me is only representative of what my past is able to provide for me.  The degree to which I feel compelled to do anything, I will or will not make that choice.  And so it is with my ultimate ability to choose one course of action.  I am only as strong as I was.  And I was only as strong as I was before that.  And so on, and so on - back into my developing conscious mind.

In the abstract, any man can do anything that any man can do.  But in reality, one man can only do the one thing that that man can do.  This is what he will do.  Just as if you knew the physical properties of the motion of every atom in a rainstorm, you would know exactly where a drop of rain will blow, if you knew the physical properties of every atom in a man's mind, you would know what he will do.  We may not know every atom in a man's brain, but we are working on it.  Pedantic quantum scientists will argue here that because it is impossible to know the precise location of sub-atomic particles, and therefore impossible to ever perfectly determine the future based on physical projections, we must realize that the thought experiment succeeds in principle.  We are fully caused.

The Process Has Already Begun
We are beginning to map the neural circuitry of the mind.  We know the general regions involved in specific cognitive processes.  Higher-order thinking involves an overwhelming degree of inter-related patterning, making a detailed analysis of individual thoughts seemingly impossible.  But at the personal level we have psychology to give us reliable data on the human psyche.  And at the macro level we have sociological research that gives reliable data on broad trends among human groups according to characteristics.

For the past 100 years humans have slowly been building a sort of behavioral genome.  From genetics to birth, from early childhood to adulthood, we have been mapping what goes into the human mind, what the mind then does with it, and how we then act.  We have data from many different modalities, all reinforcing the scientific model that is slowly allowing us to finally step outside of our own illusion of self and see the true being that we have ever only been able guess at.

The truly beautiful part, is that the closer we come to this goal of truly knowing ourselves, the closer we get to knowing others.  And the closer we get to knowing others, the more compassion we will be capable of.  This compassion, based entirely in our own basically selfish desire for happiness and fulfillment, will ultimately be what allows us to enable each other to realize that dream - to the best of our ability - for every living member of planet Earth.

Onward, Evolutionary Soldiers
What's next is anyone's guess.  My own question is how far we end up extending this New Compassion to the rest of the animal kingdom.  To the degree that they are capable of experiencing what we think of as happiness and fulfillment, how far will we go in seeking to provide them our help.  The natural order of the planet is neither happiness or suffering, but the purely technical process of natural selection.  If a species' survival depends upon its constant suffering, there is no reason that it would not have evolved a sort of living hell.  But these are question that may not need to be asked for generations, if were to be so lucky.  There is much work to be done within our own species and its direct impact upon itself and other creatures.  But I think sending aid workers out to administer morphine to dying mammals is certainly plausible.

There have of course been plenty of examples of peaceful societies throughout history.  Likewise, there have been peaceful families, and peaceful individuals.  And yet the violence has always been terrific.  Scientists still disagree as to what extent humanity has an evolved predisposition toward war.  But we know more now than ever before how to construct societies that provide happiness and fulfillment on a massive scale.  We are no where close to world peace, and it could all come crashing down rather easily.  Yet if the human mind, voracious in its attempt to expand its own consciousness, is destined to communicate with others in this quest it will inevitably grow ever more cognizant of what it is and how to get where it wants to go.  Either as a byproduct of this effort, or just as the road upon which it must travel, compassion towards others will only grow stronger and stronger.  It is built into the process, just as we are built into ourselves.  In our quest to know who we are, we know each other.  This is our destiny.

Why Aren't the Liberals Interested in Poverty?

photo: Banksy

On the Secular Right blog, Heather Mac Donald asks, "Where are all the black fathers?"

It is an iron-clad rule, presumably taught in journalism schools, that when discussing black single mothers and their children, one must never, ever ask: Who and where is the father, and how many fathers are there? Tens of thousands of articles have been written about the struggles of black single mothers, and the appearance of their children is always treated as a virgin birth. Not only are there no fathers in sight in such articles, there is no curiosity about where the fathers are and why they’re not stepping up to the plate. ... But no amount of government programs can possibly compensate for the wholesale exemption of males from the responsibility of caring for their children. The fiction of the inner city virgin birth makes for a booming social service sector, but it otherwise spells disaster for a culture.

Where are they?

Oh, you know exactly where they are...

Conservatism, through its endless denial of how human society works (i.e. basic principles of economics, sociology, psychology, biology, neurology, and every -oly that actually took the time to study the reasons behind why we do what we do), stuck its head firmly in the sand and pretended that poverty would just "go away" if we continued to ignore festering social problems and went on thinking that we're all just snappy rational actors who choose our lots in life.

It denied that people are created by the societies in which they live. It influenced public policy and social thought, seeking to strip away any effort on the part of society to help people achieve equal access to success. It sought to limit access to quality public education. It sought to limit access to drug treatment and prevention. It sought to limit access to affordable mixed-income housing. It sought to limit access to public television programming.

It sought to limit progressive taxation to pay for any of these programs. It sought to limit minimum wages. It sought to limit the regulation of environmental pollution in poor communities. It sought to limit criminal rehabilitation programs, and instead maximize punishment for drug crimes. It sought to limit public parks. It sought to limit gun control laws that might have prevented the explosion in inner-city violence.

Lets continue. It sought to limit multiculturalism. It sought to limit the celebration of other forms of expression than the standard norms. It sought to elevate one particular "American" culture to a moral standing above all others - which just happened to be white, heterosexual, Christian, patriarchal and wealthy. It sought to limit intellectual inquiry and free thought. It sought to limit the types of journalism and academic study that intended to gather data and develop theories of how and why so many people have been so marginalized and mistreated throughout history. It sought to brand any who took part in such activities as traitorous and Unamerican.

So what happened to all those dead-beat black fathers?

In short, Ms. Mac Donald happened.