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America's report card

Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass contains a poem entitled Song of the Broad-Axe. The fifth canto in that poem describes the place where the great city stands. The great city, Whitman says, is not the place of great commercial enterprises, nor the place of the biggest and most splendid buildings, “Nor the place of the best libraries and schools—nor the place where money is plentiest, Nor the place of the most numerous population.”

The place of the great city, says Whitman, is the place where we find the following:

  1. Where thrift is in its place
  2. Where prudence is in its place
  3. Where the men and women think lightly of the laws
  4. Where the slave ceases, and the master of slaves ceases
  5. Where the populace rise at once against the never-ending audacity of elected persons
  6. Where outside authority enters always after the precedence of inside authority
  7. Where the citizen is always the head and ideal—and President, Mayor, Governor, and what not, are agents for pay
  8. Where children are taught to be laws unto themselves, and to depend on themselves;
  9. Where equanimity is illustrated in affairs
  10. Where women walk in public processions in the streets, and enter the public assembly and take places the same as the men

Taking a couple of these as criteria, let's see what grade a fair-minded teacher would give contemporary America on its report card.

Thrift

When I was a child, the adults in my life hardly ever turned on the electric lights during the daytime hours. They relied on sunlight that came in through windows. When my family finally got a television set, we agreed that we would watch it no more than an hour an evening. (If we opted not to watch it at all on some evenings, we allowed ourselves to apply the time to other evenings. When the television was off, it was completely off. When it was turned on, it took about a minute to warm up. Nowadays, even when most televisions are turned off, they are consuming electricity, because a small amount is used to keep all the circuits warmed up. The same is true of several other appliances. (Learn more about hidden electrical bandits.) Nowadays lights are left on routinely, although recently awareness of this seems to be on the rise. Michael Hodges reports that America's consumption of energy has nearly quadrupled since 1955. During that same time the American population has not even doubled, which means that each of us is using on average more than twice as much energy as we used fifty years ago.

Bankrate.com reports that the average household in the U.S. is about $14,500 in debt, not counting mortgage debts. Sixty years ago hardly any households were in serious debt, while now about 40% of American families annually spend more than they earn. The United States as a nation is a little more than 13 times more in debt than it was in 1940. (This figure is corrected for inflation; without that correction, the absolute debt is, of course much higher. A fuller explanation can be found on Ed Hall's national debt clock FAQ.) Conclusion: As individuals and as a nation, Americans have completely lost sight of thrift. So by Walt Whitman's first criterion of a what makes a great city, we must give the USA an F.

Has the slave and the slave-owner ceased?

Walt Whitman lived to see the end of the ownership of kidnapped Africans forced to work for wealthy families who owned them (families that included several signatories to the Declaration of Independence and a number of America's first presidents). Whitman rightly called slavery “the foulest crime in history known to any land of age” (See This dust was once a man.) It might, however, be premature to say that America has abolished a slave-based economy. True, human beings are no longer formally owned by others, but the American economy depends heavily on an underpaid workforce made up of citizens who work at wages that keep them below the poverty line and of non-citizens who migrate here to do black-market labor. When 13% of the US population lives below the poverty line, giving the United States one of the highest poverty levels in the industrialized world, and when a significant number of families cannot afford health care, it is not unreasonable to say that conditions barely better than slavery still prevail. In a spirit of generosity, a fair-minded teacher might give the country a C.

Does the populace rise at once against the never-ending audacity of elected persons?

A recent report on the Bill Moyers Journal stated that 45% of Americans favor impeachment hearings for President Bush and 54% favor impeachment for Vice President Cheney. While those numbers are encouraging in some ways, they hardly serve as evidence that the population as a whole has risen against the audacity of elected officials. And if they have risen at all, it has certainly not been at once. The response has been sluggish and reluctant, and there is little reason to believe a) that our elected representatives in the Congress will vote for impeachment, or b) that the American electorate will vote their elective representatives out of office for their failure to impeach even when the grounds for so doing are probably as strong as they have ever been in the history of the nation. Conclusion: As individuals and as a nation, Americans have become jaded about the audacity of their elected officials. So by Walt Whitman's fifth criterion of a what makes a great city, we must give the USA no better than a C minus.

Does outside authority enter always after the precedence of inside authority?

George Fox, founder of the Quakers, claimed that any external authority is only as good as the insight and wisdom of the person who interprets it. This is a classical statement of what people nowadays call theological liberalism, that is, the position that individuals are free (liber) to interpret scriptural authority by their own lights. This is not so much a claim of policy as it is a claim of fact. That is, it is not claiming that people ought to be free to interpret authoritative statements so much as it is claiming that people have no choice but to interpret everything they encounter, for there is no such thing as any belief that is not a personal interpretation of something.

While it is obvious to theological liberals that we all swim in a sea of personal interpretation (most of which is, of course, conditioned by our desires to fit in with people around us), there are people who believe that it is possible just to read the Bible, or the US Constitution, and know immediately, without intervening interpretation, what an authoritative source means by what it says. Such a conviction is part of what we mean by the concept of fundamentalism.

So how fundamentalist is the United States? To what extent does the populace of the United States admit that they appeal to external authority only after appealing to internal authority, and celebrate that they approach authority in this way? A clue is provided by an article on the website of Copernicus Marketing, where we read:

Copernicus discovered that among the general population, the number of Americans who consider themselves religiously liberal increased much more dramatically over the course of 30 years while the number of fundamentalists increased only marginally. Liberals expanded from 18 percent of the population in 1972 to 29 percent in 2002, while fundamentalists grew from 27 percent in 1972 to 30 percent in 2002.

Although the emphasis in the wording of the paragraph above is on the percentage growth among theological liberals in the United States, it is worth noting that the number of self-identified fundamentalists is still 1% higher than the percentage of self-identified liberals, and that fundamentalism is still on the rise, even if less rapidly than theological liberalism. Conclusion: As individuals and as a nation, Americans have never been as good at thinking for themselves as they sometimes like to believe. The United States is still, to a large extent, a nation of sheep. So by Walt Whitman's sixth criterion of a what makes a great city, we must give the USA no better than a barely passing C minus.

Is equanimity illustrated in affairs?

Given that nearly every commentator on the contemporary scene has pointed out how polarized the US population has become, and given that polarization is rarely the outcome of careful, balanced thinking and equanimity, I think it is clear that, the United States is dangerously close to failure. At best, the United States is currently doing no better than D minus.

Are the genders equal?

As this is written, a woman is the leading contender to be the Democratic Party's presidential candidate, and for the first time a woman is Speaker of the House. More women than men are graduating from high school and entering college. Women are routinely in public view as news commentators, journalists, higher-level educators and political candidates. About all this, Whitman would no doubt be pleased. Women are still, however, dramatically underpaid in comparison with men who do the same jobs. The nation has been heading in the right direction for the past few decades, but there is still room for improvement. Not wanting to give a grade on this issue without consulting my wife, I asked her what grade she would give America in the area of gender equality. Her grade was exactly the same as I was thinking before asking her. So the answer must be right: in gender equality America gets a B.

Overall assessment

Averaging all the above grades according to Walt Whitman's poetic criteria of the place where the great city is found, we come up with a D+ for the United States of America as a whole. While that is strictly speaking not a failing grade, it is not high enough to earn a credit in a required course. The case is not hopeless, but there is a great deal of work to be done before a satisfactory grade can be given. The United States should perhaps have a tutor. I recommend turning for high-quality mentoring to Canada, the Netherlands, and Sweden for a start. Later, when a good foundation of social and political knowledge has been reached, the United States can turn to other countries for help.

As with any student in danger of failing to make the grade, the biggest question with the United States is: is the student willing to learn? Only time will tell.

Posted by Dayamati to New City of Friends at 8/11/2007 01:27:00 PM

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A grandson of Confucius assesses America

In “America's report card” we saw what grades the United States might get if graded by the standards set by Walt Whitman's poem “The Broad-axe.” In this squib, we'll take a look at how the United States might be graded if we used the standards of Kongji, the grandson of Kong Fuzi (Confucius), who is credited with writing these words:

There are nine standards by which to administer the empire, its states, and the families. They are: cultivating the personal life, honoring the worthy, being affectionate to relatives, being respectful toward the great ministers, identifying oneself with the welfare of the whole body of officers, treating the common people as one's own children, attracting the various artisans, showing tenderness to strangers from far countries, and extending kindly and awesome influence on the feudal lords.

Applying the criteria

Kongji goes on to explain “If the ruler cultivates his personal life, the Way will be established. If he honors the worthy, he will not be perplexed.” Our current ruler seems to cultivate his personal life, if we understand cultivation to mean keeping in good physical fitness. The President reportedly has many rigorous workouts every week and loves to ride his bicycle vigorously enough to work off 1000 calories per session. He also claims to read more than one hundred books a year. So we are off to a good start. When it comes to honoring the worthy, our President seems to believe that he does just that, although his criteria of who is worthy could be questioned. All appearances indicate that being worthy in the eyes of the President consists mostly in being loyal. While loyalty is a good quality if it is toward a noble and honorable person, loyalty to a person of low or questionable integrity is not always a positive quality. In the interest of not prejudging the situation and coming to a conclusion without adequate evidence, we should perhaps say that there is not enough impartial information to give the President a grade on this criterion.

Konji says of the ruler: “If he is affectionate to his relatives, there will be no grumbling among his uncles and brothers.” The President does seem to be affectionate, toward his father, his mother, his brother, his wife and his children. Once again, he would probably receive high marks from the grandson of Confucius.

Konji says “If he respects the great ministers, he will not be deceived.” Here most of the evidence suggests that the President is not especially good at listening to great ministers. He does seem to do well at listening to those who agree with him, but there are many well-informed thinkers who have excellent advice to offer who seem to go unheard, or at least unheeded. In this area the President is right on the borderline between failing and getting a barely passing grade. (A tougher grader than I might just fail him.)

“If he identifies himself with the welfare of the whole body of officers, then the officers will repay him heavily for his courtesies.”

From the very outset, the commander-in-chief has earned a reputation for being selective in which of his generals he heeds. Those who seriously question or openly disagree with the command-in-chief's policies find themselves on the margins. If one understands officers as including non-commissioned as well as commissioned officers in the armed services, and if one asks whether the command-in-chief identifies himself with their welfare, he cannot, I'm afraid, be given a passing grade. American members of the armed services are being exposed to unnecessarily dangerous circumstances, as a result of which serious injuries and psychological traumas are being sustained, and follow-up care for the wounded has not been even close to adequate. It is alleged that the commander-in-chief has not attended the funeral of a single uniformed serviceman who has died in the war in Iraq. It is difficult to escape the impression that the commander-in-chief has a difficult time expressing his care for the people whom he has sent into perilous situations. It is reported that he regularly cries when he thinks of the dead and injured, but his tears have not been translated into policies that would help better to prevent them from dying and being wounded.

Kongji says of the successful ruler: “If he treats the common people as his own children, then the masses will exhort one another to do good.” Here the President receives his lowest grade. His sluggish response to the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina has been well documented. The poor, the weak and the helpless citizens of the United States have never been the focus of the President's attention. Indeed, their share of the economic resources in the United States has steadily decreased during the past seven years. The rich and powerful have fared much better. They have enjoyed tax cuts and various other advantages that have result in dramatic increases in their wealth and power. Regulations that have restrained the greed of major corporations have been steadily eroded. No progress has been made toward providing universal health for everyone, including the poor and the powerless, in the country. The quality of public education has declined noticeably. If the common people had been our President's children, they would have been disinherited or treated as medieval tyrants in the treated their bastard offspring. Even giving the President an F might qualify as grade inflation.

So how are we doing in the realm of commerce? Konji says “If he attracts the various artisans, there will be sufficiency of wealth and resources in the country.” Encouraging, through a relentlessly dogmatic commitment to free markets, business enterprises in this country to seek the lowest-paid labor in the world has resulted in the steady diminishing of industry in the United States. Artisans have not done well at all in recent years. The principal beneficiaries of the President's policies have been the extremely wealthy and those in the poorly paid unskilled service sector. A larger percentage of people live in poverty in the United States than in any other industrialized nation. If there is a sufficiency of wealth and resources, they are so poorly distributed as to be almost non-existent to those with the greatest need. Once again, a fair-minded evaluator would reluctantly have to give a grade of F.

“If he shows tenderness to strangers from far countries, people from all quarters of the world will flock to him.” In this area the President himself has apparently had the will to show kindness to strangers from foreign lands, provided their plan is to come to this country to work at wages so low as to be tantamount to economic slavery. Unfortunately, he has failed to convince his most ardent supporters of the wisdom of showing compassion to people from foreign lands. As a result, there has been a collective paralysis of legislators to arrive at any workable remedies to the problem of economic refugees who have come to this country in hopes of making a decent livelihood. Or seemingly ruler has good intentions, but is it not with good intentions that the road to hell is paved?

“And if he extends kindly and awesome influence over the feudal lords, then the world will stand in awe of him.” The world has never stood in awe of the current ruler of the United States, and the world stands in less awe of the country as a whole every passing week. A Confucian would no doubt find a close link between the qualities of the President and the declining international prestige and influence enjoyed by the United States.

Summary

Taking all the criteria of Confucianism into consideration, our current ruler does not fare much better than when America's greatest poet, Walt Whitman, were used as a basis of evaluation. If the country had had inadequate leadership for only eight years, we might have hope to expect a slow but steady recovery to health. Unfortunately, incompetent leaders have been the norm in the United States for at least the past twenty-five years. Some Presidents have done better than others in specific criteria, but none have been consistently admirable, noble and competent leaders of the sort that Confucians always dreamed. It is, therefore, difficult to be both reasonable and optimistic about the future of the United States. If we stay on our present course, there is probably nothing to look forward to but steady cultural decline.

There may be an alternative. Hints on what the alternatives are may be found in Declaration of Independence. A detailed look at how that revolutionary document might be applied to our current situation may be the subject matter of a future squib.

Posted by Dayamati to New City of Friends at 9/07/2007 04:32:00 PM

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America's need for light

A scientist speaks of rainbows

One of the most interesting books to come out during the past ten years is Richard Dawkins's Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder. (Boston: Mariner Books, 1998). The title refers to a complaint from the poet John Keats that Sir Isaac Newton's work on optics was taking the mystery out of such beautiful events as rainbows. Dawkins argues that science actually adds mystery to life, because science never stops asking questions and never stops probing deeper. Religion, he suggests, is more prone to closing inquiry by giving answers, often superficial and inadequate ones, and discouraging further questioning. By way of illustrating how interesting scientific accounts can be, he offers a brief account of the optics that account for rainbows (pp. 45-49). Anyone who wishes to read that can borrow or buy the book. What I would like to do is not recapitulate the physics of rainbows but to take rainbows as a point of departure for discussing light poetically as a religious metaphor.

Where on earth is a rainbow?

One of the most interesting thinks to ask oneself about a rainbow is: where exactly is it? In thinking about this, consider that if one watches a rainbow from a fast-moving vehicle, the rainbow seems always to be about the same distance from the observer. This suggests that the rainbow is moving at the same speed as the observer. Now imagine that one is looking at a rainbow from a fast-moving train and passes a farmer who is standing in his field and looking at the rainbow. The farmer sees a rainbow that is standing still, and the person on the train sees a rainbow that is moving. Are they both looking at the same rainbow? If so, how can the same rainbow be simultaneously moving at the speed of the train and standing still?

Now consider what happens if one walks (or runs or drives very fast) toward a rainbow. The rainbow backs away. It always seems to be at exactly the same distance from the observer. What if, instead of one observer moving toward the rainbow, we had a hundred observers placed at a distance of one meter from one another. Each of them would see a rainbow that seems to be at a distance of, say, five kilometers away. (When one really thinks about it, it is quite difficult to estimate just how far away a rainbow appears to be. When I look at a rainbow from my house, it seems to be somewhere in front of the Sandia Mountains, and I know the crest of the Sandias is about 15 kilometers from my house, so presumably the rainbow seems to be closer than that.) Now if one hundred observers each see a rainbow that is five kilometers away, then either there is one rainbow located in one hundred different places, or there are one hundred rainbows, all but one of which remains hidden to each observer.

The way out of these problems seems to be to admit that each observer sees his or her own rainbow. And this would suggest that a rainbow is not located on the earth or in the sky at all. Perhaps, like the second moon one sees when one's eyes are not properly focused, it is not located anywhere at all. If it is anywhere, it could be in the eye (or mind) of the observer.

It is not, however, entirely satisfactory to say that a rainbow is merely in the eye (or mind) of the beholder. A rainbow does not appear to the beholder no matter which way she happens to be looking. The rainbow appears to an observer only if she is situated in a particular way relative to the sun. (More about this in a moment.) So the rainbow is not an internal visualization that one projects willy nilly onto an empty sky in the way that a Buddhist meditator might project an image of Amitabha Buddha onto a clear blue sky or a sunset. Where is that rainbow?

I love questions much more than answers, so I am not even going to try to answer the question of where the rainbow is. But let me return just for a moment to the question of where the observer has to be situated relative to the sun in order to see a rainbow. When the sun is still in the eastern part of the sky, the rainbow is in the west. When the sun has moved to the western part of the sky, the rainbow appears to be in the east. The observer always stands between the sun and the rainbow. In other words, an observer can see a rainbow only when his back is to the sun.

What, from an optical point of view, is a rainbow? It is the effect of clear, invisible sunlight being refracted by millions of tiny droplets of water, each of which has a prismatic effect of breaking clear light into several bands of colored light. Colored light is only a part of full-spectrum light. Colored light is light with a particular frequency, whereas whole sunlight contains all the frequencies of light at once. A rainbow, then, can be considered to be something like broken, fractured light. Whole light is invisible, yet it enables one to see everything that one sees, Fractured light is visible but enables one to see only part of the visual field. Looking at this poetically, a rainbow is an image of a display of partial and broken lights. One can see that only when one has turned one's back on the whole light, the light that enables one to see everything clearly.

Holding someone or something in the light

When Quakers know of someone who is undergoing difficulty, they often say “Friends, let us hold so-and-so in the light.” Quakers also talk of holding a concern in the light. In fact, at a Quaker meeting for worship for business, the entire proceedings are a series of holding issues in the light until it becomes clear to everyone what the right solution is. Quaker meetings for business are not run by Robert's Rules of Order. No one makes a motion. No vote is ever taken. Rather, an issue is discussed in the context of vigilant and attentive silence--silence broken only when someone has a leading to share a new dimension of the issue being discussed--and the discussion continues either until it is clear to everyone what the right policy is or until it is clear that at this time no clarity can be reached. (When the latter happens, the problem is set aside to be “seasoned” for a month or so.)

The Quaker way of discussing problems or handing conflicts can be see as doing just the opposite of what a prism does. A prism breaks up whole light into a spectrum of colors. In A Quaker meeting, each person comes in with a particular perspective, which is usually based on a partial understanding. Each Friend comes to the meeting seeing a problem in a colored light. As discussion takes place, all these colors of light merge into a more complete light. No Friend can see the full, clear light unless she is willing to turn her back to the rainbow of partial lights.

Quaker business meetings often feel as though something miraculous has emerged. Unity often arises out of what seems at first to be a set of irreconcilable diversities. Every month, after the monthly meeting for business at the Meetinghouse, I find myself wishing that America (indeed, the entire world) could do business in a similar way. I wish we could all have the courage and the will to abandon our partial perspectives and to look at every problem of life in the whole clear light, and I wish we could all realize that this can happen only when we all have the courage and will to listen carefully to everything being said, to hold it without reaction and judgment, and to let it have its way with us. This does not mean concluding that everyone is right about everything; it is not a descent into irresponsible relativism. Rather it is ascent into a higher understanding, one that is based on the recognition that everyone has a truth to tell and is therefore worth hearing out, but everyone's truth is partial and in need of being complemented by other perspectives.

Perhaps one of the reasons that few Quakers experience a conflict between religion and science is that the deep listening and reflection that is the soul of the Quakerly way of dealing with concerns is a way that is both the way of mystical religion and the way of scientific method. As long as one is willing to listen further and to reconsider issues in a fuller light than has been available so far, then one is prepared to do both good religion and good science.

At this stage of its development, a significant portion of the American nation seems to have developed the habit of turning its back on whole light and looking at all problems in isolation and in fractured, refracted light. That is a way of seeing that promotes fear, even panic, and results in ever-increasing destruction. There is an alternative to that fearful way of seeing, but one of the effects of fear is that one can rarely see alternatives to being fearful.

America is now in dire need of enlightenment. Whether enough people will see the light to turn the country back onto a more wholesome course remains to be seen. As the country descends into deeper darkness, there will always be some of us holding the country in the light.

Posted by Dayamati to New City of Friends at 8/26/2007 10:37:00 PM

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Where Have All Our Manners Gone?

On September 23, 2007, the CBS program 60 Minutes carried an interview with Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The interview, conducted by Scott Pelley, was conducted in the customarily aggressive 60 Minutes style. One does expect politeness or good manners in 60 Minutes interviews; that is not their style. It was, however, shocking to hear Pelley quote President Bush. The transcript of the program shows that Pelley said this:

I asked President Bush what he would say to you if he were sitting in this chair. And he told me-quote-speaking to you, that you've made terrible choices for your people. You've isolated your nation you've taken a nation of proud and honorable people and made your country the pariah of the world. These are President Bush's words to you, What's your reply?

President Ahmadinejad seemed slightly taken aback, but he regained his composure quickly and said he did not believe President Bush had really said those things. Pelley claimed that he was quoting the American president directly. If Pelley was telling the truth, it is a truth that should make all Americans feel deeply ashamed and embarrassed. There is no excuse for one head of state to say to another, even through a television interviewer, that the other head of state has taken a nation of proud and honorable people and made his country the pariah of the world. That, of all people, President Bush, who has disgraced his own country in the eyes of the world, should say such a thing is a prime example of a pot calling a kettle black; but that is not the point. The point is that no head of state should ever speak in such undiplomatic and unprofessional language of another. Speaking in such a way is inexcusably rude, not to mention potentially dangerous. It is conduct unbecoming a president of the United States.

Perhaps emboldened by President Bush's carelessness and rudeness, a few days later Lee Bollinger, president of Columbia University, addressed aggressively rude remarks of his own to President Ahmadinejad, who was an invited guest speaker at the university. President Bollinger said:

Let's then be clear at the beginning. Mr. President, you exhibit all the signs of a petty and cruel dictator. And so, I ask you—and so, I ask you, why have women, members of the Baha=E2=80=99i Faith, homosexuals, and so many of our academic colleagues become targets of persecution in your country? Why, in a letter last week to the Secretary General of the UN, did Akbar Ganji, Iran's leading political dissident, and over 300 public intellectuals, writers and Nobel laureates express such grave concern that your inflamed dispute with the West is distracting the world's attention from the intolerable conditions in your regime within Iran—in particular, the use of the press law to ban writers for criticizing the ruling system? Why are you so afraid of Iranian citizens expressing their opinions for change?

Then, before invited President Ahmadinejad to speak, President Bollinger closed his introduction by saying:

Frankly—I close with this comment—frankly and in all candor, Mr. President, I doubt that you will have the intellectual courage to answer these questions. But your avoiding them will, in itself, be meaningful to us. I do expect you to exhibit the fanatical mindset that characterizes so much of what you say and do. Fortunately, I am told by experts on your country that this only further undermines your position in Iran, with all the many goodhearted intelligent citizens there. A year ago, I am reliably told, your preposterous and belligerent statements in this country—was at one of the meetings of the Council on Foreign Relations—so embarrassed sensible Iranian citizens that this led to your party's defeat in the December mayoral elections. May this do that and more. I am only a professor—I am only a professor who is also a university president. And today I feel all the weight of the modern civilized world yearning to express the revulsion at what you stand for. I only wish I could do better. Thank you.

I, too, am only a professor. But if Lee Bollinger were the president of my university, I would demand his resignation as president for making such embarrassingly disgraceful comments in full public view to an invited guest. There is no excuse whatsoever for inviting a guest to speak and then to introduce him by accusing him of being a petty and cruel dictator with a fanatical mindset who makes preposterous and belligerent statements.

As Alexis de Tocqueville observed long ago, the United States of America has never been the envy of the world for being a bastion of refinement and polished civilization. That notwithstanding, the United States has in the past been a place of decency and civility. Are those days gone forever? Are we now to expect the president of the country to make rude and disparaging remarks of other heads of state? Are we to take it as a matter of course that prominent academics associated with our most prestigious universities will blurt out schoolboy taunts to invited guests? If so, we have become a sadly fallen nation indeed.

If no one else will apologize to President Ahmadinejad for the brazen crudeness and impudence of our public figures, then I will. President Ahmadinejad, on behalf of the American people, I apologize for the shoddy treatment you received while visiting my home and native land. While I myself have many differences of opinion with you, I admire the gracious cheerfulness with which you received the rudeness of my countrymen, and I thank you for saying several things about the policies of my country that desperately needed to be said. May your criticisms of us not fall on deaf ears.

Posted by Dayamati to New City of Friends at 9/28/2007 03:19:00 PM

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The karma of a nation: “This land is your land”

Emma Lazarus (1849–1887), a Sephardic Jewish American born in New York City wrote some of the best-known words in American poetry. Part of her poem “The New Collosus” were inscribed the Statue of Liberty some twenty years after the poet died, because the words were thought to capture the generous spirit of the American people.

“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

I was born in a part of the United States that was made a territory after a war of US aggression against our neighbor to the south. I belong to an ethnic group, the English, that makes up less than 7.6% of the population of the state in which I was born. Almost 37% of the population of my state are descendants of Spain, Mexico or other Spanish-speaking countries, and another 10% are native Americans whose land was forcibly taken from them by waves of people of European descent. No doubt most of my views on American immigration policy is shaped by the fact that most of my ancestors came from England several generations before the United States was an independent country and that I somehow was born in a state whose principal values were forged more by Mexican and native American values than by anything from England. The Mexican culture of hospitality has shaped my thinking at least as much as the English-American value of equality. Because of my most own deepest religious and social values, I find myself amazed at the attitude of many of my fellow Americans—an attitude that all too often strikes me as mean-spirited.

The aim of this essay is to outline a few considerations that I would hope might become the basis of American immigration policy in the near future.

The policies advocated by many citizens of the United States would be comical if the spirit behind them were not so tragically lacking in the spirit of charity that is so important in all the religions commonly practiced in the United States and the rest of the Americas. Some have proposed the ludicrous idea of building a tall wall or fence along the border between the United States and Mexico. Others have advocated tightening the border so that people cannot cross from one country to another as easily as they now do. These ideas are ridiculous, because both of the borders between the United States and neighboring countries are completely artificial. That is, they are not based on geographical realities but on arbitrary political decisions. Drawing a boundary with a straight-edged rule and then expecting animals, birds and human beings to honor those boundaries shows an appalling lack of any sense of reality. Millions of United States of Americans have relatives in Canada, Mexico and elsewhere in the Americas. These families have become divide not only because people have moved, but because artificial lines have been drawn on maps. As many people of Mexican descent in the Southwestern United States say “We did not cross the border. The border crossed us.” (One of my favorite buildings in the city where I live was built when the land it was considered part of Spain. When Mexico gained independence, the building became part of Mexico. When this land was ceded by Mexico as part of the Treaty of Hidalgo, it became a territory of the United States. The same is true of many buildings in the southwestern United States.)

The mean-spirited xenophobia exhibited by many Americans, nearly all of whom are themselves the descendants of immigrants, is creating a national karma that is not only disgraceful and embarrassing but also potentially dangerous. If the United States of America is ever to regain the reputation of benevolence and goodness it once held in most parts of the world, our people will have to meditate long and hard on the words of the Jewish American woman from New York whose words have brought tears of joy to countless millions of people, whether they were born in the United States or migrated to this country in pursuit of the inalienable God-given rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Posted by Dayamati Richard Hayes to New City of Friends at 7/24/2007 06:25:00 PM

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Is America ready for Democracy?

There are those in the United States who are enthusiastic about the project of supporting democracy in various parts of the world. Supporting democracy is a project about which I can muster some enthusiasm, but only if the circumstances are right. A democratic government is only as good as the general electorate is informed. At the very least, a voting citizen should be informed about the laws of her land, the historical circumstances that led to the making of those laws, and the geographical features of the nation in which she is casting a vote. If one is a voter in a nation that has ambitions of becoming the center of an empire, as the United States does, then a voter is obligated to be well informed about the geography of the world as a whole, and the histories of the many nations with which there is interaction.

There is mounting evidence that many of the people eligible to vote in the United States since the passing of the 26th amendment to the Constitution in 1971 (the amendment that gave the right to vote to every citizen of the United States who is 18 years of age or older) are not sufficiently well informed to make informed decisions about those who represent them and preside over them. It has been well documented for years that young Americans consistently get among the lowest scores in the world in internationally adjudicated math and science tests. More recently there have been stories about the astonishingly poor knowledge of geography that young men and women in the 18–24 age group have.

One such story can be found on the CNN Education site. On this site we learn, among other things, that 44% of Americans in the 18–24 range were unable to locate on a map even one of the countries Iraq, Iran, Israel or Saudi Arabia. Some 57% of Americans in that age range were unable to locate the state of Ohio on a map, and only 50% could find the state of New York. These results did not surprise me much. I recently asked a group of students who were taking an upper-level undergraduate course on Buddhism how many of them could find India, China, Japan, Vietnam and Korea on a map of Asia; the majority said they would be unable to find Korea, Japan and Vietnam, but most thought they would be able to find China or India. It is reassuring to know that these American students could find the two most populated countries on the planet, countries in which about 36% of the world's population lives, but I wonder how many would know that India and China together have a population about seven times that of the United States. And how many would know that most college students in those countries know far more than the average American college student knows about world geography, world history, math, science, and quite possibly American geography and history.

While I have not seen any statistics recently on how many young American adults could pass a citizenship test if they were required to, my guess is that many could not. This raises the question: if the United States does not allow immigrants to vote in US elections until they have passed a citizenship test, why are citizens allowed to vote before they can pass the same citizenship test? Never shy of recommending adjustments that might be made in US law, let me suggest the following policies that might be tried out:

Normally, I would suggest a policy of improving America's domestic educational system, but it is unlikely that Americans will ever be smart enough to elect people who will make education a priority, rather than waging aggressive wars around the world and trying to achieve regime change in “developing” countries. While it might seem like a good idea to divert some of the $400,000,000,000 the United States spends on the military every year to the education budget, which is about 10% as large as the military budget, there are probably not enough American voters sufficiently educated to insist on voting only for presidential and congressional candidates who value books more than guns and who realize that the best possible way to have a safe and secure country is to contribute to the well-being of people around the world rather than terrorizing them with knowledge that an unfriendly giant has the capacity to obliterate them.

If you have not yet seen it, check out the Oreo cookie demonstration that puts all this into perspective. It is reminiscent of the classical BB demonstration that Ben Cohen gave to give some idea of how large the nuclear arsenal of the United States is.

If you are a US citizen, please write to your senators and congressional representatives right away and insist that they support legislation to require citizenship tests of all voters, not just those who were born outside the country. But first, why not try your hand on some questions from the citizenship test that is given to people seeking US citizenship?

Posted by Dayamati to New City of Friends at 8/07/2007 08:16:00 PM

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Pausing to give thanks

George Fox admonished his followers to be aware of their own similarity to villains and sinners mentioned in the Bible. Rather than saying “It is they, they, they who sin and fall short,” he suggested getting into the habit of saying “It is I, I, I and we, we, we who are in this condition.” (See Truth of the Heart, p. 12-15.) Because it has been my lifelong practice to seek fault nearby rather than far away, and to see flaws in self and friends more readily than in real or imagined enemies, I may give the impression to some of being unduly critical of my own home and native land. Indeed, many of the blogs here may seem to fall into the “Blame America First” genre. If that is how my writings appear, it shows how deceptive appearances can be.

A Buddhist friend of Japanese-American background once told me that he thinks the most important gift that Japanese Buddhism has to make to Americans is the practice of expressing gratitude repeatedly—not only for things for which gratitude is the most obvious response, but also for things that may seem to invite expressions of discontent. Not just Japanese Buddhism, but all of Buddhism encourages practitioners to feel contentment and joy with even the smallest of good fortune, whether that good fortune is one's own or belongs to a friend, a total stranger or an enemy. When I am counting things to be deeply grateful for, one of the first items on the list is the effects that years of Buddhist practice has had on my mentality.

Also very high on my personal list of things to feel thankful for are the Sun, the planet Earth and the country in which I happened to be born and in which I have lived almost 42% of my life so far. Not only when the mood strikes, but daily I feel deep gratitude for a range of blessings found in the United States.

Posted by Dayamati to New City of Friends at 11/23/2007 05:11:00 PM

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A Chinese Totalitarian Assesses America

One of the most interesting and challenging philosophers ancient China was Hanfeizi (Han Fei Tzu), who gave gave a rational defense of what we would now call totalitarianism. For the benefit of those in The United States of America who might like to the government have more absolute and unimpeachable power, I offer this brief report card on how America is doing as a totalitarian state of the sort described by Hanfeizi.

Hanfeizi argued that the ideal government was one based on the three pillars of power, laws and statecraft. What he meant by those three pillars can be summarized as follows:

Power
Power is necessary for a king to gain control over the masses. What this means is that in the final analysis it is the state that should have the power of life and death over the people. Power ensures that no one will question or resist the authority of the government. Therefore, the king should enforce the law as if he were God, which means using power effectively and absolutely but being guided by the constraints of fairness and impartiality. Like God, the ruler should always be perceived as unquestionable. In practice, this means the ruler must be sure always to take credit for successes and to find some dispensable minister to blame for failures. But only the rule should have this sort of power to take credit and give blame; everyone else in the nation must be credited and blamed on the most objective grounds possible. In practice, this means that everyone must be watchful of everyone else; no one but the head of state can be left unwatched. Only if everyone is equally watched, will there be fairness and impartiality in all public affairs; needless to say, no one's activities will be truly private, so all affairs will be public.
Laws
The fairness and impartiality that the state requires is something that can be measured only against a known standard, namely, the law of the land. Without an objective standard of this sort, no one knows what fairness and impartiality are; they become empty words, like righteousness and benevolence. The king, therefore, like God, should use his power first to make the law and then to see to it that the law is implemented in the same way for everyone and that no one, including the king himself, is above the law in any way whatsoever. Hanfeizi wrote: “Ruler and minister, superior and inferior, nobleman and commoner—all must obey the law.” All those who break the law, whatever their social rank or their place in the government, must receive the same punishment.

Laws, if they are to uphold a fair and impartial government, must be clear, fully public and transparent, and they must be fully enforceable. Laws that are vague, or kept secret, or that cannot be enforced will only occasion contempt for the law in the minds of citizens. Contempt for the law will lead to lawless behavior among citizens, and lawless behavior will serve to erode the government's power.
Statecraft
But the good king also employs statecraft as if he were God, which means that he operates in ways that are mysterious and unfathomable to his ministers; this unpredictability, accompanied by power, inspires awe and dread in his ministers and therefore ensures that his dictates are carried out by them. If the preferences of the leader are known, then people are bound to speak and act in ways that please the leader, rather than speaking and acting authentically. To prevent sycophancy, the successful leader must be as inscrutable as God.

Once the law has been decided, said Hanfeizi, it is imperative that all private doctrines that conflict with the law be prohibited. If teachers are allowed to teach doctrines that conflict with the will of the king, then the law can never be effective. Hanfei was especially wary of philosophers, since they had a way of raising questions that could be answered in many ways, without giving people a means of deciding which answer is the uniquely correct one. If people have their minds full of open-ended unanswered questions, thought Han, then they will only be confused, and confusion is good for no one. So philosophers should be forbidden to teach. The only thing that everyone should be taught is what the law is, what the penalty of breaking the law is, and what the benefits of obeying the law are.

As important as it is for the leader to be as much like God as humanly possible in the ways described above, it is no less important for the leader to make sure the economy of the state is always sound. Just as individuals come to disaster if they spend beyond their means, states will surely fall if they go too much into debt. Therefore, all wasteful spending should be illegal, and like all illegal things, punished. Among the most wasteful enterprises a state can become involved, claimed Han, in is reckless military ventures. A state that is well run and that maintains a healthy economy will have no need to defend itself against external enemies, since its good international conduct will make no enemies. And such a state will also have no need to conquer other states to gain resources, since it will always be able to get everything its citizens need through fair trade. With no need to invade neighboring states or to defend against them, the well-run state need have only a minimal military, so its need for funds will be modest. Therefore, its need to tax citizens will also be modest.

Nothing will bring a state to ruin more surely than habits that undermine fairness and that stand in the way of the best people being appointed to positions of responsibility—and the most incompetent people being removed from those positions. If a ruler's thinking is clouded by considerations of personal favoritism or loyalty, then bad decisions are sure to follow. As potentially enfeebling to a state as personal loyalty and political partisanship are decisions based on taking into consideration the reputation and wealth of the familiy to which a person belongs. Every individual should be appointed to or removed from positions of power solely on the basis of that individual's performance in the tasks assigned to him or her.

Given what we know of Hanfei's political doctrines, how might he assess how the United States of America has been doing in recent years?

Strict obdedience of the law and punishing all lawbreakers equally.
Few administrations during the past sixty years have done a very good job at this. The US constitution declares, for example, that treaties entered into by the federal government take precedence over laws of the nation, and yet the United States has consistently been cavalier in its honoring of international treaties, United Nations resolutions, and treaties with native Americans. Moreover, the criminal justice system is in a shambles, as manifested by the different treatment of first offenders, depending on their affluence, social position and race.

Moreover, the trend during the past forty years or so has been for presidents to pardon lawbreakers within their own cabinets or within their own political circles.

In this area, therefore, the USA must be given a grade of F.
Meritocracy and avoidance of favoritism and other forms of partiality.
The current system of legislation and enforcement of policies by lobbyists and special-interest groups almost guarantees that few decisions are made on the basis of the merits of the case, and few people are hired, maintained or dismissed from their positions strictly on the basis of the quality of their performances. Whether one looks in governmental circles, the military, the commercial sector, or the academic world, one finds that social connections, affluence and personal loyalty are far more important that competence or skill.

In this area also, the USA deserves a failing grade, but because it is the country in which I was born, I'll give it a grade of B+.
Keeping the economy healthy by favoring fair trade practices.
A whole back I went to a very crowded emporium of goods sold at affordable prices. Not being in the market for anything particular, I amused myself by looking at the labels of as many products as I could to see where they were manufactured. Every single item I examined was manufactured in China or some other country that has no laws in place to protect workers or the environment or to pay workers reasonable wages or offer them benefits. Providing cheap goods to the citizens of a nation is not the best means of stimulating that nation's economy. It would be difficult to justify giving our governments of the past sixty years any cummulative grade higher than D-.
Keeping military expenditures to a minimum.
According to a table on a website maintained by Christopher Hellman, the military budget of the United States was $396,100,000,000 in the year 2000. That figure was more than the combined military budgets of the next twenty-eight nations. In contrast, the total military budgets of the three nations that David Frum, via George W. Bush, dubbed the “Axis of Evil,” namely, Iran, Iraq and North Korea was $11,800,000,000. In other words, the United States spent $33.57 for every $1.00 spent on military hardware and personnel by the nations it claims are its most dangerous enemies. As of 2003, according to answers.com the United States military budget accounted for 47% of the entire world's military expenditures. That was before the illegal invasion of Iraq, which led to a war that according to the National priorities website costs Americans $275,000,000 per day As of January 7, 2008, the total cost of the Iraq war was more than $483,000,000,000, which is about $1600 for every man, woman and child in the country.

In this area, the record of the United States is so abysmal that it does not even deserve a failing grade. It deserves to be expelled from the school and perhaps even sent to prison.
Arriving at fair and enforceable laws.
A country that has, my frequently cited estimates, more than 12,000,000 people who have entered the country illegally, obviously has flawed immigration laws. The most sensible move would be to stop trying to make it illegal to come to this country to earn an honest livelihood. And while we're at it, we might consider stopping trying to legislate against the use of narcotics, stimulants and intoxicants. Despite these examples of silly and largely unenforceable laws, on the whole the laws of the United States, namely, those in the constitution are not bad. All told, a fair-minded grader might give the country a grade in the C+/B- range.
Being mysterious and secretive.
Although some people might at first think that America's politicians get full marks for being inscrutable and impossible to fathom, closer reflection would lead most people to conclude that in fact the inner workings of most politicians and leaders are quite out in the open and hardly disguised at all. It is evident that what makes all successful politicians tick is money. First of all, hardly anyone but a multi-millionaire can get the attention necessary to get elected. Secondly, very few can resist the lure of money once they are elected. America, since at least the time of Kennedy's election, has become a plutocracy, a government by the wealthy and for the wealthy. There is no secret or mystery about that. So by Hanfei's criteria, American government would again have to get an F.
Blaming others for what goes wrong.
At last we find a category in which American politicians have excelled during the past sixty years. During most of my youth, everything that went wrong was blamed on Communists and Communist sympathizers (a category that included almost everyone who ever had a concern for anyone besides themselves). No sooner had the Communists disappeared into the oblivion of history than Americans began blaming everything on Islamo-Fascists, jihadis, terrorists and people who hated our freedom. The truth, however, is that almost all of America's political problems have been brought on American politicians themselves and by the people who elect them. It is probably true of everyone in the human race that they are their own worst enemy. It is indisputably true of Americans as a whole, and especially of America's leaders. Yet who ever takes the blame for their own folly? Who can resist taking credit for things that are in no one's control and that by some fluke occasionally go well? American leaders can proudly show that on their Hanfeizi report card they have one A.

Conclusions

At first it might seem like good news that American leaders during the past sixty years have done so poorly at following the advice of a man who engineered one of the most brutally totalitarian governments in the history of China. Unfortunately, it turns out that what would make a totalitarian government work well are pretty much the same things that would make a constitutional democracy work well. So what makes America a mediocre also-ran as a totalitarian state also makes America a second-rate also-ran as a freedom-promotion democracy. That notwithstanding, we hear American politicians routinely saying such things as “We live in the greatest nation in the history of the earth” (Rudy Giuliani recently said that) or ”Everyone in the world would live in America if they could” (Mitt Romney recently said that). Alas, so long as American political leaders keep saying that but acting like plutocratic bullies, the country they aspire to lead will never be much better than a dream that somehow never managed to come true.

Posted by Dayamati to New City of Friends at 01/07/2008 at 07:24 PM.

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Left, right, middle or none of the above?

If you are among the growing number of people who feel that the standard way of characterizing political stances as liberal, conservative, left-wing, right-wing and middle of the road is inadequate and confusing, you may be interested in a web site called The Political Compass. The authors of this web site argue convincingly that a more complex and nuanced way of characterizing political stances is needed.

The Political Compass is based on looking at two dimensions of political conviction. One dimension has to do with economic policy. Assigned to the x-axis of a standard Cartesian  type of graph, the left-of-center half of this line represents a willingness to have governmental control of the economy in the form of providing social safety nets such as social security and tax-subsidized universal health care, regulation of corporations, laws concerning minimum wages. The left-of-center half of the line, in other words, represents a tendency to favor communistic policies. The right-of-center half of the line, on the other hand, shows resistance to governmental regulation of the economy. The farther to the right one is on this axis, the more one favors economic neo-liberalism, that is, free markets.

The other dimension that the Political Compass recognizes is where one stands on the extent to which government should be allowed to regulate individual conduct. Assigned to the y-axis, the above-center half of the line represents a willingness to pass laws that criminalize the use of drugs, abortion, some sexual practices. Above-the-center positions also tend to emphasize law-and-order issues, punishment of miscreants rather than reform, a strong military, a willingness to abridge personal rights in the interests of national security. In short, above-center positions tend toward authoritarianism. The below-center positions, on the other hand, show a preference for individual rights and freedoms over national and other collectivist concerns. In other words, the farther one is situated along the y-axis, the more libertarian one's social philosophy is.

=20

If one pictures the four quadrants made by a Cartesian graph, one can think of the four sectors as NE (economically neo-liberal and socially authoritarian), SE (economically neo-liberal and socially libertarian), SW (economically communistic and socially libertarian) and NW (economically communistic and socially authoritarian). Examples of people in each of the four quadrants are George W. Bush, Adolf Hitler and Margaret Thatcher (NE); Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman (SE), Ralph Nader; The Dalai Lama, Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela (SW); Pope Benedict, Robert Mugabe and Josef Stalin (NW).

=20

The web site has a test that anyone can take for free and anonymously to determine one's own political quadrant. When I took the test I got a score that placed me pretty far to the left economically (-.868 with zero being middle-of-the-road and -10 being Communist) and slightly less strongly libertarian on social issues (-6.31 with zero being middle-of-the road and -10 being hardcore libertarian). This made immediate sense to me, given that Nader, Gandhi and the Dalai Lama are people whom I have always admired. It also helped me understand why, despite a left-leaning economic persuasion, I have always felt uncomfortable with the authoritarian nature of Soviet and Chinese Communism. It also made sense to me that the people I have admired least (Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush and Margaret Thatcher) are at the opposite end of both spectrums to me; they favor economic liberalism but social authoritarianism. So while as a Southwesterner I feel quite comfortable with, say, same-sex marriage and full legalization of marijuana and heroin but think oil companies and pharmaceutical companies should be heavily regulated and the wealthy should be heavily taxed to provide health care for the poor, the Northwestern Bush and Reagan believe just the opposite on all these issues.

Take the test yourself and see where you fit. It may help you understand better why you either like this blog cite or hate it.

For those of you who are following the American race for president, you may be interested in looking at the page on the US primaries. You will note, either with delight or with dismay, that all the leading candidates are in the same sector. They are all closely huddled around George W. Bush in the NE sector of the graph. The Republicans are all to the economic right of the Democrats and (with the exception of Ron Paul) more authoritarian, but all leading candidates of both parties are above-center authoritarians and right-of-center economic neo-liberals. If you are still undecided who to vote for, it could be because there is not much difference among the candidates. The only candidates not in the NE sector are Dennis Kucinich and Mike Gravel (neither of whom has a prayer of being nominated by their party). As the authors of the site point out, the ideological distance among American presidential candidates for the past twenty-five years or so has been less than in any other Western democracy. American political races tend to be among a pack of almost identical candidates. If it's political variety and real political choice you seek, think of living in Great Britain, Germany, Canada or New Zealand. If it's an illusion of diversity strongly magnified and exaggerated by the media you hanker for, The United States of America is the place for you.

Posted By Dayamati to New City of Friends at 1/14/2008 03:15:00 PM

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Does ignorance matter? Who knows?

Twenty years ago I took a bus from Montreal to Albuquerque. I love bus travel, because it it economical and environmentally responsible, but also because one meets interesting people. On this particular trip I sat for about a thousand miles next to a young woman whose husband was in the army. She herself was going to college. We talked about places we had visited, and she said she had been to Niagara Falls. Somehow in the course of that part of the conversation, she volunteered the information that Niagara Falls is located on the border between California and Canada. I pointed out that there are two states between California and Canada and that Niagara Falls is actually on the border between New York State and Ontario. She seemed fairly confident that I was mistaken about this, so both of us agreed to change the subject rather than argue about the disputed location of a water falling off a cliff.

At the time, I was amazed at that one student's geographical ignorance, and I wondered how she had managed to get into college. Now, twenty years later, I almost take it for granted that when I mention Korea, Japan, Vietnam, India, Pakistan, Myanmar, Thailand, Afghanistan, Iraq or Turkey to a college student, he or she will have only a dim idea of where those places on, aside from perhaps knowing that they are on planet earth. I also take it for granted that it is not for an unwillingness to learn geography that students know so little about it; the responsibility for their ignorance, I assume, falls on their teachers and on the news media. (If you live in the United States, think quickly. When's the last time you saw an in-depth news report about any country outside the United States? When's the last time you saw Ontario, Quebec, Alberta, Chihuahua or Sonora on a weather map?) According to a CNN story “nearly two-thirds of Americans aged 18 to 24 still cannot find Iraq on a map.” (Hint: it is nowhere near the California-Canada border.)

n February 15, 2008 Bill Moyers interviewed Susan Jacoby, author of a book entitled Age of American Unreason. In that interview Jacoby says “without a base of knowledge of how things are you can't really have a reasonable talk about how things ought to be.” The United States has become a nation in which even the allegedly educated—even the educators themselves—have a startling lack of knowledge of history, geography, the arts, world literature and the ways of other cultures.

Rudy Giuliani, former presidential candidate, once said in a debate that if the United States had a health care system like Canada's then Canadians would no longer be able to come here for decent health care. He also called America's health care system the best in the world. No one challenged him. No one, either his opponents or the newsman moderating the debate pointed out that Canada does not have a health care system. Health insurance schemes are managed by the provinces, not by the Canadian government, and each province has a different way of offering affordable coverage to everyone. Moreover, medical care in Canada is generally quite good, often better than what is available in the United States, and always far more affordable. So the answer to Giuliani's question is that if the states in the United States had health care systems like those in Canadian provinces, Canadians would continue to stay in Canada to get excellent health care—and Americans would stop trying to buy their pharmaceuticals in Canada, where a reasonable ceiling is placed on the profits that pharmaceutical companies can make. But how many Americans know enough to challenge a political candidate who makes inaccurate and irresponsible claims?

Democracy works only when the electorate is educated enough to make reational decisions based on a knowledge of reality and on an ability to imagine workable alternatives to the status quo. An ignorant electorate has no access to knowledge as a guide and so is prone to being swayed by untutored emotions, by rumors, by charisma, and by well-crafted manipulation.

Posted By Dayamati to New City of Friends at 2/19/2008 12:13:00 PM

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Will the real fascists please stand up?

In a squib called The Danger of Misidentified Dangers I criticized the neologism that is used in some circles these days. There is no need to repeat here what was written there, except to say that the word misuses the word “fascist”. Properly used, that word refers to a cluster of characteristics, especially, authoritarian government, patriotism/nationalism, militarism, corporatism and opposition to political liberalism. Some of those terms require futher discussion.

Corporatism
This term is used to refer to a political system in which power is given to corporations. Corporations are hierarchical structures made up of unelected officials that are formed with the purpose of controlling or strongly influencing people's behavior. Typically corporations foster more of a collectivist than an individualistic approach to what kind of conduct is acceptable. Corporations can be of any kind, but a familiar type is the kind formed for the purpose of conducing business and maximizing profit. A fascist form of government tends to one that favors the efficient operation of corporations considerably more than it favors the well-being of individuals.
Liberalism
Political liberalism is a policy that favors the freedom and well-being of individuals over the collective interests of collectives such as the nation, religious organizations or economic corporations.

Given these understandings, it is not difficult to see that Fascism—a form of government that promotes the interests of the state and its economic corporations over the interests of individuals—would be diametrically opposed to liberalism and might even see any kind of liberalism as dangerous. (Who cannot have noticed how the word “liberal” has become in American political discussions a label that no one can wear without suffering automatic disapproval in many quarters?)

When certain politicians and political commentators pin the label “Islamofascism” on real or imagined enemies of democracy who are also often called “terrorists”, it is not difficult to suppose that at least part of their plan is to deflect attention from the genuinely fascist forces that truly are undermining democratic governments and terrorizing all those who have liberal leanings. The people called Islamofascists, in other words, could well be a smokescreen behind which the true enemies of the United States and other constitutional democracies are hiding. The most dangerous enemies of democracy may not be those hiding in caves halfway around the world, but those people, both unelected and elected (or at least supposedly elected), who are wielding power in our own governments and waging a war of attrition against the governed citizens.

In an informative and insightful article in the March 16, 2008 issue of The New York Times Magazine, Jeffrey Rosen writes in “Supreme Court Inc: How the nation's highest court has come to side with business” how all but one of the supreme court justices appointed by George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton and George Bush are strongly pro-business and have consistently made decisions that have limited the degree to which major corporations can be sued for damages by private citizens or have their enterprises regulated by state and federal regulations. David Souter (appointed by G.H.W Bush), Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer (appointed by Clinton) and John Roberts and Samuel Alito (appointed by G.W. Bush) have consistently made pro-corporate decisions that have limited their accountability to consumers. Many of the most important legislation protecting consumers passed as a result of the efforts of Ralph Nader and his colleagues have been overtuned or severely muted by the Supreme Court during the past two presidencies. The Supreme Court has joined the Reagan, Bush, Clinton and Bush II presidencies in championing the interests of the economically powerful over the interests of relatively powerless private citizens. Since 1980, when Reagan was elected, Americans have conspired with the major corporations and the government to erode many of the important protections of individual rights and freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States. Fascism is alive and well, with no help at all from Islamic forces.

Aaron Russo, in a film entitled America: Freedom to Fascism produced in 2006, offers interesting food for thought. While most people will probably agree with me that the film goes over the top in drawing many far-fetched conclusions and uncritically endorses a libertarian ideology, it also offers sobering chonicles of many of the successful tactics carried out by the Bush administration to expand presidential powers, diminish congressional powers, expand corporate and military powers, and dramatically shrink the powers of ordinary citizens. It is worth watching with an open mind and a critical eye.

If the idea of living in a fascist nation with undisguised imperialistic aspirations is no more appealing to Americans than it is to those who are portrayed as enemies of freedom, it may be time for those who love the liberty of individuals as protected by the American Constitution to consider what we all—whether we are Buddhists, Christians, Jews, Muslims, Sikhs, Unitarians or Quakers—have to offer one another in our common spiritual resistance to systems of government that consistently favor the wealthy, the powerful and the oppressive over the poor, the weak and the oppressed.

Posted by Dayamati to New City of Friends at 3/16/2008 09:58:00 PM

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America's support for Tibet: Too little too late

Tibet was taken over by the Chinese in 1951. In 1959 Tibetan protests led to repressive measures by the Chinese that resulted in thousands of Tibetans fleeing their homeland and taking up residence in India, Switzerland, Canada and various other countries. The brutal treatment of Tibetans by the Chinese has been taking place for fifty years. And now the United States half opens one eye and takes a little notice. Why now?

I have nothing to offer but speculation as to why the United States now pays some attention to the suffering of the Tibetans, and speculation is of no use to anyone. I'll therefore keep it to myself. Instead of offering that, let me make a few observations about why it is too late for the United States to play a significant role in helping Tibetans find justice in their homeland.

From the Chinese perspective, the Han treatment of Tibetans, Uigurs and Mongols has been far more beneficial to those minority peoples than American treatment of the Cherokee, Lakota, Apache, Navajo, Ute, Shoshone, Crow, Cree, Iroquois and Ojibway peoples. The native American peoples were subjected to genocidal treatment, and their cultures were in many cases almost entirely obliterated and their traditional lifestyles made impossible by the forceful occupation of their lands. In past years I have been involved in several conversations with people from the People's Republic of China, and this point is always brought up. American treatment of ethic minorities has been shameful from beginning to end. Americans enslaved Africans and forcibly brought them to America to do labor. Americans conducted an illegal war against Mexico and took parts of Texas, New Mexico and Arizona from the Mexicans before buying even more land from them at unreasonable prices, and Americans have never treated the descendants of those Mexicans who now find themselves in America particularly well. In the process of settling the West, Americans repeatedly betrayed native peoples, took their land from them, rounded them up and shot their women and children even when they had peacefully surrendered. The picture of Geronimo, Chappo, Perico and Chihuahua with the caption “Homeland Security–Fighting Terrorism Since 1492” is not just an amusing joke. The Chinese know that well and find it sufficient grounds to dismiss Americans now who try to take the moral high road.

In more recent times, the American government has engaged in yet more illegal invasions of sovereign nations, this time not a neighboring country but two countries halfway around the world. The pretext for invading both Afghanistan and Iraq was quite similar to that of invading Mexico in 1846; in all cases, the sovereign nations invaded were portrayed as a threat to America's safety and an enemy of American freedom. How can a country that has repeatedly behaved in this way object to the Chinese invasion of Tibet?

Unlike any other war in American history, the American occupation of Iraq has not been financed by taxation of American citizens. It has been financed by borrowed money. Estimates vary, but an estimate published today in the New York Times is that the invasion and occupation of Iraq will have cost every man, woman and child in the United States about $10,000. None of that cost has come through ordinary budgeting, which, during the Bush presidency has already been deficit financing every year. The national debt has grown out of control. About 40% of that debt is owned by foreign nations, most of it by the Chinese. If the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan are being waged by borrowed money, and if each citizen of the USA bears $10,000 of the burden, and if China owns around 35% of the American debt, then this means that each American is about $3500 in debt to China. And this does not include the massive trade deficit that American has to China as a result of buying goods produced in that country. It also does not include the credit card debts and home mortgages and automobile loans that most Americans carry, a significant amount of which is also owned by Chinese investors. Being deeply in debt to someone does not put one in a strong position to make demands on the way they behave. The protests of a debtor are easy to shrug off. Ask anyone who has been in debt to the IRS.

As outrageous as Chinese policies in Tibet (and toward the Uigurs and Mongols in their homelands) have been, this may be a situation in which we must listen to Jesus and let him who is free of sin cast the first stone. Unfortunately, the candidate for throwing the first stone at the Chinese for their imperialistic sins is not going to be anyone who has had an empire in the past several centuries. The English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Germans, Dutch, Austrians, Hungarians, Israelis, Arabs and Turks will have to be sidelined along with the Americans, and of course the Japanese will have to sit on the bench with the rest of us. So who is left? Is there a David able and willing to sling a rock at the Chinese Goliath?

Unfortunately, any David preparing a sling to hurl a rock at the Chinese Goliath is likely to be just as ready to hurl a stone at the American Goliath, too. Thanks to our past conduct (or what Asians are inclined to call karma) as a people, most of us who belong to the human race (or to some subset thereof) have no option but to hold Tibetans in the light, as the Quakers say. That is, we have little option but to let the best of ourselves feel compassion for all those who are suffering injustice everywhere, beginning with those in our own homes, neighborhoods, countries, and continents and extending it to all living beings, animate and inanimate on this entire planet. That is the very least we can do to begin the healing of the world. Unfortunately, the very least we can do is probably considerably more than most of us will manage to do.

Posted by Dayamati to New City of Friends at 3/23/2008 05:40:00 PM

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Why are so many Americans in prison?

The next time you are aboard an airplane in the United States, think about this: the Department of Justice predicts that one out of fifteen Americans will spend time in prison sometime during their lifetimes. If you were on an airplane with 416 passengers aboard (the capacity of a Boeing 747), figure that statistically speaking about 27 of them will have spent time in prison by the time they die (that's about how many sit in the first-class cabin).

One quarter of all the prisoners in the world are imprisoned in the United States of America, which has 5% of the world's population. 737 out of every 100,000 US citizens is currently in prison, by far the highest incarceration rate in the world. That's 5.3 times the incarceration rate in the United Kingdom, and 6.6 times the incarceration rate in China and 12.5 times the rate in Norway. The state of Maine, which has the lowest incarceration rate of any state in the United States (with 148 prisoners per 100,000 people), still has a higher incarceration rate than the UK.

According to the Department of Justice website, about 52% of the prisoners in the United States are serving sentences for violent crimes. 20% are there for drug offenses. 57% of prisoners in Federal prisons are there for drug-related crimes, as opposed to 21% of those in state prisons.

The Daoist philosopher Laozi (Lao-tzu) observed that the sole cause of crime is the making of laws. One way to reduce crime, therefore, is to make fewer activities illegal. Most people would probably not favor decriminalizing such activities as intentional homicide, assault and battery and rape. But aside from some activities that are clearly so disruptive to the social harmony that people who do them should probably be given an opportunity to reform their conduct, there are some activities that should probably never have been considered criminal in the first place.

Two activities that are obvious candidates for being decriminalized are drug-related offenses and coming into the country with the purpose of making a livelihood. America's immigration laws are absurdly exclusive. One way to eliminate some crime is to open the borders so that people seeking honest work are not classified as dishonest just because they seek ways to enter the country without being kept on the outside by America's ridiculously overprotective restrictions. The campaign to “secure our borders” is little but a thinly disguised xenophobia like the nativism of the 19th century that resulted in ugly populist campaigns against Irish and Italian Catholics and Jews and Asians, not to mention a trumped-up invasion of Mexico that resulted in an illegal and unnecessary war—the first of many the United States would wage.

A second way to make a dramatic reduction of the country's prison population would be to give drug addicts who seek to overcome their addictions state-funded addiction therapy. And drug addicts who have no desire to overcome their addictions should be given access to safe and legal drugs, just as tobacco and coffee addicts and alcoholics are. Making substances illegal serves only to make them prohibitively expensive, thus increasing the likelihood that the addict will commit crimes to make money to pay for artificially expensive substances. While the campaign to secure our borders is a war against poor people from neighboring countries, but not against poverty itself, the “war on drugs” is a war waged by the American government against Americans.

It is time to look for congressional representatives, senators and presidential candidates who have the imagination to seek creative and effective alternatives to the kind of thinking that has resulted in needless suffering to thousands of addicts and millions of hard-working neighbors who seek nothing more sinsiter than to make an honest livelihood in the United States.

Posted by Dayamati to New City of Friends at 4/01/2008 09:53:00 PM

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Twelve million reasons to change the law

During the past year or so, a figure that has been repeatedly used is 12,000,000. That is supposed to be the number of people who have come to the United States seeking employment without going through the formal process for becoming immigrants or permanent residents as recognized by United States Citizenship and Immigration Services . Those who enter the country without the proper documentation are often referred to as undocumented workers or illegal immigrants. There presence in the United States causes alarm to some.

If it is true that twelve million people have entered the United States for employment, then we have twelve million good reasons to change US immigration laws. There is clearly a demand for permanent residence in the United States in people now living outside the country. If there were not, these people would not be coming here. There is also obviously a demand within the United States for the labor that these people from outside the country provide. If there were not, these people would not be finding gainful employment. What makes the most sense, then, is to make it possible for workers from outside the United States to come to this country to work, and to bring their families if they so wish. Probably the best way to do this would be to form an American Union, along the lines of the European Union, such that every citizen or legal immigrant to any country in North, Central and South America could take up residence in any other country on these continents. In this age, such documentation as passports and visas make very little sense any more; they are instruments of an earlier world whose political and economic conditions bear little resemblance to the world as it it now.

The argument most commonly used against allowing more free access to residence in the United States is that doing so would amount to a kind of “amnesty”. It would, so the argument goes, send the wrong signal to people; it would send the message that those who break the law are not punished. That claim is plainly silly. The message that amnesties in general send is not that those who break the law can avoid punishment, but that some laws are so foolish that they cannot be enforced and that those who break them really ought not to be punished.

To punish people for seeking a livelihood is clearly unjust. To put obstacles in the way of those prepared to do honest work for honest wages is monstrous. America's immigration laws are unjust—monstrously so. It is time to repeal them and bring into effect policies that reflect a more generous spirit and that manifest the celebrated American admiration of industriousness, resourcefulness and ingenuity, not to mention the kind of courage it takes to move to another country in search of a better life.

What makes no sense at all is to set up the kinds of conditions that almost guarantee a black market. When people cannot work legally, they will work on the black market, and people will hire them, and those who hire black market labor will not infrequently exploit the laborers so employed. Black market labor will almost always be paid substandard wages, receive substandard benefits (or none at all) and be subjected to the cruelties of an essentially criminal economy. As the law stands now, those who cross the borders of the United States without proper documentation are by that action alone classed as criminals. The people who employ them are also criminals. Criminals working for criminals is not a promising formula for honest, integrity and humane treatment. But the criminality in this case is a completely artificial one. It is a criminality created by a law badly in need of reform, not a criminality consisting of dangerous or harmful behavior. It is a criminality that could be removed by reforming laws, making it possible for people to do what they do now, which is to earn money so that they can feed, house and perhaps even educate their families.

One hears opponents to immigration reform talking of the need of securing our borders. One look at a map or a globe shows what a foolish concern this is. The borders between the United States and its two continental neighbors, Canada and Mexico, are mostly the work of a draftsman using a straightedge. Except for the Rio Bravo (known in the US as the Rio Grande), there is not a single natural geographical feature defining the borders between the United States and Canada or Mexico. The border to the north cuts the great prairies in half, runs in the middle of Great Lakes and bisects mountain ranges and their valleys and basins. The border to the south runs in the middle of two great deserts. They make no geographical sense whatsoever. People life in geographical realities, not on maps. When cattle graze in a basin, or when coyotes run along the ridge of a mountain, they have no idea of going from one country to the next. There is no good reason it should be otherwise for human beings. If we had any desire at all to live in a way that made sense, we would abolish all these man made lines on the earth and allow everyone to live wherever they can make a livelihood. That may not happen within the next couple of years, but at least we Americans, who pride ourselves on pragmatic values and on observing the moral imperative to help provide the conditions of freedom throughout the world, could begin by erasing our foolish and unnecessary borders.

There, another pseudo-problem has been solved with a single stroke of sensibility and clear thinking.

Posted by Dayamati to New City of Friends at 5/10/2008 09:14:00 PM

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Thy saving health among all nations

Harry Emerson Fosdick (1878–1969) wrote “I would rather live in a world where my life is surrounded by mystery than live in a world so small that my mind would comprehend it.” While I am inclined to subscribe to that sentiment, there are mysteries that I would not at all mind having unraveled. One of the mysteries I would love to see solved is why the United States of America has allowed itself to have the most expensive but the least efficient health care system in the industrialized world. A related mystery is why the people of the United States are as a rule so resistant to the models provided by various other countries.

In debates about the state of health care in the United States, I have heard people say firmly that they would not at all like to see the USA have a Canadian-style health care system. It is difficult to know exactly what that means, since Canada does not have a health care system. Each of Canada's provinces has a health care system, and each province has a different model. The only thing they have in common is that a person can receive higher-quality and more-affordable health care in any of them than one can get in the United States. So part of what Americans who reject Canadian models are rejecting, it seems, is quality, efficiency and affordability. Apparently, these Americans prefer overpriced mediocrity.

One of the arguments I have heard some of my fellow Americans use is that the United States simply cannot afford to provide universal coverage. Those who cannot afford health insurance policies must therefore either go into personal debt to get medical care, or they must do without medical care. This raises the question of why so many other countries can provide health insurance to every adult and child without going broke. Why is the United States alone among wealthy nations in being unable to provide reasonably priced health insurance to everyone, and to provide subsidized policies to those who cannot afford them?

Let me suggest a few speculative answers. One reason might be that the United States spends far too much revenue on maintaining a military that it really does not need, including military bases in around twenty nations around the world. According to The Arithmetic of America's military,

Our military deploys well over half a million soldiers, spies, technicians, teachers, dependents, and civilian contractors in other nations. To dominate the oceans and seas of the world, we are creating some thirteen naval task forces built around aircraft carriers....

The expense of maintaining all these unnecessary bases does not include the cost of waging wars that contravene international law and that do far more to endanger the American people than to protect them. It is estimated that the war in Iraq costs around $5000 per second. Supposing a health insurance policy costs $10,000 per year, the money being spent in Iraq could provide one year's worth of health insurance to 43,200 people for what it costs to finance one day of war in Iraq. For the cost of about three months of war, more than 4,000,000 Americans could be provided with health insurance.

Were it not for a bloated military, the United States could easily provide health insurance to all those who cannot afford it. But that still would not address the extraordinarily high costs of medical procedures and pharmaceuticals. The cost of those is held within reasonable bounds in Canada, most European countries and many Asian countries by simply putting a cap on how much profit a health-provider can make. Physicians, hospitals, and pharmaceutical companies are allowed to make reasonable livelihoods in Canada, Europe and Japan, but one will find no billionaires, and perhaps not even many millionaires, among health-care providers.

The United States has for a long time been married to an abusive ideology, an ideology that leaves Americans of all walks of life battered, bruised and impoverished. The principal dogma of that ideology is that unrestricted and unregulated competition keeps prices affordable for all consumers of every kind of product. Therefore, say those who propagate this dogma, the best way to keep costs reasonable is to make sure that providers of goods and services must compete with one another, and the best way to make sure of robust competition is to minimize government regulation and interference.

The argument may sound good, but it is demonstrably flawed. This is the system we have had since at least the time of President Reagan, and it has not worked at all. First of all, companies that are forced to compete in a free market are also forced to advertise in expensive media. Watch television for one evening and count how many advertisements you see for pills, salves, creams, ointments and powders. Who pays for those advertisements? The people who are persuaded that they need the product being sold. Who pays for those advertisements in other countries? No one. Medical providers usually do not advertise in other countries. Products there are plentiful and affordable. And the providers of those products are regulated. Their system works. The system in the United States does not work. It is perhaps time for our policy makers to stop preaching and to begin learning.

What we need to do to fix our broken health care system is no mystery. The only mystery is why we don't do it.

Posted by Dayamati to New City of Friends at 5/21/2008 10:24:00 PM

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Why our electoral process breeds presidential monstrosities

The United States is nearing the end of what has been without a doubt the most destructive and morally bankrupt presidential administration in our history. Many people believe that the next president, whoever is elected, will be a significant improvement over what we, the citizens of the world, have endured for the past eight years. I am not among those who hold that belief. I believe we are destined to continue a moral and cultural decline, and therefore a political and economic decline, for the foreseeable future, no matter who is elected. Our system of government, and especially our way of choosing who will govern, is incapable of producing anything but moral dwarves. (I say this with apology to dwarves, who do not deserve to be compared with American politicians.)

The American form of democracy was devised at a time when candidates for public office rode around on horseback or in carriages. It was a time when candidates met with voters in meetings small enough that the voters could take a reasonable measure of the candidate. Candidates announced their positions in broadsides and other written publications. When votes were submitted on election, the results were often not announced for weeks or even months. The process was slow and deliberate and conducive to reflection.

The American form of democracy that exists today has little in common with its ancestor. Results come in and are analysed at lightning speed. Hours before the polls close in California and Oregon, there is a strong indication of who has won in Maine, Pennsylvania and Florida. Some people still vote after a careful reflection on the positions of the candidates on issues that matter to them, but it is safe to say that everyone is to some extent influenced by factors that have nothing whatsoever to do with actual issues. People spend billions of dollars encouraging Americans to avoid thinking altogether or, if they must think, to think as superficially as possible about tangential matters that have little bearing on the character or the policies of the candidates. The candidate who is most successful in manipulating the irrational emotions of the majority of votes tends to win the election. The candidate who spends the most money tends to be the most successful in manipulating the irrational emotions of the voters.

In today's society election campaigns are conducted in such a way that the winner of an election is almost guaranteed to have bad character. It could hardly be any other way. Or current way of conducting important campaigns makes it unlikely that anyone will enter office except for moral monsters. It is worth reflecting on why this is so.

Character is the sum total of habits that a person has developed. Habits are the consequences of choices that a person has made. Every deliberate, voluntary action reinforces a habit. Everything we done increases the likelihood that, given similar conditions, we will do a similar thing in the future. This is elementary moral theory and something very much along these lines has been spoken about in detail by the ancient Greeks, by thinkers in India, by Chinese sages, and by elders in traditional oral cultures. If anything can claim to be a universal principle that holds for all human beings, it is something along the lines of what has just been said about the relation between choice, habituation and character.

If we now give a thought to the way that campaigns are conducted in technologically advanced nations in present times, we observe that the pattern followed by almost every candidate—I say“almost” even though I really cannot think of any exceptions—is that the candidate exaggerates his or her own strengths, usually quite dramatically, and magnifies even the smallest (or even the most imaginary) blemish in his or her opponent. The decision to distort the truth through hyperbole is made again and again as the candidate tours the country attending political rallies, and as the candidate approves the contents of televised paid political advertisements. Presidential campaigns in the United States nowadays go on for well over a year, during which time every candidate reinforces the habit many times every day of speaking in a way that is neither balanced nor in accord with reality. Such virtues as truthfulness, fairness, courage, compassion and humility are weakened, perhaps even obliterated. Vices such as pride—regarded in many cultures as the most vicious or sinful personal characteristic of all—and vanity and narcissism begin to rule the candidate's character. No matter what kind of character she or he may have had at the beginning, when candidacy was declared, is bound to have undergone a steady and dramatic turn for the worse by the time the last votes have been counted and the candidate has won.

During my life there have been twelve presidents of the United States. Of these there has been only one that I would allow into my house or welcome into my circle of friends. The rest I would not be willing to have in my company or to have contact with anyone I love for more than a few moments (and then only with plenty of chaperons on hand).

I do not believe this is a matter of bad luck that the United States has had men of such demonstrably inferior character in the White House. I think it is an inevitable consequence of democracy as we know it and as we have let it become. As long as we embrace the status quo of money-driven superficiality and persuasion through fallacy, we will never see anything but more monsters in the White House. I use the word “monster” advisedly. It comes from the Latin word for “warning”. We have been warned repeatedly. Still we seem, perhaps because of the bad character that results from our own educational institutions, unwilling to heed the warnings.

Posted by Dayamati to New City of Friends at 8/10/2008 06:07:00 PM

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Why no one can deliver the change they promise

National political conventions always fill me with a dreadful uneasiness and make me ponder whether the planet earth will be destroyed before intelligent life is found on it. The group ritual in which people collectively arouse themselves into teary-eyed states by intoning platitudes and partisan slogans and by skillfully demolishing caricatures of their opponents' positions reminds me that in politics fallacy nearly always trumps intellectually honest argumentation. Even when on those rare occasions I am predisposed to like a candidate, I fall away disgusted at the spectacle of that candidate speaking at a national convention as people jumpt to their feet and raucously applaud every half-truth until they are hoarse and wave placards until their arms rebel in fatigue. If any kind of good government followed these dismaying circuses, I might be able to face them with more equanimity. But good governance rarely ensues, nor can it be expected to come out of such mass displays of thoughtlessness.

The longer I live, the more plain it is to me that individual human beings have no fixed nature but instead are mostly chaotic bundles of social and biological conditions over which no one has any control. As human beings we fancy that we choose our beliefs and practices with care and for all the right reasons, that we select only the best of friends and influences, but in fact none of us has more control over our behavior than a fallen leaf going over a waterfall. No evidence has yet presented itelf to me to incline me to believe that there is any intelligent force that has any more control than we feeble human beings have. As human beings we invent plenty of deities, but they all turn out to be as self-absorbed, foolish, cruel and petty as the worshipers who invent them.

If the individual human being is foolish, then a collection of human beings is folly multiplied. Families, clans, tribes, nations, intensional social groupings, congregations, sanghas, gangs and corporations are rarely more than small-minded individuals who temporarily band together in hopes of magnifying their capacity to carry out ill-conceived schemes without much regard at all for the negative consequences that collective folly can produce.

There is hope for some individuals to make small improvements in their character by an intense and protrcted turning inward to face their own inner demons. Some people who are engaged in such efforts can derive some degree of encouragement from others engaged in a similar effort, and one is fortunate to find such encouragement—and tends to find more of it as it is less needed.

Revolutions fail and turn sour because people usually seek liberation from the wrong things. They believe they need more freedom to do what they want to do. Usually they would benefit from less of that kind of freedom. The sort of freedom they need is freedom from their own longing, hankering and striving.

Society as a whole will never improve until a critical mass of individuals gain freedom from their own inner beasts. Do not expect change to come to the political arena until people are so transfromed that they no longer require governance from outside.

Posted by Dayamati to New City of Friends at 9/05/2008 02:34:00 PM

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In praise of melancholy

For most of my adult life I have agreed with the Buddha that the project in life is to eliminate unnecessary kinds of disappointment (dukkham), and I have understood that the best way to avoid disappointment is to reduce expectations. The principal teaching of Buddhism has always struck me as a comprehensive hypothetical claim: If one hopes to reduce disappointment, then it is a good idea to reduce expectations. Seeing the teaching in this way has given me the flexibility to decide which kinds of disappointment I am unwilling to have. There are some kinds I don't mind having. This raises the question: if one does not mind being disappointed about something, then is it possible to be disappointed about it? But that question does not interest me right now. What interests me now is which kinds of mental states usually called painful are worth the pain of having them.

Buddhist texts tend to have a standard list of disappointments: aging, death, sorrow, lamentation, pain, distress, and despair. Modern psychology has other potentially disappointing psychological conditions: depression, anxiety, obsession and so forth. It could be argued that all these conditions are disappointing if one would rather not experience them. If one would rather not be old, then getting old is a vexation to the spirit. If one would rather not die, then the inevitability of one's death is unwelcome news—perhaps so unwelcome that one chooses to believe in eternal life. Of course, if that belief turns out to be false, and if one somehow learns that it is false, then one might be disappointed after all.

What I am interested in exploring here is a kind of painful psychological condition that worth the pain of trouble of having it. It goes by various names, but the name I like best is melancholy. I use the term as it is used in one of my favorite books, Swamplands of the Soul: New Life in Dismal Places by James Hollis. Hollis, a Jungian analyst argues that some of our psychological conditions that feel uncomfortable are also the conditions that are in the long term most productive. Among these uncomfortable psychological states is melancholy, which he sees as one of the most lively of the dismal conditions.

Melancholy can be seen as the condition that comes from the realization that life could be otherwise than it is, that with some effort the world could be significantly better, but that we keep missing the boat. Paul Simon wrote in his song “Train in the distance”: &ldquo:The thought that life could be better Is woven indelibly into our hearts and our brains.” That life is not better makes one sad. If the sadness is intense enough, it may put one into action to make things, or at least something, a little better.

If one does not feel quite a bit of melancholy during the election season in the United States, then one is perhaps not paying much attention. Perhaps no two people are melancholy for exactly the same reasons. My own personal melancholy comes from some of the following considerations.

It is said that Buddhism walks on two legs: wisdom and compassion. Compassion in Buddhism is defined as an active response to affliction. If one does not see the sufferings and afflictions and pain and despair all around the world, then there is no hope of anything being done to provide relief. Relief will come only when enough people find their sadness unendurable. Without melancholy there can be no compassion.

There is a Quaker dictum that there is no point in praying for anyone unless one is willing to do what is necessary to improve their condition. If there is a God, and if God is responsive to the sufferings of beings as insignificant as humans, then surely the only way God can respond is by using our arms and legs and bodies and brains. Therefore, the most effective form of prayer is to be active in relieving whatever suffering is close enough to be evident. It is rarely necessary to look very far to find someone in need of relief from their suffering.

Melancholy is to be treasured, at least until it is no longer necessary to motivate us into action. There is no reason to believe that suffering is in such short supply that melancholy is not necessary to motivate one to try to relieve it.

Posted by Dayamati to New City of Friends at 9/22/2008 08:21:00 PM

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America's debt to her military

As America, pulling the world along with it, plunges ever deeper into a financial crisis and as politicians feverishly struggle to make cosmetic repairs to the symptoms of a broken economy, it is sobering to observe how little attention has been given to the root causes of the problem. Surely one of the root causes of the credit crunch is the increasing national debt. And surely one of the largest factors in America's national debt is the enormous amount of money spent every year on an overgrown military that has long outlived its usefulness.

John McCain has said that if elected president he would repair the failing economy by lowering taxes and aggressively scrutinizing every branch of government except the military for wasted expenditures that could be eliminated. This is like a surgeon telling a patient he is going to go into the body and remove every organ except the one that has been invaded by a malignant tumor. The most obvious source of wasted expenditures is the military. Unfortunately, not even Democrats (with the possible exception of Dennis Kucinich) have the courage to point this out. The military has become a cancerous tumor that no one is willing to talk about in polite company.

The principal justification for the military, given by those who defend the resources poured into it, is that we live in a dangerous world filled with countries that want to harm us and that are eager to destroy our freedom. What this line of rationalization fails to acknowledge is that no one in the world has any desire to destroy American freedom. The reason America has enemies is not because it is a constitutional democracy, but because it interferes in the affairs of other countries and maintains a military presence in so many countries. According to an article on George Mason University's History News Network, in 2004 the United States had more than 700 military bases in about 130 countries. A more recent story published in 2007 puts the number of bases at 737 and the number of United States military personnel around the world at more than 2,500,000. The cost of maintaining such a network of military establishments is as unnecessary as it is astronomical. It is a cost that has been bleeding the American economy to death for decades and that has done far more to increase our risks of being attacked by hostile forces than it has done to provide national security.

In her vice presidential debate with Senator Joe Biden, Alaskan Governor Sarah Palin made the claim that America uses its nuclear arsenal as a deterrent. This seemed to legitimate America's nuclear arsenal in her mind. The implication was that other countries that have, or aspire to have, nuclear weapons would have the weapons for reasons other than deterrence and defense. Yet, as former Iranian president Mohammed Katami pointed out, there is only one country in the world that has actually used a nuclear weapon in warfare: the United States of America. It is not unreasonable for nations toward which the United States government has shown strong disapproval—if referring to a country as part of an axis of evil counts are strong disapproval—to feel vulnerable and in need of defense. If it is reasonable for the United States to have more than 10,000 nuclear warheads stockpiled, it is not unreasonable for Iran to aspire to have nuclear weapons as a deterrent against being attacked, especially when a Presidential candidate has said that preemptive military strikes against Iran are “not off the table.” and has repeatedly mocked his opponent for saying he is willing to negotiate with Iran without making Iran's abandoning its nuclear program a precondition for diplomatic talks.

As John McCain might say, “It's time for some straight talk, my friends.” It is time for the United States to disband its nuclear arsenal entirely. It has long outlived its usefulness (granting, for the same of argument, that it ever had any usefulness) and serves now only to bring unnecessary alarm and anxiety, not to mention terror, to the rest of the world. It is without a doubt part of the reason why others feel they have no option but to attack the United States and its allies. America's nuclear arsenal is not a deterrent to war but a provocation to attacks by people who desire nothing more than to be left alone to live undisturbed by an imperialistic superpower.

Disbanding America's nuclear arsenal is a necessary step to take in ensuring world peace, but it is not sufficient. America must also disband its 737 military bases on foreign soil and reduce its military to much lower levels. Canada's maintains an armed force of 62,000 personnel. Canada's population is about one-tenth of that of the United States. A force that size is sufficient to defend Canada's land mass, airways and coastline, all of which are considerable larger than those of the United States. A force ten times that size would be more than adequate to defend the United States. The United States needs no more than around 625,000 military personnel, approximately 25% of what it now has.

If America's nuclear arsenal were disbanded, its foreign bases closed down and its personnel reduced by 75%, much of the huge drain on the American economy would disappear. Money saved could be used to increase foreign aid, thereby creating good will and dramatically decreasing the incentive of others to attack us. Other savings could be used to provide needed services to America's own citizens and residents. Desperately needed repairs to the country's infrastructure could be made. Education and health care could be dramatically improved.

John McCain's plan to maintain the most costly institution in the country—the military—while reducing the tax resources by which that bloated institution is paid for, is a prescription for disaster. That he makes such a proposal shows that he may be heading down the path of senior dementia that diminished the effectiveness of Ronald Reagan during his lackluster presidency. That his Democratic opponent has not been more aggressive in pointing just out how bankrupt a militaristic America has become is almost as great a source of concern. The change America needs does not seem to be just around the corner.

Posted by Dayamati to New City of Friends at 10/03/2008 11:40:00 AM

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Preparing America for Democracy

Like everyone else in the world, I am waiting to see what the results will be of the 2008 elections in the United States of America, alections that the media never tire of reminding us are historic. I cannot help hoping the way the elections were conducted this year will soon be history—something we tell our grandchildren about someday but that we never again have to experience.

When I voted, there were six candidates for president on the ballot, three of whom I had never heard of. Of the three I had heard of, all were clamoring for some kind of change. Clearly America loves to see itself as a nation that is ready for change. Here is one change I am ready for: I am ready for democracy to come to America. I do not think that will happen until a few other changes are made. Here is a short list of those changes:

These recommendations hardly exhaust the changes that must be done in order to pave the way for a meaningful democracy in the United States, but they would be a start. (In a previous posting I recommended that no person be allowed to vote until he or she has passed the same citizenship test that naturalized citizens are required to take. So far this recommendation has been ignored.) If this blog has any readers, and if any of those readers have further ideas, please post further suggestions as comments to this posting.

Now I am ready to watch the farce of this year's election unfold.

Posted by Dayamati to New City of Friends at 11/04/2008 04:43:00 PM

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Thanksgiving Day 1963

As I watched tears streaming down the faces of black and white people in Chicago just as they heard the long-awaited announcement that Barack Obama had been declared as the elected president of the United States, a personal memory that had been festering for forty-five years came to the surface.

The memory was of a bitter cold Thanksgiving Day in 1963. On that day I had made plans to go with a friend of mine to a good restaurant in Beloit, Wisconsin, the town in which my friend and I were both freshman at Beloit College. When we got to the restaurant, the maitre d' pulled me aside and quietly informed me that my friend could not be seated in the reastaurant, because his presence would offend the other guests. My friend was a black student from Kenya. The feeling that came over me on that occasion was one of a deep shame for the country in which I had been born—a country in which I had lived my entire life listening to many, perhaps most, of my white friends making insulting comments about Negroes (as African Americans were then often called when people were trying to be polite), and about Jews and about Asians and about Mexicans (as Americans with Spanish surnames were usually called in those days). My family's culture was deeply at odds with the tone of racism that permeated America in the days of my youth. The prevalent cultural values of my home and native land were embarrassing to me, filled me with shame, made me angry and plunged me into despair. In 1963 I never dreamed I would live to see the day when an African American would be elected president of the United States. Therefore, like hundreds of millions of other people around the world, I wept with joy when the announcement was made last night.

There was not much to feel thankful about on Thanksgiving Day 1963. Just six days earlier, John F. Kennedy had been assassinated in Dallas. And Kennedy's presidency had been an ordeal for many of us who believed in peace and disarmament and who were alarmed by what Eisenhower had dubbed the Military Industrial Complex. Kennedy's presidency was not necessarily the beginning of America's tragic transition from a nation to an imperialistic power, but it accelerated us along that trajectory. The Kennedy years plunged us deeper into an unrealistic paranoia about the putative evils of Communism and Socialism and into a patriotic conviction that somehow America had an obligation to make the world free. The Kennedy years had been, with only a few exceptional moments, mostly unpleasant to people with my convictions. The brutality of the way that unhappy presidency ended only punctuated the tragedy that the United States had become.

The election of Barack Obama feels to me as though a curse has been lifted. It is as though an evil spell has been broken—a spell that was cast during the 1960 presidential campaign, a campaign in which there were no positive options in the race for president, a campaign in which the Americans were presented with having to choose the lesser of two evils: John Kennedy or Richard Nixon. That curse of having to choose the lesser of two evils has been with this country ever since. With the exception of the candidacy and presidency of Jimmy Carter, the American people have not been offered a wise and insightful and capable presidential candidate by either of the two most powerful political parties. For the past eight years the American people, and the entire world, have suffered under the policies of a man who quickly secured for himself the distinction of being the most disastrously destructive president the country has ever had.

In the interest of honesty I must confess that Obama was at the bottom of my list of preferences for a Democratic candidate. Early in the race I supported Dennis Kucinich. Then I settled for John Edwards. Then I supported Hillary Clinton. When only Obama was left, I reluctantly supported him, despite strong temptations to vote for the Green Party candidate, 100% of whose policies I could enthusiastically endorse. Obama's foreign policy makes me nervous; it is far too militant for my tastes. He is not nearly socialist enough for me. He believes in the death penalty. He does not endorse strong gun control. He does not favor same-sex marriage. I cannot imagine him dismantling our nuclear arsenal or closing all American military bases on foreign soil. On most issues that matter most to me, he is too far to the right, and in matters on which we agree I do not see him as a president who will push hard enough to achieve good results quickly. But for all that, he is, to my mind, not simply the lesser of two evils. He is the first presidential candidate since Carter for whom I have felt I was casting my vote for him and not just against his opponent. (Again, to be honest, I have voted for a presiential candidate only twice in my life. The 2004 election was the first one in which, at the tender age of 59, I cast a vote for anyone for any office in an American election. In that election I voted for the lesser of two evils.)

On Thanksgiving Day 2008, I will celebrate the prospects of finally seeing a black family in the White House.

Posted by Dayamati to New City of Friends at 11/05/2008 09:25:00 AM

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As civilization winds down

The ancient Chinese had the sensible belief that when unexpected unnatural events occurred, they could be taken as a sign that Heaven was angry and that the government should be overthrown by the people. Comets, eclipses of the moon, calves born with two heads or five legs and prolonged droughts (or serious floods) could all be taken as signs of a need for regime change. (I suppose melting polar ice caps, huge accumulations of plastic junk floating in the middle of the ocean, and the extinction of large numbers of flora and fauna might also qualify.) Native peoples in the Americas often have stories of warning signs of the end of human civilization and impending doom, many of them involving erratic animal behaviour.

To me one of the clearest signs that civilization is coming to an end is that old people no longer act their age. When I was a child, old people acted old. They dressed like old people. They sat in rocking chairs. They laughed at the antics of kittens and grandchildren. They recited Biblical passages they had memorized. They wheezed. Their hair was grey, and then white, if they had any at all. Their hands were cold. Women had moustaches. Hardly anyone lived much beyond 70. Old people started to smell funny, and then they got weak and spent most of their time in bed, and then they died. That, it seems to me, is what being old should be like. I do not like the way old people are nowadays.

When I was huffing and puffing (and, yes, wheezing) on an elliptical trainer at the local YMCA yesterday (something my grandfathers never did when they were 63, because in their day the YMCA was an association for young Christian men), I happened to see a news story on the television that the YMCA puts in the gym to help people avoid looking at the beautiful mountains through the huge picture windows as they exercise. The story claimed that the Mexico City government has passed a new policy to give free Viagra to all men over 70. When I saw that, I muttered my favourite prayer: “Oh, for Christ's sake!”

When men get old they don't need to have erections. Not having an erection is not a dysfunction. There is no such thing as erectile dysfunction syndrome. It is just being old. It goes with wheezing and having white hair and needing suspenders because you can't find a belt big enough to go around your waist. It's normal. Like having wrinkles and sagging cheeks and a double chin. That's part of being old. Viagra, Botox and Grecian Formula are signs that people have forgotten that they really should be acting their own age. They are signs that human civilization is coming to an end.

Cell phones and ipods are also signs that human civilization is on its last legs. Earlier this week I was a little late getting home and decided to take a bus rather than walk. As I sat on the bus, I noticed that I was the only passenger who wasn't fiddling with a cell phone or an MP3 player. Everyone else had plastic stoppers in their ears so they could hear the music being played by their ipods. Everyone looked pretty much like a corpse from the neck up: expressionless faces showing no sign of life. The only signs of life were fingers and thumbs frantically and impatiently pecking at tiny keys. Now young people being impatient are showing their age. That's a good sign. But they are not talking to each other or trying to get the attention of the opposite sex or making rude comments about the old men on the bus. That's a very bad sign.

Given what I have seen of what people seem to think civilization is, I will not miss it when it finally falls. I already have a couple of good rocking chairs. And I have a teapot. That's all an old man needs in the way of material possessions. The only thing else he needs is to remember to zip his fly now and then, just in case a visitor comes around.

Posted by Dayamati to New City of Friends at 11/15/2008 04:26:00 PM

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The bright side of economic collapse

When I was in my final semester of high school in 1963 I took a required course in American government. The teacher was a young man who had recently graduated from Harvard with a degree in economics. He was much too smart, and much too liberal, to be teaching in a high school in the suburbs of Denver in which all the brightest kids were Young Republicans, and the more ordinary students were obsessed with winning state championships in football, basketball and track. Most students found him an unbearable nerd. I loved his ability to shake up my limited world view.

One of the biggest grenades this teacher (whose name I am ashamed to have forgotten) lobbed into my Weltanshaaung (a word he taught me) was his insistence that money is not backed up by anything but faith in, well, money itself. A dollar is worth a dollar only because people keep thinking it is worth a dollar. A dollar is a fiction that liberates people from having to trade a bushel of apples for a garden hoe in some bartering transaction. If someone has a bushel of apples, he can sell it to me for a handful of dollars, and then he can buy something he really wants from someone else; he doesn't have to settle for the garden hoe I happen to want to get rid of. But what makes the entire system work is just faith in the system.

This no doubt oversimplified explanation of how money works drove me crazy. I hated the idea that anything could depend on something as fickle and friable as faith. Faith was for religious fanatics who believed in all kinds of spooky realms and unlikely fantasies about the dead being resurrected and everyone's sin being atoned for by the death of one man on a cross two millennia ago. I wanted economics to be built on a more solid foundation. I wanted something tangible, like gold, or at least granite, to be backing up the American dollar. Somehow or other, however, I got used to the idea that money is essentially a fiction that has value only as long as people continue to believe that it does. I never liked this economic reality very much. I just got used to it.

Events of the past few months have reminded me of what I learned about money in my senior year in high school. Not being an economist, I understand nothing about money in sophisticated terms. I see all financial things through the eyes of a child. So what the current economic situation looks like to me is that a bunch of greedy financial people thought they could get very rich indeed by making loans to people who were not likely to be able to pay the loans back. As people around the world began to see how much money was being lent in ways that even faith could not support, faith crumbled. As a result no one has as much money as they used to think they had. And the money they do have will not be nearly as effective in helping them acquire the goods and services they believe they want, because of two things. First, money loses purchasing power as people lose faith in it. And second, when money loses purchasing power, people stop producing the goods and services that they used to provide. So even if people still have money, there won't be as many products to buy with it. For one person to be able to go on a cruise, he has to find a few thousand other people who want, and can afford, the same luxury. When there is no longer a critical mass of people seeking luxury cruises, cruise liners will stop running. All the money one has saved up cannot by a product or service that has ceased to exist.

There is in all this something that I cannot help thinking is going to end up making the world a much better place. Commodities, even the so-called green products, tend to create conditions that degrade the environment. An ordinary automobile that meets American fuel efficiency standards carrying two passengers consumes about 55 gallons per passenger mile. In contrast, An intercity bus uses about one gallon for every 330 passenger miles; a train consumes about one gallon for every 328 passenger-miles; a hybrid automobile carrying three passengers uses about one gallon of fuel per 165 passenger-miles; a commercial jet airplane uses one gallon for every 20 passenger-miles; a cruise ship uses one gallon for every 17 passenger miles. So as the economy tanks, and more people walk or bicycle or take buses or trains, the total amount of fuels consumed will decline dramatically, leading to a reduction in greenhouse gases, and that can only be good for the environment.

Another positive outcome of a failing economy is likely to be a dramatic decline in the production of highly toxic products such as computers, mobile telephones, televisions and other electronic products that no one really needs. Their increasing availability has created terrible waste disposal problems around the world, especially in the poorest countries. As economic factors force people to wean themselves from these instruments, the environment is likely to improve.

Perhaps the best outcome of all of an economy in which faith-based financial instruments have lost their value is that people will one again discover the satisfaction of working for each other instead of for money. Communities based on real human values are likely to re-emerge. An economy in which a person's wealth is measured in terms of how much he can lend a hand to help others and provide their needs could well replace an economy in which wealth is measured in terms of how much one can hoard. An economy based on genuine needs rather than artificially created desires would be a welcome change.

Life is so complex that the only thing one can be sure of is that not much that happens will have been expected and accurately predicted. Perhaps none of the changes that I would welcome will take place. Still, it is no more inherently risky to hope for the best than to have faith in the value of fictitious money.

Posted by Dayamati to New City of Friends at 11/23/2008 06:16:00 PM

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Thanksgiving 2008

The last Thursday of November is set aside in the United States as a day for giving thanks to whomever gratitude is to be given. This year I find myself wishing to express gratitude for several features of the nation in which I was born and in which I have once again, after a long absence, taken up residence. In giving thanks for the gifts of the United States, I find it impossible not to give thanks to all the peoples of the planet earth with out whom the United States would be meaningless. This year I am feeling par ticularly grateful for the following:

After writing these expressions of gratitude, I went back and reread my Thanksgiving message of 2007 and note that I was feeling grateful for almost exactly the same things then. And so I add one further expression of gratitude: I am grateful that all the things I treasured last year have survived one more year to be treasured again this year.

Posted by Dayamati to New City of Friends at 11/26/2008 10:47:00 PM

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Confession of an indifferent sports observer

Noam Chomsky once observed that professional sports in America have the effect of keeping the minds of American citizens distracted from important issues. The culture of following sports teams and caring about which ones win and which ones lose is part of a larger culture of distraction and superficiality; sports can be part of the phenomenon of what Neal Postman discussed in his book Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business.

I still recall vividly the moment at which I stopped being interested in spectator sport. I was in high school at the time and was attending a home game of my high school's football team. Like everyone else in the stands, I was yelling and screaming and cheering our team to victory. My heart sank every time the home team fumbled or had a pass intercepted, and I became ecstatic every time the home team moved closer to scoring another goal. Quite suddenly I felt as if I were being lifted out of my personality and given a chance to look at myself as an external observer might see me, and I was overwhelmed with how utterly silly it all was. A moment later, as I settled back into feeling as if I were within myself again, I realized I actually did not care at all who won the game. If one side wins, I thought, the other side will lose. No matter what happens, someone will go home disappointed. I stopped cheering. I sat down and watched the rest of the game without caring in the least which team won. I have never cared which team wins a contest since then. Not caring who wins a game makes games pretty dull viewing, so I have spent remarkably little of my adult life watching sporting events. For a while, when I was first in Canada, I watched hockey on television from detached perspective. It fascinated me. It seemed to me like ballet interrupted by occasional fist fights.

A friend of my parents was taken prisoner by the Germans during the Second World War. He had a German surname and spoke German fluently. It came to his attention that when German-speaking American prisoners of war were returned to the United States, they were carefully cross-examined to see whether they really were Americans or were English=speaking German spies posing as Americans. The rumor was that one way of identifying genuine Americans was to ask them questions about sports. Who played shortstop for the Red Sox ? Which teams played in the 1937 World Series? Who held the American League record for stolen bases? My parents' friend hated sports and had no idea what the answers to any of those questions were. He lived the war dreading being interrogated by Americans; he was sure they would conclude he was a spy. That story has always stayed with me; like my parents' friend, I have been confident that I would fail a quiz on sports with drooping colors. I didn't even know who O.J.Simpson was until somebody told me he was already famous as a sports hero before he went on trial as a result of being accused of murdering his wife.

My attitude toward sporting events carries over to my attitude toward wars. I really do not care at all who wins a war. To be more accurate, I don't believe anyone ever wins a war. Wars have plenty of losers, and they are found on all sides of the conflict. They have no winners. Those who believe a war has been, or can be, won suffer from delusions. I have a bumper sticker on my car that reads “You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake.” Sports waste time. Wars are much more serious. They waste life and property and resources. Despite the dramatic difference in the magnitude of the disaster involved, sports have much in common with wars. Competitive sports prepare the American psyche for war. It feeds the American tendency to love winners and to see losers as, well, losers. It is difficult to imagine a pacifist society in which football or basketball had more than a handful of fanatical followers. (It is worth recalled that the English word “fan” is a shortened form of the word “fanatic.”

So here comes New Year's Day. I used to hate this holiday more than all others. Everyone I knew was busy watching football games on television. It was for me the loneliest day of the year. Now that I'm a bit older, I have learned to like my own company much better and can easily spend the day reading books, taking walks, enjoying the trees and birds and squirrels or tidying up my desk to make room for the clutter of another year. The clutter always arrives. It's one thing I know I can count on.

Whether you are a sports fanatic or not, I wish you a Happy New Year. May all your favorite teams all win, whoever they are.

Posted by Dayamati to New City of Friends at 12/29/2008 01:16 PM

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Shedding religious identity

An American Religious Self-Identification Survey reported in The Christian Science Monitor concludes that the percentage of Americans identifying themselves as Christians has declined to 76%, a drop of 10% since 1990. The number of Americans declaring themselves to identify with no religion has increased to 15%, a rise of 10% since 1990.

Interestingly, only 10% of those who identified with no religion declare themselves to be atheists or agnostics. This could suggest that Americans are not abandoning some of the core beliefs of religion as much as they are abandoning identification with a particular set of dogmas and practices. Perhaps what these people are abandoning is labels, and the sorts of things that labels often lead to, such as pride on the individual level and fund-raising campaigns on the institutional level.

I cannot help seeing the rise of the “No Religion” response as a sign of health and vitality in American culture. Institutional affiliation can come at a high price to those who indulge in it. A sense of communal belonging can rarely be acquired without at least a slight reduction in the willingness to speak critically and to act authentically. Speaking one's deepest and most sincere convictions is, in all but the rarest of communities, the shortest route to the margins of acceptability.

The only kind of community I have ever been attracted to is a community of people who are wary of organized and institutionalized communities. Over the years, I have found myself in several such communities. My experience has been that when such anti-community communities form by some freakish accident, one of two things happen. They either fall apart quickly, or they begin taking themselves seriously as communities and take on organized institutional structures—such things as by-laws, compliance with governmental regulations concerning non-profit organizations, a hankering for institutional recognition within the broader public, and perhaps a physical presence, such as a building or rented space with a sign outside telling the world that the community has a name and therefore exists. When the development of institutional structures happens, the people who are most allergic to organizations quietly (or sometimes noisily) leave. Hard feelings make the rounds of both the stay-ins and the drop-outs. It's often a sad situation.

Paradoxically, despite a fairly robust allergy to organized religion, I have become a member of several of them. Not only that, but I have gone pretty far out of my way to take the various steps that membership requires. Perhaps I enjoy the self-discipline involved in the pursuit of membership. The membership itself, once acquired, usually ends up feeling like an ill-fitting uniform. Shortly after becoming a member of a religious organization, I tend to become one of those who responds No Religion when asked about my religious self-identity.

Perhaps people with my temperament should pursue a catch-and-release approach to religion, like some of my friends who love the process of catching trout but quickly return their prey to the stream before anyone has to do any killing, cleaning, frying or eating. Whatever the case may be, I couldn't help feeling a surge of solidarity and kinship with the 15% of Americans who identify themselves as having no religion. I only pray that we can remain disorganized.

Posted by Dayamati to New City of Friends at 03/10/2009 05:29 PM

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What a waist!

In an editorial entitled Universal healthcare and the waistline police in the Christian Science Monitor dated January 7, 2009, Paul Hsieh describes a policy in Japan whereby citizens over the age of 40 have their waists measured by the government. If the citizen's waistline is large enough to indicate obesity and its attendent health risks, the citizen is required to undergo dietary counseling. Paul Hsieh finds this policy “nightmarish” and sees it as just the sort of evil that is bound to occur in a government-run health care system. As an advocate of a single-payer government-run health care system (because I have had the benefits of living under several such systems in several Canadian provinces over the course of more than thirty years), I cannot seem to find the Japanese system in any way nightmarish. Indeed, I would heartily welcome such a program in the United States.

The issue that seems to terrify Americans is the prospect of paying money into a system that takes care of people who have not taken care of themselves. People who stay slender resent paying into a system that takes care of obese people. People who exercise regularly resent paying for the health costs of couch potatoes. People who don't drink or smoke resent paying into a system that cares for the health costs of drinkers and smokers. People who oppose abortion are unhappy about paying for legal abortions. Vegetarians do not like having to pay for the medical costs of those who get cancer as a result of eating animal flesh. In a society that loves its fantasies of self-reliance and personal responsibility and especially freedom, the very idea of paying for those who are not blessed with good physical and mental health seems all but intolerable. Why, Americans ask, should I help anyone who does not think and act in exactly the ways I personally approve?

I understand the resistance. As someone in favor of banning all ownership of firearms, I am not happy having to help pay for people who get shot by pistols and rifles. As a pacifist, I do not like having 43% of my tax dollar paying for America's unnecessarily bloated military. During the twenty-five years of my adult life when I did not own or drive a car, I thought it would be nice if my hard-earned money was not paying for those who were injured in traffic accidents and for those who were made sick by air pollution coming from burning fossil fuels. But I also realized that such resistance was petty and selfish. On the balance, I wanted my fellow citizens to be healthy, and I was very happy to pay into a system that helped people retain their health. The more money I earned, the more taxes I paid, and the more I helped support the tax-based health care system, and the more I felt good about doing my share to keep the nation healthy.

Part of keeping health care costs under control is practicing preventive medicine. Taking measures to keep employees healthy makes good sense. At the place where I work there are numerous programs for helping people stop smoking, stop using alcochol, stop taking drugs, get enough exercise, stay slender and keep their blood chemistry within healthy tolerances. I am deeply grateful for those programs. I get my waist measured, and I gladly participate in exercise and diet programs. I would appreciate the programs no less if they were run by the government. (In fact, they are government programs, because my place of work is paid for by the state.)

Those who claim to love freedom but who are unwilling to pay for those who experience the consequences of exercising their freedom show that they do not love the freedom of others. They love only their own freedom. But not to love the freedom of others is not to love freedom at all. The cry of freedom is hollow and meaningless unless it is expressed in the form of helping one's neighbors when they have made their choices.

The Paul Hsieh's of the world have little reason on their side. They appeal to emotional argumentation and other fallacious methods of persuasion. Most of all they appeal to an irrational fear of government. Read his editorial for yourself. If you find anything of value in it, report back to me. A discussion on health care is something the United States of America needs to have. I'm happy to participate in that discussion with anyone who is interested.

Posted by Dayamati to New City of Friends at 04/30/2009 09:04 PM

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Laws in a land of outlaws

The city of Albuquerque passed a law some time ago against using a hand-held mobile telephone while driving a motorized vehicle. The intention of the law is clear enough, and the motivations behind it are a mystery to no one. Holding a steering wheel with one hand and holding a telephone up to the ear with the other hand gives a driver less control in case of an emergency, and being distracted by a telephone conversation is more likely to get one into an emergency situation than if one were devoting full attention to driving. (The Insurance Information Institute has a web site with information about cell phones and driving.)

I have not conducted a systematic or scientific investigation of the matter, but as a pedestrian walking several miles daily along busy streets, I have amused myself by making observations of how many drivers I see talking on cell phones as they turn corners, change lanes, approach intersections and perform other maneuvers that require a combination of paying attention and keeping a vehicle under control. I have seen drivers hurtle through red lights, apparently unaware that they did not have the right of way. I have seen truckers negotiating a tractor-trailer through a left turn using one hand on the wheel and one hand to the ear. I have seen motorcyclists holding a cell phone to an ear as they drive; since wearing a helmet would interfere with talking on the telephone, they wear nothing to protect their heads in the event of a crash or a spill. I have seen drivers holding to the wheel with the little fingers of both hands while the rest of their two hands were holding a telephone as their thumbs poked keys to dial a number or send a text message.

While looking at people driving while using cell phones, I have also seen drivers doing other potentially dangerous things while driving, such as eating or drinking or lighting cigarettes. I saw a car weaving back and forth across a divider line on a busy city street as the driver used both arms to pull a sweater over her head. Watching what people do while driving is a good method of witnessing a number of astonishing practices.

In observing mobile telephone booths, I have counted the number of cars traveling along a stretch of road for a period of time and also counted the number of drivers ignoring the law against driving while using a hand-held cell phone. Sometimes only 3% of the drivers are observed breaking the law. Sometimes it's 12%. Whatever the percentage may be, it is clear that the law is being ignored. The law seems to be as difficult to enforce as it is necessary. And this raises an interesting observation one could make about laws in general: by the common sense has degenerated to such an extent that one needs laws to protect people from their own foolishness, the laws are unlikely to be capable of doing what they were designed to do. Virtues cannot be legislated into existence, and folly cannot be legislated out of existence. As soon as government is necessary, it is too late for government to do any good. Laws do not make idiots wise; they only make idiots outlaws.

When George Fox was challenged on his interpretation of the Bible and asked whether he could read Hebrew or Greek, he responded that a knowledge of the languages of scripture are not nearly as important as having the spirit that made inspired the scriptures in the first place. If a person is already filled with love and generosity, then he can easily understand a text urging people to be loving and generous. If a person is not filled with love and generosity, then a text urging people to be loving and generous is unlikely to be understood or followed. Scriptures are effective and inspirational only for those who do not need them. Those who have the spirit have no need of being inspired. Those who are uninspired can only make a travesty of texts and institutions meant to inspire them.

My idea of a utopia would be a society in which people are so spontaneously aware that they would avoid dangerous activities without being prompted. People would simply not do such stupid things as driving while talking on a telephone. They would not become intoxicated. They would not enrich themselves by cheating or stealing from others. They would be truthful. In such a society there would be no laws, because there would be no need for them. (Recall Bob Dylan's observation (in the song Absolutely Sweet Marie): “To live outside the law you must be honest.” Living outside the law, however, is not the same as being an outlaw. Living outside the law is having such a elevated degree of integrity that one has no need for laws. Being an outlaw is having such a diminished degree of integrity that laws are incapable of altering one's behavior. I would love to live in a utopia filled with people who live outside the law. Alas, I live in a dystopia filled with a bad combination of laws and outlaws who cannot benefit from them.

Posted by Dayamati to New City of Friends on 05/06/2009

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