Alternative to Chopra's Mirror

In response to Chopra's Path by myopicdreams:

It is not too little knowledge, but too much. This is the Gnostic folly: To doggedly hound at the heels of a spectre proclaimed Truth, and when It escapes such pestering through the nearest wall, to draw upon the depths of knowledge to demonstrate--to one's own satisfaction--that the wall, and not the ghost, is insubstantial.

It is through the process of such "knowing" that all the problems of a purportedly illusory world are assigned to those who would presume to be in, rather than know of, that world. Yet, if there is an illusion, it is the mirage seen every so clearly by those who would deny the desert and dismiss their thirst as a passing fancy. 

Lest you mistake any resonance in the above observation for the ring of Truth, take heed that this too is a spectre, although perhaps less heavy with the chains of cliche that so limit the vision of the Morley that is Maya. The world Is, and we are, and so are our ghosts. Exit your meditations, look the world in the eyes, see that which Is. Leave talk of illusion to fiction and fantasy, stagecraft and showmanship.

We see. We think. We feel.

 

Heel now. I grow weary of such peripheral phantasms. I shall rest.

 Do not mind me... I am just holding up this wall.

Bluestocking-era Sensibilities

In response to Women and Education by betenoire:

I've got to find a compilation of these sorts of quotes. I recall hearing one in which it was claimed women's uteruses would explode if they rode bicycles. Which is why I don't believe any of the misinformation that comes out about women along these lines, and it still does, it most certainly does, like a never-ending stream of sewage.

To add to your compilation:

Fig 1.3 Progressive and liberal, the French artist Honor� Daumier was nevertheless ambivalent about women who aspired to be more than mothers. The caption to this lithograph read: "The mother is in the heat of writing. The child is in the bath water!" While Daumier read books like La Physiologie du bas blue (The Physiology of the Bluestocking), and produced cruel charicatures of freakish and non-nurturing women for his series entitled Les Bas-blue, back in England an early evolutionist, Herbert Spencer, was struck by the fact that "upper-class girls" reproduced less than "girls belonging to poorer classes," even though the latter were less well fed. Spencer decided that the "deficiency of reproductive power among [the advantaged] may be reasonably attributed to the overtaxing of their brains" and that "the flat-chested girls who survive their high-pressure education" would be "incompetent" to breast feed.

-- Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, Mother Nature: A History of Mothers, Infants, and Natural Selection, caption to figure on p. 16

The "social Darwinist" presumption of the time, that the less educated, and hence less evolved, female of the species had the "natural" (and hence less human) function of producing offspring, exclusive of all other purposes, lead to the logical fallacy that any woman who did not exhibit this "maternal instinct" had to have some pathology to explain it.

Leave it to the prejudiced mind to say, in one breath, that education (as encompassed in "standing on the shoulders of giants") is evidence of higher evolution in one group, and then in the next breath, to assert that education, when seen in another group, is a pathological condition to the detriment of the entire species. (A hypocrisy not limited to misogynist sentiment.)

However, Blaffer Hrdy re-examines the relationship between child-bearing/rearing (measured, in evolutionary terms, as "reproductive success") and social rank (and the education that tends to be associated with social rank in modern society), and makes the following, somewhat unsettling, observation:

In the modern world, status (whether socioeconomic or professional) is, if anything, inversely correlated with reproductive success. This is especially true for women who earn their status. Not long ago, sociobiologist Susan Essock-Vitale looked at the reproductive success of people listed on Forbes Magazine's annual listing of the four hundred wealthiest Americans. Those whomen who had inherited wealth had significantly more children on average than successful businesswomen who had acquired their wealth through their own efforts. This should not come as a surprise. When given the opporuntity, many women value upward mobility over time devoted to rearing a family. We need only look at the grueling hours that working mothers put into jobs as lawyers, doctors, and research scientists, careers with demands as insatiable as those of children. But if our evolutinary heritage has any relevance to what we are, how can this be? 

The answer is simple. In worlds where there was no birth control, and where no female was ever celibate, there was no possibility that female rank and maternal reproductive success could be other than correlated. Nature built no safegards to ambition run awry, as it were, to energies diverted to status ends that were not linked to the production, survival, and prosperity of offspring. Now that status and the survival of offspring have been decoupled, will there be selection against women who are especially inclined or driven to achieve? Probably, if our species survives long enough, and if circumstances in the workplace don't change. [Bold added.]

Myself, I'm in favor of changing the workplace, or more generally the societal structures that mandate that human beings, irrespective of gender, make irreconcilable choices between providing for, on the one hand, and caring for, on the other, not only their offspring, but their kin and communities. If we want any proof of the pathology that can arise from education, we need only look to Levitt's "bedroom" communities, Wright's porchless houses, and Robert Moses's highways.

Blaffer Hrdy quotes a surpressed manuscript of Cl�mence Royer (Darwin's translator before she scoffed at his notions of pangenesis):

Up until now, science, like law, has been exclusively made by men and has considered woman too often an absolutely passive being, without instincts, passions, or her own interests; a purely plastic material that without resistance can take whatever form one wishes to give it; a living creature without personal conscience, without will, without inner resources to react against her instincts, her hereditary passions, or finally against the education that she receives and against the discipline to which she submits following law, customs, and public opinions. 

Woman, however, is not made like this.

So too, the pathology of education is to consider society (or the natural world, for that matter) "too often an absolutely passive being...a purely plastic material that without resistance can take whatever form one wishes to give it". Society, however, is not made like this. Nature, however, is not made like this.

The sooner we decouple educational status from the presumption of superiority over our fellow human beings, the sooner ambition is decoupled from scholarcentric, androcentric, and anthropocentric bias, the sooner we can get on with the task of finding ways of relating to one another that don't reproduce the materialist assumptions of a fancifully plastic world conforming to an elitist will.

The Failure of White Flight

"Traditionally, cities have been viewed as home to poor populations, surrounded by middle- and upper-income suburbs," the report said. "This 'tipping' of poor populations to the suburbs represents a signal development that upends historical notions about who lives in cities and suburbs." 

. . . .

"I hope this says to people that the way to confront poverty is not to wall it off and concentrate it," Morial said. "You really need policies to eliminate it."

-- http://www.commondreams.org/headlines06/1207-02.htm

This has been obvious on Long Island for a while now, although most suburbanites still cling to their fantastical utopia and blame poor people for trying to recreate the city in their unsustainable experiment in homogeneity. 

Like dandelions in chemically-treated lawns, so economic disparity has a way of making itself felt. No matter how much effort and expense those with means may invest in trying to ward off economic "weeds" and social "vermin", society reproduces nature and diversity reigns.

The sooner we recognize and accept the economic heterogenity and demographic diversity that will exist in any sustainable community, the sooner we can all stop fleeing from one another, and start finding solutions that respect the inherent worth and dignity of all human beings.

Theory and Practice

In response to On Conscience in Government by Lonewulf447:

. . . . 

Personally I am not for the idea of teaching Evolutionism in class rooms to children while creationism isnt. As I have stated elsewhere in my journal, I dont believe that evolution has been proven in any way. but neither has creationists. 

Certain empiracle facts HAVE been proven like how old certain things are, suggesting that the world is older than what conservative creationists claim. In that regard then yes I believe that should be taught in school. School shouldnt be teaching children unproven theories or else then creationism should be taught there. 

. . . .

Following up Slepneir's comment to the above, I would emphasize that even figuring out how old things are is based in theory, not proof. Theories such as those concerning the prevalance of and rate of decay of carbon isotopes over geological time have a high degree of predictive power, but predictive power is not truth. 

Thomson's plum pudding model of the atom has just as much predictive power as it did before it was supplanted by particulate models of the structure and substructure of matter. Later theories couched in terms of valence and quanta may have more predictive power than Thomson's corpuscles, but that doesn't make them more true, just more useful.

The often neglected characteristic of a good theory however, and what makes evolution, in particular, so threatening to so many, is explanatory power. A more useful theory predicts things that a less useful theory can not. A more meaningful theory explains things that a less meaningful theory does not.

In this sense, the theory of evolution plays the same role as age-old fables in explaining "How the Leopard Got His Spots" and "How the Monkey Got His Tail". Here the purpose isn't to predict who will get spots or a tail next--it is not to satisfy our curiosity about how the world will be in the future--so much as provide for a coherent and consistent framework for understanding how the world already is in the present.

It is on this criteria, explanatory power, that evolutionism and creationism operate as equally viable candidates.

I will never forget the day my grandmother opined: "How do you know that God didn't create all those bones, fully formed in the ground, complete with radio carbon dating signatures, just to confuse the unbelievers?" 

Now, admittedly, Occham would no doubt wield his razor to cut away such a presumption as unnecessary fat containmating an otherwise lean theory. That admission made, we should also keep in mind the corollary to Sherlock Holmes' adage about truth being what is left after eliminating the impossible: we can't say God's fabrication of the geological record is untrue without first eliminating it as impossible.

Yet, while omnipotent genesis of entire strata of fossilized remains may sound highly improbable, and certainly is unnecessary to the useful functioning of the theory of evolution, it is not incompatible with existing theory, nor does anything in evolutionary, geological or indeed any other theory allow us to prove the impossibility of such a dues ex machina.

More importantly, allowing for such an absurdity does nothing to impinge upon the predictive power of those theories. Radio-carbon dating still gives the same essential result whether or not we interpret our results to read "this object is one million years old" or "this object was created by God so as to appear to be one million years old". Either way, the predictive power is quantitatively comparable.

Indeed, one could assert that God created the geological record for the sole purpose of prompting us to figure out the nature of the evolutionary process by way of examplars, and so bring us to an understanding of his work all the sooner. Again, this fails Occham's test, but neither can it be proven impossible.

No matter how powerful our current theories are for predicting the apparent age of prehistoric materials, those theories can never be proven. They are powerful and useful, so abandoning them absent more powerful theories would be folly, but theory should never be confused with incontrovertible fact.

Okay, I still need to respond to the substantive issues regarding the establishment of religion that were the primary subject of Lonewulf's post, but that will have to wait until tomorrow.

On Conscience in Government

In response to Is separation of church and state important...? by fourwingfive:


Okay, let us begin by referring to the opinion of Roger Williams, who Lonewulf correctly points out argued for the concept we know as "separation of church and state" a good century before Thomas Jefferson advocated the incorporation of such a concept into the Bill of Rights:

TRUTH. I acknowledge that to molest any person, Jew or Gentile, for either professing doctrine, or practicing worship merely religious or spiritual, it is to persecute him, and such a person (whatever his doctrine or practice be, true or false) suffereth persecution for conscience. But withal I desire it may be well observed that this distinction is not full and complete: for beside this that a man may be persecuted because he holds or practices what he believes in conscience to be a truth (as Daniel did, for which he was cast into the lions' den, Dan. 6), and many thousands of Christians, because they durst not cease to preach and practice what they believed was by God commanded, as the Apostles answered (Acts 4 & 5), I say besides this a man may also be persecuted, because he dares not be constrained to yield obedience to such doctrines and worships as are by men invented and appointed....

-- Roger Williams, 1644

These are the words of one who living admist the history of "Protestants and Papists, spilt in the wars of present and former ages, for their respective consciences", of one who determined that "the permission of other consciences and worships than a state professeth only can (according to God) procure a firm and lasting peace". This is the spirit in which the concept of separation of church and state first germinated.

Keep in mind, further, that at that time, even the educated in America had a very parochial view of what constituted a religion, essentially recognizing not much more than, again in Williams's words, "paganish, Jewish, Turkish, or antichristian consciences and worships", including, most likely, the "consciences and worships" of the native nations encountered by those colonist Europeans. Indeed, with the exception of the history of the Crusades against various Muslim populations in the Middle East and Northern Africa, the last of which ended in the 13th century, most Americans conceived of religious tolerance primarily in the context of not having one Protestant sect promelgate law to all other Protestants concerning the nature and priority of the Sacraments or demanding the payment of tithes as taxes in support of a particular denominational organization.

That the First Amendment would come to guarantee the rights of such diverse "consciences" as Hinduism, Sikhism, Jianism, the Baha'i Faith, Buddhism, and Taoism, the last two of which, some semanticists argue, don't even qualify as "religions" under the accepted denotative meaning of that term, instead splitting hairs and arguing that these fall into a broader category deemed "belief systems".

So too, many Americans today self-identify as "spiritual but not religious", denouncing the label of "religious" as describing something regressive and oppressive that does not represent their relationship to the sacred, or the divine. Yet, I somehow doubt we are going to hear a Court decision that "the religious protections of the First Amendment are reserved for those who accept and embrace the term 'religion' as a description of their practices and values."

Advocates of "secular government" engage in the same semantic wrangling as the "spiritual but not religious" types. The later claims that because they don't believe in the rituals of established religion, they are not religious. The former claims that because they do not believe the sacred has a place in public life (whether or not they believe the sacred exists), they are not engaging in "religion" when they act upon those beliefs.

To assert, as Slepnir does, that

I may make disparaging remarks about your religion, because I think that religion is utter nonsense that is damaging to human scientific, ethical and social progress. I think the indoctrination of children into religion is a travesty and an abuse of their developing intellect...

is not intended in a spirit of maliciousness. Instead, I would suggest that Slepnir's words are a statement of conscience, as Williams used that term. Slepnir, please correct me if your above statement comes from something else than your own conscience--your sensitive regard for fairness or justice, if you will.

Yet, Williams, that proponent of separation of church of state, couched his arguments on the premise that "the doctrine of persecution for cause of conscience is proved guilty of all the blood of the souls crying for vengeance under the altar." In essence, no one should be persecuted for cause of another's conscience, whether or not they willfully accept the label of "religious" or the category of "religion" in classifying their conscience.

Here's the rub: when someone makes "disparaging remarks about religion", they are, in their exercise of free speech and free exercise, doing no different from those who make disparaging remarks about another's irreligion. If telling another that they will suffer in the life hereafter unless they accept Jesus into their hearts is cramming beliefs down someone's throat, then so to is telling someone that raising their children according to their religious conscience is a travesty is also. Yet, it is not a violation of anyone's civil rights to make either statement. On the contrary, to suppress either is the violation.

With no intent to insult, I would state plainly that when the athiest, anti-theist, non-theist, apatheist or agnostic, such as Lonewulf, "airs" his or her "beliefs", it comes across as "shoving your irreligion down other people's throats". Claims of tolerance aside, secularism is no less guilty of "actually looking for control of the social and legal order." The example set by the Puritans was simply one example of a long, and continuing history, of those who, as Williams says, would hold "an enforced uniformity of religion in a civil state".

Where the Puritans would select an official religion and enforce it, secularists select an official prohibition upon Free Exercise in the public sphere, and enforce that just as uniformly as the doctrines and practices any state church.

The Free Exercise Clause and the Establishment Clause should be applied equally to the conscience of all, that not only those who embrace the label of religion, and those who might or might not be recognized as religious despite such semantic considerations, but also those who are by definition irreligious, should all benefit from the same protections--and be held to the same standards with regards to the establishment of law.

Which includes the Free Exercise of religious belief in public places. The government has no standing to promote any given religion, but so too the government has no standing to dictate when and were private individuals may exercise their beliefs. To make law that dictates when and where private citizens may act in accordance to their right to Free Exercise, to confine that Free Exercise to the private sphere and expel it from the public sphere, is to "make law regarding the establishment of religion" should no less abhorent to the purportedly enlightened mind than historical laws that prohibited worship of gods not recognized by the ruling tyrant.

To further do so in circumstances where private individuals are compelled by law to participate in institutions existing wholly within the public sphere, and to fund the establishment of such institutions, as is the case with truancy laws and school taxes (as a prominent example), or in the alternative to compel individuals to fund the establishment of such institutions even if they would or do also spend their money to participate in institutions existing outside the public sphere but which otherwise comply with the law (e.g. private schooling), again is contrary to the spirit of separation of church and state, per Williams:

God requireth not a uniformity of religion to be enacted and enforced in any civil state; which enforced uniformity (sooner or later) is the greatest occasion of civil war, ravishing of conscience, persecution of Christ Jesus in his servants, and of the hypocrisy and destruction of millions of souls.

Slepneir, like many others, is "against the notion of teaching dogmatic, non-scientific ideas in science class, particularly in public schools". This, again, I would suggest, arises from a judgment of his conscience. Unfortunately, the current truancy/taxation regime serves to make law which establishes these values of conscience, whatever label in contraindication of "religion" adherents would apply to them, and in so doing makes laws that disestablish religion, and in so doing undermine Free Exercise.

To hear it said, by the secularist to the religious, that if she wishes to pay to send her child five days a week to a religious school, she is free to do so, but only after she has paid from her earnings a share of the monies necessary to operate the secularist school in opposition to her conscience, should be no less offensive to the ear of the politically principled, than the sound of the Calvinist saying to the Quaker, that if he wishes to take his family to a Quaker meeting house for five hours each Sunday, he is free to do so, but only after we have extracted from his livelihood a tax to support the operation of the Calvinist house of worship in opposition to his conscience.

The equation is the same. That in the modern case those who uniformly benefit from the enactment and enforcement of their consciousness by the civil state profess to do so out of something other than "religion" is to obsfucate the underlying economic "persecution for cause of conscience."

In summation, let me make one finally observation, here with regards to brennalass's concerns. This is not an issue of majority or minority. Our federal republic is not a pure democracy, and intentionally so, as the threat of "mobocracy" was well recognized by those who architected our system of government. That the law does not favor the majority is not, and never will be, a justification for changing that law. Being in the majority does not afford one extra considerations, but rather makes one immediately suspect.

Our constitutional rights must be applied to minorities, whether of ethnicity, class, conscience, or other categorization, with as much tenacity, if not greater, than they are applied to the majority. Tenacity however, is not, and never can be, license for tyranny. Courageous adherence to the maintanance of our public values of civil liberty must be applied to all parties equally. No amount of semantic gamesmanship excuses those who would establish their conscience as the law of the land.

To reiterate the originator of the separation doctrine:

TRUTH. I acknowledge that to molest any person, Jew or Gentile, [religious or irreligious,] for either professing doctrine, or practicing worship merely religious or spiritual, it is to persecute him . . . .

-- "A Plea for Religious Liberty" by Roger Williams

Is separation of church and state important...?

In response to Is separation of church and state important...? by brennalass:

In response to Is separation of church and state important...? by LandSurveyorK:
I saw this in someone else's journal, and just wanted to chime in...

Loaded question. They're both parts of peoples lives, right? Church should be part of peoples personal/social/culteral lives, and the state should have such an insignifigant role in peoples lives that you hardly notice it (except when you're mailing a letter/mass transit/library/standing army for defense). I don't see how they can be seperate, but realistically I see how they are so prevanlent in everyone's life. Ignore either unless you need them.

First, I have to agree, our government is waaaay too invasive, involved in a lot of things it has no right being involved in. It's getting to the point where before too much longer, we'll need a permit to breathe... and you can be sure there will be a hefty tax associated with said permit... 

I also agree that it is impossible for them to be completely separate. I'm so tired of hearing "separation of church and state" raised as a battle cry for people who want to live in either a completely oppressive state, or total anarchy, I haven't figured out which is the ultimate goal yet... . . . .

Unfortunately, too many Americans, untutored in Jefferson's original correspondence with regard to religious liberties, commit the logical fallacy of reading the "establishment clause" as a "disestablishment mandate" with regards to religion.

Jefferson's wall, meant to shield religion from the unchecked unilateral power of government, today is heaved down upon believers like so many unmortared stones at a lapidation.

A full interpretation of the spirit of the "separation of church and state" would amend Justice Souter's opinion in Board of Education of Kiryas Joel Village School District v. Grumet, as follows: "government should not prefer one religion to another, or religion to irreligion, [or irreligion to religion]".

Until that bracketed portion is recognized as a logically equal and necessary consequence of the First Amendment, we will continue to see misguided activists who would insist that, in effect, "Congress should make law respecting the establishment of secularism."

See subsequent comments following the original version of this post.

How important is voting to you?

In response to How important is voting to you? by serenity27:

How important is voting to you?

• Extremely important

Very important

Not so important

Not at all important

I wish I could believe in voting, however I know the truth. Our votes (as the people) do not really count. It's our senetors votes that count. If the "people" vote in more towards Repulic, then the Electoral College goes Republic. I don't think it should go that way. I think it should actually go by the numbers and the senate should be counted as one as well.

The Electoral College does not determine who your Mayor, Town Councilperson or Village Ombudsperson is, nor does the Electoral College pick your Governor or district representative in your state legislature, nor who your state sends to the U.S. Senate, nor whether your county issues a bond to fund a major project.

Do not let the mechanics of filling one office determine your involvement in the political decision making of your own community. Voting starts at home.

More on Education

In response to Temper and Self-Confidence by Riverwind513:

Responding to some of the comments on this discussion:

Teaching and educating is hands-on by definition. Being "far removed" is not an admirable quality here. Indeed, by centralizing education at the federal level, we only remove parents and the community one step further from control of their schools. How does requiring parents to petition Washington to make improvements the school board is no longer empowered to pursue helping anyone?

Also, do we really need more comparisons of schools to figure out which ones are underperforming? Seriously? If we already know rich neighborhoods have better education than poor neighborhoods (as a rule of thumb), why then put further burden on all schools to compete for the "whose worst" ranking, just to get assistance?

This overhead only hurts performance. Already teachers, who would much rather be teaching, spend more of their time doing paperwork, reporting to bureaucrats at all levels of government, and preparing their students for standardized tests.

Notice I don't say "teaching to the test": indoctrinating students on how to meet some ominous anonymous testing board's expectations hardly meets the standard of education most teachers set for themselves when they started on their careers.

Today's standardized tests are not teaching tools, they are tools for sorting wheat from chaff, sociological threshers, first used on a mass scale by the U.S. Army to determine who would be a specialist and who would be cannon fodder. There was never any assumption that those who did poorly on standardized tests would do better for having taken them.

The first standardized test (setting aside ancient testing practices dating to the Han dynasty), Binet's IQ test, was designed to determine future educational intervention, not past educational performance. Which is admittedly useful, but only if we don't take away teachers ability to intervene for the benefit of students they can see are struggling without some test to confirm it for them.

Students that aren't learning to their best potential are recognizable without taking away valuable teaching time and educational flexibility to engage in further comparison ranking.

Calling for uniform education standards misses one very important fact: students aren't uniform. Learning is not mass produced like widgets, and educational strategies are not interchangeable like machine parts. Legislators in state and/or the federal capitol can't procure good test scores by submitting a purchase order for so many points of performance.

Teachers know this. When teachers are given the freedom to teach, to learn with their students, to engage a child's unique non-uniform motivations and leverage a pupil's individual multiple intelligences, they can work wonders.

Education is hands-on.

Funding is important. In economically disadvantaged neighborhoods without the property tax base to compete on a dollar per student basis with wealthier neighbors, funding is essential.

Funding is essential, if only to deal with all of the foundational needs from the lower rungs of Maslow's pyramid, needs that must be addressed in order to even begin to teach: Children who don't feel safe in their own homes and aren't getting basic nutrition aren't going to learn. We don't need a uniform education standard to figure this out.

The problem is confusing a standardized unit of measurement, the dollars tallied by accountants and partitioned by policy makers, with the students who sit in the class room. Students are not standardized. Children are not uniform. Classrooms are not homogenized. You can't milk performance out of a school by proclaiming requirements from afar.

Like filling the milk pail, education is hands-on. Being far removed from the problem is being far removed from a solution.

Response to Post on Education Reform

In response to Temper and Self-Confidence by Riverwind513:

So, at long last, here we are again. I have found a few minutes to sit and type up a discussion of one of those topics I mentioned a while ago. In fact, I chose this particular subject because it is the only one of the three for which I already have a reasonably well formed opinion handy. The subject for tonight is education, and education reform. [See original post for entire discussion.]

This is a very well thought out and cogent analysis. I'm especially impressed by the liberal interpretation of the "progress of science and useful arts" clause.

 That said, I would suggest that simply shifting the center of gravity of the education system doesn't really constitute "restructuring of the whole education system". As senorpicasso points out, top-down money-based education policy helps upper echelons of administration far more than it does the students we would teach.

To actually "restructure" the education system, we need to address the structure of how we organize, manage, facilitate, and orchestrate the process of educating young minds, not simply extend but otherwise retain the broken hierarchical governance and out-dated control mechanisms that constrain and limit that structure.

Unfortunately, local communities, especially poorer communities, have far less control over how their schools are run than the 17th century Bostonians had over the prototypical school of the early Massachusetts colony. Would schooling have been anywhere near as effective in colonial America if the King of England had taken an interest in the education of the colonists? I suspect not.

It is through local control that quality education arises. While leveling educational funding is a laudible goal, it needs to be done in a way that doesn't disempower local communities. Those who are getting the short end of the stick economically don't need to be rapped over the knuckles with the long end of the stick as well. Vesting even more power over education at the federal level only serves to lengthen the stick.

Patriotism

In response to Patriotism by kathrynknight:

I said the pledge of allegiance everyday before school when I was growing up. I have a picture that was taken of me when I was five saying the pledge in front of my grandparent's house on July 4th. I was standing with my grandfather with my hand over my heart looking up at the flag. I appreciate that other people in our town have their flags out as well during special holidays and events. I feel that parts of our country are either loosing their patriotism or refuse to participate all together. There are so many people that don't vote. I really feel that there is no excuse. If you don't vote, then your political opinion doesn't count for anything. All citizens should love their homeland and outwardly express their patriotism.... the very least of which is to vote.
* * * *

Unfortunately, patriotism is too often held ahead of civic involvement. People who expend more time and energy debating national elections, and then conducting rhetorical post-mortems of those elections for years after, than they do participating in local elections and community organizations, all out of patriotic love for their country--whether as conservative patriots who wave the flag or liberal patriots who use the flag in protest--have no excuse for the problems they would look to national figures to fix for them.

Patriotism is secondary to individual worth. Individuals who embrace their own worth don't expect people hundreds of miles away to fix problems for them. People who rely on their own value and power as human beings allow neither national allegiance nor social justice to overshadow engagement with one's neighbors and involvement in the political life of one's own community.

This is the ethic of barn raising, given expression today in neighborhood watch programs, parent-teacher associations, community planning meetings, and yes, voting in local elections. Before patriotism comes what Robert Pirsig calls gumption:

My personal feeling is that this is how any further improvement of the world will be done: by individuals making Quality decisions and that's all. God, I don't want to have any more enthusiasm for big programs full of social planning for big masses of people that leave individual Quality out. These can be left alone for a while. There's a place for them but they've got to be built on a foundation of Quality within the individuals involved. We've had that individual Quality in the past, exploited it as a natural resource without knowing it, and now it's just about depleted. Everyone's just about out of gumption. And I think it's about time to return to the rebuilding of this American resource--individual worth. There are political reactionaries who've been saying something close to this for years. I'm not one of them, but to the extent they're talking about real individual worth and not just an excuse for giving money to the rich, they're right. We do need a return to individual integrity, self-reliance, and old-fashioned gumption. We really do.

-- Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcyle Maintenance (1974)

Patriotism without gumption, without engagement in governance of one's own community, is empty nationalism, that no speeches about social contracts or jingoistic saber-rattling can fill. Gumption, by contrast, is the characteristic Lao Tsu was speaking of when he wrote of leaders:

True leaders
are hardly known to their followers.
Next after them are the leaders
the people know and admire;
after them, those they fear;
after them, those they despise.
To give no trust
is to get no trust.
When the work's done right,
with no fuss or boasting,
ordinary people say,
Oh, we did it.

-- Lao Tsu, Tao Te Ching (rendered by Ursula K. LeGuin)

Gumption, not patriotism, is the stuff of true leaders, of true patriots, those who at the end of the day heartily agree when their neighbors say, "Oh, we did it." This is the lesson taught by the three soldiers in the story of Stone Soup we all read as children. To be hardly known, yet contribute that which we each are best able to contribute, to trust and to do the work right. It is in this way that ordinary people build extraordinary nations, one community at a time.

Automatic Citizenship

In response to Automatic Citizenship by kathrynknight:

I am wondering if we should continue to allow automatic citizenship for those that are born here, but their parents are citizens of another country.

One thing to consider is that the United States--like most of the post-industrial nations of Europe--has a negative replacement rate*: if it were not for immigration (whether or not deemed "legal"), this country would rapidly (where rapidly is measured in generations) depopulate, as citizens by blood (born to U.S. citizens) do not have enough children to replace citizens who die. This is a natural consequence of affluence. There is an inverse relationship between class, as determined by relative wealth, and fecundity, as each generation of successively more economically successful parents tends to invest more resources into the welfare of fewer children. Also, with rising affluence, greater numbers of citizens may choose not to become parents, investing those resources in themsleves rather than progeny.

Unfortunately, in any country that has any sort of social security scheme (i.e., a system whereby the productivity of young adults subsidizes the needs of older, less vigorous citizens), a negative replacement rate means progressively fewer able workers supporting a steadily growing population of economically dependent neighbors. An unchecked negative replacement rate thus translates to economic collapse.

Also worth noting is that Germany, another country affected by a negative replacement rate, which previously had jus sanguinis (citizenship by blood) nationality laws, has as of 2000 modified their laws to confer citizenship per a variation of jus soli (citizenship by soil), thereby moving closer to the tradition of the United States and other countries in the Americas whose population has historically been driven by immigration. This may become the trend in Europe, as developed nations find themselves coping with declining replacement rates, growing senior populations, and rising immigration rates.

[*Some sources dispute this claim, arguing that blood-citizens in the more religious South have enough children to more than make up for the negative replacement rate in the secular North and urbanized coastal populations. However, this confounds the fact that these analyses credit religious fertility to the same region where the highest levels of just soli citizens are born. The population boom in the last decade--as evidenced by the hullabaloo about the "Population Clock" recently--is significantly driven by increased documented immigration quotas set by Congress as well as significantly reduced enforcement against undocumented immigrants.]

Ultimately, how one feels on issues like this comes down to one's opinion about what is right and what is wrong. Take the The Fairness Heuristics Test to delve deeper into how your sense of what is fair might influence your political opinions.

Reclaim the Night / Take Back the Night

In response to Reclaim the Night / Take Back the Night by betenoire:

Marching to Freedom (excerpts):

In 1977, when the first Reclaim the Night march was held in Leeds, I was just 15 and remember watching it on the news with a growing sense of excitement and political conviction. The Yorkshire Ripper was still terrorising the north of England and the police had been advising that, to avoid attack, women should stay inside after dark. The march responded directly to this warning (placards read "No curfew on women - curfew on men") and hundreds of women shouted about their anger at being kept off the streets - the supposedly public highways, after all - by the threat of male violence. Marches occurred simultaneously in 12 English locations, from Manchester to Soho. 

* * *

The latest incarnation of this (actually conceived 16 years prior to Reclaim the Night) is Jane Jacobs's "Eyes on the Street":

There must be eyes on the street, eyes belonging to those we might call the natural proprietors of the street. The buildings on a street equipped to handle strangers and to insure the safety of both residents and strangers, must be oriented to the street. They cannot turn their backs or blank sides on it and leave it blind. The sidewalk must have users on it fairly continuously, both to add to the number of effective eyes on the street and to induce a sufficient number of people in buildings along the street to watch the sidewalks. [Emphasis added.]

http://www.cooltownstudios.com/mt/archives/000572.html

It is not enough to reserve one day a year to march in protest, and then spend the rest of the year hiding from our neighbors in back yards and buildings, shuttling from one enclosed structure to another in climate controlled automobiles. If we want safe streets, we need to be on those streets, own those streets, every night and every day, and design our neighborhoods and the architecture of those neighborhoods to promote such use of the streets.

The self-imposed, self-selected curfew, where citizens shackle themselves and their families with television, imprison themselves in automotive confinement, and sequester themselves in fenced-off back yards, creates the very conditions that breed unsafe streets. The night can only be successfully taken back if we each assert ownership of our own communities through consistent and continuous engagement with and participation in those communities.

Having 'Eyes on the Street' obviates the need to take back the night each and every year, for it will not have been ceded in the first place.

The Walking Enthusiast Test

If you could kill all the mosquitoes in the...?

In response to If you could kill all the mosqutoes in the...? by bitter_angel:

If you could kill all the mosqutoes in the world in an instant, would you do it?

• Yes!
• No
• I'm Not Sure

46% of people say 'yes'. That.. worries me far more than you could possibly imagine. Didn't they study that 'circle of life' thing???

This question put me in mind of Charles R. Pellegrino's Dust. Terrifying prospect.

 Unfortunately, we as a society learned nothing from Silent Spring. Most still see basic components of our ecosystem as the enemy. And those who don't are instead bowing at the altar of scientific omniscience, the very false certainty that Rachel Carson indicted four decades ago.

High Definition Under the Tree

Commercial was on in the background, for one of those electronics chains, Gift-mess theme, where the voiceover says "Every guy wants to go high-def..."

Really? Is that so? Okay, if you say so, then it must be true.

Seriously, all these advertisements to push high-definition televisions are so single-mindedly playing off of gender-type expectations. Even the "first high-def for women" thinamajig. Case study in Simon Baron-Cohen's systemizing / empathizing model.

Men are from Mars, women are from Venus, and then there are those of us from Gethen who would still listen to TV-band radio if only the non-cable antenna got reception in these parts.

Poem from 1998

My secret mind is but a guitar strum:
    All notes and chords, rich melody, poem
    Of lyric--heard by none but Mob of gloam.

My lonely heart is but a beating drum--
Lost as it is in noise of life's humdrum--
    The sound it makes does not stray, does not roam.

    My silent soul is but a metronome,
Keeping time for I--to all else `tis dumb--
        Speaks not, strikes not, makes not a single wave.

        Will no one hear, but just a single stave?

A Monster Lives Under My Bed

I wrote this children's story a few years ago for my God-daughter and nephew. A colleague recently asked me about it, and I figured I might as well share it here as well.