Regarding the recent Supreme Court Decision in: 301 Creative LLC vs Elenis

I’ve been trying to come to grips with the recent supreme court decision in ”301 Creative LLC vs Elenis.” Elenis, by the way, refers to Aubrey Elenis who was the Director of the Colorado Civil Rights Division at the time of the court case filing.  Lorie Smith was the Plaintiff.  She filed a lawsuit against the State of Colorado because she wanted to expand her website design services to include wedding websites.  However, she only wanted to design websites for marriages between “one man and one woman.”  Advertising this restriction (as well as operating on it) would contravene the Colorado anti-discrimination Act.  The state denied her lawsuit which was subsequently appealed to the supreme court.

The case has been described as at the intersection of anti-discrimination law in public accommodations and the free speech clause of the first amendment.  The public accommodation law stems from Title II of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.  Disabilities were added to the original protected groups in 1990 and sexual discrimination and gender identity were added in 2020.  The first amendment says:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

My gut reaction to Lorie was that she was asking permission to put a sign out that was equivalent of “whites only,” although, in this case, it was “monogamous, heterosexuals only.”

But then I thought about how I would feel if I was asked to create a design for a white nationalist neo-Nazi fascist couple.   Maybe with some tastefully placed swastikas on the page and a link to family pictures of Hitler in better times.

 Of course, white nationalist neo-Nazis are not a protected group (yet).  But I can understand how personal beliefs can conflict with elements of your job.  Maybe, as a mostly unobservant Jew, I could imagine being a web designer who would prefer to avoid having to deal with crucifixes and persecuted images of Christ with nails and rivulets of dripping blood as design elements on a wedding website.  (Though it might serve as a projected future for the happy couple, or at least one of them).

What is it about faith, about the doctrines of a person’s religion that requires you to preselect your customers so completely that you will not acknowledge them as human beings?  Better to have them know ahead of time your opinion of them, so that you don’t have to look them in the eyes, refusing to recognize their humanity, of having emotions of love, of caring, of being able to commit themselves to a long-term relationship. 

The entire idea behind protected classes and public accommodations is to compel people to interact with those that they would otherwise exclude.  Sometimes you have to “fake-it till you make it.”  Our better selves suck-it-up and act appropriately when we want to scream our objections, in the service of civility, to go along to get along.  Respect is often about keeping in check beliefs that you would otherwise express at the expense of other people’s beliefs.  If some people prefer segregation, then, at least limit their efforts to times when they are outside of work, outside of the more public sphere of commerce.   If you are a member of American culture.  If you live in the United States, then you must at least act in accordance with the nation’s laws.  And the law says that you can not exclude protected groups from public accommodations. 

Now, in terms of your free speech, you can say quite a bit before you get into trouble.  You could say, for example, to a prospective couple that has come in for a consult on web design that you think they are an abomination of nature, that they are the devil’s work and are destined to go to hell.   The couple could then ask you how much your services cost or could just get up and leave to find another merchant. 

Maybe you could tone it down a bit.  Talk about your faith in the bible and in various interpretations of comments made in it regarding homosexuality.  You might say, “thank you for coming in.  I’m not sure I can do my best work for you, however, as I am repulsed by the very thought of you two having sex.”

I don’t know, maybe you could come up with some other explanations for how you would be paralyzed from writing words of comfort and celebration, or unable to post pictures given to you of the happy couple preparing for this auspicious occasion. 

What I see you doing, Lorie Smith, is coping out.  You are a coward, unwilling to face, face-to-face, the people with whom you disagree and your own fears about them.  No one is questioning your faith, your religion, your commitments.  They are only asking you to give them the same consideration you give to other human beings. 

Within the constraints of your socio-economic circumstances, you drive on the same roads, you shop in the same stores (or, at least, once did), and perhaps, even within the confines of the buildings in which you pray to your god, you share space with some of the very same people you are unwilling to affiliate as part of your work. 

Will you design a website for a Jewish wedding?  People who don’t believe in your New Testament, who don’t believe in your son of God?  And Muslims?  Will you design their wedding website?  And how about Hindus?  How about atheists?  Are you planning to have your prospective customers fill out a questionnaire before your first consult?  Just in case their particular religious affiliations are not superficially apparent.  And what if they have some rare genetic difference?  Perhaps an XXY chromosome trisomy that ambiguates your ability to determine if they are a man or a woman?  Do you give them the benefit of the doubt by how they dress?  Would serving them and their intended spouse confer the same contravention to your faith as a more obvious non-heterosexual couple?  Perhaps a strip search will be necessary? 

Perhaps it may be better to say on your website and in your advertisements for your services that you are a Christian fundamentalist who believes in the literal word of the bible.  This won’t offend anyone.  It won’t exclude anyone.   It doesn’t violate any public accommodations clause.  A phrase of this sort will let people know what they can expect from you.  And they, not you, can then make the choice of whether to do business with you or not. 

As to the not-normal supreme court majority, the wisdom of king Solomon seems to have eluded you on this one.  Public accommodation laws are laws.  Hanging out a white’s only sign is a thing of the past, or so I hope.  

People are Interesting...

 

People are interesting, but they’d be more interesting if they weren’t so damned irritating.  Irritation… what is it about irritation?  Where does it come from?  It’s not actually from other people.  It’s a reaction to them.  Your mind, the great inference machine, generating all these associations, encouraging primordial emotions to well up from deep within your unconscious.  Feelings of fight or flight, or if more pleasant, to draw you in, bring you closer.   But irritation, that’s not pleasant.  It's a grain of sand in a clam’s mouth.  Though the clam can’t really escape it.  So, it smooths it over.  Makes a pearl.  Can we do that?   And what if there’s a choice?  What if we can escape it, but maybe we shouldn’t.  What if the irritation is part and parcel of something that’s attractive as well as irritating?  

We can purify, filter, concentrate.  We can remove impurities.  Yet, like a perfect circle, like an absolute vacuum, these are things that we can approach, but cannot fully attain.  Asymptotes are, by definition, not obtainable.  So how much purity do we need?  When do we say we have enough of it?  And then there is the notion of doping, of adding impurity to a thing to get it to function in a certain way.  Silicon chips, the movement of electrons in them, is dependent upon impurity. 

If irritation is a form of impurity, of the introduction of something that our mind wants out, wants to be rid of, that doesn’t mean we should be rid of it.  Getting what we want isn’t necessarily what’s good for us.  Not that wanting isn’t needed, isn’t necessary.  But the specifics of wanting may be off target, and not particularly good for us.  Fantasy, dreams.  The wants of adolescence, the wants when under duress, these are not wants that are actually to be fulfilled.  Although they reveal a direction, they point the way in some non-Euclidean space-time place in our minds to which our will is to be directed.  They fulfill some ancestral logic of evolutionary significance, pulling us along, pushing us forward in time toward something we are meant to do, a place we are to find, and in so doing, to find ourselves.

Our own personal development recapitulates, at least metaphorically, the development of life as we know it.  One cell to many.  Differentiation, tissue formation, coordination, combination, the building of an organism, an ecology that is nested in other, larger ecologies.  Like moons and planets and suns and galaxies, the parts of us patterned from forces that attract and repel.  Along the way, LaGrange points of equilibrium, of balance and stability.  Points of energy neutrality.  Homeostasis.  And us, each being, part of the larger ecology of humanity, which is itself part of the multi-species ecology of life on the earth.  Our very DNA an admixture of the instructions from multiple life forms that have been combined and selected for their previously successful adaptive capabilities; now surrendered to the present, to the now of existence that will test their mettle, in a dance of life that brings everything together in moments of sublime ecstasy and excruciating pain.  A dance which pantomimes all that we have been with a promise for what we may yet become.  All the while moving in a present that takes the dance this way and that, standing and falling, circling, and crawling.  Arms outstretched and curled into a fetal position.  A dance that each of us has some say in.  In which, at each moment we can choose to embrace life or reject it, to take our irritations and turn them into pearls or to fall pray to their destructive energy, let them dissemble us, conceal our true selves, and thus diminish the positive power of our being. 

Letter to Ron (brother-in-law) re: "What I have begun to explore"

Ron,

I actually started a letter to you before I got your email but was pleased that you were able to identify the source of your memory and provide me a starting point to write to you.   I had done a bit of research and discovered that there was an author by the name of Sandra Perl who wrote a book called Felt Sense.   I don’t know why, but there are only a few copies of her book available, and they are “first edition prints” that are going for hundreds of dollars.   Apparently, her book is about how to get to a deeper meaning in creative writing.   An article about Sandra pointed me to Eugene Gendlin, who, as you know was the originator of the notion that our felt experience underlies both the conscious and unconscious aspects of our psyche.  I saw that Gendlin had two major books, Focusing, the one that you mentioned that was more of a therapeutic “how to” guide, and another book he wrote sixteen years earlier, in 1962, called Experiencing and the Creation of Meaning.  I opted to get this “more philosophical” tome and have been slowly reading and, when possible, digesting it.  Let’s just say it’s not an easy read.

As I mentioned when we last talked, I’m also reading a couple books by, or about, Carl Jung.   Memories, Dreams, Reflections is basically a biography in which Jung commissioned an editor, Aniela Jaffe, but ended up writing several chapters himself.  The other book has two of his smaller essays, “The Undiscovered Self,” and “Symbols and the Interpretation of Dreams.”  Jung mixes his childhood memories with dreams he’s had throughout his life and with his experiences, both professional and personal.   For me, the gist of Jung is that we should not ignore the two-thirds or more of that portion of our psyche that is unconscious when attempting to understand human beings and their behavior.  The thin façade of logical thinking is but a recent evolutionary development, and while it plays a role in human behavior and the emergence of the human mind, it is not the whole or even primary part of the enchilada, so to speak. 

When I studied psychology in the later sixties and through the seventies, the emphasis was on how our primitive limbic system functions were brought under control by a higher order logical-symbol- processor, the cortex.  No matter what we say about the human brain, it will be an understatement, but clearly what I gathered in my earlier psych training was overly simplistic. 

I did my masters thesis with a man named Robert Stutz, who was, with several others in the field of psychobiology, attempting to demonstrate that pleasure was a deep non-differentiated well that our brains drew upon to strengthen logical associations, regardless of the particular “drive system” that was being reinforced.  Sexual pleasure, satiation for hunger and thirst, relief from painful external events, all were ultimately reinforced from a nexus of brain stem and limbic structures having a particular biochemical arrangement.  Once triggered, the reward system operated to reinforce patterns of behavior that would be repeated again and again.  If things were short – circuited, if the reward system could be stimulated more directly by drugs like cocaine or by direct electrical stimulation of the areas that released the necessary endogenous chemicals, then the normal  adaptive behaviors could be subverted and addictions would result, locking individuals into persistent maladaptive patterns. 

It’s hard to cross over from physiology to mind.  To make the leap from a biological system to the psyche.  What are the fundamental attributes of the biological system that, when met, allow for the emergence of the psyche?  Emergence in general is a difficult concept.  Jochen Fromm gives, what he says is a common definition of an emergence:  a property of a system is emergent if it is not a property of any fundamental element, and emergence is the appearance of emergent properties and structures on a higher level of organization or complexity.” 

Another definition defines emergent properties as unpredictable and irreducible: “a property of a complex system is said to be “emergent” just in case, although it arises out of the properties and relations characterizing its simpler constituents, it is neither predictable from , nor reducible to, these lower-level characteristics.” 

Neither of these definitions really satisfies me. I am not even sure I understand them.   The closest I can come to a metaphor for emergence is something like a magnetic field emerging from a flow of electricity in a wire wrapped around an iron core.   What steps exist between the moving electrons and the emergent magnetic field?    I suppose emergence demands that there be some mystery.  

And that is precisely what Jung believes we are missing when we describe the world using only logical symbolism.   Religious experience, not the dogma or creed of a religion, but the experience of seeing a burning bush that does not extinguish, of seeing Jesus walk on water, on experiencing  the red sea opening to let the Jews flee the army of the Egyptian Pharaoh.  These are what Jung believes are the true experiences of humans that we ignore at our peril.   Our minds evolved over millennia, the innate wiring and biochemistry of the brain, the feelings and emotions we experience are at the root of a system that has been forged by the selection pressures of evolution.   They hold truths about us, about our interactions with one another and with the world around us that must be experienced.  At least, that’s what I think Jung’s saying.

While the symbolism of religious experience or dreams are true felt experiences, their imagery does not readily equate to a shared external reality.  What does it even mean that we can share an experience, and does sharing such an experience necessarily validate that our belief about the experience is somehow more true, more real?

Distinguishing between felt experience and logic and, at times, giving more credence to one over the other is fundamental to an internal process of negotiation that our mind employs to manage what are often dissimilar representations of our personal reality. 

Take illusions as an example.  Visual illusions in particular can be very vivid experiences where our conscious awareness dictates a very cogent and persuasive felt experience.  That is, until we are presented with another perspective, or we identify some logical inconsistency that makes us question our felt experience.  Once we can change our focus or perspective and see alternative possible “realities” we can no longer rely solely on our own felt experience.  Even for very strong and persistent illusions, once we know there is “a man behind the curtain performing magic tricks” as it were, we develop a wariness as to what we see before our very eyes.  Even when the illusion will not dissipate with an extra effort of focused mental energy to see it “the other way we have seen it in the past”, it will often persist.  Our memory and/or knowledge of its improbability now creates a feeling about our felt experience or modifies the memory of our original feeling.  It is no longer just a simple felt experience, but one that now includes doubt and uncertainty.  We can no longer depend upon that earlier feeling of vivid reality to give us the certainty of what we are experiencing as the truth. 

 

Descartes, in considering the erection of a firm and permanent scientific structure considered the need to “withdraw trust from the senses, on the grounds that they have sometimes deceived him.”  “Whatever I have up to now accepted as most true, I have received either from the senses, or through the senses; however I have sometimes found these to deceive; and it is prudent never to trust completely those who have deceived us even once.”

Descartes and Jung thus, collectively, express the duality of what humans rely upon for establishing  what is real and true, felt experience and symbolic reasoning, where the latter is characterized by symbolic representations of strands of thoughts which require a certain consistency to fundamental rules of logic for them to be believed as, if not true, then at least possible.  Thus, neither felt experience nor symbolic reasoning provide unequivocal truth, but only the possibility of what may be true. 

Our personal reality is built upon these foundational elements, and our individuality, our psyche and the outward expression of who we are, our personality, are to a large extent the product of how felt experience and analytical modes of thinking are reconciled , or, if not reconciled, then managed to allow us to operate in a world that would otherwise be filled with doubt and ambiguity. 

Okay, so this is the beginning.  This is what I have begun to explore.  Maybe we can talk about this in a future Zoom call. 

We are also probably past due for a “cocktail hour” call with a larger group. 

Current circumstances continue to make it clear how fortunate I am to be where I am, and to be connected in meaningful ways with others.   Hope you, Marti and all your kids and connections are equally fortunate.

Lee

(circa May, 2020)

Ruminations on Context

Surely, if nothing else, the growth and development of information technologies and the social and societal reorganization they have engendered have taught us that some quantum of information neither guarantees that truth has been discovered nor that a lie has been spoken. Bits of information are nothing more than the dots of an image made from halftones.  

Even larger chunks of it are nothing more than shape shifting patterns, illusions that flip, like a Necker cube, from one perspective to another.  An old women or a young one?  A gun or a map of the United States?  Context and perspective, what is figure and what is background, the internal focus of your minds eye, these are what determine how any element of information is interpreted. 

The circumstances of a momentary perception are but a drop in the stream of incoming sensory data.  Add to this the notion that our memory is a huge interconnected and tessellated hierarchy of overlapping patterns — think of those Persian geometric designs on the walls and ceilings of tombs and temples,

or of Escher prints where figure and ground shift and fantastical images are seen that appear to defy gravity or the basics of three dimensionality itself. 

Now, expand these limited examples, scale them up to the size and capacity of an individuals memory, all of their felt experience, all of the boundaries, patterns merged and patterns differentiated, all of this, like the astronomers night sky, available for inspection, the breadth or narrowness of your unconscious mind’s focus a key element in the search for a match, for some recognition of where to look, what contexts, what patterns to hone in on.  Your mind continuously performing an interior galactic search for what is figure, what is ground, …what is meaningful. 

Astrology was one of the earliest known attempts to try and organize the night sky into meaningful aggregates of information.  Symbolic representations of earthly forms such as people and animals where used to connect the dots into patterns.  

Astronomers subsequently recorded the apparent movements of the stars and planets, creating from
these observations a theory of the heavens. First, a theory in which the perspective hinged on seeing everything as if the earth  were at the center, the heavenly objects rotating around it.  

Later, a more heuristic theory evolved which allowed for more accurate predictions of the movements of these heavenly bodies.  This theory placed the earth in orbit around the sun and the sun, in time, was seen in the context of a galaxy of star systems. 

That the sun rises in the eastern sky and sets in the west did not change. But the context in which this information was viewed was essential to its interpretation. Our experience is steeped in the contexts provided to us.  First by our our parents, who themselves interpreted their experience using contexts framed by their parents; and then by the cultures we live in and communicate with,  a history of cultural transmission over distances and across time.  Information not in a vacuum, but embedded within a rich and varied kaleidoscope of contexts.  At the time and place of our birth and throughout our lives, nothing we experience is isolated from, or independent of, context; context which is used to interpret our experience, give it meaning, and create future expectations for our current and future selves. 

Knowing God

 

The more I think about agency and voluntary action, the more I come to believe that we experience god ( “the divine”) in a similar way to how we feel love, or hate or fear or anger. 

The divine as an emotion, essentially. 

And so if you ask the question, do I believe in the existence of emotions, of having the phenomenological experience of fear or love or hate or anger, then I answer in the affirmative. 

These are feelings I’ve had and have and for which there is considerable evidence that others have had, do have, whose prevalence is thought to be extensive, if not universal among us humans.  And so, if you ask me do I believe in a feeling of the divine, of some ineffable agency that pervades my awareness of everything I know about myself and my existence in the world, as well as the world around me, then yes, I believe with certainty that this is part of my experience and likely part of the experience of most, if not all, others – at least those who are open to it. 

Yet I also view my emotions as having a strong correlation to states of my nervous system; states related to neurochemical and electrophysiological systems that evolved over millennia to promote survival in an uncertain, unpredictable world. 

Saying that you believe in the existence of fear or love or hate does not imply that such things are material or even ephemeral vapors that float on clouds or exist within the ether of outer space. 

We don’t’ have a very good theory about consciousness, about how or why it exists or how it relates to our intentional, voluntary actions or even those subconsciously driven aspects of our being.  Presumably, our dreams are manifest from brains that first gather and process information when awake, the stages of sleep promoting and eliciting involuntary thought that string together Jungian archetypes of belief from our deepest subconscious. 

We can track electrical patterns and neurochemical activity in the brain. But we don’t really know if the spark of a feeling or an idea stems from the realm of some conscious or preconscious event or begins with a molecule moving across a membrane, or some other physical activity in our body. 

Perhaps consciousness is the product of certain neural events, or conversely, that our conscious realm dictates key nerves to activate in our brains, or maybe both.

Whether epiphenomenon or interactive, our mind, comprised of conscious and unconscious activity is what we experience.  And through our mind’s eye, it is the conduit through which we experience our bodies and the world around us. 

So I believe in the feeling of the divine, and I have learned that it is usually beneficial to pay attention to my feelings.  That knowing if I am in love, or afraid, or angry is useful when evaluating a circumstance.   My feelings provide me with a gauge as to the importance of a thing, whether I understand what’s going on at a  deeper level or not, I know that the stronger the emotion, the more importance I should attach to the circumstances eliciting it.  And the more attention I need to bring to bear on what is going on, and in determining what the reality is around me.  To the extent that I have a feeling of agency to affect the circumstances I find myself in, how might I act for a propitious beneficial outcome?  Knowing god, having a sense of divine agency offers me a motivation and context in which to interpret events and a context in which to determine a course of action and to proceed with a perspective and intent most suitable for the circumstances.

Journal entry from November 10, 2006

It’s 7 something pm.  I’m at the Chicago O’Hare airport.  My 6:00 flight was delayed until 8:40 Pm, then delayed again until 10:05 pm. There was an earlier flight, leaving at 9:00, but, of course, it was full.  The public address system keeps reminding us that that homeland security has issued an orange alert.  Something about the brits M15 releasing information on several London terrorist plots that have been uncovered.  The earlier flight that brought me to O’Hare was a harrowing white-knuckle ride through a thunderstorm.  The pilot aborted the first landing attempt and came in again after the storm had shifted a bit, and with a new runway to try. 

I’m sitting at a table for two at the Chili Grille with a beer and chips.  Nothing else to eat but chicken and burgers.  It’s crowded and I offer the other seat at the table to a trim 50 something man with white hair and a white mustache.  He tells me he just got back from Hong Kong.  He’s on his way home somewhere in Florida.  Of course, I have to ask how he’s managed to get over to Hong Kong.  It’s business, he says.  His business.  He manufactures motor yachts.  They build ‘em in Hong Kong and China.  He’s having ten to fifteen a year being made right now but hopes to tool up to fifty or so in a year.  I ask how’d he got into the business?  He was a movie producer working on a low budget slasher flick being made with Mafia money.  The cast and crew were perpetually stoned.  They wanted him to burn through the money so they could get more out of their mafia funders.  The “funders” were giving him bum checks, having their own money issues.  One day he tells both groups, apparently in the same room at the same time, you guys deserve each other – have at it, and leaves.

He’d been drawing boats since he was a kid.  He went ahead and drew another one, and then, with seventeen thou or so built it.  Or had it built, I’m not sure which.  Now he’s running Island Pilot LLC.  Marketing and Sales, he says.  He’s got no back office, no employees, though he’s thinking about having his son do some of the books.  A website, a cell phone, he doesn’t need much else.  He’s got buyers and people to make the boats, people to fund the process.  There’s no inventory and, with no employees, he can keep what he needs to know on a spreadsheet or two. 

Reuban Trane, the grandson of another Trane who made his living making, manufacturing, air conditioners.  He’s got a new idea he’s pursuing – hybrid boats that run off of solar cells.  A natural for the tropics.  Seven knots and seven watts or something like that.  They’ve done some research and will be rolling out the first production unit within the year. 

Reuban highly recommends Hong Kong.  A driver meets him and his wife when they’re traveling together as they de-plane.  She prefers 5-star hotels.  The roads are lined with manicured gardens.  Live fish and geese and, ugh, cats at the better eateries.  Reuban can do this stuff like “falling off a log.”  He doesn’t have to think about it much, making oodles of money with no investment and no real drudgery, short of the travel, I suppose.  Reuban doesn’t appear to have any sensibilities around class or social justice or even environmental issues.  The hybrid boat wasn’t about saving the environment; it was about a marketable product.  Self assured and confident, cutting through a livelihood like a hot knife through butter. Oh, sure, he’s had some projects that tanked, but he’s in his stride now. 

What is it that accounts for his success?  What lesson is there to learn from his story?  How can I redraw his story, add some humanitarian elements and the details of my own vision to come up with a story of my own?  One thing, he was open to opportunity.  I offered my table and he was on it.  Another, he was clear about where he’d been and where he was going.  Little doubt was voiced.  Maybe a bit too much ego, but I don’t think so.  He knew what he did well, and it aligned somehow with a long standing interest of his.  He likely had a lot going for him, grandson of an air-conditioning tycoon, rich boy playing movie producer, with even a hit movie now on DVD – the name of which escapes me now – some horror flick if I’m not mistaken.  At the end of his movie carrier he didn’t even want to see the moving he was making – it was that bad.  There’s money, there’s the enterprise, and there’s the work you do.  They all need to align.  The Chicago O’Hare PA blares: “The department of homeland security has raised the threat level to orange.”  My 10:05 pm flight has been cancelled.  Looking for a place to hang until airport security opens at 6 am tomorrow. 

Trust in the Midst of a Pandemic

In the midst of a pandemic that is killing friends and family and that is, or will soon be, imposing inordinate financial hardship on many,  I find it interesting that there is a quiet certitude about things.  That the noise of living has abated and I can see some things more clearly. 

My neighbor, who usually is coming and going with little more than a wave, sits on his porch in the evening with a drink.  I walk over and we chat, me on the sidewalk, he on his porch.  His partner joins us and we discuss the situation we are in.  And learn a little more about one another. 

Down the street there is a fire going in a fire pit on another neighbors’ front lawn.  It’s a signal that they are around and wouldn’t mind company.  People stop by and hang out by the fire, keeping their distance and talking. 

Some days we have a scheduled “cocktail hour” with friends via Zoom or Houseparty.  Recently, we took turns singing solo some of the  songs we particularly liked. 

I started a text thread  with family, which allowed us to share relevant info, but also provided some personal moments of our day, moments that would otherwise have gone unshared.

A neighbor, 92 and still living a vibrant life at her home, needed help with her car.  The battery warning light went on and she was concerned.  Not that she’s going anywhere.  But having her car in good shape and operational was important to her.  So I suited-up, wore a mask and used some alcohol to wipe the steering wheel and drove the car to her mechanic. The battery replaced, I returned to pick up the car, swabbing everything down again before driving it back to my neighbor.

Going grocery shopping, as most of you know, is like entering a nuclear contamination site, using mask and gloves, if you’ve got ‘em, and alcohol or other disinfectant to wipe down grocery carts.  Back at home there is a another half hour process to clean the groceries and bags before putting them away. 

Though the risk of infection is ever present, there is also this clarity about what risk people pose to you.  Walking on the sidewalk, people veer to walk in the street if there isn’t enough clearance, or, if they don’t change course, then you do.  It’s easy to see when people come toward you, or walk behind you, how far away they are.  When a respectful distance is the norm, you can track the rate at which people are moving, you can tell if somebody is keeping their distance, and they can tell if you are keeping yours.

Somehow we’ve lost the ability to recognize and manage an acceptable social distance with others.  The noise of a zillion Internet voices and a lack of respect and courtesy in how we conduct social discourse has blurred these boundaries. Trust doesn’t just happen, it is something that we work to establish.  Being trustworthy is something we seek in other people, and something we wish others see in us.  We value trust between members of our family.  We value the trust we share among our religious brethren.  We take comfort in the trust we have for those whose political views we share.  Yet trust eludes us in the wider sphere of discourse beyond these familial, religious and partisan groups.  We’ve lost our ability to recognize and trust the intentions of strangers, of those who we don’t know. 

Yet our trust in strangers is essential.  How else could we do the multitude of things we do without trust?  Trust that people will stop at stop signs and red lights.  Trust that most people will obey the law. Trust that people use standard hygiene.  Trust that doctors, engineers, and other professionals use their expertise wisely and unselfishly. 

We have become attuned to discrepancies from our highest ideals, when racial bias mars the integrity of a police force, when a business cuts corners or manipulates the market to cheat people, when individuals in positions of authority and trust take advantage of, and hurt, others to satisfy some selfish desire.

We see the imperfections of people and systems and become cynical, rather than hopeful that, while not perfect, our laws and governance are tools by which we can achieve a more perfect union.  Focusing solely or primarily on these problems distorts an awareness of all those things that are working well, that are serving us, providing safety and equitable treatment to most of us. 

Not seeing what’s working distorts our view and makes it appear that nothing is working.  This adds to a  climate of distrust, a climate of suspicion that people of different faiths, of different political persuasion, of different economic status are inherently untrustworthy.  We do not see that they have a difference of opinion. We do not see that they are essentially good people with whom we can debate.  Rather, we view them as people who are not to be trusted.

 We’ve extended this suspicion to our social institutions, to experts  in various fields of endeavor, to scientific methods and procedures.  In short, we have come to suspect a large portion of the social systems that have evolved to improve our lives, that let us live longer and better, with more choices and more freedoms then at, perhaps, any other time in the history of human societies. 

Trust must be earned.  I am not advocating for some blind uncritical acceptance. It is important for us to discuss, debate, evaluate, and use science as well as our gut instincts.   This pandemic as tragic as it is, is also a wake up call, an opportunity to throw off our knee-jerk biases and favorite shibboleths. Let us continue to strive for what we individually believe in, but also recognize what we hold in common.  Religious beliefs, partisan divisions, and economic disparities will always create a certain tension between people.  It is the balance between this tension and what we can do together that defines us as a nation and as a model for what others can achieve.

From the series: Creating our experience of reality: Agency

I was in the Red River Gorge a few months ago with some friends who had some magic mushrooms.  At some point during our “magic carpet ride” I saw all of the trees and shrubs and other vegetation moving in concert, like those old cartoons from the 1940’s and 50’s where the flowers and trees danced to the background music, bending and swaying with awareness and intent upon some foreground cartoon character.  Psychology and Philosophy have a term for this feeling.  It is called agency.  The feeling of agency is that of sensing that our voluntary actions are being directed by us; that we are in control of something we do. 

The feeling of agency is distinguished from the judgement of agency, where the judgement of agency is a higher level conceptual process that arises in situations where we make explicit attributions of agency to the self or others.  In my mushroom experience I didn't conclude that the forest was acting with  volitional intent.  Rather,  I felt its willful agency.  So, perhaps we can at least in some circumstances, sense the agency of another even if our feeling is illusory or a perceptual error.  I can imagine the utility of this capability.  It has evolutionary significance.  We need to feel the agency of a growling tiger or other predator to direct our attention to an immediate existential threat.  Leaves blowing in the wind would be a distraction if we routinely perceived them as having agency.  Yet, after a storm, a tornado for example, that destroys our house but not our neighbors, we might have some feeling of an agency to nature that selectively targets us (what did we do wrong?)

My experience in the woods, of having a feeling of agency where normally I would not, suggests that this feeling is primal and like fear, anger, love and other feelings becomes more refined as we mature and learn causal relationships, those before-after scenarios that validate or refute our sense of agency for ourselves and others, be they people, animals, plants or another natural phenomenon. 

We recognize that infants, toddlers and small children are frightened by many inanimate things, things responded to as if they were believed  to have agency. The feeling of agency informs the small child that they cannot expect constancy from something, that it is unpredictable.  Paired with fear or other negative emotions, they retreat or are more cautious around such things.  While things that elicit pleasurable affect combined with a feeling of agency draw them closer to someone or something.

I want to be clear that while we may indeed use our cognitive capabilities to make attributions about agency, I believe there is also a feeling of agency that applies to “other” as well as self.   My sense of agency for the forest was manifest in an altered state where the feeling took precedence over a set of learned associations that would otherwise have inhibited the feeling or attenuated it in favor of a more logical interpretation of my surroundings.  But I contend that the feeling represents something more fundamental about our nervous system, something which is present before we experience the world.  Our subsequent experience then creates expectations which allow us to place our feelings within a particular context so that their expression is replaced or subdued by a more cognitive interpretation of our surroundings.    

In this way agency is at the core of our experience of reality.  It is like the grain of sand that is necessary for a pearl to form.  We begin with the feeling of agency for the world around us, it is all one sentient being, and then we validate or refute our sense of agency as we encounter the world around us.  As we build neurological networks that allow us to predict events, our sense of agency is diminished and the pearl of a more causal, logical framework serves as our experience of reality.   Although the logical framework ultimately becomes our most prevalent means of understanding the world, as with the pearl, it is the feeling of agency that forms the seed from which the logical framework is constructed. 

Feelings, including the feeling of agency, determine and direct our earliest perceptions and, over time, and with additional information gleaned from the world around us, we build a probabilistic model of what is likely to occur and what is not.  Our nervous system then adjusts our feelings accordingly, refuting or validating them for either specific or general circumstances. The interplay of feelings and logical and temporal associations determine what we believe about the world around us, and what we believe about reality determines how we experience the world.

Regulations, Trust, Guns

Good regulations promote trust and facilitate our ability to conduct ourselves without being encumbered to think about the risks we face to our very survival every day.  For example, imagine what driving would be like without regulation, without traffic signals or licensing, without speed limits or turn signals.  Imagine cars with sharp protruding dashboards and handles and without seat belts or airbags.  Imagine no car seats for children or laws against drunk driving.

Laws and regulations help to fulfill our constitutional mandate as a people to have a government that, in addition to other mandates is to promote the general welfare.  And our welfare is immeasurably improved by the promotion of trust in one another.  Without regulation our trust would be diminished.  In the case of automobiles, we would inch along every street suspecting that every driver was untrained, unlicensed and under the influence.  We would need to stop at each intersection to be certain that cross traffic was going to give us the right of way, at each bridge to be sure it was strong enough or, if going under it, high enough, and we would require more caution when taking unknown roads with unknown hazards.

The notion that we cannot rely on regulations and laws and societal norms, that we must be constantly prepared to defend ourselves against an imminent threat to our ourselves and our loved ones is, I believe, what drives those who propound having guns at the ready, and who believe that concealed carry and open carry laws will reduce gun violence.  But contrary to the claim that more guns will instill a sense of security, I believe these proposed solutions create a profound mistrust of others and encumbers each of us to assume an unrelenting sense of threat for our survival at every moment.

Laws that promote carrying personal weapons as a daily feature of our lives diminish the capacity of people to trust their surroundings and the people they encounter.  As a society we have professionals, police and private security guards, to establish our security so we don’t have to prepare and monitor for threats to our immediate survival most of the time.  

None of this is to deny the real and present dangers to our lives.  Crime, aging bridges and buildings, automobiles and irresponsible drivers, toxic chemicals, unstable people with access to weapons, terrorists, these dangers, if not addressed, regulated or otherwise mitigated can reduce our lives to that of overriding suspicion and fear.  

In the USA in the year 2016, something on the order of 40,000 people died in vehicular accidents and upwards of 4.5 million were injured, many devastatingly so (see end note).  It is a risk we take to get to and from our work, our friends, our doctors, entertainment and to accomplish the multiple tasks of daily living that we do for ourselves, our family and others.  So regulations have their limitations.  They can only go so far in providing for our safety and general welfare.  Regulations put in place to improve the safety features of automobiles have had some positive impact, to be sure, but we could go further. We could reduce speed limits, for example, especially on interstate highways, which most probably would dramatically reduce accidents, save lives and result in fewer injuries.  But slowing down our expressways will also slow down our commerce.  Fewer medicines will be available in time to save lives, local markets will gain an advantage over national markets, constraining competition, allowing for more scarcity and higher prices. So regulations have their limitations and must be considered in the larger context of what we want as a society. 

Laws and regulations go hand in hand with individual responsibility.  Regulations that allow us to trust one another more don’t obviate the need for caution.  Children must still learn to look both ways before crossing a street.  People in unfamiliar territory should be wary of strangers.  It’s probably a good idea to lock your car and house at night.

To trust is to establish a firm belief in the reliability or truth of someone or something.  Trust is not blind faith, to be maintained in the absence of evidence, but something which is acquired and maintained, or lost, through periodic evaluation of the evidence.

For the most part we trust our societal systems, that police protect us, that doctors cure us, that the waterworks won’t poison us.  Yes, there are exceptions to these expectations and when the exceptions mount in frequency or severity our trust is lost and we seek redress, we seek change, we seek justice.

But the presence of weapons in our daily lives is not a solution that will instill trust or reduce gun violence.  Guns, rifles, semi-automatics must be regulated.  Who can own and use them, where they can be carried or housed, and when they are appropriate are all within the framework of the second amendment and the supreme court rulings that have been made to date. 

Death is certain and life is always on the edge of chaos.  But modern civilization advances through progressive improvements in the quality of human existence. Trust is an essential aspect for living in peace, and the more we can find ways to trust one another, the more likely it will be that peace and tranquility can prevail.  More guns are not the answer.

End Note:  Automobile statistics from Kirsten Korosec, February 15, 2017 638 PM Fortune Autos section. Timeinc.net.

A cold winter day

Looking out on a cold winter day.  The trees bereft of leaves, the ground frozen and seemingly barren.  Winter encourages a comparison with the other seasons and encourages a view of transformation and change that is part and parcel of our existence. We can not have a stable, steady life without change, any more than there can be day without night.

Part of our maturation and growth unfolds from the genetic blueprint encoded in our DNA, a blueprint that is reconstructed anew, changed and transformed from each set of parents to each child. The uniqueness of each physical being, the composition of proteins, the size and shape of each bone and muscle, the neural network of each brain and nervous system is based on a long evolutionary chain of challenge and test.  Of traits that remain and of traits that are removed from the blueprint.

So too is it that our choices lead us toward some possible futures and away from others.  Every choice leading down one path, leaving behind another.  Sometimes our choices are based on decisions that are too exclusionary, too dogmatic, decisions that unnecessarily take us too close to the things we choose to align with, and move us too far away from the things we have purposely or unmindfully excluded from our lives.  Like the forces of tectonic plates which shift and slide among one another, there is a natural tendency for our choices to re-align, for our beliefs to adjust to the past excesses of earlier intentions, those “I’ll nevers”  or “I’ll only’s” that made sense in the heat of a particular passion but which, over time, can be seen in a clearer light.

Transformation allows for a resetting of intentions and, conversely, a resetting of intentions allows for transformation and growth.  Recalibration brings you closer to those things which you’ve pushed away, and allows you to adjust your course to move away from those things that no longer serve you.

12/31/2017

East of the Vietnam War Memorial

I am east of the Vietnam War memorial wall now.  I had walked from F street and 12^th to the Washington monument, then up past the reflecting pool to the Lincoln memorial.  To the south is the Jefferson rotunda and, to the north, the White House.  Behind me is the Capital building. 

Washington, for all its power and corruption is still a spiritual place, steeped in an ideology of justice and freedom. 

People with lofty ideals are never-the-less the product of their times. They are tied to the outright prejudices and lingering doubts of their ancestors.  To allow for something less than the ideal is sometimes seen as hypocrisy.  But ideals are not meant to reflect what is, but what can be.  To voice what you wish to be true, even when your own behavior subverts achieving it, is a step forward to manifesting a better future.

Lincoln presided over a country in civil war.  A war about economics, about what is and is not permissible to buy and sell;  about whether certain people can serve as just another means of production.  It was a war that was meant to define who the we of “we the people” were.  A defining that continues today to establish those differences that can be tolerated among a peolpe who call themselves a nation.

But there comes a time when an idea, like slavery, can no longer coexist with the evolving thought of the times; when a practice deviates from a multitude of other closely held values such that the tectonic plates of a culture shift, and those who persist in their outmoded beliefs are toppled from power.

At any point in time, the prevailing culture of America is always rife with fault lines that demarcate transitions from old to new, from that which was accepted or tolerated to that which is increasingly perceived as undesirable as well as those things that were once undesirable but are now perceived as benign or in some way beneficial.

At the core of our understanding are the notions our founders called out in the preamble to the U.S. constitution:

• To form a more perfect union
• To establish justice
• To insure domestic tranquility
• To secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity

If these are the ideals we share, if this is the nation we seek to be, then whatever political acrimony of the day must be relegated to a squabble, a spat, a disagreement about how we achieve these loftier goals. 

 (November 7, 2001)

Aside...

Aside:  I’m changing the nature and format of the writings that I’ve published here, but not the overall topic.  Bridging the Divide remains as a fundamental objective.  Divide of what?  Well, that’s what I’m exploring.  What is it that divides us?  Not only from one another but from ourselves?  What keeps us from being our best selves? What keeps our society from being the best society? What keeps us from being the best partner, the best parent, the best of whatever we aspire to?  Not a competitive best, but the best in terms of what heredity and circumstance offer us.  Grace to some, blind dumb luck to others. 

Bridging, what does this mean?  To cross, to integrate, to increase connection to.  So together, Bridging the Divide means to cross over, integrate and increase connection to what keeps us from being our best selves, what keeps our society from being the best society.  And there is no getting around the fact that we are, each of us is, the fundamental unit from which society is made.

In the past I treated this blog, and the writings which preceded it within a formal framework of publication.  My own rules to be sure, and not of sufficient rigor that they were able to produce a product having perfect grammar or spelling or logic or relevance or interest.    Still, it was on the other side of the current continuum of tweets and Facebook posts, on the side of “resistance to make public” until I had edited and revised to a point of resignation – “this is the best I can do.”

I’m going to compromise and allow for more imperfection, more half-baked, ill-conceived ideas to escape the safety of my private world.   Because the times have changed.  Because it appears that we have lost our collective ability to integrate logic and subjective experience into a vision of a collective future.  A future in which the widest breadth of human experience and potential is allowed to evolve into the greatest good.

The will of Zeus: The "Iran Deal" and Nuclear Proliferation

In Greek mythology Zeus withholds fire from mankind, only to have it stolen by Prometheus  who shares this powerful source of energy with humanity.  Enraged, Zeus instructs other gods to create an enchanting  woman, Pandora, who is offered to Prometheus’s brother, Epimetheus.  Prometheus implores his brother to refuse Zeus’s gift, but is rebuffed, and Pandora becomes his brother’s wife.  As a wedding present, Zeus gives Pandora  a large Jar (often characterized as a box) that, in ancient times was used to store grains, wines, oils and other valuable items.  Large enough to hold a human body, the jar was also used to bury the dead.  The jar was decorated and lovely to behold, but the gift was given on one condition, that it not be opened.  Pandora resisted the temptation to see what was in the jar again and again, but eventually her curiosity compelled her to open the jar, and she released the evils and maladies of the world that we know today, among them, death, disease and discord.     

The eternal truth of the Pandora myth is that humanity continues to invent and discover new and powerful tools that can be used for the benefit or destruction of humanity.   Each new secret revealed, from fire, to metal, to dynamite, from airplanes, to missiles and to nuclear energy will ultimately be as much a part of our world as the natural wonders of earth, sky, water and the animals and plants upon which our existence depends.  We can no more withhold these new secrets from one another than we can deny our fellow humans air, water or sustenance.

The reality is that nuclear power, whether for useful or destructive ends, has been released from Pandora’s jar, and is now a part of the world we inhabit.  The only feasible way forward is to share its benefits, and restrain its use as a weapon.  But to do this, there must be a world order in which nations can be held accountable for their management and use of nuclear materials.  This is the direction offered by the nations negotiating with Iran; nations that represent the legacy of victory over the axis powers of World War II (US, Great Brittan, Russia, France, China).  Unfortunately, these very nations are themselves only marginally accountable for their stockpile of weapons.  The very structure and governance of the United Nations, in which these five countries serve as permanent members of the UN Security Council establishes the status quo of what constitutes national prestige and power.  Having nuclear weapons is enshrined as the very epitome of this national prestige, making it all the more likely that other nations will seek to acquire nuclear weapons for themselves.  Thus the list continues to grow, now including India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea.  These nations are even less accountable, as some have not signed the nuclear proliferation treaty, and others, such as Israel, do not officially admit to even having nuclear weapons.

It is good policy to negotiate with Iran to allow them to pursue the peaceful benefits of nuclear energy, and good policy to hold them accountable for throttling the development of nuclear weapons.  But until all nations agree to dismantle their nuclear arms, and agree to prevent any nation from having the capability to build them, there will always be the threat of their use, and a desire for other nations to acquire this technology for themselves. 

One of the contents of Pandora’s jar remained at the bottom, it was not released in the world, but was available to it.  That item was, and is, hope.  Hope is needed for us to have the opportunity to share the great abundance of earth’s resources that all of us depend upon.  Hope offers us the opportunity to further our well-being and the well-being of our families, and our descendents.  It is hope and our common humanity that will allow us to achieve a secure and abundant future.  This hope is not blind, but held with a wary eye toward betrayal, with safeguards and a plan to intervene should one nation decide to jeopardize the welfare of others.  The “deal with Iran” is a step in the right direction.  But until other nations destroy their stockpiles of nuclear weapons and agree to the same terms of peaceful use, a lasting solution to the proliferation of nuclear weapons will elude us.

Reflections on the Nuclear Age

Originally posted in October, 2006 but still relevant today....

I was born almost four years after the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I had no direct experience of the era leading up to World War II, and my knowledge of its fateful conclusion, like that of most “baby boomers”, was limited to seeing flickering, grainy newsreels as I sat in a school auditorium. Whether newsreel or sci-fi flick, the opening scene was always the same; an image of a surging column of smoke and ash that embroils itself upward in a thick billowing stalk and then ponderously crescendos downward to form the familiar shape, and most notorious symbol of the nuclear age, a mushroom cloud.

Like the twin towers of the World Trade Center, this image was repeated with a frequency and repetition that seared the image into the mind’s eye, and imprinted the soul with something akin to a generational scar; a scar which branded a generation with the knowledge that whatever passed for security before was no longer true.

The official version in news reels was that ‘the bomb’ was a testament to the marvels of science and American technological ingenuity. They gave them ‘cutsie’ names like ‘Fat Man’ and ‘Little Boy’ and quickly changed the topic to the promise of a nuclear future with plenty of cheap, clean energy.

But the rosy spin of government propaganda doesn’t last long in the hands of a popular culture. Science fiction movies quickly saw another future, one that was dark and foreboding, as the earth as we knew it was annihilated. The legacy of the next nuclear event would be stark and decimated landscapes where even the very atmosphere and weather were forever altered and human beings, the few that remained, reverted back to a desperate tenuous survival that was far from assured.

Out of the rubble of WWII, and the spectacle of a nuclear holocaust, came a renewed determination to create a world body that would prevent a repeat of the past. The United Nations was formed to rectify the failure of its predecessor, the League of Nations, to contain national aggressions and prevent another world war.

The United States of America, much to its shame, never signed on to the League of Nations. Only as one of the victors of WWII would it emerge from its former isolationism. The charter of the UN, like the declaration of independence for the US, proclaims a number of noble ideas about the rights of people and of nations. Yet the structure of the UN was immediately flawed and unbalanced as it established the victorious nations of WWII as permanent members of the Security Council. It was only a matter of time until each of the member nations followed the technological lead of the United States and tested their own nuclear weapons.

Then, ten years after China unveiled their first nuclear test, India too, became a member of the nuclear club. Pakistan, India’s rival, was not to be outdone, and by 1998 had developed nuclear weapons of their own. It was largely through Pakistan that North Korea gained the technological “know-how” for the development of their nuclear program. No one has admitted that Israel has conducted a nuclear test, but most believe that this nation, too, holds an arsenal of nuclear weapons. And Iran is not far behind.

Robert Oppenheimer, on seeing the first US test of a nuclear bomb in the New Mexican desert was reported to have quoted from the Bhagavad Gita:

If the radiance of a thousand suns

were to burst into the sky,

that would be like

the splendor of the Mighty One—

I am become Death, the shatterer of Worlds.

Oppenheimer advocated that no individual nation should hold the power of the atom but that it was necessary for an international body to serve as the sole authority for the management and use of nuclear resources. The United Nations was never given a clear mandate to serve as this authority, but it is clear that the limited role it has played in this effort has failed. We have been on a continued path toward nuclear proliferation, and now the rate of such proliferation is increasing. The ‘war on terror’ and the war in Iraq have been distractions that have taken our eye “off the ball,” have led to a misguided use of resources and have blinded us to seeing who are our friends and allies and how best we could secure the safety and future of our people and the people’s of the world.