Mouse in Dreamland

[The following is from the preface of one of my several unpublished (and unpublishable) books. I was reminded of it by a dissertation on the wonders of modern pharmacology in another blog (click on my Fairhope Lady link). I make no claim that life is not in fact as we dream it rather than as we live it, but I do claim that at this moment I do not believe I am dreaming.]

“If there were a bird who first wanted to exam­ine the size of the sky, or a fish who first wanted to exam­ine the extent of the water—and then try to fly or to swim, they will never find their own ways in the sky or the water.”[1]

Before taking his rib for use in the manufacture of the first woman, God caused a “great sleep” to fall over Adam. The Bible contains no report of Adam’s waking up.[2] Work­ing the same side of the same street, Mark Twain wrote a long, bad story from the viewpoint of a man dream­ing. He claimed he was making the point that what we call life may be a dream and our dreams the true reality. The notion catches the fancy.

By inclination unwilling and by nature unable to deal with the prob­ably impossible, I turn my back on these vaporous diversions. Adam waked up and even though some living things sometimes dream when they sleep, life and the world are pretty much as they appear to be. How do I know that’s so? I don’t, but I’m aim­ing the words in this book at awake (or dreaming) people just like me. If they read it while awake (or sleeping) and understand what I’ve writ­ten, then awake or asleep, I’ve succeeded. To wonder wheth­er we are asleep and dreaming when we think we are awake and think­ing would be to commit the error of Dogen’s bird and fish. Such ques­tions may titillate us or distract us or cast us into pleasant thralls of doubt, but they won’t help us to find our way.

But it has been argued that “from this sleep called life we awaken in death,” that “living is not our ultimate purpose,” that “life is the lar­val stage of existence.” No analysis of assertions like these can shed light on their truth value, for they have none. They may be true, but if so, we must await the end of life in order to know it. The same goes for their falsehood; it cannot be known this side of the grave (and certainly not thereafter). Any system of belief that makes of life some­thing whol­ly other to what it seems, is of a kind with systems that claim we are asleep when awake. They suggest differ­ences the living will never see.

[1] From the Zen Master Dogen (13th Century), his Shobogenzo, quoted in Alan W. Watts, The Way of Zen.

[2] This is not an original thought. I think I read it in something by the clever writer, Robert Anton Wilson. But maybe it wasn't Wilson. Could have been Robert Persig or Goethe . . . or Tom Clancy.

The Tale of the Marooned Mouse

The Gods of San Diego cherish my company. My last two visits both ended the same way, with my flight home cancelled. Had matters proceeded as intended I would have scurried home Sunday evening, but as reality set in -- by order of the aforementioned Gods -- I did not get home to greater downtown Criglersville until nearly 5 AM this morning. I have attempted to supress the details of the journey, but will mention (for my Republican friends) that I could have gotten home earlier by flying from San Diego to Boston and thence to (N.B.) "Reagan National Airport." My real reason for not taking that route had to do with milady's dislike of driving the Washington beltway, but for publication, I will invent the claim that I do not trust anything related to the "Great Communicator." My lie breaks down, though, when I mention that the airport I did fly to was named for the infamous cold-warrior, the inventor of "brinksmanship," John Foster Dulles, another Republican. Compound the contradiction with the hours delay out of Dallas/Fort Worth, and you see just how vindictive the San Diego Gods can be when their plans are foiled.

But all was not so gloom-filled as I could make this seem. After my daughter returned to the airport to gather me for another day's visit, we all went out to dinner at a pleasantly raucous Italian restaurant, where we were entertained by my granddaughter's improvised comedic talent. Her spiel revolved around her ambition to be the first female pope, after which she would defrock all male priests who were not handsome and well-built, change the pope's wardrobe, and have a kidney-shaped pool (with diving board) installed in the Vatican. When one of her alter-egos reminded her that to be pope one must first be a Catholic, she seemed surprised but quickly adjusted by falling back on the pope's imagined infallibility. I was never quite clear how that would work but I think it had something to do with a retroactive anullment of the requirement. I could not hear much of the rest. Blame it on encroaching deafness . . . or maybe I just made the whole thing up. (That's my disclaimer in case I have inadvertently ascribed more heresy to her routine than she put in it.)

The folks in San Diego are locally political, and very much so. Seems the unions representing the state's employees (garbagemen, firemen, school teachers, and other necessaries) have obtained a level of power denied their counterparts in other areas of the country. The San Diego treasury has been literally bankrupted. My daughter swears the unionized civil servants now make more in retirement than they did while working. Her attidude toward the unions and their clientele, which was never pacific, got a boost of rancor last Friday. I went with her to the high school to take along a form authorizing the school to send my grandson's grades to the college he will attend this fall. As soon as we entered the office, the civil servant tending the desk scowled, as if to say, "Why are you bothering me?" She then attempted to find a reason why she could not accept the form -- "It's not dated" (date was added); "The student's name is mispelled" (it wasn't, but his name in their records was); "There's a $2.00 fee" (daughter paid it) -- before finally agreeing to accept it. (The totally distracted clerk promptly deposited the form among a miscellany of other papers, where I am convinced it will remain forever).

I'm beginning to understand what Tip O'Neill meant when he said, "All politics is local." He didn't mean that wars fought overseas are not in some sense related to politics, but that the issues that matter most to the voters are those close to home.

Well, it's time for my midday nap. With any luck I'll wakeup tomorrow.

Mouse Taking a Break

[I will be privileged this afternoon to fly away to San Diego to witness the commencement of my youngest grandchild as he leaves high school and proceeds to a higher calling. I don't have time to think through a real blog so I'll just post a quotation from Spinoza's Treatise on Theology and Politics. These are the first two paragraphs from the Intoduction.]

Men would never be superstitious if they could govern all their circumstances by set rules, or if they were always favored by fortune; but being frequently driven into straits where rules are useless. and being kept fluctuating pitiably between hope and fear by the uncertainty of fortune's greedily coveted favors, they are consequently, for the most part, very prone to credulity. The human mind is readily swayed this way or that in times of doubt, especially when hope and fear are strugging for the mastery, though usually it is boastful, over-confident, and vain.

This is a fact I suppose everyone knows, though few, I believe, know their own nature. No one can have lived in the world without observing that most people, when in prosperity, are so over-brimming with wisdom (however inexperienced they may be), that they take every offer of advice as an insult, whereas in adversity they know not where to turn but beg and pray for counsel from every passer-by. No plan is then too futile, too absurd, or too fatuous for their adoption; the most frivolous causes will raise them to hope, or plunge them into despair. If anything happens during their fright which reminds them of some past good or ill, they think it portends a happy or unhappy issue, and therefore (though it may have proved abortive a hundred times before) style it a lucky or unlucky omen. Anything which excites their astonishment, they believe to be a portent signifying the anger of the gods or of the Supreme Being, and mistaking superstition for religion, account it impious not to [seek] to avert the evil with prayer and sacrifice. Signs and wonders of this sort they conjure up perpetually, till one might think Nature as mad as themselves, they interpret her so fantastically.

[Okay. With these ominous -- and no doubt true -- words in mind, I will be crossing my fingers and toes, carrying a rabbit's foot and a four-leaf clover, and beseeching the God of Spinoza to make sure that the pilot's time does not come before mine is due. I beg you to pray for the same fortuitous outcome to today's and next Sunday's challenge, to the end that the struggle between the law of gravity and the laws of aerodynamics will be settled in the latter's favor. Amen.]

Mouse, Moses, and Messiah

Acknowledgements. The ideas expressed in the following blog were first formulated by Baruch Spinoza in his Treatise on Theology and Politics. To the extent the ideas effectively express the truth, the credit is his. The interpretations and phrasings are of course mine. The reader must, however, take full credit or blame for any discomfort the ideas may produce, since the source of any discomfort produced by ideas is always in the guts of the beholder.

When Moses descended from the mountain bearing the Ten Commandments, he immediately set forth, with authority from on high, to found the Hebrew state. The nation he created was a theocracy. It obtained its authenticity, its direction, and its laws from God. It may be endlessly debated whether the conception of God as a human-like being, created in the first five books of the Bible, is accurate in every respect, but the question is, in any case, moot. The Hebrew people believed what Moses told them. The Hebrew state thus acknowledged the God of Abraham as its God, and obedience to His laws as the obligation of every citizen.

Even a cursory reading of the Torah (especially Leviticus and Numbers) will show that the Mosaic Law consists of many more regulations than the mere ten Moses brought down from the mountain. There are laws governing most of the major relationships between the Hebrew state and its people. Over the centuries the laws listed in the Torah were interpreted and expanded, with the result that by the time Jesus of Nazareth was born, laws and rules existed covering virtually every aspect of Hebrew life.

In a word, the Hebrew state was founded on the notion that its people must be obedient to the law, and because the laws – even those dealing with highly personal matters – were logically derived from interpretations of what were presumed to be God’s laws, to the Hebrew people, disobedience was unthinkable.

But – note well – like any set of laws enforced by any nation, the laws of the Hebrew state demanded observable obedience, behavior that could be seen and heard by one’s fellow Hebrews and the minions of the law. The requirement is typical that heresy (and other violations) could not be prosecuted without the testimony of two reliable witnesses. The Mosaic Law was a just law, and justice was defined as overt conformity to the letter of the law.

Certain of the songs and prayers in the book of Psalms suggest that the Hebrew people were aware of the inner state of their being, but for the most part, those sensibilities represented devotionals to the power and authority of God, and thus to the Mosaic Law. Psalm 23, “The Lord is my shepherd, etc,” identifies the Psalmist as a sheep, who will prosper only if he is completely obedient to God (i.e., the law). The “rod and … staff,” by which the shepherd chastises the herd to keep it together, were seen as comforts. The Psalmist appeared, in that song, to be steeling himself against the strictures and discomforts of the law. The final line – “Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever” – can be understood as his resignation to the will and law of God, however contrary the actualities of the Hebrew nation may appear. The lion’s den and fiery furnace of Daniel can also be understood as encouragements designed to assure the Hebrew people that, despite their obvious tribulations, God will rescue them.

The entire Old Testament appears to be a history of the Hebrew people and their attempts to survive as a theocratic nation. Its repeated failures are invariably interpreted as a backsliding from the law, either by the people or their rulers.

Modern Christian apologists, who argue that Jesus of Nazareth was not a “nation builder,” are essentially correct, but they miss the point entirely if they do not see that he was, in fact, a nation destroyer. Jesus may be correctly interpreted as having said that “the Kingdom of God is not of this earth,” but it would be false to assume that he meant by those words that the kingdom of God was up in the sky somewhere. It was to be here on the earth, but not of the earth. Jesus seems to have intended to locate the law of God, not in an earthly state, but in the hearts and minds of the people. The Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5 through 7) clearly makes the case that the outward observance of the law is not good enough, but rather the inward ownership of the law as one’s own. The Beatitudes cannot mean that the government bestows blessedness on the meek, the peacemakers, the poor, the mournful, the merciful, and the persecuted. Blessedness is a state of being, a self-acknowledged quality, known – and knowable – only to the person so blessed. Jesus re-centered God’s law. He removed it from the state and placed it squarely on the people themselves.

And, of course, that’s where it had always resided. The Hebrew nation had failed, and states will always fail, when the law appears as an imposition and not as a self-willed ordinance freely adopted by the people. Laws that cannot be explained and understood by reasoning people, laws that seem designed to perpetuate the state rather than its subjects, can never be wholly owned by the people who must – when all is said and done – enforce the laws upon themselves.

Jesus pulled no punches about the difficulty of his gospel. It may be “good news” to righteous people to be told that they are on target, but to those focused on maintaining the integrity of a particular theocratic nation, or to those temperamentally in need of external force to keep them “righteous,” it is certainly not good news to be told that the kingdom of God is nowhere but in themselves.

It was certainly not good news to the Hebrew people to be told that they no longer needed a nation of their own, but could abide in blessedness wherever fortune placed them. Throughout their history, they had seen themselves as a people apart, bearers of God’s message to the world. Now they were being told that the message was not so much a message as a way of relating to God. The God preached by Jesus of Nazareth was not a God speaking to a nation, but was a God speaking directly to the hearts and minds of individual people. His oft repeated quip, “Render unto Caesar those things that are Caesar’s and unto God those things that are God’s,” can be understood (perhaps can be only understood) as a rebellion against theocracy. A man’s relationship to God is private, not subject to the laws of any nation, and no nation obtains its authority and integrity except by the willing commitment of a free and righteous people. We observe the law because we choose to do so, not because we are forced. We are the authority that gives the nation its power.

And therein lies happiness, or blessedness. The free man – which we all are, existentially and without question – is not a slave to the law. He is the owner of the law. If we render to Caesar, it is because we see in our government a means that promotes and enhances our blessedness. If Caesar wants our obedience, then Caesar must recognize our supremacy. When he fails to do so, when he values himself or the state above the people, then Caesar forfeits any expectation of our loyalty. He becomes “chaff,” to be plowed under. He becomes merely another of the errors we the people have made when we have failed to recognize and accept our God-given responsibility. That’s the “good news,” you see: Jesus and his spokesman, the Apostle Paul, were telling us, “You’re in charge. It’s your responsibility to learn God’s will and to implement it. Otherwise, there shall never be a Kingdom of God.”

Yes, happiness is a “warm puppy,” but the warmth emanates inside ourselves. We are the “artists” who create beauty. If there be such as blessedness, we are its creators. God is simply, and only, that which has made blessedness possible.

Absence of Mendacity

Responding to CE’s & Robin’s birthday greetings to each other, I realized that I may indeed live to be 100, and that the world may indeed be a better place by then. What a strange vision! – me and my childhood friends, centenarians all, gathered around a huge birthday cake, all blowing together (vainly?) to extinguish 100 candles.

When the strangeness wore off, and reality crept back into the picture, the notion struck me that the birthday scene itself would not be nearly so strange as a world that has, in fact, become a better place. And on the heals (sic) of that not altogether pleasing realization came an idea of Spinoza’s, one that has stood me (and many, many others) in good stead. He believed that individuals would do themselves a favor if they would, in their minds, form an image of the person they would like to be. This image necessarily must be formed around a knowledge of what we understand as good for us and must avoid anything which we feel is not good for us. But given that we can with little success know ourselves well enough to know in all cases what is good for us, even less know what changes the future may cause us and our world to undergo, the formation of an image, or model, can only be partly effective. Nevertheless, we are better guided by a longer view of the good than by those immediate impulses and passions that would rule us if we possessed no model of the longer view.

This idea of Spinoza’s has been seen to apply in the very narrowest of cases, taking the form of certain biofeedback therapies. We can, for instance, cause autonomic processes like blood pressure to tend toward a desired level simply by focusing our attention on the goal and obtaining a real-time feedback of the progress being made. That was the essence of the weight control program I blogged in March (I think it was). By visibly recording a desired weight, and frequently recording progress, we can lose (or gain) weight without knowing the means our bodies have used to bring about the desired weight.

Taking a slightly broader view, we see that groups in which the members are conscious of their interdependencies function more effectively than those in which general distrust and envy prevail. Admittedly, the proclivity of many modern people – I cannot speak for the ancients – are such that fear of others is more prevalent than trust, but I have seen many cases in which groups were able to overcome their fears. I recall that I caused to be posted on the walls of the people I worked with this simple axiom: You can work miracles if you forget about who gets the credit. Sometimes they followed that advice and sometimes they didn’t, but I distinctly recall that the “miracles” we were occasionally able to achieve came about when the groups we were working with, and whose objections we had to overcome, were somehow led to accept our ideas as theirs. The analogy is a strong one, of the body’s unconscious response to “biofeedback” and our customers’ adoption of the goals we had preconceived.

Question: How might that analogy be extended to the entire world to make it a better place? And what model would we envision if the means were available to set up a “biofeedback”?

Just to get the answers started – you understand, I intend the answers to come from my fellow bloggers – how about we envision a world in which economic interdependence becomes the rule rather than the mercantilist goal of self-sufficiency that has ruled the hearts and minds ever since world commerce became possible. The great economist David Ricardo formulated an economic law demonstrating that more goods would be produced, at lighter expense, if every economic entity produced only that good which it could produce best, even if it could produce all goods more efficiently than anyone else. Ricardo’s Law of Efficiency (my name for it) doesn’t seem intuitively correct. I remember being dumbfounded as a freshman when the arithmetic was worked out proving that Ricardo was right. It just didn’t seem possible that our nation would be better off economically if we imported some things we could manufacture cheaper. (It still doesn’t sound right, but I know it is.) The difficulty with implementing such a policy has more to do with our fear of others than with the law’s negative appeal to intuition.

But think about it: Aren’t we less likely to destroy by war the productive capacity of nations who export necessities to us than we would be if we did not depend on them? . . . .

Hmmmm. I don’t like the answer to that one that came up for me. We’re right now making threatening gestures toward Iran, and have already antagonized Venezuela with warlike noises, when we – directly in the case of Venezuela – depend on them for a necessity, oil? Well, Ricardo, like most economists, must have assumed that economic entities behave rationally. Maybe that’s the problem, maybe that’s the image we ought to somehow create as our model – an image of all people being ruled by reason rather than by fear.

I’ll have to think about that one. I cannot conceive of a way to make that happen.

But then, I don’t know how that biofeedback stuff works either, not at any level. Is it possible that the human body is itself a rational entity? That it works fairly well without conscious input? Maybe, but there were those goals we envisioned, our ideal blood pressure, our perfect weight. Maybe Ricardo’s law fits as one of those. Wouldn’t that be something?

Why Mice Sometimes Fail to Communicate

Several decades ago I was invited to develop and teach a course to some of my peers in the infrastructure of the corporation that hired all of us. I’ve lost the outline and all the notes I prepared for that course, but I do recall one thing, a little test I wrote and used to open the course. Well, no, I don’t remember all the questions, but they weren’t as important as the lesson taught by the test results.

As such thing go, the questions were difficult, not so much individually as collectively. They were what has come to be called “trivia,” but crossed many different areas of human knowledge, so many, in fact, that it would have been miraculous if any one person answered them all correctly. There were 20 questions, each of which could be answered in one or two words. They were questions dealing with matters of fact, things like Voltaire’s real name, Babe Ruth’s birthplace, and the capital city of Estonia.

I instructed the pupils to nunber the questions, and to mark an X by the number of any question they could not answer with absolute assurance that they were right. Then I asked the questions.

After all the questions were read and answered I asked the pupils to pass their papers to anyone other than the person sitting on either side of them so they could be graded. After that was done, I told the group to circle the number of any question that was answered incorrectly with anything other than an X, and to underline the number of any question that was not correctly answered but was marked with an X. The correct answers were to be left unmarked in any way.

After all the correct answers were read, and all the marks applied (presumably correctly), I asked the people making the marks to pass the papers to anyone other than the person who gave them the paper. This instruction resulted in a bit of a hubbub, since many of the markers did not recall who had given them the paper, but eventually that part of the exercise was completed.

I then proceeded to read the answers again, asking the persons holding the test papers to raise their hands if the answer on the paper was correct. Note well: at least one hand was raised for every question; someone in the room had known the answer to every question. I then asked anyone holding a paper that had all the answers right to raise their hand. No hands were raised. I then asked for a show of hands for any who had 19 right. (No hands.) Then 18, 17, 16, and finally 15, at which time three or four hands were raised.

I then asked if any questions on the paper were answered incorrectly with something other than an X. Almost half the hands were raised. We could have spent that entire first session on that mistake alone, people wrongly believing they knew the answer, but the lesson derived from that part of the test sank in fairly easily. It was obvious to all that we might occasionally believe very strongly that we know a fact, and still be wrong.

The part of the lesson that provided the most value to the group was the fact that the collective knowledge of the group was much greater than the individual knowledge of any one member. The course was to be about the reason why, in real life situations, we often are unable to realize the full value of the collective knowledge we had just demonstrated. The remainder of the entire course involved the students in suggesting answers to that problem and working out among themselves those suggestions that seemed more nearly on target.

I must confess that while preparing the course materials I had not been caused to see as clearly as I did after the course that there is a major difference between the sorts of knowing measured by the test questions and the kinds of knowing that create true barriers to human communication. It is one thing to know that Voltaire’s name was François Arouet, and quite another to agree that Voltaire’s opinions were correct. If I had, for example, asked people to answer “yes” or “no” whether they agreed with Voltaire’s opinion that Pope Julius II was a war criminal, no matter which answer was given, it would be correct. Those who agreed with Voltaire would truthfully answer “yes,” and the others would answer, just as truthfully, “no.” Consequently, any communication on religious matters between those answering differently might be expected to be strewn with difficulties.

Concrete evidence would hardly resolve the problem. Julius II was certainly a warrior pope, but it could be argued (by the “no” voters) that some wars are righteous wars, or that even if the war was not a just war, that fact alone would not make the pope a criminal. Taken far enough, the disagreement might metastasize to include the equally argumentative definitions of “war criminal, ”just war,” and any other ambiguous word or phrase that might have crept into the discussion. Matters of opinion give birth to increasingly tangled webs of meaning.

Last month, I blogged about the different meaning a Bedouin and an American might place on the word “freedom.” The Bedouin might think it stands for nothing more than the freedom to roam the desert without political inhibition of any sort. The American might think it’s nothing less than the freedom to have a voice in deciding the laws that will, in fact, inhibit individual freedom. The difference between the Bedouin and American definitions may not be quite night and day, but is significant enough to justify questioning whether an American ought to be trying to export “freedom” to people of Bedouin (or other foreign) persuasion. We and they may have vastly different understandings of what the word means.

The more I think about that problem the more convinced I become that bringing the world together into an enduring peace will take more than mere generations. It’s going to take something like a “second coming,” a new sort of messianic transformation of the way we understand the workings of the human mind. I don’t think it’s possible that all forms of knowing can ever become of the trivia sort, unquestionable matters of fact. The human mind doesn’t work like that. We’re individually geared to seek our own best interest, and a large part of that seeking involves forming and defending individual opinions about what is good for us and what is not. So far, no one has prescribed anything that comes close to satisfying a universally acknowledged set of principles to satisfy the needs of all people. The golden rule seemed like a good idea at the time, but it doesn’t take much imagination to see that the “others” may not want done to them what we may want down to ourselves.

Perhaps, the answer lies, not so much in knowing as in the method by which we come to know. We have, in the past, put more reliance on the method called “revelation” than upon the one called “reason.” I’m not altogether sure that reason is the answer, but we’ve got enough experience with revelation – three or four millennia – to conclude fairly well that it’s not.

But then, those who put their faith in revelation will insist that it has never been given a fair chance. Could be, but then neither has reason. Want proof? Look around.

Mouse on Moral Dilemma

My previous blog – an allegory of the immigration problem – elicited responses that ran from left to right across what may not be the entire range of opinions, but comes close enough. There was, in any case, a high road, a low road, and a middle road. A young man from Sweden (he’s only in his 60s) took what I see as the high road, a belief that we owe to all people the same consideration we might give to, say, our own children. A truly young lady from Virginia (she’s 21) took the low road, strict enforcement of the laws of the land, and strong punishment for those who violate them. A school teacher from New Jersey took what seems to me to be the middle road; he agreed with the young lady that the laws ought to be enforced, but seemed torn between his Christian faith – which would point to the high road – and his desire to remain a law abiding citizen.

I may be fudging their opinions a bit just to fit them more neatly into the mold cast by the blog’s original writer, a Presbyterian minister, Rev. John D. Storey. Rev. Storey saw that the problem presents a moral dilemma. His title for the piece asked a question that he never answered: How should we respond to an invasion of personal space? True, in his last paragraph, he tentatively makes the point that “immigrants” are people too, finally taking an even bolder move to the left than even the young man from Sweden, suggesting that “perhaps we do not own the road,” by which he meant that piece of the earth we call our nation.

Rev. Storey’s question could easily be answered if the only force driving human action were a commitment to keep the law of the land at all costs. Round up the immigrants and ship them home. But he would not have asked the question had he not felt something of the same urge felt by the man from Sweden and the teacher from New Jersey. Rev. Storey asked the question because he recognized in himself a conflict that could not be resolved without one or the other of the two drives being sacrificed to the other. And that’s what the word “dilemma” means: torn between two premises, or (in this case) between two moral imperatives.

After a few initial sorties (in which the use of an allegory was called into question – and finally laid to rest) the commenters came together around a suggested solution proposed by the man from Sweden. The proposal centered upon one point in which all seemed to agree, that the real criminals in this case were those employers who have knowingly hired the illegal immigrants and, often, paid them under the table, withholding no taxes. The failure of the illegal immigrants to pay taxes is the one big burr sticking in the craw of the people in the areas with high concentrations of illegals (my daughter for one). The hospitals, schools, and other social services in those areas still serve the illegals, setting up a situation that flies in the face of what I suppose everyone would consider justice. This is “representaion without taxation.”

The point has not gone unnoticed that for employers to withhold taxes from people without credentials of any kind (Social Security numbers in this case) would have been out-and-out theft, since the monies could not have been paid into non-existent tax accounts. If we can judge from the discussions in the Congress and in the press, no current laws specifically prohibit hiring illegal immigrants, but there are laws that require employers to withhold taxes from their employees. But even this law has a loop hole. If the employee is a self employed contractor, and has signed a paper to that effect, the employer is not required to withhold taxes. I would not be surprised that the majority of the firms that consciously hire illegals know all about that loop hole. I have seen in Arizona Mexican workers brought to and from work sites in large busses. When I asked who owned the busses, the answer I got (soto voce) was “private contractors.” The farmers actually paying the wages were, thus, dealing with a company, not individual laborers. The companies furnishing the laborers are no doubt well aware of the loop hole in the law, and no doubt have required all their workers to sign the paper. So, what we have here – at least in the far southwest – are companies operating large scale “employment agencies” trafficing in illegal labor. I do not know this for sure, but those companies are probably breaking both the law and the moral code: they earn their revenues from taking a slice of the wages paid to the laborers they illegally sell to farmers.

But those practices – and the proposed solution – do not remove the moral dilemma. Even if those who knowingly hire illegals are prosecuted, and even if the illegals thus identified were sanctioned, the troublesome questions raised by the Christian ethic would remain. This is the Neuremburg dilemma all over again. The governemt is legally bound to enforce the laws of the land, but the citizenry is morally, and just as strongly bound, to obey the law only when the law does not present a clear abrogation of personal conscience. Perhaps this case is not so clearly visible as was the case in Germany, but then, the moral dilemma is perhaps more visible. It is probably true, that many Germans were unaware of the genocidal crimes being committed in their name, though they certainly were aware of the public restrictions and persecutions of Jews. The question of whether they should have rebelled against those overt atrocities applies in the case at hand. Was I, for instance, after learning of the way laborers in Arizona were being peddled, obliged to do something about it. I think I was so obliged, and it is apparent to me now, that if I and hundreds like me had taken action when we first became aware of the problem, today the nation may already be well on the way to a sane and morally consistent policy.

In short, moral law does not rest upon the shoulders of government. It lays heavily upon the backs of individual people. As Machiavelli opined, the government is obliged to take immoral action when necessary to protect the state, but the people – especially in a republic – are charged with holding themselves and their government morally accountable for their acts. We should not be too surprised that the current occupant of the White House seeks some sort of amnesty for illegal immigrants. He is charged with the political problem of seeing that the laws of the land are bent where necessary to accommodate the economic needs of a large segment of the economy. That’s his job, and like the proverbial blind squirrel, he has probably found an acorn this time. But his ambivalence to the law does not and cannot relieve the people of their awareness of the moral dilemma.

Perhaps that’s what a great man meant (I forget who) when he said that the test of maturity lies in our ability to function as human beings while holding contradictory ideas. And perhaps it is the tension created by that holding that leads us ever and always to feel the need for “something better.” For a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a Heaven for. (Robert Browning.) We live on that same darkling plain where Matthew Arnold’s ignorant armies clashed by night. And we are never, ever to be relieved of the urge to seek the right, without knowing for sure what is the right. Moral dilemma is the human condition.

Of Mice and "Worms"

[The following story appeared in the most recent issue of “The Madison Eagle,” our local newspaper. It was written by Reverend John D. Storey. I trust some of you will enjoy the story and learn as much from it as I have. The rest can disagree with Rev. Storey’s approach to and understanding of the “worm” problem. I’m sure he won’t mind.]

How should we respond to an invasion of personal space?

Recently, on early morning walks, I have noticed something strange. There have been countless earthworms struggling to find their way off the pavement.

Now, I know that worms often leave their habitat during heavy rain and end up washed onto parking lots and sidewalks, but these sightings occur when there has been no rain. Maybe these wrigglies are disoriented; maybe they are participating in some ancient spring mating rite; maybe they are responding to overpopulation and are following some pioneer worm seeking new and greener pastures; maybe the economy of their roadside patch has worsened; maybe they are trying to join family that have already made the journey.

Or maybe they are simply following the example of the proverbial chicken.

No matter their motivation, the end result is that many do not complete their journey before the morning sun dries the dew, with the result that they end up stuck on the road – literally! And here is where I face a dilemma of values. What should I do about this invasion of my space?

The worms offend my sense of aesthetics, as well as my desire to walk the earth without treading on other beings. I find myself torn between irritation at having to step over or around them and my inner impulse to compassion.

Is there some way I can help these little ones? Would they appreciate it if I tried?

Perhaps I could build a security fence along the road with no trespassing signs attached (for their own good, you understand). But, of course, they probably don’t read English, and they would just tunnel under the fence anyway.

Or, I could transport the worms back into the ditch so that at least a few could survive. But I’ve decided this won’t work either, as the worms will probably just start their migration over again. Could I mark each one in some manner so that I could check their legitimate right to be on the road after having been deported to their proper place?

Another approach has occurred to me: Worms are well known to be hard workers who ask for little compensation; perhaps I could just take them all home and give them jobs as gardeners. Surely I wouldn’t have to withhold payroll taxes or workers’ comp – after all it would be an underground economy.

I don’t expect I’ll do any of the above. I’ll probably just continue walking around their struggles and complaining about how crowded the road is getting, what with bugs and birds and fox and deer and possums. Eventually I won’t notice the worms anymore and they will continue to do what the worms of the world have always done – create the very ground we walk upon from what the rest of nature casts off.

And maybe that’s all I can learn from this: That perhaps from God’s perspective, worms are people too; that perhaps, from God’s perspective, worms are as valuable as I am; that perhaps I don’t own the road after all.

Mouse and a Moment Shared

Last evening milady and I attended a potluck hosted by two local Christian Churches to honor and serve a small group of protest-marching men and women who’re on their way to the seat of our government to announce their opposition to the People’s Republic of China’s – the PRC’s – invasion and continuing captivity of Tibet. It wasn’t that either of us were involved in the cause. True, milady and several of her lady friends had gone to Washington a couple of months ago to listen to a talk given by the Dalai Lama, but her interest was more in the man and his views than in the nation from which he lives in exile. Tibet was as far from our thoughts as the nation itself is from greater downtown Criglersville, VA, about 12.000 miles.

The dinner was held in the common room of the Madison Presbyterian Church. The marchers will spend the night in the parish house of the Piedmont Episcopal Church, and the prayer before the meal was offered up by the minister of the Hebron Lutheran Church. In his introductory remarks, Reverend Brad Jackson, the Episcopalian, observed the ecumenical persuasions of the gathering, going so far as to point out the Mouse and his lady as Unitarian Universalists, adding even greater breadth to the irony already apparent. Here we were, a diverse assemblage of Christians and “agnostic” Unitarians, in what must be one of the most religiously conservative counties in the state of Virginia, paying our respects to a group of Buddhists who were fighting for what is probably a lost cause. What could possibly have led to such an improbable gathering?

Perhaps it was nothing more mysterious – or less mysterious – than the “milk of human kindness.” The marchers were strangers, “and ye took them in,” they were hungry, “and ye fed them.” Perhaps Reverend Jackson and the Presbyterian Reverend John Storey who had organized the meal and the shelter were motivated by their calling to “do unto others as ye would have them to do unto you.” I know them both as men of unusual conviction, Christians who have not permitted the dogmatic details of their beliefs to get in the way of their humanity. Milady and I were there because Brad Jackson had asked the members of the Wednesday morning study group (which is also held in the Episcopal parish house) to assist with the food. We’re generally pretty good marks for that sort of thing.

In any case, we were there. The proceedings began with a few short talks, Reverend Jackson’s followed by two of the marchers. One was Dr. Larry Gerstein, an anthropologist on the faculty of Ball State University in Indiana, the other a young photographer, Douglas Herman, who had spent time in Tibet and had put together a short video portraying the scenery and people of Tibet, as well as some of the prior marches. [There have been many, west coast and east coast, thousands of miles of protest, peacefully, uneventfully, and – consequently – ineffectively marched.] Gerstein and Herman were two of the four westerners who were on the march. The other fifteen were all Tibetans, none of whom were now living in their native land. They had come from Hawaii, five or six different stateside states, and a couple of foreign countries. One was 71 years old, but most in their mid-years. This was their second rest stop since they had left Charlottesville, 30 miles south. They have another eight days to march the remaining 100 miles or so to Washington.

Dr. Gerstein spoke mostly of the current plight of the Tibetans, particularly of the young Panchen Lama who has been held incommunicado by the PRC for eleven years. Gerstein said one thing that struck home with me, that the Chinese ruling the PRC think in much larger time frames than we democratic westerners. We cannot plan 200 years out, as Gerstein claimed the Chinese are, primarily because our form of government focuses our leaders on the more immediate concerns, that even if we could conceive such a plan, the turnover in our leadership would practically assure that the plan would be impermanent.

Later, in table talk with Mr. Herman, I was reminded of the Chinese inhabitants of Hawaii depicted in James Michener’s book of that name. They endured four or five generations of living hand-to-mouth, while silently socking away a fortune with which they eventually purchased large chunks of prime real estate. Milady added that only a self-sacrificing people, willing to defer the satisfaction of their desires could conceive and implement such plans.

Mr. Herman and I had a brief discussion after the dinner. I tried not to reveal aloud to him my deeply held foreboding for the future of Tibet, but I feel certain, perceptive man that he seemed to be, that he understood. I do recall that he and I agreed that causes of the noble variety, causes like his, do not play well on the American stage. Why this is so traces directly to the difference between America’s consumerist, impulse driven, please-me-now mentality, and the Chinese focus on distant goals. Only later did the thought occur to me that there are some permanent and unending goals – more principles than goals – that could possibly be implemented in a democratic regime such as ours without fear they would be obscured by political changes.

Those goals have to do with what was in the hearts and minds of the people gathered there at the potluck. Not just the marchers, but those too who had come to honor them … and yes, by people everywhere. Some ideas of the highest good exist universally, though they’re too often hidden by mistaken notions of the good. We get confused by delusions of passive joy, by things loved , by places loved, even by people loved. They all give us joy, and in some cases the joy is so intense we lose any sight we may have had of the ties that bind us all as one people, on one small planet.

Once, our nation existed – perhaps only in the hearts of a few gifted men – as the embodiment of that greater ideal. It’s there – not in so many words – in the Constitution – more eloquently and more believably in the Declaration of Independence. I suppose those ideals, those dreams, are still there in the hidden hearts of most of us, the notion that all the people of the world might abide together as friends who honor and serve each other. I can imagine a world of strangers – alien nations we call them – who might see in us the flesh and blood expression of those very ideals, who might be led to see those same dreams as realities in themselves.

Imagine it, yes … that’s the word, imagine, for I cannot in my fallen state, as a man disillusioned by the enslaving loves of immediacy, see that world as a concrete thing. I cannot see the plans and strategies of alienated nations ever being able to bootstrap themselves out of the self-made swamps of their “loving.” I have lost the power to believe in the dream….

If it were not for moments like those we shared last evening with people of our own and different kinds, if it were not for the love that seemed to emerge from their shared concerns … if it were not for the imponderable fact of human kindness ... no hope for a future other than one clouded by the struggles and alarms of ignorant armies would remain. But then …

There is that glimmering light in the eyes of marchers, a light suggesting – at least to one small Mouse – that their march has meaning, even if it fails.

Mouse as Master of His Fate

Today has started out in a bothersome way. Blame it on the microwave machine. I had brewed up a gourmet mixture of oatmeal and water, inserted it into the reactor for the first round of cooking, and set about to gather the makings for the crowning of the masterpiece: two packets of store-brand sweetner and a laudable scoop of a miracle butter substitute they have named Smart Balance. Master chef that I am, and fearful that some hidden component of the invented "buttery spread" might upset the delicate flavors and aromas I had skillfully blended into the porridge, I read the contents message printed (in readable letters, as if they were not ashamed of it) on the side of the "non-hydrogenated" product. You will I am sure permit me to recite for you here the letter and verse of that highly informative message. I am not lying, this is exactly how it reads.

Ingredients: Natural Oil Blend (palm fruit, soybean, canola, and olive oils), water, contains less than 2% of salt, whey (from milk), vegetable monoglycerides and sorbitan ester of fatty acids (emulsifiers), soybean lecithin, potassium sorbate, lactic acid (to protect freshness), natural and artificial flavor, calcium disodium EDTA, vitamin A palmitate, Vitamin B6, Vitamin B12, Vitamin D, Vitamin E (di-a-tocopheryl acetate), beta-carotene color.

5.8:1 ratio of Omega-6 to Omega 3.

Omega-3:400mg/svg. Omega-6:2300mg/svg.

Having been trained beneath the feet of the great chefs of Honduras, I easily understood why "they" had capitalized "Natural Oil Blend" and all but the first of the "V(v)itamins." I would have been somewhat critical of their abreviations, "mg" and "svg" had I not remembered an artical in the Reader's Digest about abreviations approved by agencies of the Federal Government for use on government approved labels. (In addition to being a gourmet cook, I also have a lead-pipe memory.) I wasn't altogether sure whether "mg" meant "milligram" or "microgram" but I was positive that it did not refer to anything other than an internationally approved weight and/or measure. The other abbrev, "svg," is, of course, well known, so no further elaboration is necessary.

I must confess, though, that even though I -- a well-trained master of the culinary art -- knew all there was to know about the ingredients of this healthy and highly successful "buttery spread," the thought occurred to me that a few of the people who purchased it might not be as well-informed. I considered writing a lengthy chemical analysis of each of the named constituents, but thought better of it. Our government surely would not have approved the labeled dissertation had they not been assured that the vast majority of those reading it would be equally as knowledgeable as I. So, rather than run the risk of seeming condescentious and overly didicatious, I forewent that course.

Besides, it wasn't the label, or even the "buttery spread" that caused this day to begin in a bothersome way. It was the damn microwave. I had cleverly set the timer on the machine to turn itself off after exactly one minute. As you might imagine, reading the ingredient list, and gloating (silently to myself) in my superior knowledge of such matters, took more than one minute. No problem. No harm would come to the masterpiece if it sat for a few moments or so while I completed my in depth analysis of possible interactions that might entangalize the delicate flavors and essences of the dish.

But the microwave apparently did not agree. After only ten seconds it let out a demanding beep. At first I thought I was hearing things. No self-respecting machine would beep just for the heck-ot-it, now would it. But ten seconds later (my lead-pipe mind also keeps perfect time) the thing beeped again. I saw it then, as clearly as I had ever seen anything: the makers of this bestial machine had designed it to bug its users, bug them to anger, bug them to distraction ... bug them so completely they would (in a predictable number of cases) go completely berserk, snatch the freakin' thing up by its boney carcass and throw it againt the wall, blasting it to jonesereens.

Of course, being a more deliberative sort, I would never do such a thing, at least not without a touch of delicatious and flavoricious art. Can't you see how much more pleasing it was to the Gods to have taken the thing by its cord (delicately snatched from the wall socket), to have swung it round and round by its tail (as it were), and then slamming it againt the wall. Much more satisfying. Much more of the essence of civilized action. Perhaps a bit untidy, but symbolic nonetheless of man's innate and graceful humanity.

Good for the economy, too. I have to run down to Charlotesville, now, to buy another microwave and get it installed before milady notices the old one's absence. She's not so artistic as I am, so she might not see the beauty in the purposeful acts of a purposeful man, acted out in perfect response to a machine's perfect design.

Mendacious Horror & Beauty

A decade or so ago a friend and I wrote a multi-media piece for delivery to arty folks. She was (is) a photographer. I was a “poet” and a “voice.” A recently deceased other friend put together a music score, and with the lady’s slides, the thing came together as a “happening.”

A comment CE made to the previous blog reminded me of a part of that script. It won’t be quite the same without the pictures and the music, but I’ll start with a description of at least the pictures. They were taken at Arlington Cemetery. Slide one is of a single tombstone, and as the reading proceeds the camera backs off thr0ugh 15 more shots to reveal more and more of the stone scenery. The last few pictures unfold in fairly rapid order, the final scene being what seems a million tombstones. The time is near sunset. I don’t know if the photographer got the effect with a series of filters or whether the blood-red light reflecting and growing deeper in the stones was made by the approaching sunset. Let’s say the latter.

Here’s the poem.

(No title)

Beauty has many faces, some of which
don’t seem beautiful at all
Until an eye, able to see,
Lifts layers of shallow tissue
From the heart of the thing,
Like peeling the grey, crinkly shell from the
Woven chrysalis hiding the Luna Moth.

Beautiful things
Like the bubbling innards of an active volcano
Or the torrents of rain circling
The placid eye of a storm,
Are not beautiful at all
If a thing to be beautiful
Must be beautiful in every way.

And I doubt seriously that a thing of beauty
can be a joy forever
Unless what we mean by a thing of beauty
Is the memory of the thing,
The idea of it,
The embellishable growing thing,
The crowded past,
The mixed-up heaven and hell of our lives,
The apothecary of dreams.

Time comes to meet us
Again and again colliding at the edge
Where the past ends,
The moment we call “now”…
A resurrection happens there
of all that was and is,
A transformation of tattered rags
And glorious banners
Into imagined wonder.

At least two kinds of fools abide:
Those who see no beauty
And those who see no horror.
But the wise who live next door
In the nowhere of the soul,
See the same things twice:
Once for what they are –
Beautiful or horrible –
And once again
To see the horror in beauty
And the beauty in horror.


[A few pages later, the piece ends with these words…]

We were young then,
When the ethic of sacrifice and love
Was carved into the bone of our skulls…
Young and empty,
Unbaptized
By the water flowing
from the wounded sides
of yellow orphans
Squatting in the black rubble of
God’s majestic earth
Sniffling the sweet odor of their mothers’ breast
As it burns.

We did not know except we were told.
We believed the lie, and called it truth.
Praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost
Der Vater, der Sonne, und der Heilige Gheist.
Amen


A kind of end, a kind of beginning.