ISLAMIC RENAISSANCE: This will be the third and last (for now) installation of my comments on Islam in light of the recent controversy (and rioting) over the European cartoons. If it wasn’t apparent from my last two blogs, I believe that Islam is more than a religion; as with Christianity, it has a history of worldly empire. That history is long past, but the memories of its former greatness and power still reverberate amidst its tribes. As with Judaism, Islam is as much a cultural and social identity as a religion. However, over the past 5 centuries or so, the Islamic culture has been in a slump, not unlike the Dark Ages and Middle Ages that the Euro-Christian culture experienced after the fall of Rome in the Fifth and Sixth Century.

I believe that history runs in cycles, and while our Western Christian-based culture has been riding the positive side of the wave since 1500 or so, the Muslim-based culture has been on the down side. Eventually, the Islamic world will start coming up again (and the culture of the West will eventually see a downturn; hopefully it will be a soft landing). At some point, Islam will see a Renaissance, just as our culture did, probably followed by an Enlightenment and maybe even a Reformation.

But until then, they are going to be like our society was between the 6th and 13th Centuries: tied strongly to basic notions of survival, including war, violence, religious prejudice, intolerance, sexuality that is both repressive and crude, etc. To paraphrase Hobbes, their lives are too often nasty, brutish and short. This is, of course, a broad-brush interpretation. Just as during the Middle Ages there were Christian oases of civilization in Byzantium, many Muslims live peacefully as “Renaissance men” and “Renaissance women”. Unfortunately however, in the impoverished lands of Pakistan and Morocco and Iran and Saudi Arabia (remember, the oil wealth stays in the royal family and hardly trickles down to the masses), the average person lives in an older world, without access to art, education and critical thinking.

Take that situation and mix in a cultural memory of former greatness. Then add just enough access to modern media and technology to get a distorted view of Western culture, and provide relatively easy access to powerful weapons thanks to the evolving “one-world economy”. Then add a generous dash of Western addiction to the oil found under Islamic sands, and stir in a strong dose of support for a rival religious culture/state (Israel). Now what do you have? A good recipe for fundamentalism and terrorism, that’s what. Oh, and throw in increasing access to nuclear weapons, and you’ve got a real witches brew.

Some commentators have said that in order to protect ourselves from the Islamic Dark Ages, we need to come to grips with our energy situation and seek to achieve independence from Mideast oil. A few others have hinted that maybe we need to be a bit more equivocal about Israel. And then of course there is the homeland security mentality, i.e. try to wall ourselves off as much as possible from foreigners. Finally, some conservatives suggest that we are just going to have to fight them, sooner or later.

Although I definitely agree that the USA needs to face up to its insane and untenable energy situation, the second and third ideas are non-starters. We can’t walk away from Israel, and we can’t become fortress America; the multi-national corporations wouldn’t let us. And the fourth idea is the worst of all; the crusades with tactical nukes (I’m sure some US military types wish they could have hit Tora Bora with a quarter megaton device).

And then there’s the Bush administration, saying that democracy is the key. Democracy will certainly be a part of the Islamic Renaissance, once it comes. But when you emphasize democracy without enlightenment, you get things like Hamas (in Palestine) and Ahmadinejad (in Iran).

The only way out of this is for the Islamic world to begin its renaissance. But renaissances aren’t easily controllable. They seem to happen only when certain things come together, such as increased trade, better technology, and a critical mass of artists and thinkers who decide that “it doesn’t have to be like this”. America has always been a “can do” nation, but triggering such a macro-historical event within the Muslim lands seems beyond even our great genius. Having US Marines in Baghdad and Falluja doesn’t seem a good way to make it happen.

But then again, we do have one card to play with the Muslim world. We are one of the biggest providers of technical education to their children. A whole lot of kids from Jordan, Tunisia, Indonesia, Kuwait, etc. wind up in our science and engineering schools. Too many of them go back home with our technical skills, the best in the world, but without the wisdom to use them for the betterment of their societies.

It’s ironic how many active terrorists or other anti-westerners were educated in America or Europe, usually in technical schools. And that doesn’t surprise me. I went to an engineering school back in the early 1970s, and they made us take enough liberal-education courses to give us some appreciation for critical thought and social progress. But I’ve heard that the corporate and military establishments have since pressured the tech schools to cut the liberal crap way back. They want computer software analysts and petroleum engineers and weapons designers, not enlightened thinkers who ask questions — so that’s what the universities are now giving them.

We need to change that, especially for the children of the Islamic lands. They are sending us their children, their future, and we let them go without implanting the seeds of open-mindedness and free thinking. We need to REQUIRE that tech students spend a whole lot more time talking philosophy and learning ancient history and modern sociology. (And we need to work with Europe on this, so that the sheiks won’t be able to avoid our cultural learning requirements by sending their kids to pure-tech schools in Brussels or Vienna). We should probably require that foreign students spend FIVE years getting a techie bachelors degree, and encourage them to spend summers in our heartlands, getting to know our peoples and our institutions (they need to learn that America is not what they see on TV).

This obviously wouldn’t change things overnight. It would be a decade or two before the al Qaeda recruiters and the government nuclear programs in Iran and Pakistan noticed that their young geeks were now asking difficult questions. It would be even longer until this new breed would infiltrate the halls of power and have a chance to change things for the better (assuming that they somehow held on to the love of thinking and cultural progress that we tried to plant in them). It might not work. But to be honest, I don’t see any better ideas out there right now.

WAR WITH ISLAM, CONTD. Again, I don’t think it does our nation any good to think of a monolithic “Islam” with which we are fighting a cultural war (an underlying condition that allegedly spills over in to revolution, violence, war and terrorism). But then again, I am a half-assed student of history, so I do think that our present problems with various groups of Muslims who share troublesome political ideals may have roots in the past. Yea, there is certainly the Israel thing. But I’m not ready to take sides on that one right now.

I’d like to avoid getting tripped up on 20th Century Zionist resettlement and go all the way back to the days of Muhammad. Muhammad and his followers found themselves on territory that had once belonged to the Roman Empire and was still ruled by its successor, Christian Byzantium. For better and for worse, the religion of Islam became politicized very quickly (it took Christianity a few centuries, i.e. between Paul and Constantine, to do that). The early Islamic movement became very successful at territorial conquest, and in a few centuries controlled most of the southern and eastern provinces of the Roman Empire.

The eastern part of the Roman Empire was its economic powerhouse. The eastern provinces along the Mediterranean had the trade corridors between Europe and the far east (India and China), and north Africa was its breadbasket. Thus, unlike today when western Europe has more economic power and wealth, the major cities and highest populations were in the east, e.g. Greece, Asia Minor (Turkey), Syria, etc. There was plenty of money to be made by taxing and serving those trade routes, and early Islam did indeed make money off that.

By the 11th Century, when western Europe was locked in the backwardness and isolation of the Middle Ages, the Islamic world (stretching from western Africa to northern India) was a thriving civilization. In many ways it was like the Roman Empire in its prime, say in the second century. There was much trade, much wealth, and much military power. There was also much of the better things such as learning, art and scholarship. The Caliph was known then for its tolerance of the many Jews and Christians still living in its territory; the effort to convert the infidels was put on hold. Islam was also high-tech back then; it used math and astronomy to steer its ships, and picked up on the development of guns. When the last stronghold of the Eastern Roman Empire, Constantinople, was finally taken in 1453, it was the Islamic forces, and not the Europeans, who introduced the cannon.

Over the next five or six centuries, the Christian and Islamic religious empires both fell apart. But the Christianized territories in Europe secularized themselves from within during the Enlightenment. Also, for a variety of cultural, technical and political reasons, things in the former Christian lands generally got better. The Middle Ages came to an end, and trade, wealth and political unification slowly made their way back into Europe, along with culture and learning. In the Islamic lands, things just didn’t go as well. Their luck turned the other way. You can’t say that Europe deserved the revival it experienced, nor that the Islamic lands deserved the contractions that they had encountered. As the book “Germs, Guns and Steel” points out, civilizations rise and fall based on a lot of things that often amount to luck (changes in technology, changes in climate, new diseases, and the rise of a successful or unsuccessful political ideal, e.g. democracy in America versus communism in Russia). Some empire/cultures have a lucky streak (like Rome between the second century BCE and the second century CE, and like America over the past 250 years); but as any gambler can tell you, lucky streaks come to an end. That’s probably a good way to look at what has happened to Islam over the past five or six hundred years, and what could happen to us eventually.

Unfortunately, the ascending European culture was not sensitive to the mentality of its Islamic neighbors to the south and east. During the colonial craze of the 17th to 20th century, when Europeans set up their flags on the soils of Africa, North America, South America and Asia and told the natives “now we run the show here”, France and Britain and even Italy had no qualms about setting up shop in places like Iraq, Syria, Palestine, Tunisia, Libya, etc. To the nations with battleships, these were just another set of weaklings to be exploited for their natural resources. The Euro-powers didn’t ponder whether they may be inflicting deep wounds in the pride of a people who had once conquered the likes of France and Italy’s own Roman ancestors. But even if the West knew that it was “rubbing it in”, then so what? How were these backward nomads and villagers with their camels and bazaars and minarets ever going to hurt the civilized bastions of London and Paris?

(Again, I’m not qualified to say too much about the history of modern Israel. But I can’t help but wonder if Britain and France’s support for Jewish resettlement in Palestine in the early to mid 20th Century was another example of the insensitivity behind colonialization. I’m not saying that the Jews weren’t deserving of a land of their own, nor that they were total strangers to Jerusalem; but there does seem to be a good argument that Muslim Palestinians were often pushed aside unjustly to make room for the Jewish settlers from Europe. The British, who were overseeing Palestine before and after WW2, may well have thought “so what if the natives get bent out of shape? How are they ever going to hurt us? Besides, we have to take care of our own Jewish Problem.” What I’m saying is, European treatment of the natives in all of its colonies was quite bad, but in the Islamic lands it had the effect of “hatching the chickens that are now coming home to roost”.)

My point here is not to say that it’s all our fault that a lot of Muslims are now acting badly in our midst. But it is partially our responsibility (i.e., the responsibility of Europe and America; you can’t separate the two, can’t say that America had no interest in what happened). Thus, I don’t think that it’s helpful to pontificate now about our superior virtues (democracy, tolerance, science, womens rights, rationalism), and their backwardness, as many conservative writers do. The Muslims are currently going through what our culture went through during the Middle Ages; back in those days, when their civilization was peaking, our virtues were inferior to theirs. Not so long ago, we sought to exploit their current lack of luck, i.e. to get access to their oil and to find a place for the Jews that we had mistreated. So here we are today, in a tightly connected world where the natives that we formerly mistreated now have a way to get back at us, e.g. by taking flight school lessons and by obtaining plans for uranium centrifuges from European engineering firms.

It’s nice that in most places, such as India and Africa and Latin America, the children of the natives are mostly willing to forget the colonial days and use their ties with the West to make money. But they don’t have the memories of once being the “empire next door” as the Islamic world does. They don’t have the long history of inter-empire struggles with us such as the Islamic taking of Spain and then its repulsion, the Ottoman expansion and contraction from the Balkans, and the Crusades.

I’m saying that it’s going to take a lot of cultural and historical sensitivity to untangle the mess that we are now in with Islam. And if that means us going first with mea culpas, then so be it. If you accept the comparison between 9-11 and Pearl Harbor, then remember that WW2 ended by going nuclear. Within a few years, the Shiia clerics in Iran will probably have the bomb, and a fundamentalist Sunni regime may well control Pakistan (and thus its nuclear arsenal). The question then is where the first ones will go off: will al Qaeda us
e one in the West, or will Hamas shoot one at Israel, or will the Shiia and Sunni throw them at each other? It’s all bad, unless we start encouraging everyone to admit, yes, I’m partly to blame here. Perhaps we need to set the example, to start the ball rolling.

TA’INT FUNNY, McGEE. I’m the last person who enjoys thinking that we are presently “engaged” with the “Muslim world” in a “clash of civilizations”. But the current brouhaha regarding the European newspaper cartoons satirizing the Prophet over the past 3 months does give me pause. In the past week, people have lost their lives and there has been significant property damage over what appears to be a differing value system and different ways of thinking. But again, this is not to say that every (or even most) Muslims are a part of this value system and way of thinking. And I hope that Muslims don’t think that all non-Muslim Americans/Europeans enjoy such humor. I for one don’t think that the joke about Muhammad halting the parade of terrorists entering heaven because they have run out of virgins is particularly amusing. It certainly is rather insensitive, even if the “virgins in paradise” story is more a part of cultural folklore than a central religious tenant of Islam.

I’ve read articles saying that many Muslims don’t like the freewheeling, “anything goes” forms of popular entertainment available in America and Europe. Personally, I don’t always like them either. Take Howard Stern — I just don’t get his humor. Ever since Andrew Dice Clay, American comedy seems locked into a race to the bottom. The local paper today had an article about a local policeman here in northern New Jersey who moonlights as a comedian. His stage name is “Club Soda Kenny”. Club Soda has been getting increased exposure lately, making it to the Anthony and Opie radio show. But like many other American comedians, he’s working his way up by going low. According to the paper, his routine includes a story about raping a bride on her wedding day, and about his molesting his 5 year old son (hypothetically, I hope).

Yes, I would agree with the ACLU that democracy requires allowing such distasteful ventures even on the part of important civil servants (and I think that police are important civil servants — at least when they live up to it). But I do regard the conservative notion that such continued lack of virtue on the part of those who should be role models for our youth does not do our society much good.

But as to fundamentalist Muslim culture (again, not covering all Muslims, probably not even most Muslims here in the USA), I can’t say that I understand their humor. I’m not sure that we could laugh at the same things. So I did a Google on the subject, and I found a nice-enough looking Islamic-oriented web site that had a discussion on the topic, seemingly meant for non-Islamic types like me. The site goes by the name www.IslamicWisdom.com, although it exists on the talkislam.com site. It doesn’t seem like a jihadist or Wahabbist site. It seems devout but family-oriented.

Anyway, it has a link to an article entitled “The Muslim Has a Sense of Humor”. But when you click the link, you get a “NOT FOUND” message. Hmmmm, is that a meta-joke in itself, or just an irony? Hard to tell. There are also some humorous pictures relating to Islamic culture, which you can send as an e-card. In putting your e-card together, you can select a witty “poem” to add to it. But the wit isn’t entirely innocent. Here is a sample of one of the available poems:

The Inter-Faith Discussion

Rabbi Moishe, Joe Christian and Mullah Nasruddin were having a discussion about who was the most religious.

“I was riding my camel in the middle of the Sahara,” exclaimed Mullah Nasruddin. “Suddenly a fierce sandstorm appeared from nowhere. I truly thought my end had come as I lay next to my camel while we being buried deeper and deeper under the sand. But I did not lose my faith in the Almighty Allah, I prayed and prayed and suddenly all around me, the storm started to die out. Since that day I am a devout Muslim and am now learning to recite the Quran by memory.”

“One day while fishing,” started Joe Christian, “I was in my little dinghy in the middle of the ocean. Suddenly a fierce storm appeared from nowhere. I truly thought my end had come as my little dinghy was tossed up and down in the rough ocean. But I did not lose my faith in Jesus Christ, I prayed and prayed and suddenly the storm started to die out. Since that day I am a devout Christian and am now teaching young children about Him.”

“One day I was walking down the road,” explained Rabbi Moishe, “I was in my most expensive designer outfit in the middle of New York city. Suddenly I saw a black bag on the ground in front . I put my hand inside and found a million dollars in cash. I truly thought my end had come as it was a Saturday and we are not allowed to handle money on Saturdays. But I did not lose my faith in Jehovah, I prayed for what seemed like many hours, and suddenly I realized it was Sunday!”

Look, I don’t mean to be inflammatory here, but that joke seems to exploit a brand of ethno-religious stereotyping just as negative as a drawing of an angry mullah with a burning-fuse turban. The scary thing is that this wasn’t from a rabid anti-Zionist site. The anti-Semitic remark seems fairly off-the-cuff; it probably wasn’t intended to be hurtful. But that’s all the more troublesome. It appears to have come from the subconscious, quietly inherited from ancestors and elders.

I know that there are humorous Muslims, and I can accept that there is true humor in cultural Islam. But as to patience with unsaintly humor, and the ability to see one’s own unsaintliness . . . . perhaps we all need to work on those things.

TREE OF KNOWLEDGE: I recently read an interesting quote from “Baba” Ram Dass, a holdover guru-dude from the Timothy Leary era. Because Baba Dass was into meditation more than drugs, he’s still alive today . . . . unlike many of the other children of the psychedelic 1960’s, i.e. the “turn on, tune in” / “peace, pot, microdot” days. (Being a computerish kind of guy, I’m tempted to call him “RAM DOS”; but that’s getting old too.) Anyway, here’s his quote:

“We’re sitting under the tree of our thinking minds, wondering why we’re not getting any sunshine.”

Heavy, man. But seriously, the good master here is talking about spiritual realization. He’s saying that too much intellectual life gets in the way. A lot of other spiritual avatars have said similar things. This idea may go all the way back to the Book of Genesis and the Adam and Eve story — recall how the first couple got into trouble with the tree of knowledge and the forbidden fruit. Nonetheless, I’d like to challenge the notion that thinking and intelligence isn’t such a great thing (despite all it’s done for our species, Adam and Eve not withstanding).

Let’s go back to Plato and the Cave of the Forms. St. Paul said that we see through a glass darkly, and Plato said that we see the ultimate truths of the forms in roughly the same way. Instead of a dirty mirror, however, Plato imagines that we live in a cave and always keep our backs to the entrance, where the light of the sun comes in. The “sun” in this metaphor is the ultimate metaphysical power, something like what Christians and Jews call “God”. The “cave” is something like our Earth, a dirty place where things hardly ever go right. Despite its darkness and gloom, however, the light does illuminate some walls within the cave. When it does, we sometimes see shadows from the ultimate truths and principles that live outside in the higher realm (i.e., outside the cave, in the dazzling sunshine of truth). Plato makes it clear that we’re not able to go outside the cave and see these wonderful things for ourselves. The light of the “ultimate sun” is too bright for our eyes. Our eyes, being imperfect like everything else in the cave, could not work in such an intense condition.

Moses basically said the same thing in the Old Testament, when going up to the mountain. The light of God is too bright, it will blind you. Many of the great Christian contemplatives have agreed with that notion. They report “seeing” or experiencing God in terms of “darkness” and not in light. The medium of that darkness is usually a contemplative mental state brought on by prayerful meditation.

The 2nd Century neo-Pagan Plotinus (who influenced a lot of the early Christian writers including Augustine) basically said that thinking is also an approach to the greater truths, so long as the intellectual concepts are grasped at the highest level of the mind. In other words, you can think about math or physics or most any other scientific subject and fool around with it and get some results for a particular problem. But you don’t really become great at it until you have the “ah hah!” moments, until it merges into your highest planes of intuitive consciousness. That’s the Einstein level, where your mind “lives” and “breathes” things like matrix algebra and quantum chromodynamics. (Unfortunately, most of us reserve that level of our minds for things like whether Shop-Rite is going to have a sale on ground round next week). That’s where thinking and intellectual effort become spiritual acts in themselves, according to Plotinus; we then realize that we are part of a “Great Universal Mind”, a metaphysical entity that is not far from Plato’s “Ultimate Sun”.

So, if this ultimate sunshine is too bright for us, maybe the tree of knowledge and cogitation is where we are supposed to be right now. Instead of cursing the darkness with the Baba, or forbidding the use of our minds in approaching the ultimate truths (as the great religions so often do, with their “pay, pray and obey” attitudes), let’s climb the tree of the intellect. Let’s reach for higher and higher levels where more and more light gets through the leaves and branches. Let’s hug the tree of our mind and intellect, not curse it. With all due respect to Ram Dass, I think I’m with Plotinus on this one.

P.S. But I will admit that there is a dark side to the intellect. I’ve been reading “The Wizards of Armageddon” about the great old time that a bunch of eggheads had designing and planning the use of the H-Bomb back in the 1950s and 60s. Unfortunately, people are still having such a great time today in North Korea and Pakistan and Israel and Iran and India, maybe other places. I just pray that they will eventually start seeing the true light, as did American nuclear scientist Robert Oppenheimer . . . . before the the Third World blows itself up (and probably takes a lot of Americans down in the process).

ROAD TRIP: The other night, I had to drive up Route 21 from Newark, and it reminded me that I always liked that road. Twenty-one is a three-lane road built to modern interstate standards, and winds along the banks of the Passaic River. They started building it in the 1960s and finally finished it sometime in the 80s. So, Route 21’s construction more or less overlapped my teen and young adult years; it grew as I grew.

I remember the first time I went north on 21 from Newark; I was about 14 and my father was driving. It was night, and something about the winding turns and the orange lights and the shimmering waters of the river seemed mesmerizing. Well, it fascinated me, anyway; my father just wanted to get home and my brother was distracted by other things.

Later on I regularly used Route 21 to get to school and to work, so I pretty much learned to take it for granted. But I’ve been away from it for a while now, just long enough to bring back the magic (well, something like magic, anyway).

I decided to take a follow-up spin today on 21 and arranged to have some pictures taken. This isn’t exactly like driving along the California coast or through the Continental Divide, but I still like it.

We’re bumping our way along the potholed approach ramp in north Newark, enjoying the lovely sights.

Now we’re on 21, cruising at 55 through Belleville. My cheapo camera distorts the light pole, but it looks kind of cool.

Here’s the Passaic River on the right, with a bridge carrying a local road into North Arlington.

OK, we’re in Nutley, soon to cross into Clifton, with Lyndhurst across the river on the right.

Now we’re coming into Passaic, where my mother grew up. The old downtown area is off to the left; similar to all modern highways, Route 21 avoids it.

Here’s the former US Rubber factory along the river. Obviously the plant contributed greatly to the pollution that still keeps anyone from fishing or swimming. Mom and the grandparents lived right up the street from here, in the Dundee neighborhood.

We get a nice peek here at the ethnic / industrial neighborhoods near Botany Village.

Now we’re up in north Clifton, and the sign says “END 21”. Well, that’s too bad, because it’s an interesting road. Hope you enjoyed the trip.

The UN recently issued a “big think” report about the ecology and the future of the world. This report is called the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, and it sets out four different scenarios for the next 50 years, explaining what will happen to the environment and to the world economy given each particular set of assumptions.

Three of these scenarios are very nice. The first one is called Global Orchestration, and it assumes that all the nations of the world will agree to a socially-conscious globalization scheme that emphasizes equity, economic growth, and public goods, reacting to ecosystem problems when they reach critical stages (but before disaster ensues). Basically, that one would be “UN on steroids”, the George W. Bush nightmare. It would make the Kyoto protocol look like a Wall Street Journal editorial page.

Next is the Adapting Mosaic, a regionalized approach that emphasizes proactive management of ecosystems, local adaptation, and flexible governance. I guess that the anti-world trade “Seattle Movement” would like this one; it protects indigenous culture while implementing a lot of groovy things. Then there is the TechnoGarden, a globalized approach with an emphasis on green technology and a proactive approach to managing ecosystems. It’s high-tech with a social conscience and a world viewpoint; what could be nicer?

Bless the UN’s heart. After all these years, they still dream the one-world dream. But they aren’t completely blind to reality, either. The fourth scenario is called “Order from Strength”, and it represents a regionalized approach with primary emphasis on security and economic growth, reacting to ecosystem problems only as they arise. I took a quick look through the scenarios section, and guess what? The Order From Strength scenario is the only realistic one. It describes what’s happening now and what is going to keep on happening unless or until there’s some huge calamity. If Hobbes were still around, I think that he would agree (and perhaps the tiger from Calvin and Hobbes would also concur!).

Sad to say, but O.F.S. reflects the way that human beings really are. When I was young, I honestly believed that we could have a Global Orchestration world or at least an Adapting Mosaic. But in my old age, I realize that any Adapting Mosaics are going to be extremely local (village size) and secondary to the multinational business interests that will hold the real power. America will keep on electing presidents and congressmen to dismantle the federal government as a protector of the people; however, it will keep just enough (i.e., the military and the justice system) to serve the needs of the multinational corporations. To the degree that there is any Global Orchestration, it’s going to be on terms set by Exxon Mobil and General Electric and Samsung and Toyota. And the Techno world isn’t going to be a community garden, not if Microsoft and Sun and Oracle can help it.

Despite the stolid, scientific air to it, the Millennium report valiantly tries to point out the advantages of “anything but more free markets and U.S. dominance”. The Order From Strength scenario gives the worst overall economic growth results and the worst distribution of income. Obviously the US and maybe Europe will do OK under it, and China and India will muscle their way into the big time, but everyone else (Africa, Latin America, even the Arabs once their oil runs out) will be cast back into the Middle Ages. Everyone, including the USA, would experience more economic growth under the other scenarios. World population will grow fastest under O.F.S., but life will be brutish and short for the majority. There will be plenty of terrorism and plagues. And of course the environment is in for a much rougher ride than under the other three scenarios (a.k.a. pipe dreams). The authors don’t say that things are headed for disaster by 2050 under Order From Strength, but they hint that the 2051-2100 period will be up for grabs after the planet is treated so roughly for so long. The Millennium Assessment authors are doing their best to say that it doesn’t have to be this way. Regrettably, however, it does.

But then again, I don’t really know. If you’re young enough to plan on being around in 2050 and beyond, then check out the scenarios and see what you think. See what kind of world you want to live in. It would be awfully difficult, but if you were willing to live in a smaller house and drive a smaller car than your parents had — and didn’t slide back into bigness by the age of 40 — and you weren’t afraid to live amidst many different types of people speaking many different languages (immigration into the US would skyrocket under the “nice” scenarios), then maybe you could change things. My generation said that it would “change the world, rearrange the world” (I’m thinking of some old Crosby, Stills and Nash song; I never really did like their harmony). But in the end it went for big cars (SUVs), big houses, and Order From Strength. Will your generation do better?

If you care, then check it out: MILLENIUM ASSESSMENT

R.I.P., CLASS OF ’71? I was in the local supermarket the other night gathering my weekly provisions, not paying any attention to the piped-in “lite FM” music playing in the background. Hey, why start listening to a song when half-way through it the assistant manager is going to interrupt, “can we have a porter report with a mop to aisle 14”. But I couldn’t help but take notice when an old Carpenter’s tune came on as I ambled past the juices and sodas. The song was “We’ve Only Just Begun To Live”, which happened to be the theme song from my high school graduation way back in 1971. I never did really like that song, and it definitely wouldn’t have been my pick. But I wasn’t popular with the “in crowd” back in high school (or anytime since!), and thus I wasn’t consulted.

Well, here we are 35 years later. Theoretically there should be some kind of reunion this year, but my class hasn’t done well in that regard. Every five or ten years I get something in the mail about a planned reunion, but it never seems to come off. And I’ll be the first to admit, I’m not contributing any enthusiasm to the cause. Being an arch-introvert, I didn’t make a lot of friends in high school, and the handful that I might like to talk with probably wouldn’t go themselves.

I do peek in on Classmates.com now and then, as to see who is listed for my year and what is being said on the message board. Actually, hardly anyone from my class is talking these days. There was a brief flurry of messages back around 2001, but since 2003 the board has been pretty quiet.

However, there have been a fair number of entries on the obituaries board. At least 10% of my class is now gone! That really surprised me, because there haven’t been any wars or other disasters in the area. Vietnam was over by the time we reached draft age. And this isn’t a coal mining town, where you’d expect a steady attrition over the years. My class just hasn’t been terribly lucky. We had a rising basketball star, a tall kid who was a great center who led the school team to a championship back in 71. He had his pick of college athletic scholarships. But he wound up on the streets of New York City, a drug addict who eventually caught the virus. He died in 1997.

And of course, our class-song chanteuse, Karen Carpenter, also decided it was all too much and “punched out early” back in 1983.

But I’m still here, hanging in there by my fingernails. More than half of my life is gone, most definitely. The “best years”, i.e. my twenties, thirties and forties have vanished. I don’t have too much to show for them, just a bunch of false starts and meltdowns. But I’d like to think that something intense and fulfilling could still come along, a situation that could translate my natural talents and strengths into something that would change the world for the better. I.e., something that would do good, and at the same time do good for me — something to serve my ego, but more importantly, slake my unmet need for self-actualization. Until then I’ll go on working as a glorified file clerk and go on reading and thinking and having thoughts and insights that interest no one much. And my (very) small group of supporters will go on telling me that I’m a good guy and that I am living a worthwhile life. Such consolation sometimes just makes it seem worse (but I thank them anyway for trying).

I’d like to think that life doesn’t always go according to schedule, and that you can live the equivalent of a full life in the course of a few intense years. (Let me make it clear here that I’m not talking about the mistake that people my age sometimes make, i.e. going on a spending / vacation spree, hoping to find meaning in their lives by buying a sports car or a yacht or by touring India.) For me, those years haven’t arrived yet (although there were a few months here and there in my past that provided a taste of it). But I’m still out there looking for them. I’d like to think that it’s still possible to “just begin to live” even at an advanced age, even if the earlier years didn’t go so well.

Too bad that Karen Carpenter couldn’t believe in this; she got her taste of fame and fortune early on. People told her “it don’t get better than this”, but she in fact was looking for something better (just listen to her haunting rendition of “Ave Maria”, a Carpenters song that never made it to the top 10 radio charts). Karen eventually decided that it just wasn’t here. As to that tall kid from my class who knew how to handle a basketball, darn if I know what he was looking for; but it was something, something he never found. As for me — I’m gonna keep on looking, looking amidst the aisles of the supermarket, looking in the books that I read, looking on the Internet, looking in the people that I work with. Ah, had only my graduating class been able to select a 1988 tune by the Moody Blues: “I Know You’re Out There Somewhere”.

ANNOUNCEMENT – GRAND OPENING!!! No, there’s not a new Wal-Mart coming to my home town . . . . . thank goodness. But there is a new section on my web site devoted to the science and mystery of human consciousness. Here’s the link:

WHENCE CONSCIOUSNESS

Many people today are fascinated by the question of just how our lives and our feelings and our perceptions and our theories and our dreams and such take place in a 8 by 6 inch shell full of wet, gray, squishy stuff. Just what is it about that squishy stuff (a.k.a. “the brain”) that makes it so special?

The more that neuroscientists look at the brain, the more they say that there’s nothing terribly special about it at all. It is highly complex and extremely organized, having many times the data storage and computing capacity of the largest supercomputer now in existence. We still can’t build a machine that nearly does what the brain does in terms of input / output signal processing (it takes in a whole lot of signals from all over the body, and puts out a whole lot of commands telling the various muscles and glands and organs what to do and how to do it all in near-perfect coordination). But the brain runs according to ordinary physical and chemical laws, and programming routines that aren’t all that different from our computer software (especially the newer generation of object-oriented programming). And it’s similar to what a whole lot of other living critters have behind their eyes.

But for whatever reason, the human brain seems to have crossed some kind of a threshold. It seems to inspire behavior reflecting belief in the possession of a transcendent soul and in an ontological purpose beyond food and safety and mating (the big three for most animals). We look at animals and see a blank stare most of the time. Then we look at ourselves and see a festival of ever-changing emotions; every micro-second of consciousness (including our dreams) invokes a felt response to our current state of sensory inputs and “inner processing”, e.g. imagination, impressions, ideas, brainstorms, delusions, hallucinations, etc. Animals also have emotions that are triggered and monitored by their gray matter; so why does our gray matter seem to take our emotions so personally? Just why does a machine following the normal rules of physics (that’s all that the brain scientists see when they study the brain; there ain’t no magic, no unheard-of forces and effects from some unknown dimension of reality) have such a vivid inner life?

I find it very fascinating; there’s a whole lot more to be said about consciousness. I really wonder, however, if there are ultimate answers. Perhaps this subject lies at the threshold of knowledge. Or maybe it is just a grand delusion, as some philosophers and psychologists and neuroscientists are arguing. Maybe there really is no surprise that a machine creates what we experience in our minds. Maybe when you break it down bit by bit, tackle the small problems and then put it all back together, it will seem entirely possible that science has all the answers. Maybe the grand question of consciousness (the “hard question”, as the experts call it) will just fade away, just as the sacred and extra-worldly nature of thunder and lightening faded away once we learned about electricity and sound waves and weather. Some people have had that “revelation” about consciousness, but the consensus doesn’t seem to have reached that point yet.

My pages on consciousness will be a work in progress. Hopefully they will improve as I learn more. If you are a true expert on the subject, you can probably pick out faulty thinking and dubious assumptions amidst my words. But at least you will appreciate that I’m trying to keep it mostly in the realm of plain language. Yes, I realize that plain language has its limitations; NASA could never have built an interplanetary rocket ship with plain language instructions. They clearly needed specialized mathematical, scientific and engineering symbols and syntax. The academic philosophers seem to think that a special language is also needed to truly plumb the depths of consciousness. Maybe they are correct; I’m still in the early stages of trying to learn their language. Nonetheless, I’d like to offer some technical quotes about consciousness from a smart fellow named Uriah Kriegel. Dr. Kriegel is a well accomplished scholar who is very involved in the consciousness field. He is kind enough to offer much of his work for free on the Internet (Dr. Kriegel’s Web Site). But unless you know philosophical techno-speak, be ready for some tough sledding. Try this, from his summary regarding consciousness:

“A mental state is phenomenally conscious iff it has phenomenal character . . . . phenomenal character is just the compresence of qualitative and subjective character . . . .
My theory of phenomenal consciousness revolves around the idea that conscious experiences have qualitative character in virtue of representing environmental features and have subjective character in virtue of representing themselves . . . . A mental state of mine is conscious only if it is for me, not only in me. (That is what gives it a subjective character.) This requires that I be aware of the state (in the right way). Awareness of something requires representation of it. Therefore, my state is conscious only if I represent it (in the right way).”

Hmm, I’m not sure yet just what that “right way” is. But seriously, Dr. Kriegel’s words are valuable and insightful; it’s just that you need to have all the background knowledge regarding philosophical abstractions and terms of art to appreciate what he’s talking about. For example, the terms “representing” and “representation” are loaded here. To lay people like me, representation isn’t such a big deal; a politician represents me in Congress, so what? But to the good Doctor and his like, “representation” is a big deal, with a very specific and important meaning.

If you’re up for it, then check out Dr. Kreigel’s consciousness stuff. But if you’re still floundering around with it all, then have a look at my pages and let’s compare our floundering notes. I’m not saying that stupid wild-ass guesses are better than well-structured thoughts; but stupid guesses are a starting point (for me, anyway), and I hope to progress from there. So if you’d like to visit my starting point, here’s the link again:

WHENCE CONSCIOUSNESS

(And hey, if Uriah Kreigel or any of his ‘homies’ [his word] ever read this, then no hard feelings; if you would like to enlighten me and help me make my stupid guesses slightly less stupid, the e-mail “shout out” button is up top.)

I was in my apartment yesterday looking out the side window and saw some birds sitting in the bushes. There were some juncos, which are common this time of year. They spend their spring and summer seasons up on the hilltop wilderness preserve just west of here, then come down into the ‘burbs for the winter. But there were also a couple of visitors — some kind of capped sparrow along with a tufted titmouse. Not exactly very exotic sightings for experienced birdwatchers (which I’m not), but somewhat unusual for a crowded human habitat. It was nice to see them; it brightened up an otherwise usual winter’s day.

Ah, winter. During the short daytime, it’s either dark overcast or bright sun not far over the horizon, casting long shadows. I’m not sure which is more depressing. Thank goodness it doesn’t last forever. I don’t know what I’d do in northern Maine or upper Canada, where it actually does last forever (except for a brief warm season plagued by hoards of black flies)!

Yea, Mother Nature is often overrated, but birds are one of her consolations. When I was growing up, we had a lot of factories in my town, and only the toughest of birds could stand it — pigeons, starlings, sparrows and bluejays. In the 1980s, the factories started shutting down, and we finally saw some other kinds of birds, such as cardinals, northern mockingbirds, catbirds, and house finches. You knew that the pollution was finally abating, but it was too bad about the human effects; a lot of people from the cities lost their union jobs and probably never found anything equivalent. A lot more guys are in jail these days.

I don’t have a good theme tonight, just a couple of scattered observations from a mid-January day. Sometimes life has no grand themes, just a matter of survival. Survival and faith. Faith that sooner or later, the gray will give way to something nicer. But for now . . . . .

Republican politicians love to talk about what a wonderful and miraculous health care system we have here in the USA. And in a lot of ways, that is true. But in a lot of ways it’s not. First of all, access to the miracle of modern medicine in America is certainly very unequal. There’s that huge chunk of the population without health insurance (around 16%). Yes, there’s still Medicare and Medicaid assistance available, but the Republicans are cutting it way back so as to pay for war, tax cuts, and damage from hurricanes that have become very destructive because of pollution from SUVs and coal power plants (more long-time GOP favorites).

But there’s another thing about the American health care system that irks me. It’s extremely biased against education and prevention. Doctors, hospitals, pharmaceutical companies and insurance companies love to do thing for you when you’re sick, but they don’t seem very interested in preventing you from getting sick. This is not too surprising; not too many big businesses (and that’s what medicine in America is) will voluntarily attempt to shrink the demand for its product. Businesses generally act to increase demand, rationally or more often, irrationally. And that’s just what appears to be happening among all the players in the modern health care system.

Case in point — the NY Times is currently running a series on the effects of diabetes in the New York area. As in the rest of the nation, people are becoming more and more obese in this region, and that is causing more and more diabetes. But diabetes is a slow disease; it usually gives you a chance to change your ways so as to keep it in control and possibly avoid the nasty side-effects like amputation and blindness and heart disease. A number of hospitals in the region realize that, and tried to open “disease management” centers for diabetics, i.e. programs that focus on education and better living habits (most significantly, more exercise and weight loss). But most of those centers have closed, despite the encouraging results they were getting with their patients. Why? Because the insurance companies were hardly interested in paying for their services, even though they could clearly lower future claim costs due to better health.

The article spells out some rather shocking facts. Insurance companies will pay $30,000 for a foot amputation, but will deny a $150 claim for a podiatrist to help a diabetic avoid foot problems. They will deny an occasional $75 session with a nutritionist for advice on diet, but have no trouble with on-going $350 payments for dialysis. Actually, they would rather not pay anything at all for diabetics; they would rather discourage diabetics from doing business with them. So, they don’t offer “nice services” like foot care and nutrition counseling, for fear of attracting diabetics as customers. So the population gets sicker, health care costs shoot way up (as patients are provided with expensive, high-tech treatments for serious medical conditions that could have been prevented or delayed), and yet the capitalist owners of health care companies get richer. Yes, folks, this is the miracle of American medicine — wait until you get really sick, and then stuff you with complicated chemicals and wire you to robot devices so as to keep you going; alive but not really well. But that’s only IF you have insurance. Otherwise . . . . . it might as well be the Middle Ages.

I studied microeconomics in grad school, and I was certainly bedazzled by the “magic of the market” after the careful exposition the professor gave of efficiencies and rational allocation effects of a competitive economy. But we were also taught that “there are certain exceptions, and the results aren’t necessarily fair”. And the older I get, the more I see of those exceptions and that unfairness. Yes, I realize that socialist medicine is a non-starter. But capitalist medicine ultimately hurts the social corpus. Just as our founding fathers realized that we need mixed government (taking a cue from Aristotle, who said long ago that total monarchy is bad and total democracy is bad, whereas the truth lies in the middle), we need to realize that our nation needs a mixed economy. Over the past 25 years, America has wandered further and further from that ideal (during which time a lot of people have gotten very rich, but many, many more have become quite poor). I hope the pendulum might yet turn.

But for now, a lot of Americans are diabetic or are becoming diabetic, and the health care system that they rely on is certainly a very imperfect and often unfair one, not to mention irrational. Check out the article if you need some proof. And keep exercising and watch your weight!