Society « The Ramblings of An Eternal Student of Life

Saturday, July 14, 2007

Politics ... Society ...

I work in Newark, NJ, so the office scuttlebutt this past week focused on the federal indictment of former Newark Mayor Sharpe James. It came as a surprise, but in an inverted fashion; since the early 1990s, everyone “in the know” suspected James of taking a cut from all the real estate development going on in Newark. The James administration does deserve credit for getting a wide variety of real estate projects off the ground; during his 20 years in office, Sharpe James injected new life into a city that was otherwise going down the tubes. However, it seemed pretty clear that James was reaping his own gains from this, and was not limiting himself to using legal and ethical methods. However, James was a “Teflon genius”; he survived various investigations because the state and federal authorities could never make anything stick. Thus, we were taken aback on Thursday when US Attorney for NJ Chris Christie finally got an indictment against James (albeit, more than a year after James left City Hall, replaced by Cory Booker).

There’s still a long way to go until James either cuts a deal with the feds or goes to trial. But over the next few months, there may be some drama. From what I’ve heard, it’s going to focus around a former high-level Newark official and long-time associate of James, who is suspected of turning “state’s evidence” (this associate is also an elected official in his own right, on the county level; furthermore, he has been noted for his own questionable but very lucrative land dealings within the past few years). For a long time, there has been a wall of silence protecting Sharpe James. No one affiliated with him has dared to turn against him, even on pain of doing jail time (e.g., his former chief of staff Jackie Mattison). But now, a second-rate politico from Newark may emerge from the shadows and testify against James, allowing the feds to finally pin some serious land sale fraud charges on him and threaten the former mayor with real jail time.

In a way, it reminds me of that 1962 movie, “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence”. Well, only in a rough sense – the movie plot was actually rather complicated. Metaphors only go so far. But still, if the politico that I’m thinking of sticks with the program that the US Attorney and FBI are setting up, he will go down in history as the man who shot down the seemingly untouchable Sharpe James. It’s going to be interesting.

One footnote to the situation: the Sharpe James indictment came on the 40th anniversary of the 1967 Newark Riots. PBS just aired an episode of “P.O.V.” devoted to the Newark Riots (“Revolution 67”), and Sharpe James was interviewed in it. He came across with much gravity and dignity, a man of history. But ironically, just a day later he is a man under indictment, accused of selling city properties at way-below market prices to a woman who was keeping company with him on a variety of “business trips”. The woman in question, Tamkia Riley, was a failed businesswoman who had no real estate experience. And yet the Mayor saw fit to direct valuable city properties to her, on the rationale that she would develop those properties in ways that would benefit the city’s economic base. But all she did was to resell the properties to other interests, at a very handsome profit.

So, it was hard to take seriously the noises being made by some of the local black activists that the US Attorney (who is white) had intentionally timed the indictment because of racial motivations. Even the last of the 1960’s white activists, Rich Cammerieri, made a similar statement in the local paper. I used to know Rich, and I respect him for all that he has done for Newark. But I can’t go along with his knee-jerk, “support the cause” comments. The criminal justice system needs critics, for sure, given all of the power that the state can bring against the individual. But as to Sharpe James — he will have his day in court, with some very good (and expensive) legal firepower at his side. If I were Rich Cammerieri, I wouldn’t waste energy on shielding Sharpe James from racial persecution by the police. That sort of thing may well still be happening here. But it’s the little guys, not the big fish just begging to be caught, that Rich should be worrying about.

◊ posted by Jim G @ 10:59 pm No Comments Yet / Leave a Comment

Tuesday, July 3, 2007

◊ Consciousness and Optimism

Brain / Mind ... Society ...

One of the big questions regarding human consciousness is whether consciousness has any effect on the material brain and body. Does consciousness, which is surely not a physical entity (although many argue that it reduces to physical brain phenomenon, just as lightening relates to electrical discharges), have an independent effect on how the body acts and moves? Or is it “epiphenomenal”, just along for the ride, just “watching” what the mechanical mind is perceiving and deciding?

I personally thing that question will someday be shown to be a false presumption in itself. Consciousness will be shown to be inherent and inseparable from the physical processes within the brain. It can’t be that consciousness is some sort of severable force or ghost-like entity that stands apart from the physical brain and “throws the levers” within it. And yet, matter and physical processes having consciousness will be shown to act differently than those without consciousness.

For now, though, we still don’t have a clear definition of just what consciousness is. Just what sets it off? What tips a complicated physical system, one that handles lots of data and information, over the edge into self-awareness, into that higher realm of world awareness? We don’t know yet. Maybe someday we will. Until then, the best we can say is that we know consciousness when we see it (in someone else). And when we experience it (in ourself). One thing we can do in the interim: learn to make the most of the time that we do have consciousness.

PS — on the topic of national consciousness (if there is such a thing), there was an interesting poll done by CBS News the other day. When asked how the Founding Fathers (Franklin, Jefferson, Adams, Madison, etc.) would feel if they could come back and see America today, 72% said they would probably be disappointed! As to whether life for the future generations will be better, the same or worse, 48% said worse; 25% said better, and 24% said “the same”. Bottom line, about half aren’t very optimistic about the future. To be fair, there was some optimism; 49% said that they were at least “somewhat satisfied” with their present life, and 62% said they had better opportunities to succeed than their parents’ generation. That was down from 72% in a 2000 poll, though.

◊ posted by Jim G @ 8:25 pm No Comments Yet / Leave a Comment

Saturday, June 30, 2007

◊ Strange Euro Bedfellows

Current Affairs ... Religion ... Society ...

I just read an article about secularism and atheism in Europe. Religion and belief in God is not very popular amidst the native populations of western Europe these days. However, it’s still pretty popular amidst the Muslims, whose numbers are growing a lot faster than the natives. As far as the Catholics go, Pope Benedict is on a mission to “re-Christianize” Europe. I’m sure he’d like to get those heathen French and Belgian folk back into the old cathedrals, but it looks as though his new Euro-Christian army is going to be comprised mostly of African and South American immigrants. Like the Arabs and Turks, they also embrace the old-tyme religion and have a lot of babies.

So, it looks like the European scene is in for some conflict in the coming decades. If the script from the past is followed, the Christians and the Muslims will resort to violence in competing for the right to show the faithless the error of their ways. And the atheists will just write more books about the stupidity and hypocrisy of it all. But you never know – history does have its twists. Perhaps Benedict and the sheiks will find common cause in the campaign (dare I say “crusade”) against modern Godlessness in Europe. Perhaps they will unite in various political campaigns to outlaw abortion, women’s equality, stem-cell research and academic freedom. That will go a long way to cast Europe back into the middle ages.

I think it’s a terrible shame that the Catholic faith, which for a short time back in the 1960s seemed ready to make peace with the modern world, is now on a campaign to bring back the past. Obviously, I’d much rather see Rome engage the secularists instead of going head-to-head with them (just what we criticize the Islamics for doing). But the much-acclaimed Pope John Paul II wasn’t in the mood for accommodating the secularists, and they went their own way. Now his right-hand man is finishing the job. JP2 is still celebrated for helping to reclaim eastern Europe from Communism; but he also has to take the blame for losing western Europe to atheism. It happened on his watch. As with President Ronald Reagan, I think JP2 is over-rated. They were both very good at leadership; the fall of communism made it look as though they were leading in the right direction. But just because you avoid one dead end, doesn’t mean that you know the right way. In the end, both Ronnie and JP found other wrong directions to take their flocks.

◊ posted by Jim G @ 11:02 pm No Comments Yet / Leave a Comment

Sunday, June 3, 2007

◊ The Strange Loops of War

Philosophy ... Society ...

At present, I’m trying to cut my way through the very dense jungle of prose within a book called “Godel, Escher and Bach”, as written by mathematician Douglas Hofstadter. This book was published in 1979, and gave Hofstadter a taste of fame within the philosophical ranks. The book came out just a few years after Robert Pirsig‘s “The Art of Zen and Motorcycle Maintenance”. Both books were written by off-beat geniuses who offered up concoctions of math, science, philosophy and eastern spirituality to seekers of higher truths. Pirsig made the bigger splash with Zen and Motorcycle Maintenance, which became a best seller in the early 80s. However, Hofstadter has had much more staying power over the past quarter century. Pirsig managed to get another book out in 1991 called “Lila”, which was mostly a dud. However, Hofstadter published a number of well-received works on a variety of techno-philosophical issues over that time.

Hofstadter now has a book out called “I Am A Strange Loop”, which has gained a fair amount of attention. “Strange Loop” presents his solution to the mind-body problem, the ultimate question of what our consciousness is. I’m looking forward to reading it, but I’ve heard that you really should be familiar with Godel, Escher and Bach before taking it on. So I’m trying to get ready, although the 700 some-odd pages of GEB turn out not to make for an interesting and pleasant Sunday afternoon. The author (then a young professor) seemed to think that everyone is in love with number theory and is willing to spend days and days going thru his lessons on how to write a theorem regarding the pattern among positive integers between a prime number and the cube of their successors (next highest number), taking their difference and adding it to the square of . . . . Sometimes you want to throw the book at the wall and say “who gives a ____ “.

But there are some spots where Hofstadter calms down and writes for real people, sharing various insights from his brilliant mind regarding the nature of reality. One insight that I found very interesting regarded ants and bees and neurons. These things all have to do with the fashionable topic of complexity and emergence, which was still quite unknown to the public when GEB first came out. Ants somehow act in unison to make an ant colony thrive; bees somehow make a bee hive work; and neurons somehow make our brains light up. This is despite the fact that in all cases, there is no central controller for the individual ants, bees and neurons. Each one has no idea what the grand plan is. They just do their little jobs. Yet somehow it all comes together to support a great collective effort.

Hofstadter ponders just where the “information” lies that directs the workings of an ant colony, or a bee hive, or the human brain. It does NOT reside in the individual ant, bee, or neuron. NONE of these things can actually talk; but if they could, and if you could ask them what the grand plan is for connecting the caves of an ant colony, or the secret of honey production in the bee hive, or how the human mind composes songs and lyrics, each of them would shrug and say “I have no idea”. The grand plan resides on a higher level, outside of any putative consciousness of the participants.

That made me think back to my recent ponderings regarding warfare. War is one of those things that humans just don’t seem able to control. Wars just happen. Our diplomats try to stop them, but not very successfully in most instances. It kind-of seems like something from a bee hive or an ant colony. The “grand plan”, the “information” behind warfare, seems to reside at a higher level than human awareness, even higher than human collective awareness like national governments or the United Nations (which is pretty much a joke, anyway).

So just what could that “information level” behind warfare be? I don’t like to get spacey and go off on New Age tangents. But I can’t help but wonder if there might be something to the “Gaia hypothesis” regarding a planetary “consciousness” of sorts. Is war Gaia’s way of keeping the human race, with its dreams and grand plans for conquest and control, in check? (Talk about a “STRANGE LOOP”.) Are we just too aggressive and exploitative for the good of the planetary system as a whole, and so the planetary system pushes us into controlling ourselves by a war or ethnic cleansing now and then?

I read somewhere that about 200 million people died as a result of war and genocide during the 20th Century. My almanac says that world population went from around 1.7 billion in 1900 to around 6.1 billion in 2000. Using some rough averaging, I’d guess that around 8 billion people lived during the 20th century (figuring average lifespan just short of 50 years). So, about 2.5% of everyone, or around 5 out of every 200 people, had their lives cut short (usually in young adulthood) because of war.

I’m glad that Gaia let me off the hook. But as the 21st Century progresses, with global warming and nuclear weapons proliferation and worsening wealth and knowledge inequity (with the poor getting poorer, a small handful getting tremendously rich), and as the population level nears 10 billion around 2070 . . . . I can’t help but wonder what Gaia has up her sleeve. Sorry to be such a pessimist, but it may not be pretty. Wonder if Mr. Hofstadter has any ideas on how to cut that Strange Loop short?

◊ posted by Jim G @ 12:02 pm No Comments Yet / Leave a Comment

Saturday, May 12, 2007

◊ Random Thoughts During The Newark Homicide Watch

Society ...

I was working on a federal grant application yesterday regarding DNA analysis for criminal cases, and one of the Chiefs mentioned that the murder count to date for this year is 53. Last year on this date, it was 43. In 2006, we had the highest number of murders in ten years. And we’re on the way to break that record this year. So, things aren’t exactly going that well out in the post-industrial slums of Newark and its surrounding cities (Irvington, East Orange and Orange).

That bit of info made me reflect on my former life as a crypto-activist in Newark, i.e. my 2 years as a loyal volunteer and my 10 years of employment at New Community Corporation. New Community got started about 15 years before I got there, and reached its peak in terms of size and achievement during my tenure. But unfortunately, it never really got close to its lofty goal of “converting the neighborhood and then the city”, into a functional working-class environment where every child has a good chance of leading a fulfilling and productive life.

In fact, New Community unintentionally contributed to Newark’s ongoing urban tragedy by building and clustering thousands of low-income apartment units. These were designed to be humane, low-density alternatives to the many high-rise “New Jack City” towers that were built in the 50s by the Newark Housing Authority (and hundreds of other urban HA’s). But as unionized entry-level jobs left Newark in the 70’s and 80’s, and the schools fell apart in the 90’s, this housing served just as effectively as the old “projects” to breed a nasty way of thinking and an unpleasant way of life amidst those who couldn’t get out. New Community was imitated in its heyday by a variety of other Newark community agencies, who sprinkled thousands of additional low-income apartments throughout the town. Together with the extraordinarily large inventory of developments built by the Newark Housing Authority, large swaths of Newark have been “locked in” to poverty culture by these buildings for the foreseeable future.

And so, the gangs, guns, drugs and killings continue in greater Newark, despite valiant and innovative efforts on the part of both local police and my boss (the county prosecutor) to combat them. You could say that I’m now helping to mop up the mess that I helped to make. But please believe me, the road to this hell truly was paved with the best and most heavenly of intentions. I missed the formative days, when the spirit of Christian social justice at New Community was “so thick you could cut it with a knife”. However, the dream (and the illusion) had not fully died when I got involved with NCC in 1988. We still believed that we could disassemble urban poverty by weaving a thick net of housing, daycare, job training, youth programs and health services. We really didn’t anticipate that the surrounding economy and political culture would change so much; it happened while we weren’t watching. We couldn’t have imagined that as things got worse, an angry “f*** it” attitude would take hold amidst the young. Yea, this attitude sells plenty of rap music in the suburbs, but it ain’t no entertainment in the cities. Mopping up after the latest shooting is no fun, or so I hear from the guys at work who actually do that stuff.

Newark is not without hope. If you listen to Mayor Booker, there are plenty of things to be hopeful about in Newark these days (although Booker recently gave a rather despairing speech about the murder crisis). The downtown area is still getting better, a new professional sports arena will open soon, and thousands of new homes have been built and sold to valiant young families who are pushing the gang-bangers off their blocks. There’s nothing like owning property to inspire people to get involved in crimewatches. I even helped to develop about 300 or so of those houses during my final years at NCC. But there are still tens of thousands of impoverished single-parent families going from apartment to apartment (with boyfriends drifting in and out) throughout greater Newark. As welfare reform showed, the women usually find some kind of crappy, unpleasant work to keep their kids going. However, too many of the young men refuse to bite that bullet, and get caught up in the cycle of drug involvements, jail and gang affiliation. It’s nice that there are so many stable working families who are buying up all of the new houses, even on some of the worst streets. But the gang-bangers who they push off of those streets aren’t going to be going too far. No other towns will take them.

In my Some Urban Thoughts pages, I have outlined my vision for a new kind of urban anti-poverty effort (actually, a “regional” effort) to respond to the realities that let all the air out of my earlier idealism. But right now, I don’t see anyone with a new and more realistic vision making any waves in the cities and amidst the halls of power and wealth (as New Community’s founders once did). So, I’ll stay where I am, helping to mop up the mess that our spiritual justice inspirations ironically helped to create. But I still hope to live long enough to see a new spirit of urban activism, one that learns from our mistakes and builds on our failures. As I point out, it’s not going to be a bootstraps operation, as NCC tried to be. It’s going to directly involve suburban areas like where I live. That’s gonna be a tough sell. Still, you never know when a new generation of neophyte saints and prophets are going to come out of the woodwork. One must keep their hope alive.

◊ posted by Jim G @ 3:02 pm No Comments Yet / Leave a Comment

Saturday, January 20, 2007

◊ Superstition Ain’t the Way

Personal Reflections ... Society ...

VERY SUPERSTITIOUS: When I was a kid, I was a bit superstitious. Maybe I still am, despite my life-long efforts to be a man of reason, a Renaissance man, a man of the Enlightenment. One of the most spooky (and thus effective) superstitions that I know of came from my cousin Mike at around the age of 11 or 12. Mike told me that it was bad luck to count the number of cars in a funeral procession. He said that he once did it, and a day later he got hit in the head with a pipe. So ever since then, I always did my best not to start counting when a funeral procession was driving past me. I would look away, or start humming the national anthem, or do something to distract myself. And it seemed to work, as I haven’t been hit in the head with a pipe yet (although I’ve had many other forms of “bad luck” in my life, as has everyone else).

On another day long ago, the same cousin and I pondered the fact that superstitions aren’t entirely irrational. The one about walking under ladders is obvious. Because mirrors were once hugely expensive, the superstition about cracks in the looking glass encouraged good care of them. As to black cats, well, that one is more Freudian in nature. However, the superstition against counting cars in a funeral procession does in fact make a point, maybe an important point. When you see a funeral procession going by, something important is happening. Instead of counting cars (or trying to avoid counting cars, as I have done for so many years), it might do everyone on the sidelines some good to ponder the question of human mortality. We might extend a bit of sympathy in our hearts to those in that procession who will miss the decedent, whether emotionally or financially (or both, as is often the case). We might hold solemn the end of another human life, the finishing of another story in the book of humankind. We probably don’t know the person who died, but hey – for whom do the bells toll, anyway?

A person might also be tempted to count the cars in a funeral so as to gauge the decedent’s importance. If there were just a few cars, the deceased man or woman was probably just another schmuck. If there are 30 cars or so and they’re mostly big and expensive – well then, maybe we have a bigshot funeral going by, a corporate president or a politician.

Again, though, such thinking deserves a pipe to the head. Saints often die lonely deaths, and people who did a lot of harm in this world are often well celebrated upon their passing (celebrated with acclaim, that is, not with raw truth). If “the other side” truly exists and there are hosts of angels waiting at the gates, hopefully they do a better job of gaging the worth of a person when she or he enters their realm, than we do when they pass from us.

Superstition ain’t the way, as Stevie Wonder sang. But with regard to superstitions about funerals, perhaps there is a point to be made – i.e., if you can get beyond counting or trying not to count.

◊ posted by Jim G @ 3:09 pm No Comments Yet / Leave a Comment

Thursday, September 21, 2006

◊ GLOBAL WARMING, GLOBAL CONFUSION

Public Policy ... Science ... Society ...

Most scientists have come around to the global warming hypothesis. Yes, there are still some cynics; and of course there are still the industry prostitutes who do their best to sow seeds of confusion amidst the public, so as to buy more time for the coal, oil, auto and power industries. But for the most part, experts now agree that humankind, through its release of gasses created by industrial processes, heating and transportation activities, has changed the Earth’s climate. Mother nature has incredible powers to adjust to changes, but we’ve pushed her just a bit out of her range. So, things are changing.

But exactly how much they are going to change in the future, and exactly what the consequences are going to be, are still quite uncertain. I’ve done some surface level research lately on the different scenarios for the future that various people and groups have developed, based on what is known thus far. There are a few well-respected experts who foresee major calamity by the year 2100. Perhaps the gloomiest doomsday voice right now is that of James Lovelock, the guy who came up with the Gaia theory, i.e. the Earth as a large-scale living being in and of itself.

Lovelock, in his recent book (Gaia’s Revenge), sez that we’re gonna be soggy toast; both temperatures and sea levels are going to rise so as to make most of our planet uninhabitable. Humankind will enter the 22nd Century with about half as many people as we have now, concentrated as close to the North and South Poles as possible (hmmm, then the whole world will be “Pole-ish”; sorry, bad Polish joke). Civilization will have to go by the wayside, for the most part; life will be quite Hobbsian, i.e. nasty, brutish and short. Perhaps by the 23rd Century things will cool down a bit and humankind will experience a new renaissance and a new enlightenment. Lovelock holds out hope for that.

And next we have Al Gore. He isn’t quite as gloomy as Lovelock, but he’s still plenty gloomy: 300,000 deaths a year by 2030, a million species extinct by 2050, a sea rise of 20 feet by 2100. Then there’s Jim Hansen, a climate specialist working for NASA. He thinks that if the world doesn’t drastically cut greenhouse gas emissions in ten years, bad stuff will happen. Again, he doesn’t go quite as far as Lovelock, but in one article he says that sea levels could rise by 16 feet every century between now and 2400.

The middle-of-the-road scientists are being a bit more careful. In a well-respected study released in 2001 by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a UN-related agency, a number of different scenarios were examined with varying assumptions regarding world economic growth and actions to reduce greenhouse gasses. The “middle level” scenario estimates a rise in sea levels of about 16 inches by 2100. Admittedly, 16 inches of sea rise would still reek a lot of havoc; but it would not be the show-stopper that Hansen, Gore and Lovelock anticipate. The IPCC study also discussed changing rainfall conditions that will probably cause famine, but not necessarily on a world-wide basis.

You can also find studies showing even lower estimates of sea rises; a climate model developed at the Center for Climate System Research at the University of Tokyo in 2005 indicated a 12 to 15 inch rise by 2100. So what’s a few more retaining walls? Even Holland could probably handle that! (But not New Orleans).

And just to make it all the more confusing, there’s the study done for the Pentagon in 2004, which talks about upcoming famines caused not by heating, but by rapid atmospheric cooling (at least in the Northern Hemisphere). The authors believe that the melting of the ice caps will mess up the Gulf Stream and other ocean currents such that heat from the Tropics will no longer be conveyed to northern latitudes (where most of the world’s land and people are). So the tropical regions around the Equator and the seas south of it will get hotter, while much of the middle zone (the US, Europe, Russia, north China, etc.) will become cold and dry.

There are obviously a whole lot of uncertainties here. Some scientists think that we might get another 50 to 100 years of breathing room if the sun goes into a quieter phase of its sunspot cycle; one or two even think that a new ice age will soon be upon us. (However, a number of scientists are saying that solar radiation changes from sunspots and orbital wobble aren’t nearly strong enough to overwhelm greenhouse gas effects.)

We also don’t know just how quickly the Antarctic ice cap and the Greenland ice cap are going to melt. If the West Antarctic ice sheet breaks off and melts, we’re supposedly in for a 16 foot rise in ocean levels. But it wouldn’t happen instantly. Would it take 25 years? 100 years? 500 years? No one knows . . . . . although some very recent studies indicate that the ice over Greenland and Antarctica may be melting faster than previously thought. Not good.

You can also find some smart people who say that it’s all fixable and preventable. In 2004, the Princeton Environmental Institute (affilated with Princeton University) issued a study saying that we now have the technology to hold future greenhouse gas emissions steady at today’s levels, and that if we do, nothing too bad should happen. The study seems to include some very optimistic assumptions, e.g. a 50 fold increase for wind power, a doubling of nuclear power, increased ethanol production by a factor of 50 through biomass plantations using one-sixth of the world’s croplands, double fuel efficiency of cars to 60 mpg (even hybrids don’t get that yet), decrease the number of car miles traveled by HALF, replace 1400 coal electric plants with natural gas, produce hydrogen from coal at 6 times the present rate, and sequester CO2 emmissions from 800 coal electric plants (and also from the new hydrogen plants). The study doesn’t say what this would all cost or who would pay for it. I’m not sure if it were meant to be anything more than a puff piece to lull the public into thinking that global warming need not become a political issue. After all, the study was funded by $20 million in grants from BP and Ford Motor Co.

The Princeton study still has an academic cachet about it (how could anything with the Priceton brand have anything less?). If you want to see a real down-n-dirty industry approach to public awareness regarding global warming, then check out the Competitive Enterprise Institute. I’m not sure exactly who funds this group, but whomever it is, they recently inspired CEI to produce and play some 30 second commercials on TV which try to convince us that CO2 is our friend. “Some call it pollution . . . we call it life”. You can see these commercials on CEI’s web site; if you do, note the glacier commercial, where scenes of melting ice caps are run backward! Yes, CEI would like us to think that the ice caps are un-melting somehow, and that the oceans are spitting ice back up onto the land. Sorry, CEI, but you can’t make it all
go away with a cheap visual propaganda trick. Americans can be hoodwinked pretty easily by slick commercials, but you’ve gone a step too far here in assuming viewer stupidity.

So there’s a quick summary regarding the wide range of opinions about where we are and where we’re headed with global warming. Despite all the confusion, it’s pretty clear that humankind is now facing a huge challenge. If we go on burning coal and oil as we presently do, and if China and India continue to burn increasing amounts in their attempts to leave eons of poverty behind, we know that we’re headed onto unknown turf. We’re betting the farm, quite literally. The global warming situation is a real head-scratcher. At the moment, I can’t figure out just how to wrap my mind around it. So I’m gonna leave it at this for now. Hopefully I’ll be back in a few days with some more thoughts on just how humankind can reasonably approach this situation.

◊ posted by Jim G @ 11:01 pm No Comments Yet / Leave a Comment

Saturday, August 19, 2006

◊ Low on Optimism, Even in the City

Personal Reflections ... Society ...

I guess that I’m not the most optimistic of people. I’ve explained here why human civilization may be heading for a 200 or 300 year setback, starting sometime before the end of this century. This setback certainly won’t be the end of humankind, nor of civilization; but as with the Dark Ages, it certainly will increase the Hobbsian character of life for the average Joe and Jane, everywhere in the world. I.e., life for everyone on the planet will be nasty, brutish and short.

After a while, maybe around 2300 or so, there may well be a Renaissance; hope will return, based not so much on technology or wealth as on wisdom. People will finally learn that greed and tribalism and aggression have got to go. Laissez-faire capitalism, as we know it today, will finally be seen for the abomination that it is; society will finally see through the lure of individual riches that it offers. World consciousness will finally take root, overcoming the tribal barriers and prejudices that have built up around differences in languages, customs, skin colors, body structures and religious metaphysics. People will share each other’s resources and be concerned about each other’s needs; Houston will be concerned with Cairo, Buenos Airians will think about Vladivostok, Brazzaville will offer help to Los Angeles. Too bad I won’t live to see it (neither will anyone alive today).

But for now, it’s just one more sign of social decay after another along the road spiraling downward. If you’ve read my Urban Thoughts section, you know that I’ve been watching trends in America’s inner cities and have concluded that despite all the signs of gentrification and rebirth, many neighborhoods are stuck in a downward spiral of lawlessness and disengagement from the mainstream system of social norms, education and economics. An alternate social and economic reality is being built there by the street gangs, around guns, narcotics and other forms of illicit entrepreneurship. I started writing Urban Thoughts in 1998. Now it’s eight years later, and too many of my predictions are coming true. The gangsta rappers are making lots of cash selling songs about it to kids in the bored suburbs, who ironically don’t seem to realize that this is real. I’m not sure where it’s going to wind up for this “alternate America”, but I don’t think it’s going to be pretty.

I don’t stay up with the latest mega hiphop songs by 50 Cent or The Game, but I can offer you a local news story that is similarly quite frightening. It’s about the life of Raynard Brown of Orange, NJ. Orange isn’t quite what I would call a ghetto. It is located just to the west of East Orange, Newark and Irvington, all of which do have areas with a lot of poverty, crime, and gang activity. But Orange seemed to be hanging on as a working class town. However, about a week ago, Mr. Brown was reported to the police for shooting a sawed off shotgun at someone in the street. The police arrived and chased him toward an abandoned house used by drug dealers. Brown went up some steps to a second floor, then turned with his gun just as Orange Police Detective Kiernan Shields arrived below him. Brown pulled the trigger and Shields died from the gunshot blast.

In one of the background stories published in the local newspapers to explain this tragedy, it was pointed out that Brown is a ranking member of the Bloods street gang. But what really got me is that Raynard Brown grew up in a stable, working class family, the kind of household that still dominates the town of Orange. He had both his father and his mother at home with him, and they both cared about his education. They wanted him to succeed. They got him involved in after-school activities, and steered him away from the “trouble” crowd. They followed the parental handbook; they did everything right. And yet they couldn’t keep their son from the grips of a social infection that hadn’t seemed to have reached their town yet, not in a big way at least. The dysfunctional world of single parent homes and welfare and junkies and “hoeing” that spawned the local Bloods and Crips sets seemed to stop a mile or two away from the Brown family residence. And yet, that mile or two, along with a caring family, wasn’t enough protection. Obviously, the infection is still spreading.

What to do? As my Urban Thoughts page says, I think that the forces behind this “infection” are extremely strong and will overcome the meager resources that our society is willing to devote to it (e.g., federal and state grants for anti-gang youth programs, job training, housing redevelopment, inner-city economic development, convict re-entry support, etc.). In the end, about the best we can do is to help those who want to get out of the bad neighborhoods to get out, by expanding things like the HUD “Move to Opportunity” program. This “infection” may just have to end like the plagues of the Middle Ages did, by killing off those who are most vulnerable. In the mean time, it will also take down some collateral victims, like Officer Shields. I wish that I was wrong about that. But at the moment, America seems too busy … too “Bushy” … to care.

It may well take 2 or 3 centuries for a revolution of wisdom to overcome all of this and bring about a Renaissance of Hope.

◊ posted by Jim G @ 5:44 pm No Comments Yet / Leave a Comment

Wednesday, July 26, 2006

◊ Hey Dawkins, Thanks for the Memes

Religion ... Society ...

I saw an article in the NY Times about Richard Dawkins’ soon to be released book “The God Delusion”. You might remember Dawkins for his concept of the “meme”. He explains it in his earlier book “The Selfish Gene”. Basically, a “meme” is something like a social version of a human gene. Instead of being an actual strand of molecules that determines our physical features, such as a DNA gene is, a “meme” is a social idea that helps to determine our mental features, e.g. our beliefs, our wants, our cultural tastes, our sense of humor, etc. A “meme” starts out with one person or a small group of people who think up something clever; or at least they find it clever. It can be a joke, a song, a poem, an ad jingle, a magazine article, an opinion, an idea about parenting, a positive or negative review of a restaurant, etc. This “clever thing” can be about big ideas (e.g., Plato’s theory of the forms) or about little stuff (an opinion about a certain kind of mouthwash).

A meme starts out with one or two people, but it soon gets passed on to other people (word of mouth, publication, paid advertisement, etc.). And that’s where it gets put to the test. Just as a species of flora or fauna is tested by the environment it faces, a meme competes for people’s attention. If a lot of people find the “meme” useful or interesting or edifying, it gets passed on. If not, it dies out quickly (or has but a brief season in the sun, like hula hoops and mood rings did). So, the “meme” goes through a Darwinian evolutionary process, where it’s the survival of the fittest (or most popular).

Personally, I’ve had a lot of meme ideas, and they’ve all bombed out. I just can’t seem to “touch the nerve” of the public. (The blogosphere is a good example of a competitive “meme” environment. A handful of blogs — even some non-pornographic ones — get thousands of hits each day. And yet many, like mine, are lucky to get a handful a week. They just never catch on.)

Anyway, Dawkins obviously has some opinions about religion’s status as a meme (or more accurately, as a “memeplex”, a complex system of inter-related memes). I haven’t read his new book yet, but according to the reviews and his other writings and interviews, Dawkins feels that religious faith is a bad meme, something like a gene that causes cancer. According to the Times article, Dawkins feels that God and religion are evolutionary defects that will eventually be eliminated as humankind progresses. In fact, he says that this is already happening in one place — western Europe. He seems quite enthusiastic about this brave new Euroworld.

The idea of God is indeed a meme (or memeplex). It seems to me that it’s a meme that has done pretty well over the centuries, survival-wise. And as with living creatures, you can argue that the idea of God has evolved so as to get better and more intelligent every so many centuries. It took quite a while for a kinder and gentler God, a wiser and unified God to emerge from the many concepts of spirits and multiple gods that have been bandied about across the many cultures of the world over the past — what? — three thousand years? As to religions, admittedly, they still have a long ways to go. Some of them are still quite crude, and all of them are very crude in certain ways. Dawkins spends a lot of time in his book outlining this. As with Dawkins, none of the religions inspire me to get up early on a Sunday morning. But I have faith that some day, we may see the evolution of a better religion, one with greater wisdom, one that makes its peace with science and individuality. That is, if the world doesn’t blow itself back into the Stone Age (through science and individuality).

I obviously see God and religion as being similar to all of the imperfect living creatures in the physical universe, which are slowly improving over time through evolutionary processes, i.e. by responding to varying and ongoing environmental challenges. As with most creatures, the ideas of God and religion sometimes seem to challenge or even threaten intelligent life; although more often they are beneficial. Dawkins and a variety of other modern thinkers (most notoriously philosopher Daniel Dennett) find religion to be an unfortunate and pernicious “memenic” accident, something like a deadly virus. Obviously, they feel it has little to offer to the cause of intelligent enlightenment, and much to harm it.

Well, Mr. Dawkins. If the memes of God and religion are like harmful microbes, they certainly have infected a large swath of humanity. And they have done so for a long, long time. How many biological diseases or pathological conditions can you compare that with? Despite continued belief in God and participation in religion, humankind continues to develop such things as human rights, democracy, critical thinking, artistic culture, philosophy, science and technology. In some cases, religion (or a certain form of it) even assisted the emergence of these things.

And as to western Europe — their secular orientation is something relatively new, something that developed over the past 40 years or so. And just what has western Europe contributed, “meme-wise”, to the human condition during this time? Well, let’s consider some things: Techno-trance; Europop; Spaghetti Funk; Abba. Well OK, the Scorpions, admittedly; but also Eiffel 65 and Turbo-Folk. If that is what the future of culture is going to be like once secularism reigns supreme, then give me that old-tyme religion!

◊ posted by Jim G @ 8:11 pm No Comments Yet / Leave a Comment

Thursday, June 22, 2006

◊ Race Matters … In Politics

Politics ... Society ...

Race Matters . . . . In Politics Anyway: Working in a prosecutor’s office, I get to see pictures of people convicted of murder. Since my county has a significant black population, a lot of its convicted murders are black. Very black. I haven’t done a controlled study, but it looks to me as though many African-American males convicted of murder have very dark skin tones and prominent African facial features.

Compare that with the present-day African-American movers and shakers on the political scene. I can think of Barak Obama, Condi Rice, Corry Booker, and Harold Ford. And not so long ago, Colin Powell. All of these people have fairly light complexions and noticeable European facial features. If you did a controlled, objective study, I think you would find a significant difference in tone and facial structure between black homicide convicts and successful black politicians (at least on the state or national level).

So, the winners from the African-American culture arguably look somewhat Caucasian, while the losers look more like their ancestors from Africa. You could come up with two theories about that. The first one, based on the Hernstein-Murray “Bell Curve” rationale, is that African genetics don’t foster the intellectual capabilities that are critical to success in America today, at least not to the degree that European (and Asian) genetics do. The other rationale is that American culture is still not color blind. People who look more European are received better than people who look African. (And perhaps people who are very black are more subject to police attention and arrest — although many of the police who arrest black murder suspects and the juries who convict them are also black). Despite banishing overt racism, America is still covertly, perhaps unconsciously, racist.

I myself think that the second rationale makes more sense. America likes to think of itself as an open society, welcoming all comers without stuffy European attitudes about class. But as most any sociologist will tell you, no human society can completely purify itself of its unspoken assumptions; it hardly knows that it has any! Subtle notions get passed from generation to generation without ever being put into words. If you happen to be on the wrong side of those unspoken assumptions — well, then, good luck.

Unfortunately, America and Americans have more yet to do on the topic of racism. And Euro-Americans have to do the heavy lifting here. But there is a footnote to that, too. Black counter-racism against whites also exists. Perhaps it can be sympathized with, given the history of racial relationships over the past 500 years; but it still isn’t right, either. We all have some growing up to do.

◊ posted by Jim G @ 7:19 pm Read Comment (1) / Leave a Comment

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