jannotes

There is no better way to bring about a fascist state than to lead people into despair because of democratic impotence. Hobbes’s Leviathan is a sleeping giant lying behind all petty power playing and irresponsible recalcitrance. When people are fearful and deeply insecure, they lash out against all who look, talk, and act differently and demand unlimited cruelty to fix the cracks in their parochial comforts. When in pain, only relief from the pain is relevant, and whoever has no immediate antidote will be attacked. Freedom is ultimately only freedom from pain, and individual pain makes it impossible to feel for others or even care. A wounded animal attacks those who would help him unless they come well protected and forearmed with restraining chains. Absolute Authority is Absolute Comfort. In this country, the irony is that the discontent is over a lifestyle most of the world envies. A billionaire lashes out in wounded-dog-like rage when a penny is added to his taxes. The problem starts with the low threshold for pain we have in this country, especially by the pampered and metaphysically entitled. Regular, unwealthy people who two years ago screamed in rage that their Medicare was being stolen from them now want leaders who will abolish it altogether. When the planned austerity of the budget is put in place by the Republicans (and a White President, thank God!) the economy will plummet, but the clarion call to Patriotism and Exceptionalism, and bombs over Tehran will sooth the savage breast. There will be more reasons to laud the “Warriors” and their sacrifice and service at pregame Baseball First Pitch ceremonies. And we, “safe” at home, will starve, sans unemployment benefits, sans food stamps, sans a living wage, sans health care, sans everything. I remember reading a poem some years ago depicting a father beating his child brutally, and the child would keep coming back to his father crying, looking for comfort from him, only to be beaten again. This continued persistently, because, said the poet, “he had nowhere else to go.” This is the illusion the Republican Party is instilling in the electorate, and so many of them will throw in their lives in order to prevent a woman from receiving birth control or an unemployed worker from receiving food stamps, or a cancer sufferer from receiving medical care. If George Romney takes over, and the Republicans have congressional majorities, the abuse of the people of the country will be complete. And they will love every minute of it. After all, we are exceptional. What more could you ask for?

Do not confuse rightful anger at injustice and predation with hatred. Hate is all consuming and has a very general, impersonal focus. It is impersonal because the hater has no ability to meet up empathically with an individual as an individual, but merely as a token of primal otherness. Hatred sparks itself into violence, whereas anger is a reaction to personal threat requiring action for protection against predation. Hatred is a power that needs no external threat for action, merely the presence of alterity. Anger is focused on a specific injustice and seeks not to destroy the person but to rectify the situation that person has caused. Hatred seeks to destroy the other and requires dehumanizing that person, making him or her an Other, incapable of recognizing any feeling of shared humanity with the object of hate. This is the psychology of hatred, and it is based on primal xenophobic fear, a genomic constant. When society is knocked askew as in present times, primal behaviors will prevail. Xenophobia is scratched deep into the human genome and is safely funnelled into benign activities when times are pleasant, and takes over as a “warre of all against all” when terror becomes a social effluvium. At that point groups become the Other, whatever their identity: racial, ethnic, political, occupational, socioeconomic. It is irrational and in many people it is pathological. Pathological hatred becomes viral and infects the society en masse. The right wing feels deeply of and speaks only out of terror. And thus the resonance for so many. When we are incapable of seeing ourselves as connected with all human beings, empathically energized when in their presence, even in hostility understanding their needs and perspectives however they may clash with ours, but feel only Otherness of being, isolation amidst them, the toxins fulfill us and the will to power is spurred into bloodbathing. Anger must be felt and channeled into a positive action against the hatred itself that pervades this country and that is propagated so efficiently by the robotic little minds that articulate it. That one would worry deeply about becoming a hater in this resistance is assurance in itself that this person won’t become one. Self defense of oneself and the sole desire for not personal victory over the foe but with hope to bring such people back into the fold of common humanity with all of us, this should be the goal. Protect ourselves against hatred in whatever practical way is required, but always with the goal to forgive and reunite, not to destroy. We must know our foe, understand their humanity, desire the best for them, seek to regain their love, but refuse their agenda with whatever it takes. Remember Jesus’s last words on the cross and know that in a just battle, it is the victor who weeps.

Human rights belong to all by birth. The government does not “give” people rights, they always already have them. There are people who would deny rights to others. The government then has the Duty to Protect the rights of People that others would take from them. The legal protection of rights as a government function is one of the historically most radical innovations of the U.S. Constitution. Since its inception, the protections have always been there. Who needs to be protected has been slowly recognized over time. The answer to “Who” is simply “Everyone.” That simple fact could have saved us a lot of blood and tears. The majority has no “right” to decide who does and does not have rights. They are natural human entitlements and when denied the crime is the action of the denier. The need to dominate and deny another his or her full humanity is supported by the dark energy of Fear, Evil’s weapon of mass destruction. There is no safety in denying rights to others. There is only ongoing painful folly. The Golden Rule, that one apply reciprocity and empathy to all interpersonal actions, has many and varied iterations, and it is the final and elegant guide to true and lasting happiness for those who apply it. It is the antidote to Fear. My favorite form of the Golden Rule: Live and Let Live.

Why have I never heard of Maurice Sendak or “Where the Wild Things Are”? I feel I have had a part of existence denied me for something I did terribly wrong.
There was a wonderful program of interviews with Maurice Sendak on Fresh Air with Terry Gross today. I have never heard a person describe a personal philosophy so similar to my own. He is an atheist, who like myself, is unapologetic about his weltanshaung and not disturbed by the issues of ultimate purpose and the nonsense of afterlife (terror of death is the power behind modern religions, not morality or purpose) – he loves life and that is the purpose of life – to love it while it lasts, every moment of it. Accept the reality of true death and get on with things. Her most recent interview with him was last September by phone since he was immobilized by what he knew was a terminal state. She asked him about impending death and his atheism, and whether he had second thoughts. He said no, he had no reason to change his understanding of things and as for his own death, he merely said: “I am ready. I am ready. I am ready.” It was the death of others that made him sad, and he told her he was glad he would go before she would, since he will not have to be sad over her. This man is extraordinary, and I, the all knowing, never heard of him or his books before today. It is a hole in my life that I shall now begin to fill in.
“You know who my gods are, who I believe in fervently? Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson — she’s probably the top — Mozart, Shakespeare, Keats. These are wonderful gods who have gotten me through the narrow straits of life.”
- Maurice Sendak
On faith
“I am not a religious person, nor do I have any regrets.”
Like me, his spiritual life is enabled by reading and by listening to music. Today, for the first time, I felt validated as an atheist who finds meaning in the very living of life itself, accepts the inevitability of death as existentially final, and appreciating the gift given over the millennia of the experience of the human condition lived out in the words and art of the special human beings who set their experience to transmittable media – writing and visual and aural art. The art and literature of the species from the most distant past to the immediate present is the gift of human life. Having lived, when the time comes to dis-integrate and reorganize into something other than human, I hope my last words will be: “Thank you.”

One need not be comfortable with gay marriage to support it as a right. Culture embeds many biases that cannot be fully expunged from our existential makeup. Abe Lincoln showed his greatness not by considering African Americans “equal” human beings in all respects (he didn’t and is on record saying some disturbing things on that topic) but by understanding that whatever his feelings, they were real human beings who deserved basic human rights. His sense of humanity and justice overrode his personal biases, and that is where moral greatness lies. If I have to live with the “rights” of a person to tote a gun under any and all circumstances, which can be a true threat to my life, then others can live with the right of a human being to marry the person of his or her choice, which can be ignored and will not have any impact on his or her life. Why is that so hard to stomach for so many? #HumanAllTooHuman

Marriage traditionally never included love. It is about combining families and having offspring that will give the man at least some assurance the the kids are his. Romantic love is not really about marriage, but about relationship and mutual care. It is not about the result of sexual behavior (i.e. offspring), but sexual behavior as an act of intimate sharing through intense physical elations, a gift from partner to partner. This idea of love and marriage as analogous to a horse and a carriage (the Sinatra principle) is almost unexpressed in literature before Romeo and Juliet, and thus is probably a product of Renaissance introspection. But love outside of marriage as a human good is as old as the ages. Consider the “favorite concubines” of ancient kings, David and Bathsheba, Odysseus’ amorous experiences on his way back to his wife. And yes, to co-opt any of the obvious complaints about this view, the male-female criteria are totally asymmetrical. A man and a woman may have a special bond, and this includes a sense of equality in the relationship, but the marriage situation puts the woman without rights while the man has them all. David has hundreds of concubines and has his best general murdered in order to claim his wife, but David’s wife must be loyal to him and him alone, both sexually and in relationship with another man. This goes back to the original point: assurance that one’s children are one’s own seed. Only a woman can have that kind of certainty. Love is beautiful, and it is a human universal, but is not the foundation of marriage. To get married for love is a modern luxury, but all modern people should be allowed this luxury without qualification.

The most repulsive new “tradition” of recent years is the Sunday singing at Baseball Parks across America of Irving Berlin’s Tin Pan Alley trash tune, “God Bless America.”  This is a holdover of the Bush-Cheney faux patriotic attempt to bring American Exceptionalism as an embedded symbol for the mind-challenged hoi polloi.  As a tune, it is repulsive, as a message, it is repulsive, as a propaganda tool it is repulsive, as a Religious/Nationalistic message it is repulsive, as Baseball Tradition it is repulsive, vile, and disgusting.  Bush-Cheney-Koch’s America is soon to become Mudville.

The Bush-Cheney neo-con thuggary always wanted Iraq to be perceived as WWII redux, with an evil tyrant out to destroy the world and the nations who refused to go along with us obviously cowardly appeasers. This, even though there was no draft, no taxes to pay for it, no existential threat to this country let alone the entire world, no threat of Totalitarianism; in other words, the undeclared war that would be WWII all over again, rather than being a patriotic cause, was merely a War Crime, and nothing else. MLB requires GBA to be sung on Sundays – I watch many games here in Chicago and it is only sung on that day. Besides that, they demand that people take off hats and put their hands on their heart, thus elevating this trifling tune probably pilfered from a trash can on Tin Pan Alley to the level of National Anthem. I remember while listening to a game on the radio a few years ago, the former major league pitcher and now White Sox radio announcer Ed Farmer saying on his broadcast with incredulity and clear umbrage:  “why are they taking off their hats and putting their hands on their hearts?  This isn’t the National Anthem.” Obviously a true patriot, he was offended.  He is not a political person, and I would assume he is also quite conservative at heart, as most of those guys are.  This has been going on for some 10 years, and it is an assault on all  who see through this pernicious manipulation.  I didn’t mean to imply it was a religious problem, it is merely an imposition of official chauvinism and forced worship of Mythic American Exceptionalism: Deutschland Uber Allis meets Mudville.  Irving Berlin wrote many wonderful songs worthy of hearing in a variety of venues, though I can’t think of any that belong in a ball park.  God Bless America is not one of those songs, in fact it is a piece of hackneyed trash written for and  belonging entirely to Kate Smith, bless her chubby little heart – it had a context and the feeling of American Innocence that spoke to the moment; it has no business being exhumed and sung at what should be an a-political event. Two expansions: The attempt to instill the sense of American “Innocence” which the GBA-Kate Smith cult stand for (and thus the innate guilt possessed by the rest of the envious and resentful world for the hatred they so unjustly hold towards us is implied – a WWII trope that worked well back then and underpins the cult of American Exceptionalism) and the fact that, setting aside for now that America the Beautiful has a passing and meaningful use of the word God in it, in GBA, the entire song is about America as the home of God’s Chosen People and moves doggedly towards a  climactic, long held operatic pinnacle note  that blares out the word “God” on a high note held much longer than any other in the song – you better believe that is a theocratic message to the idolaters of the Religious Right.  Carl Rove understands exactly what he is doing. Even Obama has to make a kow-tow by finishing all of his speeches with “God Bless the United States of America.”  (He can’t say “America” like all others can, since his foes will immediately insist he is speaking of the Hemisphere, not the Chosen People of the country with its penis in Florida and its asshole in Alaska).

“The entire psychological field – including human conception, responsible action, rationality, knowledge – is a vast and branching development of feeling. Susanne  K. Langer, Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling (23).

Over the past several centuries, from the Renaissance and especially the Enlightenment era, the separation of cognition from affect and the inevitable dichotomization of the two aspects of human information and behavioral processing  has  brought about a fundamental misunderstanding of our very humanity, our species specific ways of receiving the world about us and responding appropriately.  The  over-stressing of an independent “Reason” that is both prior to and has a trumping effect on “Affect (feeling, phenomenology, emotion, mood)” is now finally being questioned.  This may be in the nature of a Kuhnian “Paradigm shift” if we understand this as requiring a fundamental change in a basic understanding  of world of nature: in this case, what, in analogy with Copernicus, the “Cognicentric” axiom becomes replaced by the “Affecticentric” axiom.  This may not be as helpful as it seems, since this too requires a dichotomization of Cognition and Affect, with one taking over the other.  The Systems Theory and Information Theory approach (a system of information processing with reciprocal and parallel neural events in constant flux and back and forth dissemination of information that brings the eventual reactions and responses of the organism into functional actions), which would unify the two aspects of our psychic life into systemic properties resulting from constant informational  back and forth among the multifarious components of the somatic and neural aspects of the human organism. This de-dichotomization of our affective and cognitive functions will help provide fundamental changes not only in the many psychological disciplines, but also in the important area of understanding human social, political, and moral behaviors.  Morality as a purely cognitive function, a function of Reason, handed down from Plato to Kant to the modern Harvard School (Rawls, Nozick, Sen, and others), in which affective states are bracketed as if they are merely the emotional backlash following a rational analysis.  The Copernican shift in which the affective element underpins the very relevance of ethical discourse and action can be seen in crude fashion in the Scottish Enlightenment, notably the ethical writings of Hutcheson, Hume, and Smith – the practical social outcome of ethical action and the notion of ethical sentiments (feelings, affect), based on an exceptional understanding of human empathy (especially in Smith, using the term sympathy) and the rather anti-intuitive  idea that those we interact with give us our moral signals, that is, we are moral from external rather than internal input – the external connection is the foundation of moral action.  This is a concept that must be pursued in that it too goes against the general paradigm of morality as an internal judgment, the idea of pure autonomy which underpins Kant’s moral theories. The rational power of Kant (despite the terrible paradoxes of his system, a problem with all rationalistic world-views) put him in the forefront, at least considering  method and approach to moral philosophy, if not in absolute acceptance of his specific ideas.  Rationalistic world-views refuse to take contingencies seriously into account, seeing them only as aberrations over which the theory will eventually triumph.  In pure reasoning, only Necessity is recognized as having reality; contingency is the enemy that must be expunged.  Interestingly, the notion of the primacy of affect, and the well documented recent understanding that much of our belief system is validated more by post facto rationalization rather than pre-facto logical analysis.  We act, then we decide on the moral quality of the action, fitting it into our desired moral justification .  The research of Jonathan Haight and others is essential to this new moral understanding, and it supports the idea that morality is not Universal Natural Law but is a highly contingent and fluid social judgment phenomenon and must be understood as at its root a biological function.  And Feeling, not Reasoning, is the foundation of morality. This upsets so many people, I think I will continue my own thinking on this and continue to put it out on this venue. 

On Randall Balmer’s Review of BAD RELIGION How We Became a Nation of Heretics

By Ross Douthat

Love the book’s author’s name: Douthat.  A warning that we should Doubt That?  I also love the tokens of dissent we get from the Centrist media (NYT in this case). Another tale, told by an idiot and signifying nothing:  The myth of the Christian core of this nation.  That Christianity is actually what this nation is all about.  In other words, Christianity defined as bigotry. Christianity with a stutter:  KKKristianity.  What is most indecent about this paean to mankind’s most pernicious yoke? Bringing in Dr. King as part of the mission.  He was a Christian (a true one, Ch . ..  not KKK),  but his mission, unlike Billy Graham’s and all other varieties of crackers, was justice for a beaten down people, wherein he noted that justice for one is justice for all.  It wasn’t to convert the world to a dead mythology of group exceptionalism and acceptance of injustice by the poor and ethnically “unclean. “  And what was the downside of this great 50’s-60’s revivial?  Says the reviewer, Randall Balmer: “Douthat’s narrative of decline implicates the sexual revolution; globalization (by which he means exposure to non-Christian religions); and the Vietnam War, which bifurcated American Christianity.  Seminary enrollments declined, denominations faced budgetary stringencies and the elites understood that the only reason to pay attention to traditional Christianity was to subject it to a withering critique. Add to that the ordination of women, the growing acceptance of divorce and the destigmatizing of homosexuality, and you have a traditionalist’s nightmare. ” Note the problem was “dividing Christianity.’  Can’t do that, now can we.  MLK didn’t?  Of course not.  It was already that way, in fact it was like that before the nails had done their job and were pulled away by Joseph of Arimathea, lo so long ago. Don’t forget, the Puritans came to this country not to escape persecution, but to find a friendly bit of unrestraining real estate in which they could proclaim the Truth and persecute those who refused to see it.  Torquemada was not the only torturer and burner of heretics in Christianity: Calvin was an expert at it too.  Douthat, Santorum, Rick Warren and  Pat Robertson are their spawn.

Reading history, it is self-evident that human beings are cruel and xenophobic  – it is a function of our DNA.  Hatred of the Other had much primeval utility and allowed for keeping boundaries across peoples.  Aggression across boundaries for resources and the feeling of glory and power that gave to the aggressors (behavioral reinforcement) are characteristics we continue to possess. Over time details vary, but the internal phenomenology is the same.  Thus the Caesars and the Kings of the middle-ages would lead their troops into battle, taking personal risks along with their army; they were prodded by a sense of glory and renown for bravery.  That’s what a Prince is: courageous, aggressive, a model for the little people who follow him.  Over time, the Prince became a bureaucrat; an executive in a spacious office half-way across the world; even his Generals stayed as safe as possible in offices outside of the combat zone.  The wars were said to be Patriotic, but no patriotic sacrifice was ever required of the citizens.  No one was forced into service for the sake of the protection of the Nation; rather, many who signed up in peace suddenly had their lives destroyed by the small print that kept them enslaved to their military contract.  Others followed true patriotism and went and died, or came home with severe mental and physical handicaps that were poorly treated.  The Princes, though, showed up in their  aircraft carriers, press conferences and interviews and preened like Caesars and Richard the Lionhearted, speaking of their courage and their patriotic duty; how WE have stopped the enemy (yes, WE Kimosabe).  The Romans tortured slaves to get the goods on their masters, and so do our Princes.  From Homer to Joshua to Tacitus we are told of the glory of slaughter of the Other, through honest face to face combat as well as occasional trickery.  Our deposed Princes take credit for the victories of the present Prince, and they have a list of countries of Others that must be annihilated post haste, and deploring  the cowardice of the present Prince for not doing so.  None of them, not the former or the present Princes has seen a day in battle, even those who lived at a time that young men were forced into battle by their government.  They found loopholes and maintained their bodily safety so that they could become future Caesars and bask in the glory of war. The laws of their nation were broken along with the laws of international accords (which apply, according to them, only to the enemy). When the former Prince’s  time was up for earthly life, he would take a heart from a much younger person in need in order to extend  himself for another year or two to expound on the need to murder more innocents across the world and deplore the present Prince’s cowardice, weakness, and danger to the Nation.  History repeats itself because the genome repeats itself.  However, like the genome, history has its variations.  The modern Prince has lost the physical courage of the ancient one.  The modern Prince who glorifies war has tools of persuasion that can portray him as a man of Courage and Wisdom, and the ill-educated masses, through mass media, are immersed in his posings and posturings and angry hate filled intonings (nothing exercises the little people like the hatred of Others their paternal Princes emit) and like all slavish people, they lap it up and emulate their master’s arrogance, imitating the lord as a child imitates its parents.  Since they are enfranchised to choose leaders, they choose those who sneer and leer at those who desire  peaceful ways, decency and equality for all, oblivious to the truth  that they themselves are the very targets of the former Prince’s scorn.  The loyalty of a slave to a master that pervades history again begs the genomic explanation.  The Grand Inquisitor of Dostoevsky had us nailed.