People, Politics & Culture – Page 2

January 23, 2021

The Trump Phenomenon

Oxford Languages defines phenomenon as “a fact or situation that is observed to exist or happen, especially one whose cause or explanation is in question.” That is to say, one might be tempted to ask themselves: did this really happen? Or: how could this have been possible?

I’m looking at this in the context of the 45th president of America now having left the White House, as reluctantly as that would have been the case. He rejected the outcome of a democratic election by declaring it to be fraud, and going as far as inciting an insurrection by urging a viscous mob to violate and ransack the US Capitol, and trying to justify this with the – since deleted – tweet on January 6, stating that “these are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away.”

The fact that he or his supporters could not produce one shred of credible and verifiable evidence in support of that bizarre and outrageous claim is just one more reason to refer to his turbulent and abysmally divisive four year term as the head of the USA as a unique phenomenon that requires some exploration.

I’ve written enough about this now ex-president in earlier posts to make it clear that, yes, I have an intense dislike for him – and for all the reasons that are perhaps best summarized by something his former National Security Advisor John Bolton once said about him: he has a hole where his character should have been.

If the 45th president of the United States has demonstrated anything during his noxious reign, it is the fact that he appears to be totally devoid of humanity. By the time he left office on January 20th, over 400,000 Americans had been killed by current pandemic, yet one would have a hard time recalling even one instance in which he publicly expressed genuine empathy towards the families affected by the tragic loss of their loved ones.

Nor did he demonstrate at any time the kind of resoluteness and determination required to address this deadly pandemic with the sense of urgency that one would expect from the leader of a country that is being ravaged by it. The conclusion has to be: he couldn’t care less! After all – be it one or 400,00 dead Americans – they are of no use to him, i.e., they will not be able to pledge fealty to him, let alone vote for him. At most they are an embarrassment for having died in such numbers during his term in office, to the point that when his presidency came to an end the USA had the highest number of novel corona-virus deaths in the world

Throughout his career in private business and during the last four years as a politician it has become very clear that the only person he cares about is himself. Add his inability to admit mistakes by always blaming others and deliver false and misleading claims on just about any subject should that serve his purpose: you have the textbook definition of a sociopath!

While he might seem to care about those who support him and appear to be loyal to him, the moment that seems no longer the case you may as well not exist, i.e., you are of no value to him, as many of his former supporters have found out. A case in point would be the situation his ever-loyal vice-president found himself in on January 6, 2021, when Mike Pence decided to uphold his country’s constitution and certify the election results – as he was legally required to do – instead of complying with Trump’s demand to throw them out so he could stay in office. More recently it appears his ever loyal legal sidekick Rudolph Giuliani has now been given the heave-ho, presumably for services perhaps not so successfully rendered.

So the question remains: how was it possible for a sociopath such as Trump to be elected as the 45th president of the US? I don’t believe I can offer any kind of unique insight into this – for me – baffling phenomenon but the short answer appears to be: he benefited from the significant and historically longstanding divisions within the country, by appealing to the disgruntled hard hearted side of the political spectrum and become their chosen champion to rebuild the USA in their image.

Moreover, he was able to transformed the Republican party from a political organization into a cult of personality that would endow him with a sense of reverence seldom seen within Western politics. The upshot was that he could do no wrong; he could count on their absolute support for whatever action he would consider necessary – legally or illegally – to make the country see things his way.

That he was able to accomplish this over a relatively short period of time is remarkable, but it would be a big mistake to credit him with any kind of political savvy to make this happen. Instead, it was a case of being in the right place at the right time. Never short on ambition, his crude and abrasive in-your-face personae became the perfect medium to personify and give voice to the spiteful and less generous side of human nature on behalf of those on the political right wanting to express their resentment and anger with their country’s status quo.

Trump and the political right rise to power must be seen within the context of many Americans having been manipulated to perceive the looming threat of “socialism” during the eight years of the Obama administration. Despite being among the top world economic powers, the US remains the sole industrialized nation in the world without universal health care coverage. The Affordable Care Act (ACA) – nicknamed Obamacare – aimed to provide affordable health insurance coverage for all Americans – it would be portrayed as another major step towards socialism by those who opposed it.

January 3, 2021

In The Gray Morning Light

In a few weeks it will be International Holocaust Remembrance Day, and the anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz death-camp on January 27, 1945, by the Soviet army. There are many things that continue to disturb me when I think about this period in time again, in addition to the unimaginable evil of it: a state run people extermination program …

There continue to be folks today – imbeciles would be a good name for them – who deny that anything like the Holocaust actually happened. Typically, they will have their own demented ideological agendas that will prevent them from acknowledging the sickening truth of this event, but the well-documented fact remains that on January 20, 1942, in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee, 15 high-ranking Nazi Party and German government officials got together under the leadership of Reinhardt Heydrich, chief of the Reich Main Security Office (including the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), Gestapo, and Kripo) to discuss and coordinate of what they called the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question“.

While the official minutes of this this meeting did not reflect the actual ways and means of the implementation of this state sanctioned policy – we know from actual testimony provided by Adolf Eichmann who was present at the meeting that an agreement was reached to pursue the annihilation of all Jewish people, and that this strategy was subsequently implemented with deadly efficiency, resulting in the murder of perhaps as many as 6 million Jewish people. This includes approximately 1 million Jews just in the Auschwitz complex alone (including Birkenau, Monowitz, and subcamps).

And so it happened that – while Nazi Germany was at war – at the outset life went on more or less as normal for the majority of the German population, but some of their neighbours were forced from their warm beds in the very early morning hours, given 15 minutes to get ready, fathers, mothers, their little children, grandparents, entire families, generations, standing there in front of their homes, in the gray morning light, shivering, frightened, crying, a small bag of belongings clutched under their arms, to be trucked away to local railway stations, then transported in unheated goods trains in the middle of winter – packed so tightly together – there was no room to sit down during a journey lasting often several days. Pitch dark inside, with a bucket or hole in the floor for a toilet, men, women, young and elderly, children, babies, women expecting, giving birth, and all this indescribably suffering had to be endured by thousands of people just so they could be gassed to death at a distant location.

From a 1943 secret report by a German army officer that was smuggled to the Dutch Resistance, for further distribution:

The trains with the victims arrive from all the occupied territories of Europe. They are made up of cattle wagons whose windows are barred with barbed wire, in each of the wagons there are 120 people. Depending on the weather, about 90 % arrive alive, although more than once last summer, 50 % were already dead from lack of water. After the wagons arrive at the camp, the people are whipped out and into the surrounding barracks, and locked in. The next day or several days later, depending on arrivals, 700 to 800 people are pushed together in to a courtyard. They are told to undress completely, the clothes must be put carefully in piles and the shoes lined up. Completely naked, men, women, children are pushed along a passage between two dividers of barbed wire. Then Ukrainian criminals begin to cut and shave the women’s and men’s hair. The hair is collected carefully because it is used to seal the joints [Dichtungen] of the submarines [U-Boot]. For long hours, the poor people must stand in the biting cold or the burning heat. As soon as some fall, worn out by the harsh cold or the burning heat, the henchmen lash the naked bodies of these poor people with the whips. The pain and the suffering that takes place in these corridors defy description. Mothers try to warm their infants against their own naked bodies. There is hardly any talking, only the eyes of the poor people express a nameless suffering and dulled resignation. This corridor leads to an iron door of a stone building. The door is opened and the 700-800 people destined for death are whipped inside until they are squeezed like herring in a barrel and unable to move. A three years old boy who tries to run away is caught and whipped back inside. Then the doors are hermetically closed. Outside the building, a large tractor is turned on, its exhaust fumes are pumped inside the building by a small window, I could see the effects on the victims inside. Packed in, the poor people were standing and waiting for their last moment, there was no panic, no cries, only a low murmur that could be heard from outside, as though a collective prayer rose towards the sky. One hour later, all were dead. Sliding windows were opened from the outside for the carbon monoxide to be evacuated. A half hour later, some Jews came – they owe their life to this dismal work which follows – to open a door in the back wall and drag out the bodies of the gassed people outside, before carrying them to the pits full of lime prepared for this task. They must remove rings from the fingers and open mouths to pull out gold teeth if there are any. Each installation keeps statistics of the number of killings [Tötungen]. Every day, in other words, every 24 hours, three or four killings[Tötungen] take place. This means that for the four installations [Anstalten], 8 000 to 9 000 deaths per day. In all, 6 million and a half people have already been killed in this way, including 4 million Jews and 2 and 1/2 “institutionalized individuals” or so-called “Deutschfeindlichen”. The program includes 16 million and a half people, in other words, all the Jews in the occupied territories and all the Polish and Czech intellectuals. In high places, there is currently an emphasis on rapidity and it is planned to use a more efficient method of killing. Cyanide gas has been suggested but apparently it has not been used yet, so the killing continues to take place in the cynical manner described above.
(March 25, 1943)

The ultimate indignity to human life – but there really are no words in any language that could capture in any way the degree of terror, horror and pain that was inflicted on so many innocent men, women and children by the relatively handful of truly murderous individuals that made up the Nazi upper hierarchy.

Most disturbing to me is the fact that this unbelievable sick and demented initiative was perpetrated by the leadership of a nation steeped in cultural significance as far as western civilization is concerned. And here we have Reinhard Heydrich – the Chair of the 1942 Wannsee conference – himself a talented classical violinist and son of a composer and professional opera singer, born into a family of social standing and substantial financial means, and often described as the main author of the Holocaust and the darkest figure within the Nazi elite. Hitler christened him “The Man with the Iron Heart”(*)

Oh – and before I forget – the Holocaust happened to certain people only because they were Jewish – but that seems hardly relevant, does it? I mean, how could such a factor be relevant? Unless, perhaps, you were in a country ruled by a mentally deranged homicidal megalomaniac who used its powerful army to act out his sick and deadly fantasies. No, it is the fact that this could have happened at all – where it happened, when it happened and how it happened – these the only things that matter here. How this could have happened – I don’t think I will ever be able to figure this out at all.

August 1945 -A boy averts his eyes while walking by the starved and emaciated corpses being extracted from the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp following the defeat of the Nazi empire.

(*) It is perhaps worth mentioning that Mr. Heydrich’s iron heart stopped beating at the occasion of his death a few months after the Wannsee conference as the result of an attempt on his life on 27 May 1942 by a British-trained team of Czech and Slovak soldiers who had been sent on behalf of the Czechoslovak government-in-exile to assassinate him in an operation named Operation Anthropoid.

December 11, 2020

How Gullible Are We?

I have stated earlier that there is a pathetic streak of gullibility running through the human race and referred to it as “a debilitating if not fatal flaw by any other name, but seemingly so deeply embedded in our DNA that I’m not sure how we will ever get rid of it”. It is our species greatest weakness that leaves us wide open to all kinds deception and deadly mischief: the willingness to accept something as being absolutely true without one shred of verifiable evidence.

It is hard not to see our species as being defined by this fatal flaw! In particular the claims and beliefs of organized religion – which should have been dismissed a long time ago – that have lead to centuries of religious strife that resulted in countless of lives lost for no reason other than the competition between such beliefs and the vested interest that the various religious denominations had acquired in them.

Gullibility can be even deadlier – to the point of voluntary self destruction – as in the case of religious cult membership, one tragic example being the dead by suicide of more than 900 Americans, members of the People Temple cult in Jonestown, Guyana on November 18th, 1978, at the urging of their demented leader the “Reverend” Jim Jones.

Then, a more recent example that even the most bizarre and unsubstantiated beliefs can have deadly consequences for those that accept them as absolute truth happened in 1997, when members of Heaven’s Gate, a religious cult, believed that as the Hale-Bopp comet passed by Earth, a spaceship would be travelling in its wake—ready to take true believers aboard. Several members of the group bought an expensive, high-powered telescope so that they might get a clearer view of the comet. They quickly brought it back and asked for a refund. When the manager asked why, they complained that the telescope was defective, that it didn’t show the spaceship following the comet. A short time later, believing that they would be rescued once they had shed their “earthly containers” (their bodies), all 39 members killed themselves. (from a July 2020 article in the The Atlantic)

Today the practice of blindly believing the unsubstantiated is running rampant on the internet. Donald J. Trump supporters take note: he lost the election by more than 7 million validated votes. But since you believe that DJT would have been the obvious person to vote for, more or less guaranteeing a landslide victory, you have difficulty believing he lost the election. So when you hear claims that the election was rigged, you will want to believe that, even when there is no factual evidence in support of it.

This is an epistemological problem, and some will refer to this as examples of cognitive dissonance, defined as the motivational mechanism that underlies the reluctance to admit mistakes or accept scientific findings. Once we form an opinion on a particular topic, we refuse to believe anything contrary to our beliefs; even going as far as to reject factual information to rationalize our own opinion.

The question is, how did our species get as far as it has with this obvious flaw – something I consider an absolutely critical flaw, and responsible for much of the evil that people have inflicted onto themselves and others over the centuries.

Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction. (Blaise Pascal, 1623-1662)

November 29, 2020

The Ugly American

First used as the title of a 1948 photograph of an American tourist in Havana, the term “Ugly American” refers to a stereotype depicting a certain type of American citizen as exhibiting loud, arrogant, demeaning, thoughtless, ignorant, and ethnocentric behaviour mainly abroad, but also at home. The phrase entered popular culture as the title of a 1958 book by authors William Lederer and Eugene Burdick. In 1963 it was made into a film starring Marlon Brando.

Following the highly divisive reign of the US administration over the last four years I would like to broaden the original characterization of the “Ugly American” personae beyond the already listed traits of “loud, arrogant, demeaning, thoughtless, ignorant and ethnocentric behaviour” and include some of the especially ugly traits frequently exhibited by its current president who is about to leave office after losing the 2020 presidential election by more than six million votes.

While is true that by expanding the definition we are less likely to refer to a stereotype and more to a unique individual, I feel that it is nevertheless a useful exercise to illustrate how truly ugly and unsavoury an individual can be and especially in a position of power and influence and effecting millions of people that find themselves at the receiving end of it.

The list of deplorable personal qualities that can be attributed to this exacerbated version of the Ugly American persona is too long to get a decent outline here but there is a summary in the Washington Post of November 12 by Michael Gerson that goes a long way in stating what is wrong with the current occupant of the White House. It features some of the more nefarious traits exhibited by Donald J. Trump while demonstrating his complete and unique unsuitability to take on the mantle of the 45th president of the United States back in 2016:

We see a dishonest president, spinning lie after lie about the electoral system. A selfish president, incapable of preferring any duty above his own narrow interests. A reckless president, undermining the transition between administrations and exposing the country to risk. A vain president, unable to responsibly process an electoral loss. A corrupt president, willing to abuse federal power to serve his own ends. A spiteful president, taking revenge against officials who have resisted him. A faithless president, indifferent to constitutional principles and his oath of office.

In short, this catastrophically flawed individual should have never been allowed to take the helm of a country, and especially not an influential and powerful country such as the United States.

Not surprisingly, the fact that it did happen has damaged the country in more ways than one. His demonstrated admiration for totalitarian leaders such as Putin has had a debilitating effect on the country’s democratic institutions by riding roughshod over its civil service and by the appointment of cronies and other assorted lackeys and sycophants. This includes members of his extended family in key position of government, apparently on condition of absolute loyalty to him alone. I would also include the somewhat sinister figure of the vice-president, his faithful apologist and a staunch champion of the white religious right. If you smell a contradiction here, you might be right – it’s either that, or in the interest of political expediency that Christianity has been redefined to allow for pathological liars such as the current president to be absolved from their sins.

We should also not be surprised that there are significant repercussions internationally, when the impact of his fickle reign continues to be felt around the world due to the unpredictably of his actions. A notable decline in America’s prestige abroad since he took office in 2017 has negatively affected the US’ relations with both friends or foes while introducing a great deal of uncertainty regarding the status of various pending international agreements related to trade, defense, climate and health.

trump-golf — Donald Trump at Trump National Golf Club in Sterling, Virginia, on 21 November. Photograph: Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP

And with respect to health, his decision to abandon the World Health Organization during the height of the current COVID-19 pandemic is nothing more than a cynical move to punish the WHO for his own failure to address the seriousness of the pandemic at the outset by not providing the critical national leadership it called for. The result has been that the US incurred 20% of all pandemic related deaths worldwide while representing only about 4% of the total world population. As the pandemic rages on, at the time that I write this Americans are dying at the rate of nearly one every 60seconds , for a total now approaching 280,000 since the disease was first detected in the country.

Furthermore, the most shameful aspect from a national leadership point of view is his total lack of empathy toward those members of society that have suffered greatly as a result of the pandemic and the hundreds and thousands of Americans that have lost one or more family members as a result of it.

It seems this president can find more time to play golf than provide some badly needed national leadership in fighting the virus that is running amok in his country. At the recent G20 summit he skipped the G20 summit’s “Pandemic Preparedness” event on November 21st to visit one of his golf clubs on the same day that a record 195,500 new Covid-19 infections were reported in a 24-hour period in the United States, according to Johns Hopkins.

But if there is one thing in particular that should be held against this president it is his treasonous effort to take advantage of the already deep divisions in his country, and in particular between Democrats and Republicans. And I say “treasonous” because if you are the duly elected leader of a country – you are obliged to represent ALL of your citizens regardless of whether they voted for you or not and do everything in your power to encourage the middle ground between them. Anything else ends up weakening the country even further, to the point of shutting down dialogue between the opposing ideologies, making any kind of cooperation just about impossible and paralyzing its government.

And so he has been playing the “us and them” blame game from the day he was installed in office. This proved to be perfect recipe for various social unrest much of which has already materialized in various cities around the country. Initially peaceful demonstrations for Black Lives Matter following the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor were seized upon by those elements in society with alternate agendas more focused on looting and the destruction of private and government property.

Today there are the shenanigans around the presidential election process, and his delusional and utterly baseless claim that there was massive voting fraud that will remove him from office as of January 20th. To date not one shred of evidence has been presented regarding the alleged voter fraud, and we’re looking at a situation so absurd that is making the US the laughing stock of the world. The worst of it is that the majority of Republicans voters – including state legislators, senators and the like – continue to support him in this efforts to get the election results overturned due to fraud, and going as far as to urge his supporters to send him money to help fund his fruitless attempts to overturn the election.

America, I Pray for Thee.

June 2, 2020

An Uncertain Future

Given what we think we know about the age of the universe, planet earth and the myriad of creatures that have and are continuing to inhabit it since life first appeared, we have arrived only recently as a species uniquely capable of reflective thought and reasoning. With it – I suggest – came the potential to make something of ourselves beyond being just another species for which the need to survive and ensure the continuation of its genus appear to be its main objectives..

On that premise we find ourselves at the receiving end of the implicit obligation to go beyond these basic needs, and not only because we can envisage ourselves of being capable of accomplishing much more than that, but also, surely, because we would not want to see ourselves being limited by them.

But given the state of the world today, for many the potential to distinguish ourselves beyond being just another creature on this planet appears to have been reduced to some self-aggrandizing exercise in unlimited exploitation, boundless consumption and mindless procreation, and that at great cost to ourselves and our future. As a matter of fact, we seem to have taken the first steps towards our own extinction by continuing to undermine the very environment that spawned and nurtured us and allowed us to thrive as a species.

Alternatively – and yes, there is always an alternative, in particular to just being unimaginably shortsighted! – we could use our collective brain-trust to decide what kinds of uniquely human qualities we ought to prioritize in order to truly benefit us all and start acting accordingly.

I can think of a few: Imagine a world-wide society built on mutual trust and respect, featuring such things as a sustainable waste-free economy, free education, healthcare, equal opportunity regardless of race , age or gender, the pursuit of arts and sciences, and being free from famine, disease and crime. In other words, not much we are familiar with today, but something worth pursuing, don’t you think?

Easier said than done, without question; in fact some will say that such an utopian state of affairs will be impossible to achieve given what history has shown us to date about human nature. True, is difficult to see any such potential reflected in the daily course of our lives. Not only does it seems near impossible to quantify them beyond being either mundane – and at any rate less than profound – or positively evil, and that would include much of human kind’s murderous, bloodstained past and all of our self-destructive activities such as our relentless attacks on the earth’s critical life-sustaining biosphere.

The problem of course is that we seem to be lost and absolutely hapless when it comes to understanding our place in the world. In the mid 1600’s the Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza wrote that people find themselves with needs and desires without understanding the reasons why they want and act as they do. Lacking this knowledge about themselves and their place in the world creates the illusion that they can do as they please, and which is a source of much grief when they act against their own interest because they don’t seem know any better.

Nevertheless, it is the implicit promise of our cosmic DNA, our origins, that will continue to urge us along this uncertain path towards a future we might one day be able to imagine what that would look like if we develop the ambition, courage and intellectual wherewithal to conceive the realization of it. And why shouldn’t we be able to: are we not the descendants of a magnificent cosmic event and all the spectacular creative energy that lies within and is necessarily represented within every particle of our being?

I say “necessarily” because how could it not be? We aren’t some accidental and aberrant event over and above the phenomenon of the universe: we ARE the universe, nothing more and nothing less. Now, if we only knew what that meant, but that is what life is all about, isn’t it? And clearly, this is the larger context we should be taking our cues from when we plan our future – as little as we are able to grasp of it at the moment.

For this we need to be able to turn ourselves inside out, by prioritizing the spiritual over the physical and embracing those values that are clearly larger than the largely material ones we appear to be pursuing today. Instead we ought to be pursuing empathy, compassion, trust and a respect for life in recognition of the incredible accomplishment that life represents as a cosmic effort to redefine itself for whatever purpose it has in mind – as much as we cannot even begin to think what that purpose may be although I suspect it might have something to do with establishing order over entropy and light over darkness in pursuit of total harmony.

However – and as much as I hate to admit this – my greatest fear is that this kind of enlightened future is in fact not available to us as, when we may not have moved far enough up the evolutionary ladder to be able to visualize it – or event want it ! – and to start changing our ways collectively to make it a reality.

As such, life is likely to continue to be the absolute tragedy it is, for our life-giving planet and for so many of our species today.

June 19, 2019

Going Up In Smoke

I must admit, I am somewhat dumbfounded by this cannabis thing. As an erstwhile Dutchman watching the popularity of pot work its way up from Paris into Amsterdam in the late 50s, I readily admit I had a few joints then but couldn’t decide what the fuss was all about and so that was that.

Cannabis continues to be an illegal drug in the Netherlands. While tolerated – meaning the authorities will turn a blind eye to those in possession of 5g or less – since April of this year, several cities have taken steps to limit the public use of cannabis because of the stench produced by smoking it (one is reminded of a well-seasoned dog turd on fire) as well as the noise generated by its users. The Hague became the first Dutch city to ban it in the city center, the central train station, and major shopping areas.

With this in mind, I am bemused by the anticipatory euphoria towards the imminent legalization of pot in Canada. This includes the gushing enthusiasm displayed by the various media – including the Globe and Mail (Pursuits, August 4^th) – in attempting to provide this drug with the sheen of sophistication, by featuring it in a boutique environment, and in the context of stylish cannabis accoutrements and haute dining experiences that have their dishes spiked (sorry “infused”) with it.

Finally – given all this brouhaha around the matter – as well as the billions being invested in it, I can’t get this picture out of my mind: the possibility of massive clouds of pot smoke billowing over this country once this drug is legal here. Probably not, but whatever smoke there will be, it will likely also include folks seeing their financial interest in cannabis going that way.

January 30, 2019

A Play Without A Script

Shakespeare once wrote:

All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;

Sometimes I think that we humans behave like actors in a self-directed play that seemed to have lost track of its script, and that we make it up as we go along since that seems to be the only option.

In doing so we appear to be driven to act and do as we want, but essentially without much of a clue to justify why we are going into the direction we appear to be heading.

For instance, being even a cursory student of human history will show that not acting in the best interest of our species appears to be the hallmark of human interaction over the centuries. The slaughter of millions of our own kinds features prominently in the matter settling disputes among ourselves that could have been resolved peacefully with a modicum of rationality and goodwill and to the benefit of everyone involved.

Moreover, it has become especially clear that we are most definitely not acting in our own best interest when much of what we do today has had a detrimental effect on the very environment that sustains us as we continue to rape and pillage the earth’s biosphere, including dumping our garbage in its oceans and poisoning its atmosphere. Indications are that if we continue the way we are acting now we might well be heading towards our own extinction.

I would like to think that we’re not headed in that direction, but it could be argued that being confronted with one’s own extinction is a necessary step in our development as a species that must know its limitations before it will be able to employ its full potential as a force of creative energy in the universe.

In the meantime this question remains: does the world – and all that it encompasses – have to be about something beyond the mere act of experiencing it? Couldn’t the world simply exist for its own sake – and that the very matter of experiencing it through our interactions with it is all that it is capable of delivering – suggesting that to search for a meaning beyond it would be an exercise in futility.

I find that difficult to accept, and not so much for the experience of positive events that make us happy and seem to provide the justification for it, but more because there appears to be so much more tragedy and despair in this world, through hunger, natural disasters and senseless wars and affecting mainly those who are least able to defend themselves from these misfortunes. Where is the justification for that? That doesn’t seem right to me – and where does that sense of right and wrong originate from, if not from the very reason why we are here in the first place? That suggest there is more to life beyond merely living it, i.e., that there is in fact a script in play and it is up to us to uncover it. This as opposed to merely accepting the status quo and the soul-destroying inevitability of it.

October 31, 2018

The Night of Broken Glass

This November it will be exactly 80 years ago that a wave of anti-Jewish savagery and destruction broke out across Nazi occupied Europe on November 9 and 10 in 1938. Known as the Kristallnacht, or the Night of Broken Glass, after the shards of shattered glass that lined German streets in the wake of the pogrom – broken glass from the windows of synagogues, Jewish-owned homes and businesses were ransacked, plundered or destroyed during the violence, often by neighbors and acquaintances of the victims. These November pogroms marked the start of the Holocaust.

Hateful, riotous and violent events such as these raise the chilling question how people can be made to turn on their fellow citizens en masse, to the point of destroying their properties and livelihoods, or even by killing them.

Such events do not occur in isolation, of course, and are often years in the making, and typically the outcome of a climate of division, misinformation, mistrust, intimidation, hate-mongering and fear. At bottom lies the vulnerability of the human race to being manipulated by folks who claim that they have the answers to all their problems, and who are able to convince others of their creed by appealing to the most basic instincts of our species, amongst which greed and fear are the more susceptible ones.

In addition, their appeal feeds on another intrinsic feature of the human race, namely the need to belong to the herd. Described by Nietzsche as the obedience of the individual to the mass, blindly and without reflection, and perhaps best characterized by his near-contemporary existentialist writer Kierkegaard, when he said that … we men are constantly in need of “the others,” the herd; we die, or despair, if we are not reassured by being in the herd, of the same opinion as the herd. And, as Simone Weil once remarked, people find comfort in the absence of the necessity to think.

Clearly, such basic human tendencies work directly against the willingness and ability to think about the morality of our actions for ourselves – as individuals – as well as the courage to act accordingly, regardless of diverging mass opinions. This as opposed to being purely driven by instinct, something that would have urged our animal ancestors to prefer the safety of numbers by remaining within the herd, for no other reason than being a member of the same species with the need to conform.

That the latter can be a contributing factor in the occurrence of mass violence – including state sponsored genocide, as in the case of Nazi Germany – can be seen in the context of the herd instinct being alive and well and continuing to thrive amongst the more vulnerable-minded of our species, particularly in the religious and political spheres. And if our history has shown us anything it is the fact that such outbreaks of mass violence can be initiated by those who have a purpose for it, or, if they are afflicted with a pathological need to dominate others and the obsession with the exercise of power.

Not easily understood if you are not affected by it – and essentially a delusion about one’s own power or importance – Adolf Hitler rise to power resulting in WWII is perhaps history’s most deadly example of how millions of people can be murdered for no reason other than that someone believing in their own divine purpose and invincibility is able to motivate others to blindly act out their deadly manic or paranoid disorder for them.

This couldn’t happen in our day and age you say? But you only have to watch the large adoring crowds at various Trump rallies and their absolute delight in chanting “Lock Her Up” to understand how the masses can be manipulated and potentially motivated to commit a heinous act.

With the oratory skills of a pulpit bully and employing a 5th-grade vocabulary largely limited to hollow phraseology such as “it’s gonna be great, it’s gonna be fantastic!”, a large and primarily anti-intellectual crowd for whom truth is a function of what they want to believe as opposed to what is actually the case – after being told what they want to hear, e.g., how deserving they are, or how wonderful they are – can be made to focus on an illusionary enemy who is made out to be standing in the way of their entitlements, a promised utopia, and conceivably set afoot from there, and never mind the consequences.

June 8, 2018

Why The World Is At War

A recent March 2018 Guardian article by Jason Burke titled “Why Is the World at War” makes the point that “The harsh reality may be that we should not be wondering why wars seem so intractable today, but why our time on this planet creates such intractable wars”.

Burke outlines a number of seemingly never ending regional conflicts, causing no end of misery and death among local populations: Syria, Afghanistan, Yemen, the Ukraine, and the Democratic Republic of Congo, to name the more frequently profiled ones. Often these conflicts follow boundaries that divide clans or castes, not necessarily countries. They lie along frontiers between ethnic or sectarian communities:

In fact, if we look around the world at all its many conflicts, and if we define these wars more broadly, then we see front lines everywhere, each with its own no man’s land strewn with casualties. In Mexico, Brazil, South Africa or the Philippines, there is huge violence associated with criminality and the efforts (by states) to stamp it out .

And so the article goes on to analyze a number of these protracted conflicts in order to get a sense of what lies at the heart of them, in particular as to their history and the seeming inability to get them resolved.

The reasons are clearly many and varied – and to say that they are complex is perhaps an understatement. But as to any kind of overall “why”, the only common element appears to be the persistent inability of our species to get out from underneath the quagmire of basic instincts and desires that appear to feed the negative human characteristic we are all too familiar with, such as greed, selfishness, bullying and the exploitation and oppression of others, to name just a few, and all them typically leading to conflict. This as opposed to being guided by more enlightened qualities of human endeavor such as being able to compromise, mediate, cooperate and share with the realization that all human interests are best served by them.

In the meantime there remains the question of how to address the current states of affairs as outlined in the Guardian article. Essentially, though, they appear unsolvable, except by more of the same, and unless the conflicting parties agree to sit down to discuss a solution beyond trying to kill each other, there is not much left on the table but to continue the mutual bloodshed.

If these conflicts are evidence of something, it is that evolutionary pressures are operation at all levels of existence, and that includes the competition between ideas about what kind of societies we should structure for ourselves, and the principles that underpin them, i.e., social-economically, politically, morally. At the bottom of this struggle we find the Might is Right conundrum, and essentially the Law of the Jungle, bequeathed to us courtesy of our animal past in our participation in the Survival of the Fittest contest and obviously still very much a part of our way of dealing with the world.

When reason – that feature of the human cortex most recently required as a result of an evolutionary upgrade – is subjugated to instinct, the Law of the Jungle continues to prevail and becomes even more destructive, if not to the point of self-destruction, as in the case of potentially trying to annihilate ourselves by throwing nuclear bombs at each other.

The issue here of course is why we would allow reason to be overruled by instinct and in particular when there are clear reason to believe that in a particular case this would not be in our interest. But the first response here would be to say that these are not matters of black and white, and that we might well confuse the one for the other.

As well, the ability to apply reason is a skill that must be learned – and just because you have the capacity for it in the cerebral hardware department, all that means is that you have the prerequisites for being able to act rationally.

However, it should be clear that even after minimal observation of human behavior and the current state of the world that the application of reason requires training, as well as the insight into what benefits our species in the long term, and I like to think that this would be about more than the fact of our mere survival. To act instinctively, however, is something we are born with, and built into the biology of our species, from the very first phases of existence as a distinct organism that needed to be able to look after itself to ensure its survival.

And so not much is likely to change in the world with respect to these kinds of conflicts until such time that we change our ways and wake up to the fact that we are not the creature that we think we are, i.e., that we must be the creature as defined by our past, and our bloodstained, war-torn history.

Instead we need to respond to the call of what it means to be a rational human being, or at least have the imagination and courage to try to find out what that might be all about without the need to kill each other. And this would mean redefining ourselves in terms of our future, and what we may be able to accomplish as a species motivated by the more enlightened principles of empathy and compassion, as well as the spirit of mutual cooperation between nations with the realization that the shared stewardship of the earth resources is the only way to guarantee our peaceful coexistence on this planet.

How we will get to that point is anyone’s guess – and if our species is actually capable of that much common sense I don’t know. Given the state of the world today – and the quality of the leadership that appears to be in charge of the world’s most powerful nations – I am not hopeful that any of this will happen anytime soon.

“Until it begins, war is a matter of choice. After that, it’s shaped by forces and realities which dwarf the individuals who participate.” (Joshua Rothman writes in the New Yorker in December of 2017 , reviewing Victor Davis Hanson’s “The Second World Wars”)

April 9, 2018

Enlightenment – How?

In response to Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress – to repeat something I stated in an earlier post – who can begin to enumerate the number and variety of social economic, health and environmental issues ranging from poverty to homelessness to starvation across the globe? Just recently the NY Times in an article titled The U.S. Can No Longer Hide from Its Deep Poverty Problem showed a tally of those living on $4 a day or less in selected developed countries, and it included 5.3 million people living in the US. I don’t necessarily want to pick on the US, but with the highest GDP in the world you wonder how this can even be the case when a country is deemed the wealthiest country in the world.

Beyond that there is the disturbing statistic that half of the world’s wealth belongs to the top 1%, while the top 10% of adults hold 85%, and the bottom 90% hold the remaining 15% of the world’s total wealth. If you believe that these discrepancies are simply a function of some folks working harder and smarter than others, and reaping the benefit of it, then bless you! But you may have to learn something about the celebrated tenets of predatory capitalism and how some people, organizations and certain governments operate in order to accumulate the incredible wealth that they have acquired, if only to ensure the rich are getting richer while the poor are getting poorer.

And how depressing is it when you read about the general well-being of people outside the developed countries and find out that approximately 9 million people die of starvation each year according to world hunger statistics; more than the death toll for malaria, AIDs and tuberculosis combined in 2012. And currently an estimated 130 children or more die every day in war-torn Yemen from extreme hunger and disease according to international aid groups working there.

Add to this the pollution of our life-sustaining atmosphere air with toxic gasses and poisonous particulates, the contamination of our precious living oceans with eight million metric tons of plastics each year, the relentless depletion of non-renewable natural resources and the creation of mountains of garbage and putrid waste that we really don’t know what to do with courtesy of our mindless obsessive-compulsive consumerism and you have a picture of a planet that appears to be in deep trouble no matter how rosy the glasses you are wearing you look at it.

Of course, there is far more going on in the world that should be of concern if you care about the future of this earth – which is our future, lest we forget – such as people continuing to slaughter each other no matter what. We are reminded daily of the ongoing tribal wars in the Middle East, featuring the long standing tradition of killing each other in the name of some deity or another, e.g., the murderous Taliban sect and today’s equally deadly version of the black plaque known as ISIS. And last but not least we have a nuclear threat mounted by that obdurate dictator living like royalty of the meager avails of his starving nation in South East Asia, all the while advancing the world’s Doomsday Clock to two minutes before apocalyptic midnight, and a situation sadly lacking in amelioration from that chap in the White House.

And speaking of that chap in the White House, who can forget H. L. Mencken (1880-1956) depressing prophesy come true last year, that “On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”

Now I don’t know about you, but as much as I hate to see the current status of the world reduced to these tragic events, I can’t help but think that no amount of positive thinking is able to gloss over these sordid states of affairs with Pinker’s astonishingly naive claim that things are getting better by the day. If global poverty has been reduced and longevity expanded, it is nevertheless within the larger herd of human lemmings hurtling down the cliff toward extinction.

No need to give up all hope, however! Apparently, the great barren expanse of Mars is waiting for us, as all-round wunderkind Elon Musk will be able to shoot us there in a tin can perhaps as soon a seven years from now. It seems space is where our future lies as the acolytes of modern consumerism! Mars will be the first interplanetary step after we’re done with the earth, and from there we will spread it among the stars, to infinity and beyond. Our greatest gift to the cosmos, indeed!