Monthly Archives: July 2016

Donald

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Chicken Little was hyper after Donald’s acceptance speech at the Republican Convention. The entire speech provided no solutions, no specific resolutions, only promises that Donald will do something. In later interviews with Donald Junior, it turns out that Donald doesn’t intend to oversee Federal Policy; that job, described as domestic and foreign policy, is Pence’s job.

What disturbs Chicken Little is the fact that the entire speech sat on a foundation of authoritarianism. It’s Reaganism all over again but run with less voter input. Donald sees himself as a CEO, not the Executive Branch representing public policy. How close can a President get to dictatorship in a Republic?

The mariner feels the TV polls are not accurate. If cell phone users share the mariner’s habit of not answering calls that he doesn’t have in his directory, or not answering phone numbers on a land line with caller ID, any poll will not reflect the opinion of a large section of voters. The mariner does not listen to polls. He listens to Nate Silver, who has a stellar reputation collecting valuable information that affects betting odds. See:

http://www.bing.com/search?q=nate+silver+2016+presidential+predictions&qs=LS&pq=nate+silver&sk=LS1&sc=8-11&sp=3&cvid=187BAD3BDABD4840A57B41C4C8464FC6&FORM=QBLH&ghc=1

If the reader would like an analysis of how Donald may win, see from Nate’s website:

http://www.newsweek.com/2016/07/29/donald-trump-can-win-481404.html

Also, check out http://fivethirtyeight.com/politics/feed/ probably what the reader wants to know in the first place. The article covers everything in the world of polls.

Finally, if you want to poke around in trends, see:

http://fivethirtyeight.com/politics/features/

The point is this: This is a culture-changing election. It’s comparable to FDR, Kennedy, Johnson and Reagan. The voter is required to think beyond the news, beyond the political ads, beyond the water-cooler advice, and beyond the reader’s clique of friends. There is a lot at stake in this election that is not covered in news media. The reader has an obligation to think hard – not something the American citizen is often required to do in a general election.

REFERENCE SECTION

The mariner’s wife has contributed an excellent website that is focused on the spiritual side of life’s experiences – not spiritual in a religious doctrine sense but the website provides a rich collection of short essays about the fragile side of our species and how empathetic roles are important to our survival. For liberal arts readers, it is an excellent site. See:

http://www.onbeing.org/program/xavier-le-pichon-the-fragility-at-the-heart-of-humanity/transcript/8832#main_content

The Olympics is days away. This is an unusual Olympics fraught with Zika and Russian doping. Type ‘2016 Olympics’ into your search engine to catch up not only on the sport aspects but the politics and health issues.

Ancient Mariner

 

What is Empathy?

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In the mariner’s last post, “The Greatest Sin is Prejudice,” it was suggested that the real measure of successful evolution was not intellectual prowess but empathy. The post prompted notable interest in the midst of confusion about the differences between sympathy, pathos, compassion, empathy, etc. It is important to understand empathy as a unique experience because the post suggests that empathy is a positive phenomenon capable of shaping evolution.

This post will focus on words that often are mistaken for empathy and a focused note about empathy as an evolutionary influence.

Aware – On the scale of emotional interaction, being aware of human behavior in others is more a result of the five senses behaving normally. At best, ‘sensitive’ may mean the same. For example, ‘I am aware that you are a democrat. Being aware of that opinion helps me adjust my sociability when interacting with you.’

Pathos – Often used to express ‘sympathy,’ it is not the same. Pathos is an intense response to a situation usually intensified by art or other imagery.

Pity – While pathos can be an intense response, it lacks personal engagement. Pity, on the other hand, suggests that you are aware that the person(s) do not deserve their difficulty; you have a perspective about the circumstances in which they find themselves but rarely stop to involve yourself in easing their plight unless they already have a bonded relationship with you.

Passion – The key to recognizing passion is that you are at the center of the emotion. Passion is a self-serving response which drives your focus to accomplish something that has captured your emotions. Examples are infatuation, personality tendencies, response to a perceived threat, perseverance to modify an important social situation, etc.

Sympathy – Surprisingly, rather than being focused primarily on one person, sympathy is an allegiance to a group ethic or morality. Sympathy means your reality is intertwined with values and experiences of others. Sympathy is the feeling that binds you to what is important to others – enabling you to experience the ebb and flow of group or individual values. Often used erroneously in place of pity, a closer synonym would be ‘loyalty.’

Compassion – A common expression among married couples of long standing is “Passion turns into compassion.” The meaning of the phrase represents the replacement of personal passion with a commitment to the wellbeing of the spouse, that is, your personal emotions become integrated with your spouse’s emotions such that neither stands alone. This same allegiance, when applied to social situations, means you and others experiencing that situation are bound to support the well being of others involved, engaging physically in real time response to achieve solutions. A popular distinction in literature follows the theme, “A warrior has passion; a hero has compassion.”

Empathy – Empathy obviously is derived from the same Greek root as pathos. Empathy carries the same intensity as pathos but has an added dimension: empathy also means the ability to infuse one’s understanding of another’s inner feelings so amazingly that it seems as if you could become that being. One becomes so obsessed with the other being’s gestalt that the two beings appear twin-like in behavior, motivation and awareness. This does not suggest magic or weird music; rather, you become so aware of the internal feelings and values of the other person that you can fully represent their gestalt.

A simplified example of not exercising empathy by choice is common among dog owners. Animal psychologists have determined the following:[1]

Dogs do not like to be hugged. They feel trapped and unable to escape if necessary.

Dogs are born to run. They are hunters very much like their wolf ancestors – even if it is a Shih Tzu. Life in a pocketbook or at the end of a chain or locked up in a house all day must be hard.

A great experiment (and something that will probably have your dog sighing with relief) is to try to spend a whole day not saying a word to your dog, but communicating only with your body. You’ll realize just how much you “talk” with your body without realizing it.

Most humans think that dogs like being patted on the head. The reality is that while many dogs will put up with this if it’s someone they know and trust, most dogs don’t enjoy it. You may notice that even the loving family dog might lean away slightly when you reach for her face to pet her. She’ll let you because you’re the boss, but she doesn’t like it.

Fortunately, over thousands of years of breeding, we have made dogs more empathetic than we are.

The future for the current environment and all its inhabitants is not bright. Homo sapiens has overrun the planet in a savage way and every day is driving species of every kind into extinction. Already humans consume more than the Earth can provide each year; the oceans show rates of depletion that suggest the oceans will be fished out by the end of this century. The Earth itself is slowly shifting to a warmer environment that in time will stress all living creatures.

The philosophical question is, how will whatever is still alive continue to exist? Futurists are suggesting competition between species and between ourselves will only hasten extinction. The opposite of conflict is empathy – living in close harmony with the best interest of any living thing as closely managed as we can. That may grant our biosphere a few more centuries.

Empathy is a parallel behavior to what religions have been espousing for 8,000 years: love and giving is the true key to survival. There will be no room for expensive idiosyncrasies, greed, or waste. Love and giving, i.e., empathy may be our best chance to evolve properly for the end of our age.

Ancient Mariner

[1] From Jaymi Heimbuck, http://www.mnn.com/family/pets/stories/11-things-humans-do-that-dogs-hate

The Greatest Sin is Prejudice

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For Christians specifically but referenced similarly in virtually every religion, there are two Great Commandments in the New Testament. One is about loving your God and the other is about loving others. Insofar as they instruct humans, they are wise instructions. Written in Matthew some time before 99AD, the quote is:

Hearing that Jesus had silenced the Sadducees, the Pharisees got together. One of them, an expert in the law, tested him with this question: “Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?”

Jesus replied: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”

The mariner has pondered this quote ever since he was a young boy. There was something too neat, too overarching to be applicable to reality. It seemed too much like a plug-in. In recent decades, perhaps as long as a century, reality has pressed us with questions that seem not targeted on the wellbeing of humans but nevertheless incessantly grow more urgent.

The stories that supported the early Western religions, namely, Islam, Judaism, Christianity, and also Buddhism, are not capable of supporting today’s boundaries of knowledge. The stories do not reconcile the reality or the confrontation that 21st century humans face. Today’s Christian advocates, clinging to the old beliefs, look in disdain at the “non-believers.” They call them “secularists.” Indeed the era of change is upon us. So many scientific breakthroughs; so many industries and conveniences. Today, right now, medicine can change our genetic code to cure vulnerabilities. “Who,” the secularists ask, “needs Adam, Eve, Cain, Able, magic swords, brothers surviving in a fiery oven or a flying Son of God?”

No longer do the myths from two thousand years ago hold relevance. There was a time early in the last century when apologists attempted to validate the myths by reinterpreting them as figures of speech or story telling devices not intended to be literal. Still, the theology was laid bare without meaning.

That the church liturgy has lost much of its sacredness is only one cause of dwindling attendance at religious institutions. Perhaps more important is that modern society has not begun to replace the mythic values that underlie faith and commitment. Modern society may not be able to accomplish a new value structure for humanity for some time. The entire planet is at a crossroads. Frontiers of science and technology have ripped through the time lines that would have helped us transition across eras; we are thrust unprepared into an alien society. The tearing of cultural meaning can be seen in politics, where values are jumbled if not missing altogether. In some ways we have met the devil and he is us. We wander in rudderless ignorance as we destroy Earth’s environment and fail to repair the prejudices that lead to war, gluttony, and ecological destruction.

There is no way to escape prejudicial attitudes without a myth greater than ourselves – larger than our alien computer culture. Without a sanctified value that is permanently valued more than any earthly phenomenon, we will drift into extinction leaving behind a planet covered in human trash – unable to present a transcendent achievement for the path of evolution.

Run all religious faiths together through a homogenizing process and two principles are common: love and giving. Each of these principles, in their purity, prevents prejudice; each prevents judgment; each promotes holistic unity on the scale of the universe.

With introspection, one realizes that love and giving are rich in mythic origin. Reorganizing our understanding of evolution, where does love and giving fit in? In evolutionary terms, only recently has empathy emerged in mammals. Empathy for nursing and raising suckled young was a great leap forward in brain awareness. We often think of man’s development of abstract problem solving as the core mark of progress in evolution but the simple ability to empathize permits family awareness, sharing, and cultural understanding. Without communal empathy, humanity’s great achievements could not have been accomplished.

Using empathy as the measure of evolution’s key objective suggests there may be a future in human evolution for something similar to the “single soul” element of pantheism: “God” is the universe. Therefore, each human is a part of God. Perhaps the Islamic definition of soul as an interactive awareness between all living things including plants is the goal. Including similar ideas across philosophy implies indirectly that empathy may be spread across more than the mammalian branch of creation.

Has religion, with its empathetic two great commandments, been struggling to correct the misconception that intellectual problem solving and invention are the primary goal of evolution? Is the new myth for love and giving derived from the universe itself? Is oneness through empathy with all things the path to eventual transformation?

Rome captured the western world and dictated from that time the focus of the church, government, cultural progress and economics. Has the west been too concerned with the physical, combative models learned from the Romans? Is it time to look to another emphasis to guide us?

Let’s practice empathy. It may be more transformative than we think.

Ancient Mariner

 

Darts

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The mariner is embarrassed to live in the same state as Steve King (R-4th) because Iowan people actually chose him as a Federal Representative. Already identified by analysis of his work as the worst representative in Congress, Steve has stepped forward to block Harriet Tubman as the face on the $20 bill. The NY Daily News said:
“Republican Steve King had claimed that putting the abolitionist in place of President Andrew Jackson, most famous for the Trail of Tears, would be divisive.
He had attempted to block any attempt to change up currency by sneaking an amendment into a bill about Treasury Department funding, though the Republican-controlled Rules Committee shot down the measure Tuesday night.” (King has never had one piece of legislative language survive his Congressional Committee)
If only to rub salt in the whole “face on money” issue, we aren’t too good at selecting our premier statesmen and citizens. As mentioned above, Andrew Jackson was responsible for the “Trail of Tears.” PBS wrote:
“In 1838 and 1839, as part of Andrew Jackson’s Indian removal policy, the Cherokee nation was forced to give up its lands east of the Mississippi River and to migrate to an area in present-day Oklahoma. The Cherokee people called this journey the “Trail of Tears,” because of its devastating effects. The migrants faced hunger, disease, and exhaustion on the forced march. Over 4,000 out of 15,000 of the Cherokees died.”
Note that racism isn’t a harsh issue in white, plain state Iowa; Steve King’s career as a do-nothing Congressman was not at risk over this issue. To the mariner, this is one reason an aptitude test must be passed for those wishing to represent the citizenry.
Even Steve’s own Republican Representatives kicked this one out.
But to further impugn Steve, Huffington Post covered this gem:
For crying out loud, whether it was a good or bad thing to drag human beings across the ocean to serve as slaves is still, for some reason, a matter for debate. But somehow, perhaps incorrectly, I’d come to accept that America was pretty clear about the matter of pitting dogs against each other for amusement. Dogfighting equals terrible advocates for dogfighting equals reprehensible humans — I figured that this was, by now, axiomatic.
But, lo, here comes Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) with a bee in his bonnet over the Humane Society and its stance on animal torture. Various state measures have been enacted to limit “several horrific farming and food practices,” including Maryland’s prohibition against arsenic being added to chicken feed, which seems eminently reasonable, given the fact we are talking about, well, arsenic.
How does dogfighting get wrapped up into these deliberations? Well, as Scott Keyes reports today, King took a question at a “tele-townhall” about “his opposition to animal rights and recently introduced legislation that would undermine local standards preventing animal torture.” And part of King’s response declared it strange to be so concerned about dogfighting, when humans are allowed to step into a ring and fight for sport themselves.
KING: When the legislation that passed in the farm bill that says that it’s a federal crime to watch animals fight or to induce someone else to watch an animal fight, but it’s not a federal crime to induce somebody to watch people fighting, there’s something wrong with the priorities of people that think like that.
Keyes added in his column: “Manny Pacquiao chooses to step into the ring. Michael Vick’s dogs did not.”
Steve King is 67 years old. By the mariner’s standards, he should have met term limitations seven years ago. Steve has been serving in Congress since 2003 (13 years). Though he isn’t competent enough to cause harm, it might be nice to have a productive representative for the 4th District.
Ancient Mariner

Liberal Arts on Cable TV still exist.

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For those who have not been exposed to liberal arts and to those frightened away by the word ‘liberal,’ let the mariner assure the reader that liberal arts means the study of humanity and is neither liberal nor conservative. It is open-minded – which may be frightening to any close-minded person conservative or liberal.

Many TV viewers are moving on to the new marketing format available through HULU, NETFLIX, HBO, SPORT networks and even social networks. The channels rich in liberal arts are not the reason for this move; rather it is less costly and provides more personal control over channel selection although not much. To be honest, most viewers consider liberal arts channels the ones they don’t want to pay for.

Still, there is a growing need for some percentage of the American population to understand that mental sophistication and insightful judgment are critical both to our enjoyment and to our future. Liberal arts sources grow scant and even unavailable as college after college drops liberal art majors and humanities requirements from its curriculum. It is a dangerous time for dismissing sophisticated thinking about humans and what may be important digressions from the powers of artificial intelligence.

For an accounting of Liberal Arts in past posts, use the search box to recover posts containing the term liberal arts.

In this post, the mariner will point out a number of broadcast and cable TV channels that give generous time to thoughtful programming across the spectrum of insight, education and art. Cultural events are available as specials, for example, “The Kennedy Center Honors” is primarily entertainment but the program’s tone acknowledges cultural style and cultural significance – artificial intelligence unnecessary. News specials appear regularly on all the broadcast channels: ‘Special Reports’ programming typically focuses on important events more deeply and insightfully; Frontline on PBS always is on the frontline…; calendar specials – recent broadcasts were informative about Jackie Robinson and Martin Luther King; another was about the mindset of the founding fathers. There is a bit of burden on the reader to peruse broadcast listings and promotions to identify thoughtful presentations about any subject. Even CNN and MSNBC broadcast good ones once in awhile.

Of notable contribution to liberal arts is PBS. Viewed in collaboration with PBS on line, a veritable library of liberal arts topics is available from Pushkin to Pythagoras to Emerson. Add NPR on the radio and all programming is treated as serious, personal and event oriented. Did you say goodbye to Garrison Keillor and A Prairie Home Companion? President Obama did with an on-the-air telephone call.

BBCHD and BBCAHD contribute a good amount of broadcast time to humanities programming. On Saturdays there is a series of programs that are enjoyable yet targeted around topics one would think have little of consequence. Try Studio-1 and Brilliant Ideas.

CSPAN1 and 2 are rich in humanity programs. The library of videos on line has tens of thousands of programs. Not all are based on book reviews with authors; they include interviews with world leaders, US politicians, government actions and human interest in all the humanities. One never knows when a particular author interview may spark enough interest to buy or borrow the book at the library. Mariner can attest to dozens of interviews that led to further research.

Discounting Fox channels because they reinforce close-mindedness with their already close-minded audience, there is little left to represent humanity’s political ideology. Two liberal channels, LINK and FSTV, present material close to the positions of Bernie Sanders but their material frequently is out of date and may not match current reality. Still, liberal figures whose ideas represent mainstream socialism appear in their broadcasting; examples are Chomsky and Ralph Nader plus activists and personalities participating in current activity. Mariner watches occasionally to keep his ship’s keel in line. (If all the reader does is watch news on TV, one will be led quickly away from reality. Humanities is not a strength of news media.)

Then there is the champion of free information on any subject one can imagine. Unlike TV, which feeds the viewer a pre-researched topic, the viewer can know everything plus more if the viewer does all the research about a topic of personally determined interest. Mariner has said in the past that Wikipedia is a playground for liberal arts.

The point is this: Every element of our species that we hold dear is vulnerable to displacement by the digital takeover of “big data.” Computers already have learning algorithms that teach them to form their own functional solutions to computer-determined needs; give computers access to all there is to know about you, your environment, your motivations and the patterns of human behavior, and the computers will live your life for you and do the work that once needed you. Humans will be displaced to the point that economic rules will collapse and humans will have no way to produce income. Only the enrichment of liberal arts in the minds of leaders will have any chance to divert pure digital solutions from displacing humanity. Chicken Little, Amos and the Guru all agree on this outcome. Further, you can find television programs and books already describing this future. Even Stephen Hawking feels computers will dislodge the human species  as humans give up human functionality. Care to consult a digital psychologist for counseling? That function already exists.

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There are two ‘third party’ options for the 2016 election: The Libertarian Party and the Green Party. The libertarian party promotes a harmful, draconian view of government that would destroy today’s culture; it allows only military, printing money and international relations as Federal functions. There is no room for anything else. All other matters are left to the fifty states. The other party, the green party, has Jill Stein running for President. The Green Party is left-center but notably more progressive. The political platform can be read at http://www.gp.org/four_pillars_10_kv . If the two major candidates don’t fit the bill for you, check out the Green Party manifesto. The mariner personally does not recommend Donald.

REFERENCE SECTION

The latest Atlantic Magazine has a good lead article, “How American Politics Went Insane.” Check out the September issue or read it on line at

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/07/how-american-politics-went-insane/485570/

Even more insightful is to watch “The Greeks” on PBS TONIGHT (Tuesday, July 05, 2016). Everyone will recognize the similarity of American history to Greece’s path to democracy.

Ancient Mariner