disaster redux

Autumn descends on us, with the mornings turning chilly and damp. Roofers have been at work on our building over the past two weeks, and in the past three days have been right over our unit, ripping and thumping, making the wooden structure tremble. Down here in my office I'm as far from that action as I can get, but I do have young guys passing to and fro by my office window, carrying sheets of plywood and answering calls to their cell-phones.

Kimmie is still undergoing the long tail of this headcold (mine is pretty much completely gone). Her voice is still wispy and her ears are plugged. Another way of marking the change of season.

In the wider world we have the ructions of the financial and stock markets. We're overdue for an economic depression, so I'm expecting one--and expecting it to be long and severe. I believe that when historians look back on this era, they will shake their heads at how so many government policies and private practices could have been undertaken that were so wrongheaded and that led so surely to disaster--much as historians now look at the policies and practices that led to the Great Depression of the 1930s. Ben Bernanke, the head of the U.S. Federal Reserve, is a scholar of the Great Depression. But policymakers, like generals, are always refighting the last war rather than addressing the situation before them.

I've mentioned before how events have the look of the three-stage unfolding of an ancient Greek tragedy: koros, hubris, and ate (surfeit, outrageous behavior, and disaster). By the time of the great tragedians of Athens, ate had come to mean objective, external disaster--retribution for one's ill-starred actions. But as E. R. Dodds observes in his book The Greeks and the Irrational, the term ate in earlier, Homeric times had a different meaning:

Always, or practically always, ate is a state of mind--a temporary clouding or bewildering of the normal consciousness. It is, in fact, a partial and temporary insanity...

But what is insanity? Literally, it means mental unhealthiness or unwholesomeness. A disconnect from reality.

That sounds like what starts the tragic cycle. For koros is "surfeit" according to Arnold J. Toynbee--doing too much of something. But doing too much of something is itself a sign of lack of realism: you have too high a regard for your own powers to control things, to make things go as you wish. You lack humility, and so are led on to hubris, "outrageous action"--doing things that reflect your unrealistic self-assessment. You make big mistakes. And the locomotive of big mistakes pulls a train of painful consequences--ate.

So I suppose ate, the painful consequences, can be viewed from either the external angle (disaster) or from the internal angle ("insanity"). For external disaster in itself is neutral, you might say; it is our response to it, our feelings about it, that constitute its pain and suffering. Ate then seems to be both the disasters caused by our foolish actions, and the suffering that results.

One dark note of the "insanity" model is that it doesn't suggest learning. The crazy person, after an "episode", gradually becomes quiescent again. Peace returns--and further opportunities for surfeit...

I think it was Voltaire who said:

History never repeats itself;
Man always does.

What can I say? Here we go again.

darkness ahead

Where have I been, you ask?

Well, Kimmie and I have been working our way through a headcold, caught we know not where. I got it first, and probably passed it on to her. I'm very much better, but Kimmie is going through the middle of hers. Indeed, she's decided to take today off work.

I've been chipping away at my mighty work, and at the ideas surrounding and supporting it. This is a huge task, and one that I don't think I can really discuss in this blog, since I don't want to go too deeply into my own views of the meanings of my still unfinished work.

Then I'm feeling a certain blog-fatigue, as I did a couple of years ago. This blog, begun as a kind of lark or experiment back in 2005, has become a kind of commitment. I've often told myself that even if not many people read it, it can still serve as a personal record--a kind of diary of my own thoughts, if not of my life exactly, during this time of creation.

Then there's the world falling about our ears: a worldwide financial meltdown and the wintry prospects beyond. It feels almost irresponsible not to address these grave and urgent matters--but what do I know about them? I suspect that even those in the know don't really know much about what's going on. As I write these words, the U.S. House of Representatives is still grappling with the $700- (or is it $800-) billion bailout bill for Wall Street. This is almost certainly a further waste of money--a mere playing for time in order to keep things from collapsing before the federal election. The legislation, at least as it exists till now, includes these words in its Section 8:

Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency.

Is it constitutional to put decisions and individuals beyond the reach of law? That I don't know, but the fact that the framers of the bill are trying it tells me that we've got something that looks much like what happened at times of crisis in ancient Rome. It was the Romans who invented the office of the dictator: a person who could be invested with supreme command over the state and the army and who could rule by decree for a fixed period of exactly six months.

In Rome the dictatorship was a perfectly constitutional office that had its own defined limits. One could be appointed in times of grave stress or threat to the Republic, and he would lapse back to ordinary citizenship again when he had done his task and restored normalcy to the polity.

The U.S. of course has no such provision in its constitution. The ever-increasing tendency to place persons in authority beyond the reach of law or oversight is a sign of creeping tyranny, and the prospect of an unconstitutional dictatorship draws ever closer. Section 8 of this bill gives certain people great power while removing any accountability from them. It's a very bad sign when a preoccupation of the regime is how to escape prosecution for its actions.

Arnold J. Toynbee, in his A Study of History, describes how every society goes through the transition from being guided by leaders--people who inspire others to follow them on the basis of their vision and personal qualities--to being dominated by rulers--those who have inherited the levers of power, but who lack the charisma of actual leaders. In the U.S., we've had the transition from leaders such as Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, who stirred and inspired their fellow citizens, to rulers such as George W. Bush and Richard Cheney, who have been preoccupied with world domination and shaping their own country into something closer to a police state.

As I've mentioned before, Toynbee also discusses the threefold progress of a typical Greek tragedy as it applies to the catastrophic undoing of such a ruling regime. Those three stages are koros, hubris, and ate. He translates these as "surfeit", "outrageous behavior", and "disaster". I believe we've seen plenty of the first two of these; now the third is looming into view.

The U.S. has the largest military in the world. They may feel they need it if large segments of its population, thrown out of their houses and their jobs, their retirements savings wiped out, become agitated. Voila: full-on military dictatorship.

Preposterous? Maybe. But maybe that's what they thought in Burma too. And I expect that real estate is still very affordable there.

before the fall

My research has me ranging over ideas far and wide. I'm still searching for the core ideas that are most relevant to my work. I can't really afford to pass over any that I discover along the way. Any of these nuggets may turn out to be gold.

As an example of how the flow of my mind works, this morning I was typing notes from my newly acquired book The Greeks and the Irrational by E. R. Dodds, a famous work based on a series of lectures given by the Irish scholar in 1949. Chapter 1 is "Agamemnon's Apology", in which Dodds examines the psychological and spiritual factors at work in the Iliad when Agamemnon finally apologizes to Achilles for insulting him. In the course of the discussion Dodds talks about the Greek word ate, which he translates as "divine temptation or infatuation". Dodds sees this as a form of "psychic intervention": the sudden eruption into one's mind of a thought, idea, or impulse. If the thought, idea, or impulse is not in line with the thoughts, ideas, or impulses that one usually tends to have, then there is a strong sense that it is something alien to oneself, that it was "put there" by someone or something else--a god or a daemon.

But I recalled the term ate from another book, A Study of History by Arnold J. Toynbee. There he uses the term in his analysis of the phenomenon of militarism:

We may now go on to examine the active aberration described in the three Greek words koros, hubris, ate. Objectively koros means "surfeit," hubris "outrageous behavior," and ate "disaster." Subjectively koros means the psychological conditions of being spoilt by success; hubris means the consequent loss of mental and moral balance; and ate means the blind headstrong ungovernable impulse which sweeps an unbalanced soul into attempting the impossible. This active psychological catastrophe in three acts was the commonest theme in the 5th-century Athenian tragic drama. In Platonic language:

"If one sins against the laws of proportion and gives something too big to something too small to carry it--too big sails to too small a ship, too big meals to too small a body, too big powers to too small a soul--the result is bound to be a complete upset. In an outburst of hubris the overfed body will rush into sickness, while the jack-in-office will rush into the unrighteousness which hubris always breeds."

I felt a shudder as I read these words again, for they seem to be an apt description of our own times. Toynbee, writing in the 1940s, goes on to illustrate his point with the story of David and Goliath. The proud, overconfident Goliath complacently puts his trust in his past accomplishments and his reputation, as well as in his sheer size. A well-aimed stone takes him down.

The story is familiar to everyone, and yet we remain blind to the process by which we (some of us) personally morph from David into Goliath. Militarism is the path trodden by the Goliath of the U.S. Pentagon, and Canada is guilty of me-tooism with our adventure in Afghanistan. I'd like to think that the near-simultaneous federal elections in these two countries will make a difference, but alas, I fear not. It's not in Goliath's nature to see the error of his ways, until just a few seconds after it's too late.

happiness and unhappiness

What would a "happy" life look like for me?

I'm not sure but I'm probably living it.

All of life is a tension of opposites, is it not? Happiness exists only in contradistinction to its opposite, unhappiness (or misery or sorrow or suffering). Only when the opposites are in fairly close proximity do we feel the intensity of one or the other. If you've had a biopsy for a suspected cancer, you may be waiting for the result with feelings of anxiety, even dread. When it comes back negative, you feel a rush of relief and joy. For a while, life seems rich and wonderful--a gift. But the intensity of contrast wears off as a function of time, and you return to your previous state of tension along the happiness-unhappiness axis.

Writers, like other people, tend to measure success in terms of social rewards such as prestige and earnings. But if an intelligent, objective person looks at those rewards carefully, there is not much to them. I think about, say, Conrad Black, the once-Canadian tycoon now languishing in hoosegow in Florida. Wealthy, prominent, and successful by just about any social yardstick except his own, he sought, Gatsby-like, to attain to some limit or singularity of social success and glamor, to "suck on the pap of wonder" (I think those were Fitzgerald's words) by becoming a British lord and joining the "real" nobility.

It was not to be. Or rather, it was--but then ended, spectacularly and suddenly, generating a contrast-experience in the downward direction.

The psychologist Victor Frankl says that life does not provide the answers; life asks the questions, and we provide the answers. Our lives, our living situations, are, basically, our answer--so far--to the questions put to us by life. Each problem or dilemma in life is another question, and our response is our answer to that question.

Whatever my feelings about toiling in obscurity, this toil and this obscurity are the result of choices I have made--my answers to the questions set by my life. If I don't like that, then I have a new question to answer. But my Buddhist training tells me to have caution. The restless search for a better deal in life is the hallmark of the human realm, and is itself a manifestation of suffering--of living in samsara.

The best definition of samsara that I've come across is "wanting things to be other than they are". Here's something to try: if you find yourself wishing things were other than they are, take a deliberate break from that way of thinking. For a few moments, just accept the way things are and pay attention to your surroundings. Notice then how your mind feels. To the extent that you can do this, you have had a taste of nirvana.

For me, to be in a state of tension between happiness and unhappiness is the way things are. Well, why not?

don't do it

Nobody knows anything.

This statement was made famous by William Goldman, the screenwriter and novelist, who was making a comment on the movie industry. He was pointing to the fact that many people in that industry, especially studio executives with high salaries, claim to understand the industry and what makes movies successful, and indeed must believe this in order to justify said high salaries, even though the facts seem to point quite the other way. The great majority of movies are flops both critically and commercially. To Goldman the inescapable conclusion was that, all chest-thumping aside, nobody in the movie industry, not even those who have been in it longest and have enjoyed the most success, really knows what makes a movie successful. Nobody knows what's going to work. Or, in brief: nobody knows anything.

But why stop there? Is this condition merely an aspect of movies, or is it a more general phenomenon? When it comes right down to it, who really knows what they're doing? Does anyone?

Take the Iraq War. The stated reasons for the invasion were Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and Saddam's links with Al Qaeda. For the sake of argument, let's assume everyone was sincere and honest about this from the start. Before long it came out that these reasons were in fact nonexistent. On the face of it, it would appear that the invasion was therefore a boo-boo, even in its own terms. Assuming sincerity and honesty, a lack of knowledge led to a mistaken and highly costly and bloody action, and we have every reason to think that Goldman's dictum applies 100% in this case as well.

That's a spectacular instance, but by no means the only one. You don't have to be a Buddhist to see that ignorance is the driving force behind much of our activity, perhaps all of it. From Thalidomide to CFCs to pumping groundwater dry throughout the world (currently under way--soon much of the world will be without water to irrigate crops with or to drink): action is confidently undertaken on the basis of incomplete knowledge, with disastrous results.

We hear of the "law of unintended consequences": everything we do brings a harvest of unexpected knock-on effects. Many of those are unpleasant, and have us scrambling to take new ill-informed actions to try to deal with them. I'm wondering whether the law of unintended consequences is the motto on the flip side of the coin of "nobody knows anything".

It feels good to do things instead of just sitting around on one's duff. I often feel bad about how little I do. But if we look at it objectively, the world would probably be in a lot better shape if more of us spent more time on our duffs and not trying to do things. This is the view of Hinayana Buddhism (sort of), as well as the Hippocratic Oath: "first of all, do no harm". As in first aid, the wise, disciplined approach is often a matter of not doing too much. Meditation, indeed, is really just a calculated strategy of sitting on one's duff.

Ha--here's maybe a case in point. I was just seeing Kimmie off to work. On the front porch, I swung the door closed behind me--only to have it slam on my fingertip. Smash. I gave it a good one, and it hurt plenty (still does--I'm typing this with my left hand).

I didn't know what I was doing.

( don't worry--I've been applying an ice-pack, and it's starting to calm down.)

Yeah, I'm liking sitting on my duff--the perfect activity for those of us who don't know anything.

billions

It seems I'm finally coming up against what I feared when I first started this blog back in 2005: that I might run out of things to write about.

I used to keep a file of possible blog-post topics, but found that I never referred to it, preferring to shoot from the hip when I opened up the posting window. Why not just grab whatever's going through my mind, and start typing?

Sounds good. And maybe if I had more guts I could really follow through with that. But I feel constrained by the fact that, on the one hand, I don't want to talk too much about the content of my work in progress, the ostensible theme of this blog, and on the other that many of the other thoughts and feelings that dominate my life right now are things that are very private and inward.

So: here I sit.

Another week begins, and I must pray to the Muse to grant me a few more lines of my work--or at least the gumption to open up its files and face it, something I found that I couldn't do last Friday.

It helps to keep some perspective. Last night on CBC Newsworld I watched Brian Stewart interview the economist Paul Collier about his book The Bottom Billion, about the world's poorest people. These are the people--or whole families--who try to survive on less than $1 a day. Many of those people are in Africa. There were video clips of violence in Africa: unarmed people running for their lives while "soldiers" shot at them, and so on. What a mess.

I liked Paul Collier--a Brit who used to work for the World Bank. As he observed, political stability has only ever arrived anywhere at a great price in violence and upheaval, a fact we should bear in mind as we shake our heads over Africa. And, I think, even once it's achieved it's fragile, ready to be smashed when the strong give in to the temptation to gain their ends by force, and reap the whirlwind of violence.

As one of the "top billion", I have nothing to complain about. So I should get to work, then.

an elephant and his beliefs

My life these days is largely reading--more than it is writing, that's for sure.

I've always loved reading, and I do more of it now than I ever have before. Our old family friend, the late Dorothy Burt, born in 1908, spent much of every day reading for a large part of her adult life. Her day was broken down into the different things she read: The Observer, The Manchester Guardian, nonfiction book, fiction...

I used to think it was a bit strange to spend all of one's time reading and never doing anything, or at least writing something oneself. I think I still feel that way, although I'm less sure.

In my case, although I enjoy reading, I seldom read purely for "pleasure". For me, all reading is study, and that in fact is why I find it pleasurable. Possibly then it's not really reading I like, but learning, and reading is still the most efficient, accessible, and affordable way to learn. Aristotle said that humans by nature love to learn, and that the appeal of art is exactly that we learn from it.

So I'm learning. But am I really? In one obvious sense I certainly am. I do retain some quantity of what I read (less than I'd like). But the motive that keeps pushing me to read more is a feeling of dissatisfaction: that I have not yet learned what I'm seeking to learn.

What am I seeking? I'm searching for my beliefs. What do I think is true? What are the reasons--the real reasons--behind what I see in the world, in my experience?

According to William James, a belief is by definition a concept that we use as the basis for action. We act on what we believe, and only on what we believe. I reach down to my keyboard right now to press keys because I believe that when I do, the corresponding letters will appear on the monitor before me. (So far, so good.) I'm doing that because I believe that when I press the Publish Post button on the screen, this post will uploaded to my blog and become available for people to read. If I found out that these posts were not being uploaded to the blog, I would quite soon stop writing them. My belief would have changed, and with it my behavior.

I look around me in the world and see, mainly, actions based on erroneous or misguided beliefs. These happen on vast, world-changing scales. If, for example, you believe that the U.S. invaded Iraq, as was stated, in order to root out weapons of mass destruction, then that whole costly invasion and subsequent war was initiated on the basis of an erroneous belief. But even if you believe, as I do, that the invasion was for quite other purposes, such as "future oil security", or even "world domination", these too, in my view, are mistaken, since I am certain that neither one can be achieved in this way. Enormous resources are being consumed and lives lost right now, as I type, all on the basis of mistaken beliefs.

In Buddhism, it is taught that we are all separated from complete great enlightenment by the "two veils": the veil of "conflicting emotions" and the veil of "primitive beliefs about reality". Both of these are very difficult to remove, but the first one, "conflicting emotions", is much easier than the second, "primitive beliefs".

It might seem odd that an Indian monk who lived 2,500 years ago would, if he could look at our modern society with its secular outlook and advanced technology, describe our beliefs as primitive--but he would. He did. Our modernity and technology don't touch the issue of our basic mistakenness about things.

Of course, I'm not going to find Buddhist-style enlightenment in books. But I do want to become informed. Even in this relative and temporal way, I want to find out what the true causal forces are working in the world around me. I don't want to act--I don't feel I can act--until I feel I understand what's going on well enough. That means that instead of going out to achieve things, to crusade in the world, I'm sitting in my soft chair, book and highlighter in hand.

I feel like an elephant. It's said that an elephant will not step onto a bridge that won't hold its weight. An elephant just knows. And yet it's probably not just intuition; the elephant must look at the bridge, examine it, and come to a conclusion on the basis of its observations. It arrives at a belief about the bridge, and acts accordingly. I feel that most actions in the world are like that bridge, and I'm still trying to figure out if it will hold my weight.

from the moon to earth

Last night Kimmie and I watched episode 4 of the 1998 docu-drama series From the Earth to the Moon--about the flight of Apollo 8 in 1968. The series, a high-budget HBO offering produced by Tom Hanks, Ron Howard, and Brian Grazer--the forces behind the 1995 movie Apollo 13--is well made and does capture some of the flavor of the 1960s as I remember it. It was a time of war, rioting, social unrest, assassinations--society in convulsions. I watched it on black-and-white TV at the time: state funerals, soldiers clubbing protesting students, endless machine-gunning and explosions in remote tropical forests--a backdrop of violence and killing against which politicians made stirring, idealistic speeches.

The series shows clips of all that, plus scenes of intense, nerdish men in rooms fogged with cigarette smoke talking earnestly about how to put astronauts on the moon before the Soviets beat them to it. At age nine, it was obvious and natural to me why "we" should be going all-out to fly to the moon: it was neat! What did it matter to me how many billions it cost? I made 25 cents a week in allowance; I had no notion of money. I loved space and its technology maybe even more than other nine-year-old boys.

I see things differently now. I'm still fascinated by space and space science, and I'm sure I'll always be interested in spacecraft. But instead of John F. Kennedy's famous speech of 25 May 1961, in which he committed the United States to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade, I think of another speech, given four months earlier, by his predecessor Dwight Eisenhower, which contained these words:

Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations.

This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence--economic, political, even spiritual--is felt in every city, every Statehouse, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

The makers of the spacecraft that got America to the moon were all leading military contractors: General Dynamics, Rockwell, Boeing. The total cost of the Apollo program was about $20-25 billion, or the equivalent of around $120 billion today. It was ostensibly a peacetime initiative, but we can't ignore that it was done in direct, stated competition with the USSR--the West's Cold War enemy--and that the technologies developed were no doubt helpful for future military applications. Plus the money-stream helped those military contractors keep meeting their very large payrolls.

I remember that Christmas of 1968, hearing the radio broadcast of the astronauts Borman, Anders, and Lovell, in orbit around the moon, reading the opening verses of Genesis. Harvey Burt, our host for that Christmas dinner, said that Mara and I would be able to think back to that day and remember where we were.

Looking back on the Apollo program and on the show last night, I think the most important and memorable thing was the awe of the astronauts when they watched the Earth rise from over the horizon of the moon. As far as I know, all astronauts have felt this awe: the feeling of preciousness of Earth, our island home in the vast, dark, frigid sea of space. What are we doing to the only home we've got?

I felt anxiety and sadness as I watched the show. Looking at the world around me, from the news on TV to the street outside my house, I find it hard to be optimistic. We take our planet for granted, and I think there will be a terrible, terrible price to pay.

denial, habit, and the cliff

Last night I finished reading Six Degrees by Mark Lynas, a sketch of our global future in a warmer world. The final chapter, in which he discusses the challenge of preventing the global temperature from rising more than 2°C, I found especially interesting because of his treatment of the major stumbling-block in our path: the psychological defense-mechanism of denial.

There are many different defense mechanisms (Anna Freud made an extensive study of them in the 1930s) that we use to protect ourselves from potential emotional pain. Among them, denial is a key one. According to one explanation, when we experience cognitive dissonance--the conflict in our minds between two strong but irreconcilable beliefs--we feel such discomfort that we deny the truth of one of the beliefs. The classic example is in the behavior around addictions, such as smoking. A person with otherwise healthy self-esteem is confronted with two data: smoking is damaging to the body; and nonetheless, I smoke. Denial in this case usually takes the form of "smoking is not really damaging", or "it won't damage me." But sometimes a smoker might assert, "I"m not really a smoker--I smoke less than a pack a day." Either way, one is spared the pain of confronting one's own self-destructive behavior.

Lynas is saying that this is the dominant mechanism preventing action on the problem of global warming. He says:

One study used random-sample focus groups in Switzerland to investigate attitudes to climate change. Its results showed how the "tragedy of the commons" is reflected in people's belief "in the insignificance of individual action to change the order of things," with the result that perceived "costs to the self are greater than benefits to others." However, the researchers found that the most powerful motivator of denial was more straightforwardly selfish--an unwillingness to abandon personal comforts and consumption patterns. People would complain that public transport is late, dirty and overcrowded, therefore they "need" their cars. Or they might argue that their lives are busy and difficult, so they "need" foreign holidays for a couple of weeks a year.

Lynas goes on to list eight specific expressions of denial catalogued by the Swiss researchers:

• the "metaphor of displaced commitment" ("I protect the environment in other ways, like recycling");


• denial of responsibility ("I am not the main cause of this problem");


• condemning the accuser ("You have no right to challenge me");


• rejection of blame ("I've done nothing wrong");


• ignorance ("I don’t know the consequences of my actions");


• powerlessness ("Nothing I do makes much difference");


• comfort ("It is too difficult for me to change my behavior"); and


• "fabricated constraints" ("There are too many impediments").
  

Quite the list. I recognize pretty much all of them operating in my own psyche (my special favorites are the last three). Together, they form a powerful bulwark against behavioral change.

I had another thought while I was reading the chapter: denial may have a large share of responsibility in preventing change, but let's not forget good old habit. Habits by definition are behaviors that have become automatic, and they have become that way because we find them to be effective in achieving our aims. Most of our behavior is habit, with or without any psychological defense-mechanism running alongside it. William James stresses its powerful, even paramount, role in our mental lives.

But recently I read another interesting take on habit: it was by Arthur Koestler in The Act of Creation. He says that it's easy to form new habits. What is difficult is to break old ones.

This is because all of our mental apparatus is programmed precisely to form new habits. We automate our behavior in order to free up attention for the novelties in our experience. When we're learning how to walk, it ties up our attention. We have to concentrate on where to put our feet, how to balance ourselves. Once it's learned, it becomes automatic, so that normally we can walk without giving it even a moment's thought. Only special conditions, such as walking on an ice-rink, or across a stream via stepping-stones, or when we have pain, force our attention back to the task. Otherwise, we can walk, talk, and yes chew gum all at the same time.

What does all this imply about our common future? Will we be able to give up the herd mentality and status-seeking that have us moving ever farther into remote suburbs and commuting to work in ever larger carbon-spewing vehicles? We have to cut through the layer of denial, then through the layer of habit. Will we? Or will the lemmings plunge dutifully off the cliff, secure in the knowledge that we didn't break ranks?

Not to dodge personal responsibility, but much does depend on leadership. Even though we believe in freedom, we follow leaders. After all, one of those lemmings has to be the first one over the cliff.

musings on a dark, rainy fall morning

Back to the task. Kimmie returns to work today. The mornings are dark a long time now after 5:30, when our alarm goes off. I hear the distant jingling of our front-door chimes buffeted in the predawn autumn wind.

My project, my story, is morphing out from under me. As I learn more, throw open more doors to the vaults of the deep past, my world enlarges and changes the journey of my heroes. Not fundamentally--I'm in far too deep to make a radical story-change now. But it's more like discovering things that were already here: connections, meanings, possibilities. I feel I have the opportunity to replace certain arbitrary elements, which I'm never very happy about, with elements that reflect the growing meaning of my story. In this way a controlling idea very gradually emerges, like a shipwreck being floated gingerly from the bottom of the ocean.

My reading about the cults of the Roman Empire--the exotic religions brought into it by its foreign traders and captives--is throwing tremendous new light on the way I see that world. I sometimes wonder (and worry) about the fact that I'm coming across this information so late in my journey, but in general I trust the timing of the arrival of information. This trust seems to be borne out time and again by the coincidental arrival of complementary information from different sources. I read about the Egyptian religion of Isis, which became widespread in the Roman world, in a book devoted to her cult, only to open a chapter of Toynbee's A Study of History to find him discussing Isis and Osiris (he conjectures that this brother-sister, husband-wife, mother-son duo represents a transformation of the more ancient cult of Ishtar and Tammuz in Sumer). These simultaneous linkages between widely different sources happen a lot for me, and tend to confirm the path I'm on, and the way I'm traveling it. It's like just-in-time delivery of manufacturing parts, except the parts here are ideas or pieces of knowledge.

If my "building blocks" are arriving just in time, that must mean I'm assembling things at the right pace--painfully slow though that seems to me. (I find it embarrassing to be asked about the progress of my work, since its progress is almost imperceptible, even to me. Pluto seems to orbit the Sun faster.)

Even in Chalmers Johnson's latest book, Nemesis, about the disintegration of the American republic, I have a very good short summary of the rise and fall of the Roman Republic, which also dovetails with my other research, even though I'm reading it to learn more about current events and not for my project. The parallels between Rome and the U.S. are striking, and give me a feeling of relevance in what I'm doing.

Supposedly Harry Truman said that the only news is the history you don't know. I'm sure that's true. History is made generally by the ignorant and purblind, those who believe they're acting in an original way but who are in fact merely duplicating the actions of others taken long before, most often with disastrous results. It's a truism to say that history repeats itself, and it never actually does, quite. But the hallmark of intelligence is the ability to see a pattern where the less intelligent see only chaos.

Mind you, that's also the hallmark of paranoia.

One of Ian Fleming's James Bond novels, I think it was Live and Let Die, had as an epigraph this little saying:

Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action.

According to Toynbee, since the beginning of civilization societies have evolved according to one overarching pattern: growth; stagnation into a "time of troubles"; the rise of a pacifying "universal state"; and a final rupture and disintegration due to the combined agitation of a disenfranchised "internal proletariat" and a hostile and opportunistic "external proletariat" of barbarians beyond the civilization's frontier. Although I have not yet finished reading his Study of History, Toynbee so far reckons that our own civilization (which he calls Western Christendom) entered its "time of troubles" in the 16th century with the bitter and fratricidal European Wars of Religion. Since the 20th century was even more disastrous and bloodthirsty, it seems safe to say we're not out of the time of troubles yet. Indeed, they have to get so bad, in Toynbee's view, that people are generally relieved to acquiesce in living under the aegis of a universal state, like Rome under the Empire.

We don't seem to be there yet, which means that things are set to get continually worse. The U.S. administrations since World War 2 have set their sights on becoming the next universal state. But their chances of success are, in my opinion, poor. I expect this century to be worse than the 20th century in terms of human suffering, and that much of it will be linked to catastrophic environmental change. If Toynbee's historical cycle is still functioning after we go through that wringer, it's anyone's guess who might be strong and coherent enough to provide a peaceful universal state for the survivors to recuperate in.

Whew, this morning's even darker than I thought.

politics and the artist

One point I wanted to reach yesterday was to raise the question of what the artist's relationship should be to politics.

It's a complex question. My first instinct is that an artist should not really come out as supporting any particular political view or party. For one thing, as well put by my late brother-in-law the artist Fred Douglas, "I don't see why other people should be interested in my opinions." (Although Freddie was not shy about spouting his opinions at length if you actually happened to be in his company--but still.)

To me, a liberal or a conservative, or a communist or a fascist, artist, seems like a limited thing--sort of the way I feel about, say, Christian rockers. In a sense, you're selling someone else's message, and to that extent are bankrupt as an artist.

At the same time, an artist may have, as anyone may have, political views. Should one then conceal them? Isn't this just mystification--the self-conscious attempt to generate a mystique around oneself, to keep people guessing?

On the other hand, the artist is also an economic entity, someone trying to earn a living. Should one risk alienating potential buyers by exposing one's political views? I think about the Dixie Chicks, and how they landed in hot water with many erstwhile fans when Natalie Maines made critical remarks about George Bush. At the time I thought this was foolish, since the Dixie Chicks' work has nothing to do with politics; the outburst was a taking advantage of the fame of the Dixie Chicks, and the fact that the opinions would get a lot of publicity. Natalie Maines found herself with a soapbox, so she used it. But what, if anything, was the benefit to anyone?

Then again, one doesn't want to be too much of a slut. I recall Michael Jordan's infamous comment that "Republicans buy sneakers too"--invoking his role as shoe salesman to beg off helping a Democrat in North Carolina defeat the notorious Republican incumbent Jesse Helms in 1990. Of course, Michael Jordan is not an artist--but you get the idea.

Then there's the question of what is meant by the very term politics. I remember my late friend and mentor Harvey Burt distinguishing between politics in general and partisan politics--the politics of specific parties. Politics in general has to do with relationships of power between people, and therefore, one would think, is naturally open for comment by artists. And one might naturally incline toward one political or social philosophy over another. Harvey also told me, for example, that Malcolm Lowry, his friend and neighbor in the squatters' camp at Dollarton, was very idealistic about the squatter's life, and romanticized it as being a kind of Thoreau-esque statement by the Common Man against the evil and dehumanizing forces of Civilization. The squatters were the oppressed, decent, principled proletarians up against the faceless State.

As for me, I have for many years now seen partisan politics as being inherently puerile, even as I see the necessity, or anyway the inevitability, of political parties. The public statements of most politicians are embarrassing, flatulent banalities, when they are not outright prevarications or lies. If this behavior wins votes, then that fact reflects on us, the electorate: as a group we are credulous sheep, and therefore must expect to be treated as such. It's depressing to think that a candid, honest politician would be punished at the ballot box. In general, I am suspicious of artists who take partisan politics too seriously.

Can I draw any conclusions? In the last analysis, one should not sacrifice one's integrity for any reason. If you have strong political beliefs, then so be it. But I think artists should tread carefully. Natalie Maines's exclamation that she was ashamed that George Bush was from Texas was, in my view, a pointless gesture. Sincere, no doubt--but empty of content. In effect, she was using her personal stardom as a vehicle for selling dislike of the president. I support her freedom to do so, but I believe that she did no good for herself as an artist, or for society.

That said, I hold musicians and actors to a lower standard in this respect than I do writers. Mostly they're performing other people's work--other people's writing. When the performer is also a songwriter, as the Dixie Chicks are, this still doesn't make too much difference unless they deal with political material in their created work--which they usually don't. Musicians like Billy Bragg, who pump out paeans to social activism and such, I tend to lump in with Christian rockers. They're marketers of ideas conceived by others.

I suppose my advice to myself is: if you have a political statement to make, be sure it's calm, cogent, well supported, objective, mature, and wise.

Is that asking so much?

the same old dream

I've been sitting here for some minutes now, trying to decide what to write.

One of my strongest interests at the moment is the subject-matter of The Sorrows of Empire by Chalmers Johnson, the book that currently attracts me most in my reading-stack, and holds me longest. It is that unusual thing for me: a book that I find hard to put down.

The book's subtitle sketches out its agenda: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic. When I first got the book I flipped it open and found, at the head of chapter 2, "The Roots of American Militarism", the following epigraph:

Overgrown military establishments are under any form of government inauspicious to liberty, and are to be regarded as particularly hostile to Republican liberty.

Do you know who said this? It was George Washington, in his presidential farewell address delivered on 17 September 1796. That epigraph is followed by one from another famous presidential farewell address, given by Dwight D. Eisenhower on 17 January 1961:

This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience.... In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted.

I remember seeing a film-clip of Eisenhower's speech, and being shocked that a sitting president of the United States could have such a dark and critical viewpoint of the system in which he functioned--the system which he was supposed, in fact, to be running.

With great authority, and bringing to bear a wealth of telling detail, Chalmers Johnson develops the case that since World War 2 the U.S. has been in transition from a republic to an empire. It's important to understand that he uses the word empire not metaphorically but literally. He means it.

In the U.S. itself the idea has become somewhat mainstream and acceptable since the end of the Cold War in 1991 and especially since the 9/11 attacks in 2001, especially among conservatives and so-called neoconservatives. And on the face of it, if America is a virtuous democracy, what's the harm in letting them run the world? Why not let them take on the Johnny Appleseed role of sowing justice and decency everywhere?

Alas, as Johnson documents, as nations go, the U.S. is not especially virtuous, and, increasingly, is not even really a democracy. In his own words:

In my opinion, the growth of militarism, official secrecy, and a belief that the U.S. is no longer bound, as the Declaration of Independence so famously puts it, by "a decent respect for the opinions of mankind" is probably irreversible.

After a brief flirtation with international law in the 20th century, following the bloodbaths of World Wars 1 and 2, we're back to Thomas Hobbes's "state of nature": survival of the fittest, and may the devil take the hindmost. Or, as the elephant says in the chicken coop: "Every man for himself!"

The elephant in the chicken coop might seem to have the run of the place, but even chickens, when their backs are pressed to the wall, might prove to be a serious nuisance. And what's the elephant going to live on? Large standing armies are hugely expensive (the average U.S. "defense" budget has been just under $400 billion a year since 1950, measured in 2002 dollars), and eventually bankrupt even the richest nations. This is what happened to Spain in the late-16th century, the world's mightiest nation at the time. The urbanologist and economist Jane Jacobs pointed to standing armies as one of the three major "transactions of decline" that lead a society from prosperity to poverty. A large army is too expensive to finance through peacetime operations; they must earn their keep through plunder, or, as in China, being large industrial operations in their own right, with productive assets like factories and farmland.

Where is Spain today? When I visited the country in 1982, few Spaniards traveled because their employment was too low and their currency too depressed. The rest of the world--even next-door France--was too expensive for them. They're doing much better now, but they are still just one country among many, still, as far as I know, net recipients of transfers from the common kitty of the European Union.

The search for power and prestige, the mirage of security through violence--where do these things come from? Another brilliant epigraph from Johnson's book sums it up, this one to chapter 3, from Ian Fleming's 1958 James Bond novel, Doctor No:

It's the same old dream--world domination.

ego is my hobby

Stephen King said that he wrote 365 days a year, including Christmas and his birthday, because that's what he liked to do. Book after book was written in this way, seven days a week, many thousands of words a day. Hence his famous prolificness.

I write fewer than 365 days a year--but not that many fewer. It's probably about 350. (Of course my output per day is also much less. Sigh.) But I'm not always pushing a single project forward. Continuous, unremitting work on a single thing I find exhausting and eventually boring and confining; I need a break, I need to let my mind loose on other things.

So on weekends I turn my mind away from The Mission and focus elsewhere. Right now I'm back to my musings on identity, writing notes toward what may, I hope, eventually become a nonfiction book project of its own. On Saturday and Sunday I sat here keying notes in much the same way I do with The Mission, including notes from research books. This project has its own folders set up on my PC, just as the novel does.

It's a hobby project, undertaken for love and interest, in exactly the same way that Kimmie makes a hobby right now of creating haute couture costumes for Barbie dolls up in her sewing room. Purely for love, not for any monetary or pragmatic reason, she diligently puts together patterns with carefully chosen fabrics, and makes little accessories from scratch such as hats with plumes and little handbags with special details; she even sews up Barbie-scale lace panties from sections of stretch ribbon. Over this past weekend she spent hours preparing an inventory of all her work on it to date, and counted 73 outfits already made, many of which are modeled on the three dozen or so dolls she has ranged in tiers atop her white shelving unit. Many of the costumes are Victorian and antebellum gowns--her favorite period. Like everything that's done for love, they're all excellent.

I'm trying to work for love as much as possible (I'm certainly not working for money!). And certainly my weekend hobby is done for love. I'm driven by pure curiosity and a desire to understand.

And what am I coming up with? I'm working toward a unified belief system for myself. I'd like to find out what I believe--what I think is true, what my real values are. In various problems and conflicts around the world, from the Iraq War to global warming to mass violence and starvation in Darfur, I think about what the solutions might be--not merely band-aids but solutions to the underlying problems. This means identifying the underlying problems correctly, just as a doctor can't treat a disease without diagnosing it properly first. What are the root causes of these problems?

The Buddha identified the root cause of all suffering as ego fixation: clinging to the notion that one's self is a real, existent thing that needs continual care and feeding. His insight was that this universal conviction is in fact a mistake, and that if one can gain clear insight into this mistake, everything changes--for the better. Specifically, your suffering is at a complete and permanent end, and you become a truly useful person to the rest of humanity.

Sounds good. I spent 15 years fairly intensively studying and practicing those teachings; they form the great bulk of my spiritual education, such as it is. I haven't achieved the enlightenment of the Buddha--far from it--and I came to see that that eventuality is probably some way off, not in this lifetime, not for me. But in all those years I made an examination of ego from the Buddhist perspective, for Buddhism is, in a certain sense, an intensive effort to understand ego through study and introspection. Now I've changed my approach, and am looking at it from a "Western" perspective--a philosophical and scientific approach, you might say.

What is it that makes us hate? What is it that has us identifying with an in-group and seeing ourselves in antagonistic competition with other perceived groups? Why are "Arabs" slaughtering "blacks" in Darfur? What, at bottom, do Shiites have against Sunnis, and vice versa? Why do I want more than my share?

These are all questions relating to ego, which I have rebranded as "identity" for my purposes. And that, friends, is my hobby.

breakdowns large and small

All kinds of ideas swirl in my head of things I'd like to write about as I go about my day(s), but now that I open up the text box here at Blogger.com--nada, or near-nada.

I'm underslept, that's one thing. Today I feel it. And the heavy cold rain has returned, falling from a featureless sky of thick watery cloud. The tapwater will continue to run yellow-green, the bathtub will fill with a brownish liquid like pond-water. The "boil water" advisory is still in effect.

These past two mornings I've spent time reading, on what has become my favorite source of online news or political commentary, a preview of an essay by Mark Danner called "Iraq: The War of the Imagination", which will be published in the December 21 edition of The New York Review of Books. In some ways it's like a compressed recap of Thomas Ricks's book Fiasco. And fiasco it is, lest there be any remaining doubters out there.

I'd read once that the word fiasco was someone's name--some Italian naval officer who'd screwed up in an exemplary way. But according to my Dictionary of Word Origins, it is simply Italian for "bottle", from an Italian phrase far fiasco, "make a bottle", theatrical slang for "suffer a complete breakdown in performance."

Performance breakdown. There are many ways for one's "performance" to break down. It's no doubt best done in the privacy and comfort of one's own home, rather than being writ large on the world stage, engulfing millions of lives and billions of dollars. So I've got that to be thankful for.

Another post I recently read at the Tomdispatch site was a piece on NASCAR racing and its political overtones. It gets me thinking about car-racing--seemingly a field rife with breakdowns. And yet, in some sense, I reckon they probably don't see mechanical failures that way. I'm assuming that in NASCAR they have pit stops as they do in Formula 1 racing--places where the cars pull in for quick servicing during the race. The key point is that they expect these--they're part of the race. You don't go out there without having a pit crew ready. The car is complex, expensive, and you're driving it hard, at the limits of its performance envelope. Things are going to go foo-foo here and there.

I suppose I'm driving toward the idea that "breakdowns" (which my Webster's defines as "a failure to function"--I love Webster's!) can be reframed as "pit stops": not (necessarily) disasters, but an inevitable part of pushing one's performance to the limits. Your car's pulled off to the side, the wheels are all off, you're not moving anywhere--but you're still in the race. Your stressed parts are just getting a little TLC.

I'm in the pit stop, and the wheels are definitely off. C'mon guys--put 'em back on!

the big lie

I'll try to get in a quick post before heading up for tea. It's already 4:00 p.m.

I've been a good lad, working diligently on my copywriting assignment. In the morning over coffee I keyed some notes from the book Uriel's Machine by Christopher Knight and Robert Lomas, authors of The Hiram Key. This is genuine research for The Mission, so I'm getting my mind back to that. Indeed, I worked fairly hard on it yesterday, Sunday. Kimmie and Robin had headed off, with emergency rain-ponchos, to watch the Santa Parade in Vancouver, leaving me to my quiet suburban devices. I dove back into my research, feeling just in the mood.

But I've wanted since last week to touch in on something else that came to me. On Saturday I had to return the library copy of Fiasco by Thomas E. Ricks. I only made it to page 100; I'll have to put another hold on it and wait for the eight people in front of me to have a go first. But it was already absorbing reading as far as I got.

Ricks makes this point:

The Iraq fiasco occurred not just because the Bush administration engaged in sustained self-deception over the threat presented by Iraq and the difficulty of occupying the country, but also because of other major lapses in major American institutions, from the military establishment and the intelligence community to the media.

One thought that came to me was the recollection of the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1962 during the Kennedy administration. It is now given as a textbook example of groupthink--the psychological phenomenon of a group's subtle or not so subtle tendency to smother dissent and manufacture consensus. It seems clear that this was strongly operating in the U.S. administration--as well as its legislative branch--in the runup to the war.

But another thought was a vague memory of the phrase, "the big lie." I couldn't remember quite where I'd heard it or what it referred to, so I went to Wikipedia and was intrigued to find that the phrase is due to Adolf Hitler. They have an extract there from Mein Kampf:

[I]n the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.

Ricks's book makes clear that in the runup to the war, the U.S. administration persistently and willfully overrode its own intelligence community in the matter of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. The emphaticness with which they did so, arguably culminating in Colin Powell's February 2003 speech to the UN, strongly suggests a reliance on Hitler's technique. It was a big lie.

Also, on Remembrance Day I found another quote, this time from Hermann Goering:

Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.

Again, I was struck by the resemblance to the political behavior I've seen in the last few years. Apparently, until recently anyway, it was working in the U.S.

Enough--teatime!

casualties

The fall rains are here: water falling out of a wet but still faintly glowing sky, pasting big rusty maple-leaves to sidewalks and streets.

It's been a solitary day. The phone has rung twice: each time it was the dead sound of a telemarketer's automatic dialing system waiting to connect, and I hung up before the salespeople clicked on.

Down here in my dim office, in the pale splash of light given off by my tiny metal desklamp, I typed in little bursts in my Notes document for chapter 25. I'm feeling stuck, and this creates a sense of futility and anxiety, since it seems no more productive than standing by a high wall, waiting for a way over to present itself.

Looking for ways to break the logjam (new metaphor--sorry), I went to the dictionary to look up words. I typed the definitions into a Word document I have for Merriam Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, 10th edition: credit and grace. Rome was in turmoil just before Caesar's return from the civil war in the East. The big issue was the cancellation of debts--a law pushed forward by the aggressive and heavily indebted patrician-turned-plebeian Dolabella. People weren't sure whether Caesar would ever return, or whether he would be killed first, and so the issue of who was running the show was up in the air. Nominally it was Mark Antony, the so-called Master of the Horse appointed by Caesar to run the city in his absence, but Antony was preoccupied with carousing and transferring the property of Pompeians into the hands of himself and his cronies. Meanwhile, armed gangs roamed the streets, fighting each other and terrorizing other citizens.

The situation echoed with some reading I did in the morning on the conditions in Baghdad, which are (or were in spring this year) much grimmer than what we generally hear about on the news, which for me generally appears only as headlines of daily body-counts from bomb blasts and such. I think back to when I was growing up in the 1960s, during the Vietnam War. Every evening the news would come on TV, and Walter Cronkite would somberly report the day's (or maybe the week's) death-toll. Even by age 9 I could see that the death-tolls followed a strange pattern. U.S. casualties were always in the single digits; South Vietnamese in the tens; and Vietcong in the hundreds, sometimes over a thousand. How was it they always died in those same proportions? I wondered.

I didn't know then that the proportions were due to the very first casualty: truth.

conflicts of interest

I recently finished reading a book (an achievement for me, since I start many more books than I finish): House of Bush, House of Saud: The Secret Relationship Between the World's Two Most Powerful Dynasties by American investigative journalist Craig Unger. I was inspired to read this book after finishing John Perkins's Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, and wanting to learn more about skulduggery at the highest levels of power.

Unger has delivered the goods with his book, a meticulously documented investigation of the links between what he provocatively calls the house of Bush--that is, the Bush family and some of its close business and political associates--and the ruling family of Saudi Arabia. These links extend far into the past, well before the time when the elder Bush became president in 1989, and, according to Unger, came about due to the Bushes' involvement in the oil industry.

By the end of the book Unger makes a strong case that the administration of George W. Bush has been compromised in its ability to deal effectively with Islamic terrorism aimed at the U.S. because of the strong ties of friendship and business connections between him and the house of Saud. Unger's most striking illustration of this is the fact that on 13 September 2001, two days after the 9/11 terrorist attack, when all civil aviation was still grounded, certain private flights were permitted for the purpose of evacuating 140 high-level Saudis from the U.S., including members of the bin Laden family. The clearance for such flights could only have come from the highest levels of government--the White House--and were presumably authorized at the request of the Saudi government. Unger's point is that shortly after nearly 3,000 Americans had been killed in a terrorist attack, a number of people who should have been of great interest to the FBI for questioning were permitted to leave the country as a favor to a foreign regime--the very country from which a majority of the terrorists came.

Shocking stuff. It's the first time I'd heard of this, although apparently it had already been in the news in the U.S. My thought upon finishing the book was this: that George Bush and many of his associates have managed to place themselves in a gigantic conflict of interest. As president of the United States his duty is to the citizens of his country, protecting and promoting their welfare, pure and simple. As a private individual he is concerned about his assets and business dealings. Unger shows how Bush, his father, and associates such as James Baker and Frank Carlucci are connected to the Carlyle Group, a holding company formed in 1987 by David Rubinstein, a former domestic policy adviser to Jimmy Carter. The Carlyle Group became, through retaining key powerful figures leaving senior government posts, a major defense contractor. The Carlyle Group over the years has had large business dealings with the Saudis, worth at least about $1.3 billion according to Unger's reckoning.

From the point of view of the U.S. administration, there have been strong reasons to foster close relations with the ruling family of Saudi Arabia, even though they owe their position to their ties to the Islamic extremists known as Wahhabis. After the OPEC oil embargo of the 1970s, the U.S. wanted to ensure a steady supply from the world's largest producer. Better to have the Saudis as friends than as enemies. One way of cementing friendship is doing business together; then everybody wins: big earnings to the deal-makers, lucrative work for U.S. contractors, infrastructure development and armaments for the Saudis, and oil at a reasonable price for U.S. citizens. What's not to like?

Everything's great until those seemingly aligned interests diverge. Your "president" hat no longer fits with your "breadwinner" hat. A bunch of Saudis commit mass murder on your soil, and you find yourself with a dilemma. What's the right thing to do?

It's so hard to tell, when your own bank account, and those of your family and friends, are involved. It's hard to tell, and it also looks bad. Very bad. It becomes difficult, impossible, to appear impartial. You have a conflict of interest.

I think of Joseph Campbell in The Hero with a Thousand Faces; he narrates the story of King Minos of Crete:

Great Minos, king of Crete in the period of its commercial supremacy, hired the celebrated artist-craftsman Daedalus to invent and construct for him a labyrinth, in which to hide something of which the palace was at once ashamed and afraid. For there was a monster on the premises--which had been born to Pasiphaë, the queen. It had been nothing worse, really, than what Minos' own mother had allowed to happen: Minos' mother was Europa, and it is well known that she was carried by a bull to Crete. The bull had been the god Zeus, and the honored son of that sacred union was Minos himself.

Society has blamed the queen greatly; but the king was not unconscious of his own share of guilt. The bull in question had been sent by the god Poseidon, long ago. Minos had asserted that the throne was his, by divine right, and had prayed the god to send up a bull out of the sea, as a sign. and he had sealed the prayer with a vow to sacrifice the animal immediately, as an offering and symbol of service. The bull had appeared, and Minos took the throne; but when he beheld the majesty of the beast that had been sent, and thought what an advantage it would be to possess such a specimen, he determined to risk a merchant's substitution.

He had converted a public event to personal gain, whereas the whole sense of his investiture as king had been that he was no longer a mere private person. The return of the bull should have symbolized his absolutely selfless submission to the functions of his role. The retaining of itrepresentedd, on the other hand, an impulse to egocentric self-aggrandizement. And so the king "by the grace of God" became the dangerous tyrant Holdfast--out for himself.

There it is: the tyrant Holdfast. Another thought, this one from Jung's Aion:

Since real moral problems all begin where the penal code leaves off, their solution can seldom or never depend on precedent, much less on precepts and commandments. The real moral problems spring from conflicts of duty.

I sense that people who crave worldly power often are unaware that if they achieve this, extraordinary demands will put on them: not just demands of effort, but demands on their conscience and ethics. As a leader or power figure, your personal growth--or failure thereat--is enacted in a vast arena, in public view.

John Perkins's book goes a step beyond this, describing powerful figures who are actually acting more or less in bad faith. In this case, it is not so much a conflict of interest as the actions of wolves in sheep's clothing. When subversion of democratic institutions happens at the highest levels, we truly have a problem. A deep, deep problem.

finding inspiration--and depression

Kimmie has taken some days off work, starting today and ending the Tuesday after Easter. So there was no alarm clock this morning. I slept through till about 5:35, then lay comfortably until I decided to rise at 6:20 to make the coffee.

I didn't actually get to my project this morning, although I did type a few notes. Yesterday I got back in the swing, digging further into my research as a way of seeking inspiration for my story. It took the form of character research: in this case for Alexander, my young would-be astrologer. As I seek his motivation, his feelings, I need material about his background. This had me reading through my research folder, copying extracts and dropping these into my chapter-notes document, and letting what I found spark ideas. The chapter-notes document has grown to 27 pages (many of which are the aforementioned extracts).

My reading of course goes on. I haven't read any directly period-research-related book for a long time now. Yesterday I finished reading Confessions of an Economic Hit Man by John Perkins. I found it very interesting: an expose along the lines of Philip Agee's CIA Diary, which I read back in 1984. More important than the literary quality of these books is what they have to say, and indeed the very fact that they exist. Since I'm not a cynical person, I perhaps need help in seeing that people do indeed sometimes act out of base motives, and that such people are often the very ones most driven to seek power and wealth for themselves.

Perkins's "confessions" offer a good view of the inside workings of a power-broker within the world of developing-world finance in the 1970s and 80s. The term "economic hit man" (EHM) refers to a species of economist who worked for private U.S. consulting firms (such as Halliburton) as part of teams trying to sell certain developing countries on large-scale, internationally financed, American-built infrastructure projects. Their specific though unstated intent was to oversell the projects to create much more lucrative contracts, and also to cause the developing country to default on its debt. Yes: the default was intentional, to put the country in a condition of obligation to the U.S. government, so that it would be more tractable in offering up things like UN votes, space for military bases, or natural resources such as oil. According to Perkins, this was his job, and he was very successful at it, working over countries such as Ecuador and Indonesia, among others.

Among many insights that I had while reading the book was this: suddenly it became clear why the World Bank has been such a dismal failure at helping developing countries develop. It's because the true mission of the World Bank is not its stated mission. Perkins alleges that the World Bank, in the pocket of the U.S. government, is essentially a facility for carrying out these economic "hits." It is a failure at its stated mission--but a success at its true one.

Sobering, even depressing thoughts. And yet I'm not too depressed: because at bottom I do not find truth depressing. Only when you see how things really are can you do anything effective or meaningful.

adventure from cradle to grave

Goodness gracious. This blog's birthday came and went yesterday, and I didn't think of it until just now. Happy birthday to it.

Is it possible to generate any kind of excitement or interest around a life of the mind? Worldly adventures have their own undeniable appeal. My niece Clare is adventuring in Central America right now (and is running her own blog of the adventures). Snorkeling in lagoons, canoeing down Belizean rivers, bouncing in Guatemalan buses--these are adventurous.

What about the mind--the place where I now do my "adventuring"? Can I convey any sense of that adventure? Indeed, can I feel that adventure?

Yes, I can. Conveying a sense of it is perhaps another matter. In a small way, I've tried in this blog. I haven't engaged in physical adventure for some time now. I don't travel; I scarcely manage to get out of the house. If I did, though, I would have a nagging feeling that I'm missing the action. The action, for me, right now, is in books.

Yesterday I read further into Daniel Goleman's Vital Lies, Simple Truths. He has moved from discussing the unconscious restrictions of attention that we all unknowingly engage in as individuals, to discussing how this phenomenon--the selective permitting of only certain data into awareness--operates at the group level. Here is a Goleman's description of some of the effects of groupthink:

The first victim of groupthink is critical thought. Typically, talk is limited to a few courses of action, while the full range of alternatives is ignored. No attention is paid to the values implicit in this range of alternatives, nor does anyone stop to consider the drawbacks of these initial choices. The ignored alternatives are never brought up, no matter what advantages they might have. Facts that challenge the initial choice are brushed aside. The group expects success, and makes no contingency plans to deal with failure.

As an example of groupthink and its effects, Goleman presents the Bay of Pigs invasion of 1961. The Kennedy administration appeared to sleepwalk its way into this botched adventure in Cuba, much to its own embarrassment. I couldn't help but draw a connection to the current war in Iraq. It shows many of the above-named signs of groupthink. Has the U.S. sleepwalked its way into another blundered adventure--this one vastly larger than the 1,500 Cuban exiles who landed in the Bay of Pigs?

Having read (and reviewed) Gwynne Dyer's Future: Tense, about the implications of the Iraq war, I also had this thought: Is Mesopotamia, often called "the cradle of civilization", also to be its grave?

This is a sampler of some of the recent thoughts in my life of the mind. It is its own kind of adventure--no less so, and indeed I think more so, than jumping into the water with the barracudas when I was in Belize as a young man in 1979.

on dissing other people's prophets

It used to be that patriotism was the last refuge of the scoundrel; now religion has taken its place.

This was my thought as the news stories first unfolded about the reaction of "Muslims" to the publication of cartoons in Denmark and other countries. Not many news stories provoke an emotional reaction in me; this was one. For as an artist and, more than that, as a person I have strong feelings about freedom of expression. I believe we (that is, free societies) should think very, very hard before making it any kind of crime, or sanctioning people in any way, for the way they have arranged ink on paper.

I was disappointed too at how apologetic everyone was, from the Danish government to many other Western representatives. Perhaps it was inevitable that the editor of the French newspaper that reran the cartoons should be sacked by his Egyptian-French boss, but I felt that that editor's heart was in the right place.

Of course I feel that people should be free too to protest, peacefully, over their grievances. But the appearance of masked thugs setting fire to buildings and threatening people with death and beheading and so on--well, what has this to do with offended religious values? All I could think was, "The more violence in the name of 'Islam' there is, the more telling the cartoon was."

Mohammed was a historical figure who, although revered by Muslims, is not owned by them. His thoughts, words, and deeds have had tremendous consequences for the world--all parts of it, including the non-Islamic parts--and not merely religious but political as well. If people burn down Western embassies in his name, then he has certainly become fair game for Western comment, whether reverent, satirical, or otherwise.

For me, one of the most disturbing images was from a protest march in London. The march appeared to be orderly and peaceful, but one of the marchers carried a placard that read, "To hell with free speech!" I thought, London is the wrong place for you, friend. There are a lot of regimes out there who share that sentiment; that's where you need to be.

The whole affair triggered a memory from my recent readings. This is from Evil: Inside Human Violence and Cruelty by Roy F. Baumeister:

When people believe that their rights and their group pride have been injured by someone from another group, they are all too often ready to respond in a violent fashion that goes beyond any practical or instrumental use. Groups reflect a built-in predisposition toward a certain pattern of antagonism.

That, of course, is what we have here. The terms "cartoon" and "Muslim" become mere tokens in a conflict between groups. It is a manifestation of identity politics. "Muslims" can feel a sense of solidarity with those who share that identity and feel outrage against the Others: those who slander the Prophet.

For my part, I'm willing to identify with those who support free speech and freedom of the press.