Americans are still behind in their understanding of modern China. China is growing at an astounding pace and may pass the United States as the world's leading economic power by the year 2016, and some people believe that it is already there. The Obama administration's insane anti-growth policies, which provoke ridicule, not admiration, among educated Chinese when they aren't being too polite to let on, are making American politicians, the media, Hollywood, and academia, delusional. The Chinese make mistakes like anyone else, of course. China is becoming too urbanized for the good of the country. Many rural areas of mainland China remain backward. In other words, China has its growing pains. But those who underrate China should beware, and consider a visit to Hainan before becoming too smug. The pictures above are of downtown Haikou.
Tuesday, October 30, 2012
Hainan is a tropical island, 31,100 sq. miles. and the southernmost province of China, located just south of the mainland and below the tropic of cancer. The capital is Haikou, an extraordinarily lovely city, also known as the 'Coconut City' or jokingly 'Eastern Hawaii'. It is thoroughly modern, with excellent restaurants and hotels, a well-designed and engineered airport and all the other facilities of modern life. and very friendly and hospitable to tourists. The people are generally well educated and many of them speak English and other western languages. Hainan, including Haikou, is an example of a place few westerners have heard of without having traveled the far east. On a map it looks as if it is way off the beaten path, rural, remote and probably backward, but it is none of those things.
Monday, October 29, 2012
Tuesday, October 23, 2012
Cruelty in the Comics
The comics page in a recent local urban newspaper has Sgt. Snorkel choking Beetle Bailey and Lucy is frequently seen grabbing Linus' security blanket much to his consternation. In both cases cruelty is represented as something funny. It isn't. Cruelty in a "comic" strip is cruelty. Of course that must make me a poor sport, but the point is this. Cruelty in a serious news story or in a movie is unlikely to make a reader or viewer cruel. They see it for what it is. If they have that bent they are probably at least somewhat that way already. Children, however, can be impressed with anything which is supposedly funny and they are likely to think that anything funny is OK. When 'Abbot and Costello' had a movie series some decades ago they or their adversaries were constantly doing 'funny' things that killed or maimed people. In an animated cartoon Bugs Bunny (and I am a Bugs Bunny fan) fiddled until some snaggle-toothed mountaineers, not paying attention to where they were stepping, stepped off a cliff.
I am also a 'Peanuts' fan, but I do not like to see Charlie Brown sitting by himself on a playground bench bemoaning the fact that 'nobody likes' him. (In fact they do. They tease him, which is not the same thing). A lonely little boy or girl suffering feelings of rejection can hit too close to home for a lot of people. It isn't funny. And more recently, the bases are loaded and Charlie Brown steps up to bat and strikes out, thereby frustrating what must have been his passionate ambition to hit a grand slam home run. What on earth is funny about that? Again, I am a Peanuts fan and have been for decades. But folks can be treated a little nicer, even in the comics.
I am also a 'Peanuts' fan, but I do not like to see Charlie Brown sitting by himself on a playground bench bemoaning the fact that 'nobody likes' him. (In fact they do. They tease him, which is not the same thing). A lonely little boy or girl suffering feelings of rejection can hit too close to home for a lot of people. It isn't funny. And more recently, the bases are loaded and Charlie Brown steps up to bat and strikes out, thereby frustrating what must have been his passionate ambition to hit a grand slam home run. What on earth is funny about that? Again, I am a Peanuts fan and have been for decades. But folks can be treated a little nicer, even in the comics.
Christian Theology --- Right, Wrong and Command
A few years ago I wrote something titled Does God Decree What is Right or is it Right Because God Decrees it? I deleted it because I thought it said too much, more than my understanding of the subject justified. Nonetheless I was a bit hasty in abandoning the subject altogether . What I was tying to establish was that while God creates all things, judgments of Good (right) and Evil (wrong) are not judgments of things; they are, simply, value judgments. God has created a mind in the human species which understands what is good and what is not.
Though philosophers have wrestled with the question whether God decides arbitrarily what is good, and something which He now calls good He might just as well have called bad, or whether something is good simply because it obviously is good. Can any rational being believe that gratuitous cruelty is 'good' or that kindness and a charitable disposition are 'bad'? Even if you can argue that under some circumstnce theft may be justified, the concept itself always denotes something which is bad, simply by definition, not because it is a bad thing, but because it is, simply, bad. Period.
If gratuitous violence could be rendered a good thing, or at least morally acceptable, because God so decrees, our religion would be based solely on command. There would be no concepts of honour or decency, kindness or charity, right or wrong, only arbitrary commands. That is apparently the view of political extremists and jihadists. However, they are wrong. God is the Creator and Ruler of the Universe who has given man free will while informing him through the Ten Commandments and the teachings of Christ that He wants His creatures to be conform to the pre-established standard of good. He is not telling us what is good because we already know that, the knowledge having been built in us, so to speak. So if we do not do good we "have no excuse" as Paul wrote. As the ability to understand the difference between good and evil is embedded in the human mind, there is a basis for judging the atrocities of Nazis and radical Moslem jihadist to be evil --- actually evil in fact, not just contrary to someone's commands or whims. In other words, the Nazis and Jihadist extremists "have no excuse".
I did not, however, set out to write a library full of words, nor will I attempt it now. There are many subjects which this analysis does not cover --- definitions, moral dilemas, "what is the good life" and on and on. I leave that to another time, or to others.
Though philosophers have wrestled with the question whether God decides arbitrarily what is good, and something which He now calls good He might just as well have called bad, or whether something is good simply because it obviously is good. Can any rational being believe that gratuitous cruelty is 'good' or that kindness and a charitable disposition are 'bad'? Even if you can argue that under some circumstnce theft may be justified, the concept itself always denotes something which is bad, simply by definition, not because it is a bad thing, but because it is, simply, bad. Period.
If gratuitous violence could be rendered a good thing, or at least morally acceptable, because God so decrees, our religion would be based solely on command. There would be no concepts of honour or decency, kindness or charity, right or wrong, only arbitrary commands. That is apparently the view of political extremists and jihadists. However, they are wrong. God is the Creator and Ruler of the Universe who has given man free will while informing him through the Ten Commandments and the teachings of Christ that He wants His creatures to be conform to the pre-established standard of good. He is not telling us what is good because we already know that, the knowledge having been built in us, so to speak. So if we do not do good we "have no excuse" as Paul wrote. As the ability to understand the difference between good and evil is embedded in the human mind, there is a basis for judging the atrocities of Nazis and radical Moslem jihadist to be evil --- actually evil in fact, not just contrary to someone's commands or whims. In other words, the Nazis and Jihadist extremists "have no excuse".
I did not, however, set out to write a library full of words, nor will I attempt it now. There are many subjects which this analysis does not cover --- definitions, moral dilemas, "what is the good life" and on and on. I leave that to another time, or to others.
Monday, October 22, 2012
Liberal Judges and the Constitution
Liberal judges have gone so far toward ignoring the Constitution and substituting their own preferences and ideolgical predilections for it that they are nearing the point where Congress will either have to rein in the courts or concede that America is a Platonic oligarchy of philosopher kings in the form of judges wearing black robes.
A recent judicial outrage is the decision of a federal judge that California's ban on gay marriage is unconstitutional. To reach that result the judge had to read the Constitution and find something somewhere in its wording which was intended to vindicate gay marriage against the will of the people to invalidate it. There is no such thing, not a single article, section, phrase, sentence or word. It is not there. Furthermore, the result prescribed by the judge could not possibly have been intended by the drafters or ratifyers of the Constitution or have been understood by them to be the consequence of their work. And the judge knew this, so he violated his oath of office. In over thirty states the people have rejected gay marriage. The Constitution of Massachusetts, where a right of gay marriage was decreed by judicial fiat, was drafted by John Adams, and anyone with even a passing acquaintence with the life and work of John Adams, and the times in which he lived, knows perfectly well that had the subject of gay marriage even occurred to him he would have written into that constitution a most emphatic prohibition. Yet the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts decided that somewhere within the words of the state constitution is a validation of gay marriage. No there isn't. It was not intended by the drafters or ratifyers, or by the state legislature, or the governor, or the people of Massachusetts, who attempted to reverse the pro gay marriage ruling. Only a group of arrogant "philosopher kings" in black robes wanted it. In fact, not all gay people want it.
I am not concerned here with the merits of gay marriage, if any. I am concerned with what is happening when the majority of the people from coast to coast cannot prevail with democratic methods in the establishment of law. Here are the judges and here is the institution of gay marriage, unknown to every society, every culture, every religion, every legal system for all the thousands and thousands of years of recorded human history and disapproved by the people virtually wherever it has appeared; yet the people are said to have nothing to say about the form, character and core values of their society, not simply incidental attributes, when a handfull of judges disagree.
But isn't there some argument offered by the judges in defense of what they do? Yes, and while it takes somewhat different form with different words it can be reduced to the following views. There is contained in the fourteenth amendment to the United States Constitution, and elsewhere in the Constitution and in the various state constitutions, the requirement of equal rights and equal treatment under the laws, federal and state. No one quarrels with that. And everyone knows the purpose for which that principle became so endemic to the laws, the culture, and the sometimes turbulent history of the United States, wherein it was once disputed. It was intended to remove the disgrace of slavery from the national landscape. The thirteenth amendment abolished slavery directly, de jure, but the drafters knew how cleverly an intended result can be thwarted by those who may be intent on manipulation of words and evasion of principles. Left alone, the thirteenth amendment would not have been sufficient to achieve its intended result because de facto slavery would have replaced the de jure slavery which had been abolished. To head off and prevent such evasion equal protection clauses were placed in the federal constitution and those state consitutions in states where slavery had existed or was thought still threatened.
As time went on the principle of equal protection was extended to other classes of people; women, for example, in cases of sex discrimination. It was extended in other ways, usually producing benign results generally accepted by the people. Questions of meaning do arise and some of them are complex and difficult; yet however we may resolve constitutional questions at the margins of uncertainty it is perfectly clear that while judges have some latitude in matters of interpretation, construction and application of laws and constitutions they have no moral or legal authority to transform, by judicial fiat, the fundamental nature of the society they are supposed to serve in accordance with the oath they have taken.
These liberal judges habitually find a principle to exist in the constitution which is not there and never was and is not even implied or hinted at. The judge will opine that there exists no "rational" basis for banning gay marriage and that such a ban does not promote any "compelling state interest". He or she will decide what is a "compelling state interest" and that will determine the outcome of the case even though neither the words "compelling state interest" nor the concept is contained anywhere in the constitution. Let us be clear. When the people desire some result by direct vote or through their representatives they have, by the expression of that desire in the form of legislation, themselves decided what is a sufficient state interest to warrant state action and the word "compelling" adds nothing to the matter in most cases. A "state interest" is any interest which the people wish to advance unless it is incompatible with the constitution. In a narrow range of cases it might be true that something which would ordinarily be unconstitutional may pass muster because of extreme necessity, although even that principle is not found in the Constitution except in the case of the suspension of habeus corpus. If, for the sake of argument, we posit that extreme necessity can justify going around a principle which would ordinarily be a constitutional bar to some course of action (a view which I believe is acceptable) resort to to the concept of a "compelling state interest" might make sense, though reliance on a validating exception in extremis would make more sense. But in the ordinary course of events the mere fact that the people want something to be done or not done, without anything more than that, should be enough to protect it from having to show any "compelling state interest". In other words, although perhaps the government can legitimately silence dissent during a violent revolution by a showing of a "compelling state interest" there should be no need to show it in the case of a bar against gay marriage because the courts are not in that case presented with a crisis or a measure which is clearly unconstitutional. And certainly an institution as sacrosanct as marriage over such a long period of time in so many regions, nations and cultures of the world can be protected against any charge of irrationality. Added to all the above, the liberal judge will frequently opine that gay marriage is a "fundamental" right. Really? If it is "fundamental" why did no one know about it prior to when the Supreme Court of Hawaii propounded the principle circa 1990? How can a right so "fundamental" have escaped the attention of all of the constitution's drafters and ratifyers and every recoginzed philosopher and religious leader in the history of the world from Plato and Moses to the present? When someone has to resort to such silliness to make his case, that case is not terribly solid.
You will also hear the argument that we have a "living constitution", the meaning of which will change from time to time. No, we do not, not in that sense. The application of the constitution can sometimes change through changes in circumstances but never through the mere passage of time. When each state is allocated two senators it will not become three or six senators through the passage of time. What can change is the application of certain principles, though not the spirit or intent. For example, the Constitution prohibits cruel and unusual punishment. At one time confinement to bread and water might not have been considered "cruel and unusual". It has long since become at least unusual. Furthermore, someone has to decide what is "cruel". Obviously the drafters left that to the reasonable discretion of judges and legislatures. As Abraham Lincoln pointed out in his first inaugural address, March 4, 1865, no document of reasonable length can anticipate in detail every question which will arise under it. Judges are not encyclopedias or dictionaries. There were expected to be reasonable people who truly intended to vindicate not what they wanted to be the law, but the law as it came to them under circumstances then existing.
Why are appellate courts even permitted, ever, to invalidate a federal or state law duly enacted? There are two reasons. First, Americans do not want a temporary majority animated by mass hysteria or thoughtless excitement to trample on rights plainly protected by the constitution and intended to be protected by the drafters and ratifiers thereof. The slow and ponderous rejection of gay marriage by a majority of the people in state after state hardly amounts to the sort of mass hyesteria and overreaction which judicial revue was intended to head off and obviate. Second, there are genuine gray areas in the application of some constitutional provisions. For example, although the constitution does guarantee access to legal counsel for anyone accused of a crime, it does not expressly require government to locate and pay for counsel when the defendant can do neither. That question invited a legitimate difference of opinion which was fortunately resolved in a positive way by the Supreme Court in Gideon vs. Wainright and legal counsel are now provided gratis to those unable to afford counsel with their own resources. But it should be clearly understood that if there is ever to be gay marriage in this country there must either be a massive and radical shift in the people's core values or a constitutional amendment to achieve it. Otherwise the imposition of gay marriage on an unwilling populace represents a usurpation of power by tyrants.
A recent judicial outrage is the decision of a federal judge that California's ban on gay marriage is unconstitutional. To reach that result the judge had to read the Constitution and find something somewhere in its wording which was intended to vindicate gay marriage against the will of the people to invalidate it. There is no such thing, not a single article, section, phrase, sentence or word. It is not there. Furthermore, the result prescribed by the judge could not possibly have been intended by the drafters or ratifyers of the Constitution or have been understood by them to be the consequence of their work. And the judge knew this, so he violated his oath of office. In over thirty states the people have rejected gay marriage. The Constitution of Massachusetts, where a right of gay marriage was decreed by judicial fiat, was drafted by John Adams, and anyone with even a passing acquaintence with the life and work of John Adams, and the times in which he lived, knows perfectly well that had the subject of gay marriage even occurred to him he would have written into that constitution a most emphatic prohibition. Yet the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts decided that somewhere within the words of the state constitution is a validation of gay marriage. No there isn't. It was not intended by the drafters or ratifyers, or by the state legislature, or the governor, or the people of Massachusetts, who attempted to reverse the pro gay marriage ruling. Only a group of arrogant "philosopher kings" in black robes wanted it. In fact, not all gay people want it.
I am not concerned here with the merits of gay marriage, if any. I am concerned with what is happening when the majority of the people from coast to coast cannot prevail with democratic methods in the establishment of law. Here are the judges and here is the institution of gay marriage, unknown to every society, every culture, every religion, every legal system for all the thousands and thousands of years of recorded human history and disapproved by the people virtually wherever it has appeared; yet the people are said to have nothing to say about the form, character and core values of their society, not simply incidental attributes, when a handfull of judges disagree.
But isn't there some argument offered by the judges in defense of what they do? Yes, and while it takes somewhat different form with different words it can be reduced to the following views. There is contained in the fourteenth amendment to the United States Constitution, and elsewhere in the Constitution and in the various state constitutions, the requirement of equal rights and equal treatment under the laws, federal and state. No one quarrels with that. And everyone knows the purpose for which that principle became so endemic to the laws, the culture, and the sometimes turbulent history of the United States, wherein it was once disputed. It was intended to remove the disgrace of slavery from the national landscape. The thirteenth amendment abolished slavery directly, de jure, but the drafters knew how cleverly an intended result can be thwarted by those who may be intent on manipulation of words and evasion of principles. Left alone, the thirteenth amendment would not have been sufficient to achieve its intended result because de facto slavery would have replaced the de jure slavery which had been abolished. To head off and prevent such evasion equal protection clauses were placed in the federal constitution and those state consitutions in states where slavery had existed or was thought still threatened.
As time went on the principle of equal protection was extended to other classes of people; women, for example, in cases of sex discrimination. It was extended in other ways, usually producing benign results generally accepted by the people. Questions of meaning do arise and some of them are complex and difficult; yet however we may resolve constitutional questions at the margins of uncertainty it is perfectly clear that while judges have some latitude in matters of interpretation, construction and application of laws and constitutions they have no moral or legal authority to transform, by judicial fiat, the fundamental nature of the society they are supposed to serve in accordance with the oath they have taken.
These liberal judges habitually find a principle to exist in the constitution which is not there and never was and is not even implied or hinted at. The judge will opine that there exists no "rational" basis for banning gay marriage and that such a ban does not promote any "compelling state interest". He or she will decide what is a "compelling state interest" and that will determine the outcome of the case even though neither the words "compelling state interest" nor the concept is contained anywhere in the constitution. Let us be clear. When the people desire some result by direct vote or through their representatives they have, by the expression of that desire in the form of legislation, themselves decided what is a sufficient state interest to warrant state action and the word "compelling" adds nothing to the matter in most cases. A "state interest" is any interest which the people wish to advance unless it is incompatible with the constitution. In a narrow range of cases it might be true that something which would ordinarily be unconstitutional may pass muster because of extreme necessity, although even that principle is not found in the Constitution except in the case of the suspension of habeus corpus. If, for the sake of argument, we posit that extreme necessity can justify going around a principle which would ordinarily be a constitutional bar to some course of action (a view which I believe is acceptable) resort to to the concept of a "compelling state interest" might make sense, though reliance on a validating exception in extremis would make more sense. But in the ordinary course of events the mere fact that the people want something to be done or not done, without anything more than that, should be enough to protect it from having to show any "compelling state interest". In other words, although perhaps the government can legitimately silence dissent during a violent revolution by a showing of a "compelling state interest" there should be no need to show it in the case of a bar against gay marriage because the courts are not in that case presented with a crisis or a measure which is clearly unconstitutional. And certainly an institution as sacrosanct as marriage over such a long period of time in so many regions, nations and cultures of the world can be protected against any charge of irrationality. Added to all the above, the liberal judge will frequently opine that gay marriage is a "fundamental" right. Really? If it is "fundamental" why did no one know about it prior to when the Supreme Court of Hawaii propounded the principle circa 1990? How can a right so "fundamental" have escaped the attention of all of the constitution's drafters and ratifyers and every recoginzed philosopher and religious leader in the history of the world from Plato and Moses to the present? When someone has to resort to such silliness to make his case, that case is not terribly solid.
You will also hear the argument that we have a "living constitution", the meaning of which will change from time to time. No, we do not, not in that sense. The application of the constitution can sometimes change through changes in circumstances but never through the mere passage of time. When each state is allocated two senators it will not become three or six senators through the passage of time. What can change is the application of certain principles, though not the spirit or intent. For example, the Constitution prohibits cruel and unusual punishment. At one time confinement to bread and water might not have been considered "cruel and unusual". It has long since become at least unusual. Furthermore, someone has to decide what is "cruel". Obviously the drafters left that to the reasonable discretion of judges and legislatures. As Abraham Lincoln pointed out in his first inaugural address, March 4, 1865, no document of reasonable length can anticipate in detail every question which will arise under it. Judges are not encyclopedias or dictionaries. There were expected to be reasonable people who truly intended to vindicate not what they wanted to be the law, but the law as it came to them under circumstances then existing.
Why are appellate courts even permitted, ever, to invalidate a federal or state law duly enacted? There are two reasons. First, Americans do not want a temporary majority animated by mass hysteria or thoughtless excitement to trample on rights plainly protected by the constitution and intended to be protected by the drafters and ratifiers thereof. The slow and ponderous rejection of gay marriage by a majority of the people in state after state hardly amounts to the sort of mass hyesteria and overreaction which judicial revue was intended to head off and obviate. Second, there are genuine gray areas in the application of some constitutional provisions. For example, although the constitution does guarantee access to legal counsel for anyone accused of a crime, it does not expressly require government to locate and pay for counsel when the defendant can do neither. That question invited a legitimate difference of opinion which was fortunately resolved in a positive way by the Supreme Court in Gideon vs. Wainright and legal counsel are now provided gratis to those unable to afford counsel with their own resources. But it should be clearly understood that if there is ever to be gay marriage in this country there must either be a massive and radical shift in the people's core values or a constitutional amendment to achieve it. Otherwise the imposition of gay marriage on an unwilling populace represents a usurpation of power by tyrants.
Fundamentalism and Fanaticism
Suppose you are taking a walk downtown and on a busy corner you see a "guru" with a long beard and a sign reading "Doom, the End is Near . . ." followed by various commands --- 'flee to the mountains', perhaps, or 'partake no more of demon rum'. It's all amusing. The guy is some kind of nut case, you surmise, and there are plenty of those around, some in Congress. Then you read further: 'kill all unbelievers. They are infidels'. Suddenly it's not funny any more. He may be a nut case but if he has followers he's a very dangerous and threatening nut case.
Then you discover that he does have followers --- a bunch of bearded weirdos with turbins running around yelling "DOOM, DOOM, DOOM" with guns blazing, BANG, BANG, BANG and bombs (appearing at first to be bowling balls) going BOOM, BOOM, BOOM. No it's certainly not funny any more. So you go up to one of these violent kooks who appears to be suffering from an attack of rational thought and ask "Why are you following this guru? Can't you see that he's a violent nut"? "No, no, no, this is the Great Gumbo Ya Ya, just in from the Louisiana swamp country, you infidel". Returning to normal he weaves away screaming something which sounds like "Off with his head" and "So sayeth the Great Gumbo Ya Ya whose every command must be followed". You run for shelter, just evading the three equally weird, turbin-wearing homocidal crazies, who are even more dangerous because they carry swords and appear for all the world to mean business. Each one is carrying the Mystical Book of Mumbo Jumbo, the authoritative mystical, magical book of commands which must not be violated or disobeyed on pain of death.
And that is where fundamentalism ultimately winds up when it isn't checked by rational thought. It may go from obstinate insistence on some set of doctrine to burning other peoples' holy books to shouting insults at soldiers' funerals because of a distaste for gay rights. In a society which is strong enough to resist its encroachments it doesn't go much further. Otherwise you get scenarios not so different from the foregoing tale. The essence of fundamentalism which leads into fanaticism and from there to madness and violence is that it is based entirely on command --- the commands of some priest, rabbi, ayatollah or holy man who scratched out some sacred book which can now be "interpreted" by other gurus who then write their own books --- and away we go, without any thought, or much thought, of honesty, personal integrity, honor, charity, kindness, forgiveness or even a forgiving spirit. All of that is swept away because we have THE BOOK.
That is what Christianity is up against, that and apathy which serves the purposes of fanatics.
Christianity is rational. In the New Testament we meet a Saviour who explains Himself to His followers. We have an historical bases for accepting it as fact and believing it as truth. When we understand His commands we find that they are reasonable, and that validates those which we may not understand. We know that if we hear a "voice" commanding us to go murder someone, it isn't His voice. We value tolerance while maintaining Christian principles (though we practice them imperfectly, something a fanatic will not admit about his own principles --- his sacred commands). As Daryl Donovan, the astute and widely respected preacher at the Sanibel Community Church in Florida, wrote recently "Tolerance is a virtue, and so is passion . . ." and the two strains of faith converge in Christianity.
Thursday, October 18, 2012
Presidential Debates
The problem with nearly all presidential debates is that they are hardly debates at all --- at least not in the usual sense. Lincoln and Douglas debated the right and wrong of allowing states to decide the slavery question by vote. So far as I can tell there was never any question about the facts. Real debates typically, though not always, start with a common understanding of what the facts are and then proceed to analysis of the significance of those facts, value judgments. There can be a mix of facts, analysis and moral or ethical judgment. You can oppose high tax rates on the ground that they penalize incentive and stunt growth. That's largely a question of fact. You can also argue the fairness or unfairness of progressive taxation philosophically. But everyone agrees on what the rates are now. That facilitates discussion of ethical and moral quesions about taxation, the proper role of government etc., i.e. value judgments. In contrast the presidential debates this election year and, for that matter, almost all previoius election years, are more like arguments in an elementary school yard than they are like debates.
"Unemployment is up 20% since such-and-such year". "No, it isn't". "Yes, it is". "No, it isn't". "You're a liar". "You just want to help millionaires and billionaires". "No, I don't". "Yes, you do". And so on.
What is needed is better formatting. They had the right idea with the Lincoln-Douglas debates. First, one cadidate says whatever he wants to say for 20 minutes (or some other length of time) while the other one shuts the hell up. The moderator keeps his opinion to himself. In fact, all the moderator does is serve as a time keeper. Then the other candidate has his turn. Then each has a rebuttal period and maybe something after that --- whatever the rules provide.
If both candidates will avoid ad hominum arguments and accusations such a return to the fundamentals of real debate could be a great aid to public understanding of the issues. What we get now usually doesn't help much.
"Unemployment is up 20% since such-and-such year". "No, it isn't". "Yes, it is". "No, it isn't". "You're a liar". "You just want to help millionaires and billionaires". "No, I don't". "Yes, you do". And so on.
What is needed is better formatting. They had the right idea with the Lincoln-Douglas debates. First, one cadidate says whatever he wants to say for 20 minutes (or some other length of time) while the other one shuts the hell up. The moderator keeps his opinion to himself. In fact, all the moderator does is serve as a time keeper. Then the other candidate has his turn. Then each has a rebuttal period and maybe something after that --- whatever the rules provide.
If both candidates will avoid ad hominum arguments and accusations such a return to the fundamentals of real debate could be a great aid to public understanding of the issues. What we get now usually doesn't help much.
Wednesday, October 17, 2012
Time --- What is it and who cares?
In the whole range of human curiosity and philosophical speculation one of the most interesting topics to me is that of time, the kind you observe on a clock and which keeps passing. My grandfather, John Napier Plato, Sr., told me that he first started thinking about it when he was about the age of ten and his parents had decided to take the family on what seemed to be an endless trek out West, to Seattle, down through California, the Grand Canyon and elsewhere. The family did the same thing the next year by different routes so they could see other sights. The parents had decided that my grandfather and his older sister, my great aunt Natalia, should see the West, of which they had seen nothing previously and about which they knew very little --- Yellowstone Park, the Rockies, Mount Rushmore and so on. They saw many wonderful things but they also had those endless miles to travel, so they needed things to fill up the time in addition to the usual 'car' games such as Twenty Questions and Three Thirds of a Ghost. In that pursuit my grandfather remembers looking out the car window and observing a phenomenon which seemed stranger and stranger the more he thought about it. He would see, for example, a billboard touting the wonders of some commercial product or perhaps one of those wonderful Burma Shave poems that I heard so much about. As the car moved closer and closer to the sign it would fill more and more of the field of vision.
"And then", he said, "the sign would be behind me! What had happened? Where was the sign? Naturally, I knew that it had gone 'behind' me as the car passed it", he explained "so I'm not referring to the physical location of the sign but, rather, the experience of seeing it --- the phenomenon, as a philosopher might say. I could not shake the sense of weirdness this produced. I still can't". And after he told me about those experiences I puzzled over them myself, and found that I had similar reactions to time. When the present moves into the past, where does it go? This seems strange and inexplicable to me but it is very difficult to explain why it does to anyone who doesn't feel it himself. You either feel it or you don't.
Then in about the year 2001 I saw something in Time Magazine about a British physicist named Julian Barbour who had written a book titled The End of Time in which he argued that time really does not exist! It's just a mental construct or some such. I was only thirteen at the time but the subject really intrigued me, so I read the book but could not follow the argument, which may have been due to my age and shortage of scientific education. So I e-mailed the author, who resided in England, and he was nice enough to respond but I still couldn't get there from here. I concluded that my problem was that he did not seem to explain what he meant by the word time. He did not seem to define it or if he did I missed it. You cannot discuss the existence of something intelligently if you have one concept of what you are talking about and someone else has a different concept --- if in discussing the word giraffe, for example, one of you is picturing something like a horse with a long neck and the other chocolate pudding. In any case, once more I was hooked on the subject of time and for that I thank Dr. Barbour. If I don't quite understand what he was saying it is due to my own lack of scientific sophistication and not any fault of his. What I decided to do was to try to analyze time philosophically, where I am on firmer ground, rather than scientically where I am found wanting. I do not believe that time is definable. Any definition of anything explains something you don't know in terms of something you do know. If you don't know what a giraffe is you can picture a horse with a long neck. But there is nothing at all similar to time. So if we are to get anywhere we have to try to describe it. How can you describe the inexplicable? Perhaps you can't, but we can try, so here goes.
We must try to deal with elements of time, categories, which may be no more than mental constructs without corollaries in noumenal reality, i.e. the actual, material universe. In other words we will juggle mental concepts, phenomena, without knowing the extent to which they corollate with what is really 'out there', or noumena. With that prelude, time can be thought about in terms of the following: Sequence, Ratio, Duration Causation, Simultaneity, Synchronicity, Unidirectional progression, Motion, Past, Present, and Future. To most of us the word time probably means simply duration, the third in the foregoing list. We say that we spend a lot of time in doctors' waiting rooms, or in lines at a bank, reading a book, waiting for someone to return a call, And duration is a good place to start, with the words time and duration meaning about the same thing because it would be awkward to say "duration flies".
At what rate does time flow? True, we can argue that it doesn't 'flow' at all. Maybe it moves in discreet segments as a motion picture film does, one frame after another, giving the appearance of flow. Or maybe we should think of the future flowing toward us rather than our going into the future. Either way, we still meet the question of rate. Your car can move forward at sixty miles an hour. That's its rate. Suppose that I boil a three-minute egg while you drive three miles simultaneously, so we get into ratio, simultaneity and synchronicity. But we have not and cannot answer the question "at what rate does time itself move forward"? A rate is a relationship between one thing and another, and there is no 'other' to relate to. Even if we posit some sort of super-time against which we measure our time, all we have done is to push the problem one step back. In other words, we then face the question of the rate of our hypothetical super-time. We haven't gotten anywhere. Motion raises the same questions in a different format. Suppose that with my legendary golf swing I send the ball flying toward the green. As it flies, does it move in an even, undifferentiated flow or in a sequence of discreet still positions? No matter how you try to answer that question, the answer raises more questions. Yet something happens, doesn't it? The ball does move at a certain speed, right?
We can get wound up in words and start letting words and their definition control thought. But that's not all bad. Is it really time which flows (or stands still while something else "flows")? Perhaps it is "now" --- "the present" --- which is flowing through the medium we call time. Or perhaps even that is only an appearance. The word "time" may simply describe the entity, of past, present and future. Perhaps nothing actually "flows". That is, perhaps, nothing "goes" anywhere. Things --- reality --- just is. Go back to the idea of a motion picture. Suppose that you have a round cannister and within it is the film Patton starring George C. Scott and recounting the adventurous derring-do of the colourful world war two general. It begins as the War does and ends shortly after the War ends. But we are holding the whole adventure in one hand. Nothing moves until we project it on a screen in sequence and then, frame by frame, events seem to transpire. But not really. When the projector stops, so does the action, replaced by absolute inaction. Each frame can be seen as an appearance in a chain of the eternal nows and the links appear to come and go from our consciousness. Accoring to this scenario time doesn't flow. In fact nothing "moves". Movement is an illusion; the way we perceive. Think of the movie Patton remaining forever stationery. Our perception of ever-changing reality has created the illusion of continual change. "Now" simply describes a place in the collidascope of perception. The bank of a river isn't going anywhere. It is the water in the river which appears to be going somewhere past the bank. Driving from St. Louis to New York you go through Indianapolis, then Columbus, around Philadelphia and into New York. You have left behind you St. Louis, Indianapolis, Columbus and Philadelphia but those cities have not ceased to exist. They are still there. It's your attention, or perception, which has become elsewhere. Is this the correct way of looking at matters? Frankly, I doubt that there is any correct way, because we are dealing with concepts which have no counterpart anywhere else and, hence, we can't define them. A giraffe is like a horse, we say, but what if there isn't any horse with which to compare it? I discuss all this simply to make us careful about thinking we can wrap reality in a package of words, tie a bow around it and call the result "reality". Perhaps when we think we are saying something we really aren't saying anything.
What is the present? "Well, it's 'right now'" one might say. All right, but "right now" is gone as soon as it arrives. There is no discreet segment of time which if it could be isolated like an atom would be observed as something which stands still so that we can observe it at our leisure. It won't cooperate that way. It will not "stand still". In geometry a point is a location without dimension. So, plainly, is the present. (However, see the Addendum at the end). And positing frames like the frames of a motion picture will not help us because we then have to determine what is between the frames. If it is nothingness then the frames are all piled one on top of another, so to speak, and we have now denied the reality of duration entirely. That, however, does invite the possibility that time, in the sense of duration, in fact does not exist, as Julian Barbour maintains, and even that sequential progression is in some way illusory. That, in turn, would lead us to ask if the whole thing is being manipulated by some Cosmic Mastermind and therefore God Himself.
A geometric point can be located on a piece of paper. The piece of paper may be on a desk, the desk in a room and so on and so forth until we get to the planet Earth, the Solar System the Galaxy, the Universe itself. But how do we locate the Universe itself? We can't. It isn't anywhere, it just is, and that applies to the present as well. That is the problem which I have when someone, even a learned scientist, tell us that the Universe is, say, fifteen billion years old. It implies that it could be much older or much younger, yet the Universe itself can only be so many years old within itself because by definition there isn't anything outside itself. I can say that I have lived 24 years and that is a certain 'stretch', or duration, relative to other things within the Universe such as the age of trees, or clouds, your car or the length of time you are put on 'hold' because of course your call is important to someone in India or Pakistan or wherever. But how do we know that the progression of time within the Universe is synchronized with whatever is outside the Universe? How could we ever know? There is nothing at all outside the Universe or, if there is, it really isn't outside of it and to refer to something which is outside the Universe and inside of it simultaneously is of course an oxymoron. Whatever kind of clock we may have to measure the passage of time, such as a clock per se or seasons or the speed of trains or radio waves, or anything else we may try to use for measurement turns out to depend on the relative place of the observer. And that is exactly what Albert Einstein told us. If you are travelling almost the speed of light in a rocket ship there is a time within the rocket ship. To someone on a platform in space you may be moving very slowly but you think you are moving normally. And here's the kicker. You are both right. This is not simply a point of view, a matter or perception. It is very real and experiments have proven it.
In C. S. Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia time moves differently in Narnia than it does on Earth, where a day in London may be a hundred years there, or three weeks. The two time tracks do not coincide evenly. Psalm 90 has the poet praying to God that ". . .a thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday when it is past, and as a watch in the night". This implies that there is another Universe, or maybe more than one, and may contradict the claim that nothing is outside the Universe. In other words perhaps we should revise that to say that everything within this Universe can be related to everything else within it but not to anything on the outside unless such a comparison has been prescribed by the God who created both, and for all anyone can know God can synchronize two Universes --- for some purposes, perhaps, but not always or in all respects. (The suggestion that there "is" another Universe is an example of the confusion of language which we encounter whenever we try to put into words some concept which is simply not compatible with the language which we have and with which we must work. "Is" is a word denoting simultaneity, which of course raises the question "simultaneous with what")?
So we are spinning around in a kind of relativity soup. The past is gone, we don't know where, the present doesn't exist and the future, aside from not being here now, is rushing at us at an indeterminate speed and when it reaches us will rush past us without stopping, that is, without spending any time at all. We can't even know that matter is absolutely "real" apart from perception because all we can know about it is relative location (there being no absolute location of the Universe), size, color, texture, things like that, but matter itself is mindless, and all those traits are relative to the observer. I cannot even be certain that the red and blue which I see are the same as the red and blue which someone else sees. So, passing over a lot of ideas, we can ask the real question "Is anything real in and of itself and without reference to anything else"? The answer is yes, ideas and thoughts can relate to realities which do not require measurement by anything else. That includes mathematical propositions. Two times eight is sixteen, whether there are any objects in existence or not, and whether there is any person to apprehend it or not. A circle is an enclosed curvalinear configuration plotted on a plane whereing every point thereon is equidistant from the center. That is true and will always be true without reference to anything else. It will be true even if there are no actual circles on which to operate or any mind to apprehend it. Forms do not require the consent of anyone or the assent to their existence by any conscious, sentient being..
Forms are more real than any attempt to represent or approxiamte them because in fact forms are not 'things', they are concepts, or truisms, without the need for anything else. Every attempt to locate a form --- a circle, a triangle, or whatnot -- somewhere in the Universe, or even to assign measurement to it, fails because representations of lines have to have some thickness and no distance can be perfectly plotted on a piece of paper. And, we can add, no piece of paper is perfect for the purpose. But the concept of "circle" is absolutely real and will remain so forever whether or not any mind remains to appreciate that fact. In other words, it is impossible to imagine any material thing existing on its own, but forms obviously do exist on their own. They are not invented. They are discovered. And so it is with potential. When the Big Bang went Boom the potential existed that I would have coffee with my breakfast this morning. (This is not to posit any form of mechanical determinism, which is another question entirely). And finally, the concepts of right and wrong are absolute. It is wrong for me to steal my neighbor's car even if there is no car and even if I do not have a neighbor whose car I could steal if I had a neighbor and he had a car. In other words, a moral proposition is valid even if there is no object or thing on which it can operate.
There is actually some question whether the Universe "exists" apart from any minds existing to perceive it. In fact the Universe appears to some questioners to be mental, not material, although that idea is so opposed to human intuition and instinct that it will probably never go anywhere in the court of public opinion. But another way of putting it is this. There is no need for matter, we only need the thoughts and perceptions which seem to originate partly with matter and partly with mind. And it appears that there must be some Central Mind to spawn other minds and mind matter. That would be God.
However, lest there be any misunderstand, any suspicion that I am a mystic or a crackpot (albeit two very different kinds of people) let me hasten to say that in any case we cannot ignore matter because we are stuck with it, for now. I do not intend to jump from a tall building this afternoon on the assumption that the building and the ground below are not "real". They certainly are real for every practical purpose, and we are constrained to operate in a practical Universe. But is it a noumenal Universe, existing on its own, or is it a mental Universe; and Whose Mind do we mean? These are all matters which organized religion should explore in addition to questions about whether this bishop or that guru or some other potentate or ayatollah thinks he knows what awaits us in Heaven or who is or is not going there, which is entirely up to God and about which it is not man's business to decide. This does not mean that we should dispense with hymns and inspirational or motivational messages but it is a good idea also to exercise, as Hercule Poirot might say, "the little gray cells". God gaves us those "little gray cells" as well as a capacity for music appreciation with the expectation, no-doubt, that we would put them both to good use..
And that leads into my final point. Science and religion seem to have been at war for several centuries. In the long pre-historic past, apparently, man explained anything he could not understand by attributing it to a Supreme Being, or God, by one name or another, and frequently more than one; for example the god or gods who cause volcanos or eclipses. As man became capable of explaining more and more phenomena in naturalistic (scientific) terms, God's work assignments constricted. In other words He was needed less and less for explanations. Churches grew up and, like all human institutions, attracted the seekers of fame and power as they became increasingly powerful themselves. Naturally, they resisted intrusions by those who claimed that they could explain something like an eclipse, or the roundness and orbit of the earth, in naturalistic terms. The contest thus set up was sometimes resolved by violence. Then science gradually got the upper hand in the 18th, 19th and 20th Centuries, and the reverse process set in. That's where we are now, when the practitioners of pseudo-science claim that nothing the world around us should be attributed to God, who may not even exist. It really is not surprising that science (or pseudo-science) has now become as intolerant and superstitious as 'religion' once was. It is against the law to burn people to a stake, but "enlightened" people have adopted the vocabulary of pseudo-science and do the next best thing with ridicule and censorship so that, for example, no questioning of Darwin's theory of evolution is even allowed in the public arena, the schools and whatnot, however modestly, reasonably and fairly presented. In this atmosphere witches aren't burned but Christians are hounded and insulted out of public presence. Science has its own priesthood, no less intolerant than the church priesthood of former times. The problem is not with science or religion. It is with human nature, fallen man. Even when Creation by a Supreme Being seems almost irresistably clear the priests of pseudo-science and distorted science want to ban any form of Creationism, some of which are not related to any specific body of religious belief. There are powerful and persuasive arguments for the proposition that the Universe was created by design, but no one is even allowed to say the words in public schools. Why won't the enlightened ones take up those arguments and then refute them if they can? Is it because in reality they probably would not know a science lab from an ice cream social?
If the day ever comes when science and religion stop fighting each other we should see universal celebration. Instead of "scientific truth" or religious truth man should pursue truth --- period. Here is an illustration of what I mean. As I mentioned earlier, I once exchanged e-mails with a British physicist on this very subject, time. We just couldn't connect. I explained that I attributed that to my own shortage of scientific education. But there was something else. In trying to understand time, or anything else, I take into account hypothetical thoughts as to God's possible purposes. This, in turn, helps me to develope my ideas. But my correspondent would not do that. It wouldn't be "scientific". That does not mean that he doesn't believe in God or necessaritly that I do (though in fact I do). It does mean that he has eliminated from his work a variety of lines of thought which might correspond to the truth. Science may now be almost as far off the track as religion was once accused of being. How can we know if religion and science will not talk to each other? It may be possible, for example, to reconcile certain biblical claims, such as the relatively short age of the earth, with scientific claims of a much greater age if we consider different ways of expressing time. As odd as it sounds, science and religion may both be right. The objective of religion, science and philosophy should be truth and reality, and not which truth or reality is better than another.
ADDENDUM: The concept of simultaneity seems to remove reality from that of the present, or 'now'. Think about some friend who has gone to the Moon. What is she doing now? Do we mean her now or ours? And what do we mean by simultaneity? That word means now. If two people are playing tennis they don't think about simultaneous action. They both seem to be acting in the same time frame. Except for that, they couldn't be playing tennis at all. But if we say that various observers are scattered about the Universe at a hodge-podge of varying distances, to say that they are waving their hands simultaneously would appear to have no meaning whatsoever because their motions would be simultaneous for some, but not others, and minutes apart or hours or years apart. Is there any absolute now? For some observers very far away George Washington could, in their present time, now be marching on Trenton, New Jersey, December 25, 1776. But not in his. How close do two people or two objects, or one object and one person, have to be in order for it to be said that they can interact. I can play chess with someone in Australia by exchanging mailed letters but is that "interaction"? What if we are using e-mail? Is it interaction in one case but not the other?
"And then", he said, "the sign would be behind me! What had happened? Where was the sign? Naturally, I knew that it had gone 'behind' me as the car passed it", he explained "so I'm not referring to the physical location of the sign but, rather, the experience of seeing it --- the phenomenon, as a philosopher might say. I could not shake the sense of weirdness this produced. I still can't". And after he told me about those experiences I puzzled over them myself, and found that I had similar reactions to time. When the present moves into the past, where does it go? This seems strange and inexplicable to me but it is very difficult to explain why it does to anyone who doesn't feel it himself. You either feel it or you don't.
Then in about the year 2001 I saw something in Time Magazine about a British physicist named Julian Barbour who had written a book titled The End of Time in which he argued that time really does not exist! It's just a mental construct or some such. I was only thirteen at the time but the subject really intrigued me, so I read the book but could not follow the argument, which may have been due to my age and shortage of scientific education. So I e-mailed the author, who resided in England, and he was nice enough to respond but I still couldn't get there from here. I concluded that my problem was that he did not seem to explain what he meant by the word time. He did not seem to define it or if he did I missed it. You cannot discuss the existence of something intelligently if you have one concept of what you are talking about and someone else has a different concept --- if in discussing the word giraffe, for example, one of you is picturing something like a horse with a long neck and the other chocolate pudding. In any case, once more I was hooked on the subject of time and for that I thank Dr. Barbour. If I don't quite understand what he was saying it is due to my own lack of scientific sophistication and not any fault of his. What I decided to do was to try to analyze time philosophically, where I am on firmer ground, rather than scientically where I am found wanting. I do not believe that time is definable. Any definition of anything explains something you don't know in terms of something you do know. If you don't know what a giraffe is you can picture a horse with a long neck. But there is nothing at all similar to time. So if we are to get anywhere we have to try to describe it. How can you describe the inexplicable? Perhaps you can't, but we can try, so here goes.
We must try to deal with elements of time, categories, which may be no more than mental constructs without corollaries in noumenal reality, i.e. the actual, material universe. In other words we will juggle mental concepts, phenomena, without knowing the extent to which they corollate with what is really 'out there', or noumena. With that prelude, time can be thought about in terms of the following: Sequence, Ratio, Duration Causation, Simultaneity, Synchronicity, Unidirectional progression, Motion, Past, Present, and Future. To most of us the word time probably means simply duration, the third in the foregoing list. We say that we spend a lot of time in doctors' waiting rooms, or in lines at a bank, reading a book, waiting for someone to return a call, And duration is a good place to start, with the words time and duration meaning about the same thing because it would be awkward to say "duration flies".
At what rate does time flow? True, we can argue that it doesn't 'flow' at all. Maybe it moves in discreet segments as a motion picture film does, one frame after another, giving the appearance of flow. Or maybe we should think of the future flowing toward us rather than our going into the future. Either way, we still meet the question of rate. Your car can move forward at sixty miles an hour. That's its rate. Suppose that I boil a three-minute egg while you drive three miles simultaneously, so we get into ratio, simultaneity and synchronicity. But we have not and cannot answer the question "at what rate does time itself move forward"? A rate is a relationship between one thing and another, and there is no 'other' to relate to. Even if we posit some sort of super-time against which we measure our time, all we have done is to push the problem one step back. In other words, we then face the question of the rate of our hypothetical super-time. We haven't gotten anywhere. Motion raises the same questions in a different format. Suppose that with my legendary golf swing I send the ball flying toward the green. As it flies, does it move in an even, undifferentiated flow or in a sequence of discreet still positions? No matter how you try to answer that question, the answer raises more questions. Yet something happens, doesn't it? The ball does move at a certain speed, right?
We can get wound up in words and start letting words and their definition control thought. But that's not all bad. Is it really time which flows (or stands still while something else "flows")? Perhaps it is "now" --- "the present" --- which is flowing through the medium we call time. Or perhaps even that is only an appearance. The word "time" may simply describe the entity, of past, present and future. Perhaps nothing actually "flows". That is, perhaps, nothing "goes" anywhere. Things --- reality --- just is. Go back to the idea of a motion picture. Suppose that you have a round cannister and within it is the film Patton starring George C. Scott and recounting the adventurous derring-do of the colourful world war two general. It begins as the War does and ends shortly after the War ends. But we are holding the whole adventure in one hand. Nothing moves until we project it on a screen in sequence and then, frame by frame, events seem to transpire. But not really. When the projector stops, so does the action, replaced by absolute inaction. Each frame can be seen as an appearance in a chain of the eternal nows and the links appear to come and go from our consciousness. Accoring to this scenario time doesn't flow. In fact nothing "moves". Movement is an illusion; the way we perceive. Think of the movie Patton remaining forever stationery. Our perception of ever-changing reality has created the illusion of continual change. "Now" simply describes a place in the collidascope of perception. The bank of a river isn't going anywhere. It is the water in the river which appears to be going somewhere past the bank. Driving from St. Louis to New York you go through Indianapolis, then Columbus, around Philadelphia and into New York. You have left behind you St. Louis, Indianapolis, Columbus and Philadelphia but those cities have not ceased to exist. They are still there. It's your attention, or perception, which has become elsewhere. Is this the correct way of looking at matters? Frankly, I doubt that there is any correct way, because we are dealing with concepts which have no counterpart anywhere else and, hence, we can't define them. A giraffe is like a horse, we say, but what if there isn't any horse with which to compare it? I discuss all this simply to make us careful about thinking we can wrap reality in a package of words, tie a bow around it and call the result "reality". Perhaps when we think we are saying something we really aren't saying anything.
What is the present? "Well, it's 'right now'" one might say. All right, but "right now" is gone as soon as it arrives. There is no discreet segment of time which if it could be isolated like an atom would be observed as something which stands still so that we can observe it at our leisure. It won't cooperate that way. It will not "stand still". In geometry a point is a location without dimension. So, plainly, is the present. (However, see the Addendum at the end). And positing frames like the frames of a motion picture will not help us because we then have to determine what is between the frames. If it is nothingness then the frames are all piled one on top of another, so to speak, and we have now denied the reality of duration entirely. That, however, does invite the possibility that time, in the sense of duration, in fact does not exist, as Julian Barbour maintains, and even that sequential progression is in some way illusory. That, in turn, would lead us to ask if the whole thing is being manipulated by some Cosmic Mastermind and therefore God Himself.
A geometric point can be located on a piece of paper. The piece of paper may be on a desk, the desk in a room and so on and so forth until we get to the planet Earth, the Solar System the Galaxy, the Universe itself. But how do we locate the Universe itself? We can't. It isn't anywhere, it just is, and that applies to the present as well. That is the problem which I have when someone, even a learned scientist, tell us that the Universe is, say, fifteen billion years old. It implies that it could be much older or much younger, yet the Universe itself can only be so many years old within itself because by definition there isn't anything outside itself. I can say that I have lived 24 years and that is a certain 'stretch', or duration, relative to other things within the Universe such as the age of trees, or clouds, your car or the length of time you are put on 'hold' because of course your call is important to someone in India or Pakistan or wherever. But how do we know that the progression of time within the Universe is synchronized with whatever is outside the Universe? How could we ever know? There is nothing at all outside the Universe or, if there is, it really isn't outside of it and to refer to something which is outside the Universe and inside of it simultaneously is of course an oxymoron. Whatever kind of clock we may have to measure the passage of time, such as a clock per se or seasons or the speed of trains or radio waves, or anything else we may try to use for measurement turns out to depend on the relative place of the observer. And that is exactly what Albert Einstein told us. If you are travelling almost the speed of light in a rocket ship there is a time within the rocket ship. To someone on a platform in space you may be moving very slowly but you think you are moving normally. And here's the kicker. You are both right. This is not simply a point of view, a matter or perception. It is very real and experiments have proven it.
In C. S. Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia time moves differently in Narnia than it does on Earth, where a day in London may be a hundred years there, or three weeks. The two time tracks do not coincide evenly. Psalm 90 has the poet praying to God that ". . .a thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday when it is past, and as a watch in the night". This implies that there is another Universe, or maybe more than one, and may contradict the claim that nothing is outside the Universe. In other words perhaps we should revise that to say that everything within this Universe can be related to everything else within it but not to anything on the outside unless such a comparison has been prescribed by the God who created both, and for all anyone can know God can synchronize two Universes --- for some purposes, perhaps, but not always or in all respects. (The suggestion that there "is" another Universe is an example of the confusion of language which we encounter whenever we try to put into words some concept which is simply not compatible with the language which we have and with which we must work. "Is" is a word denoting simultaneity, which of course raises the question "simultaneous with what")?
So we are spinning around in a kind of relativity soup. The past is gone, we don't know where, the present doesn't exist and the future, aside from not being here now, is rushing at us at an indeterminate speed and when it reaches us will rush past us without stopping, that is, without spending any time at all. We can't even know that matter is absolutely "real" apart from perception because all we can know about it is relative location (there being no absolute location of the Universe), size, color, texture, things like that, but matter itself is mindless, and all those traits are relative to the observer. I cannot even be certain that the red and blue which I see are the same as the red and blue which someone else sees. So, passing over a lot of ideas, we can ask the real question "Is anything real in and of itself and without reference to anything else"? The answer is yes, ideas and thoughts can relate to realities which do not require measurement by anything else. That includes mathematical propositions. Two times eight is sixteen, whether there are any objects in existence or not, and whether there is any person to apprehend it or not. A circle is an enclosed curvalinear configuration plotted on a plane whereing every point thereon is equidistant from the center. That is true and will always be true without reference to anything else. It will be true even if there are no actual circles on which to operate or any mind to apprehend it. Forms do not require the consent of anyone or the assent to their existence by any conscious, sentient being..
Forms are more real than any attempt to represent or approxiamte them because in fact forms are not 'things', they are concepts, or truisms, without the need for anything else. Every attempt to locate a form --- a circle, a triangle, or whatnot -- somewhere in the Universe, or even to assign measurement to it, fails because representations of lines have to have some thickness and no distance can be perfectly plotted on a piece of paper. And, we can add, no piece of paper is perfect for the purpose. But the concept of "circle" is absolutely real and will remain so forever whether or not any mind remains to appreciate that fact. In other words, it is impossible to imagine any material thing existing on its own, but forms obviously do exist on their own. They are not invented. They are discovered. And so it is with potential. When the Big Bang went Boom the potential existed that I would have coffee with my breakfast this morning. (This is not to posit any form of mechanical determinism, which is another question entirely). And finally, the concepts of right and wrong are absolute. It is wrong for me to steal my neighbor's car even if there is no car and even if I do not have a neighbor whose car I could steal if I had a neighbor and he had a car. In other words, a moral proposition is valid even if there is no object or thing on which it can operate.
There is actually some question whether the Universe "exists" apart from any minds existing to perceive it. In fact the Universe appears to some questioners to be mental, not material, although that idea is so opposed to human intuition and instinct that it will probably never go anywhere in the court of public opinion. But another way of putting it is this. There is no need for matter, we only need the thoughts and perceptions which seem to originate partly with matter and partly with mind. And it appears that there must be some Central Mind to spawn other minds and mind matter. That would be God.
However, lest there be any misunderstand, any suspicion that I am a mystic or a crackpot (albeit two very different kinds of people) let me hasten to say that in any case we cannot ignore matter because we are stuck with it, for now. I do not intend to jump from a tall building this afternoon on the assumption that the building and the ground below are not "real". They certainly are real for every practical purpose, and we are constrained to operate in a practical Universe. But is it a noumenal Universe, existing on its own, or is it a mental Universe; and Whose Mind do we mean? These are all matters which organized religion should explore in addition to questions about whether this bishop or that guru or some other potentate or ayatollah thinks he knows what awaits us in Heaven or who is or is not going there, which is entirely up to God and about which it is not man's business to decide. This does not mean that we should dispense with hymns and inspirational or motivational messages but it is a good idea also to exercise, as Hercule Poirot might say, "the little gray cells". God gaves us those "little gray cells" as well as a capacity for music appreciation with the expectation, no-doubt, that we would put them both to good use..
And that leads into my final point. Science and religion seem to have been at war for several centuries. In the long pre-historic past, apparently, man explained anything he could not understand by attributing it to a Supreme Being, or God, by one name or another, and frequently more than one; for example the god or gods who cause volcanos or eclipses. As man became capable of explaining more and more phenomena in naturalistic (scientific) terms, God's work assignments constricted. In other words He was needed less and less for explanations. Churches grew up and, like all human institutions, attracted the seekers of fame and power as they became increasingly powerful themselves. Naturally, they resisted intrusions by those who claimed that they could explain something like an eclipse, or the roundness and orbit of the earth, in naturalistic terms. The contest thus set up was sometimes resolved by violence. Then science gradually got the upper hand in the 18th, 19th and 20th Centuries, and the reverse process set in. That's where we are now, when the practitioners of pseudo-science claim that nothing the world around us should be attributed to God, who may not even exist. It really is not surprising that science (or pseudo-science) has now become as intolerant and superstitious as 'religion' once was. It is against the law to burn people to a stake, but "enlightened" people have adopted the vocabulary of pseudo-science and do the next best thing with ridicule and censorship so that, for example, no questioning of Darwin's theory of evolution is even allowed in the public arena, the schools and whatnot, however modestly, reasonably and fairly presented. In this atmosphere witches aren't burned but Christians are hounded and insulted out of public presence. Science has its own priesthood, no less intolerant than the church priesthood of former times. The problem is not with science or religion. It is with human nature, fallen man. Even when Creation by a Supreme Being seems almost irresistably clear the priests of pseudo-science and distorted science want to ban any form of Creationism, some of which are not related to any specific body of religious belief. There are powerful and persuasive arguments for the proposition that the Universe was created by design, but no one is even allowed to say the words in public schools. Why won't the enlightened ones take up those arguments and then refute them if they can? Is it because in reality they probably would not know a science lab from an ice cream social?
If the day ever comes when science and religion stop fighting each other we should see universal celebration. Instead of "scientific truth" or religious truth man should pursue truth --- period. Here is an illustration of what I mean. As I mentioned earlier, I once exchanged e-mails with a British physicist on this very subject, time. We just couldn't connect. I explained that I attributed that to my own shortage of scientific education. But there was something else. In trying to understand time, or anything else, I take into account hypothetical thoughts as to God's possible purposes. This, in turn, helps me to develope my ideas. But my correspondent would not do that. It wouldn't be "scientific". That does not mean that he doesn't believe in God or necessaritly that I do (though in fact I do). It does mean that he has eliminated from his work a variety of lines of thought which might correspond to the truth. Science may now be almost as far off the track as religion was once accused of being. How can we know if religion and science will not talk to each other? It may be possible, for example, to reconcile certain biblical claims, such as the relatively short age of the earth, with scientific claims of a much greater age if we consider different ways of expressing time. As odd as it sounds, science and religion may both be right. The objective of religion, science and philosophy should be truth and reality, and not which truth or reality is better than another.
ADDENDUM: The concept of simultaneity seems to remove reality from that of the present, or 'now'. Think about some friend who has gone to the Moon. What is she doing now? Do we mean her now or ours? And what do we mean by simultaneity? That word means now. If two people are playing tennis they don't think about simultaneous action. They both seem to be acting in the same time frame. Except for that, they couldn't be playing tennis at all. But if we say that various observers are scattered about the Universe at a hodge-podge of varying distances, to say that they are waving their hands simultaneously would appear to have no meaning whatsoever because their motions would be simultaneous for some, but not others, and minutes apart or hours or years apart. Is there any absolute now? For some observers very far away George Washington could, in their present time, now be marching on Trenton, New Jersey, December 25, 1776. But not in his. How close do two people or two objects, or one object and one person, have to be in order for it to be said that they can interact. I can play chess with someone in Australia by exchanging mailed letters but is that "interaction"? What if we are using e-mail? Is it interaction in one case but not the other?
Tuesday, October 16, 2012
The Teaching of Evolution
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Why do arguments about the teaching of Darwin's Theory of Evolution, as well as objections to it, in public schools never seem to resolve the question of what we mean when we say teaching Evolution? Do we mean teaching that Evolution is a true and accurate explanation of man's existence to the exclusion of other lines of inquiry? Or do we simply mean telling students that Evolution theories do exist, which is true, what they are, that many scientists accept them as probably true, but that they are not undisputed by other accredited scientists, which is also true? Are the Evolutionists such fanatics that they will not entertain the thought that some people, even Charles Darwin himself, have problems with Evolution? Has there ever been another scientific theory, at least within the past 500 years, which has enjoyed such a privileged status? Even Einstein's Theory of Relativity can be questioned, despite the fact that it, unlike Evolution, is universally accepted in the scientific community. Why does the presentation of the simple fact that some fully accredited scientists question what is purported to be a scientific theory violate the non-establishment clause in the First Amendment? How? How can an argument be religious when God is not mentioned or even alluded to?
The late Fred Hoyle was an English cosmologist, a fully credentialed scientists and the man who originated the phrase "Big Bang". He was an atheist, at least at one time, which would satisfy the Evolutionists until they are told that Hoyle said that the chances of a human being existing without a designer would be about the same as the chance that a tornado would roar through a junk yard and leave behind it a Boeing 747.
Even when religion is introduced into the mix, one can adhere to almost any particular religion, or no religion, while believing one or the other, or all, of the Design explanations. Fred Hoyle himself was not a Christian when he offered his airplane-in-a-junkyard analogy. Merely because something --- even the Big Bang itself --- may tend to support religion as far as it goes does not mean that telling students that Evolution does not enjoy unanimous scientific support is the teaching of religion in any sense. (Even if you buy into the argument that it is teaching about religion it should not cause a reasonable person any problem. The imprint of the world's religions on secular history is undeniable). Religion depends on the concurrence of divine and natural causes. Even an atheist can question Evolution, and some probably do. How can the mere questioning of a scientific theory, on scientific grounds, amount to an "establishment of religion" in violation of the Establishment clause of the First Amendment?
My own view is that the "argument" is more political and ideological than anything else. Nearly all Evolutionist fanaticism is advanced from the left because leftists are pragmatists --- if it works it's OK --- and religion, including anything which remotely supports it, is grounded in principle, in right and wrong as absolute categories by decree of God. To the left, morality itself evolves. That's why leftists are so fond of the idea of a "living Constitution", as distinguished from a Constitution which is what it is until amended. Also, leftists crave power, and power cannot be absolute if it is checked by the commands of a desinging and creative God.
Monday, October 15, 2012
Advice to Warren Buffett
I have nothing at all against Warren Buffett. He made his money fair and square and I don't begrudge him a dime (though I wish he would give me a measly million or two. He wouldn't miss it and it would make me deliriously happy --- ever since I discovered that money does buy happiness. Or at least it pays for the kind of misery I enjoy).
I have a few quibbles with Mr. Buffett, however. The first is that he seems to think he's heroic by assuring us that his soak-the-rich tax recommendations apply to him as well as others and therefore he should be congratulated. Baloney, Mr. Buffett. In the first place, if the income tax were raised to a highest bracket of one hundred percent it would not affect you adversely to any extent whatever. You would still be left with multiple times as much money as an army of men could spend in a lifetime. You wouldn't even notice it. You already give away huge amounts of money to charitable causes. That's great. I hope you keep it up. But stop acting as if that makes you Mother Bountiful. You still have enough for that army. That's fine with me --- really. Just cut the crap.
Another thing about that. While a high income tax would have no personal affect on you, it would adversely affect millions of people who aren't rich by any stretch but would like to become rich and are working diligently toward, they hope, that result and in the process producing some of the world's goods. As far as I can tell you never produced anything that anyone can eat, drive, burn for fuel, live in or wear. You shuffled papers around and activated electronic blips on computers which fed or housed or transported no one. That's OK. It was legal and it may even have served some esoteric purpose in the world of higher economics which I can't roam around in because I don't undertand it and doubtless never will. I'm perfectly satisfied that you can buy what you want and play lots of bridge with your pal Bill Gates.
Buffett is obviously an intelligent man. You would have to be more than just a little bit bright to accumulate the mountain range of cash that he has. But does he really believe that by screwing the "rich" out of their money and throwing it around in an orgasm of redistribution he would make everyone affluent and happy? What is economics about? It's about the production, allocation and distribution of goods and services. And that's all it's about, though it breaks down into quite a few subdivisions. How does throwing cash around, by itself, produce one single box of raisin bran or one ping pong ball, a car, a map of Omaha or a recipe for ten ways to cook spinach? You can, of course, take cash from Peter and pay Paul but that doesn't produce wealth, it just divides what is already there. Paul buys a football that Peter would have bought if we hadn't taken his money. Yes, the economics gurus can doubtless spin some theories on how we have stimulated the production of footballs, and they may even be right. Not every "expert" is wrong about everything all the time. But in the meantime where do we go to get our chocolate covered chunkies if they are no longer produced because Peter, who produced them, went out of business or just decided to pack it in because he no longer has any incentive to produce anything? And who will give his factory workers jobs now that they are out of work?
There may be answers. I'm not an economist and I'm not as smart as Mr. Buffett. If I were I would be writing this on the yacht I don't have. But surely we are not out of line if we ask him to give us some answers to these questions before we go overboard praising him for being such a grand and noble chap.
I have a few quibbles with Mr. Buffett, however. The first is that he seems to think he's heroic by assuring us that his soak-the-rich tax recommendations apply to him as well as others and therefore he should be congratulated. Baloney, Mr. Buffett. In the first place, if the income tax were raised to a highest bracket of one hundred percent it would not affect you adversely to any extent whatever. You would still be left with multiple times as much money as an army of men could spend in a lifetime. You wouldn't even notice it. You already give away huge amounts of money to charitable causes. That's great. I hope you keep it up. But stop acting as if that makes you Mother Bountiful. You still have enough for that army. That's fine with me --- really. Just cut the crap.
Another thing about that. While a high income tax would have no personal affect on you, it would adversely affect millions of people who aren't rich by any stretch but would like to become rich and are working diligently toward, they hope, that result and in the process producing some of the world's goods. As far as I can tell you never produced anything that anyone can eat, drive, burn for fuel, live in or wear. You shuffled papers around and activated electronic blips on computers which fed or housed or transported no one. That's OK. It was legal and it may even have served some esoteric purpose in the world of higher economics which I can't roam around in because I don't undertand it and doubtless never will. I'm perfectly satisfied that you can buy what you want and play lots of bridge with your pal Bill Gates.
Buffett is obviously an intelligent man. You would have to be more than just a little bit bright to accumulate the mountain range of cash that he has. But does he really believe that by screwing the "rich" out of their money and throwing it around in an orgasm of redistribution he would make everyone affluent and happy? What is economics about? It's about the production, allocation and distribution of goods and services. And that's all it's about, though it breaks down into quite a few subdivisions. How does throwing cash around, by itself, produce one single box of raisin bran or one ping pong ball, a car, a map of Omaha or a recipe for ten ways to cook spinach? You can, of course, take cash from Peter and pay Paul but that doesn't produce wealth, it just divides what is already there. Paul buys a football that Peter would have bought if we hadn't taken his money. Yes, the economics gurus can doubtless spin some theories on how we have stimulated the production of footballs, and they may even be right. Not every "expert" is wrong about everything all the time. But in the meantime where do we go to get our chocolate covered chunkies if they are no longer produced because Peter, who produced them, went out of business or just decided to pack it in because he no longer has any incentive to produce anything? And who will give his factory workers jobs now that they are out of work?
There may be answers. I'm not an economist and I'm not as smart as Mr. Buffett. If I were I would be writing this on the yacht I don't have. But surely we are not out of line if we ask him to give us some answers to these questions before we go overboard praising him for being such a grand and noble chap.
Sunday, October 14, 2012
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