Culture Shock

Culture Shock

If any of you are like me, not that this could be willingly imposed, life sometimes feels surreal, unreal, or too-real.  There are certainly times when we sigh, "Stop the world, I want to get off'.  But we hang on, not that we can be survivors---none of us will "ever get out of this world alive".  

But really, we understand so little and understand too much for our own sanity. We win some battles, albeit the effort may be long and exhausting---if not physically, then mentally---and what do we win, if we win?  A chance to fight another battle. Some get to pile 'things of possession' higher and higher only in the end to be no more contented than some semi retarded Bozo down the street.  We all know the guy/gal---smiling, wasting time, bullshitting, impulsively gobbling down some unhealthy tasty morsel we fear to touch, going merrily through life having no real knowledge of the world or it's leaders, whose philosophy extends to the next meal, inane TV shows or computer games, and lives in some sort of cluttered accumulation of junk no one else wants.  Well, enough, but all this is enough to make us wonder who are the stupid amongst us?

In one 24 hr period I was exposed to worlds so different they could not possibly exist on the same planet.  But they do.  There is this educational program, I think in New York, where students still go to school, but once at school, they sit down before this computer whose internal program knows more about that particular student's mind than can be imagined. This computer is the student teacher.  Using past input from the student this computer knows a great deal about how this particular student's mind works---what it can do best, at what speed, and with what kind of program (input). So let's say the student is going to learn physiology. 

I can remember walking into lecture halls with 150 students all specifically arranged (by me) to sit in a certain place with two seats between each student, and for 1-3 hrs I would lecture on physiology.  Of course the lecture was pitched to the way I best understood body function and if some students were lucky, we would be on the same page and going at the correct speed.   

I have been retired now like 17 years and this New York classroom is something else. The computer does the teaching and it approaches the subject matter in ways which best suit the mental attributes of the particular student.  The student's rate of progress is determined by the student, not the computer.  So we have a room full of students all learning the same subject matters at their own rate in the way best designed to meet their particular mental strengths.  When the computer decides the student is ready to be tested, then they are.  If the student has questions or is confused about something, there is no raising a hand or searching out the instructors office and office hrs, the teaching computer can help at any time.  I reckon the computer probably even knows when it is time to take a break.  This is not going to speak well for the future of college campuses.  I don't think this computer program is going to cost tens of thousands of dollar a year, not to mention it can be done at home at any time. There is no longer even a need to juggle your work hrs with your course schedule.  So I finished reading about this computer program and sighed, "The world has really changed". 

The next day I attended a presentation by Doctor's Without Borders in Chicago and they had videos about the work they do in the most backward and dangerous countries in the world---like Sudan, the Congo, Afghanistan, the Middle East, etc.  Nothing penetrates my consciousness with such pain as looking into the eyes of these hapless human forms suffering in ways unimaginable to someone living on the 11th floor of an affluent suburban area high rise.  These people have essentially nothing.  Not enough food, not enough water, no schooling of any note, nothing resembling adequate health care, no personal safety, no rule of law---and if this is a child, often has no parents.  If we were caring for a pet in conditions like this we would be put in jail.  And the eyes tell it all---pure incomprehensible vacant stares like we are getting a glance at pure hell.  There is nothing sadder than a child/teenager, emaciated, in pain, with tears streaming down their cheeks, totally helpless with no possible insight to understand why this is happening.  In the worst hopeless cases, the eyes transmit nothing but the last fading flicker of life.  How can a world capable of creating a computer for individual learning allow other humans to suffer in this way?  In terms of sheer numbers there are more humans suffering from starvation, curable diseases, lack of water, homelessness, death from violence, and no personal security than ever before in recorded history.  At the same time there is a small percentage of humans who have wealth piled higher than ever before in recorded history.  How can humans, collectively, allow such an obscene distribution of wealth?  How can churches and civilized governments permit this?  What kind of priorities do the affluent in the world have to tolerate any of this? "The answer, my friend is blowing in the wind" (This song dates me).

Later that day I read an article about forest fires in this country. The stats are indisputable. 

In 1980 670 structures were lost to wildfires. 

In 2012  4, 244 structures were lost to wildfires. 

In 1986  2,719,162 acres were burned

In 2012   9,326,238 acres were burned

In 1986---property damage was $2 million (adjusted for inflation)

In 2012----$1.1 billion dollars in damage

1901-1910 average summer temperature was 70.5 degrees

1981-1990  average summer temperature was 71.7 degrees

In 2012  average summer temperature was 73.7 degrees

1901-1910  average summer precipitation was 8.6 inches

1981-1990  average summer precipitation was 8.3 inches

2012---average precipitation was 7.2 inches

How is all this interpreted?

Science: the combination of higher temperatures and lower moisture tends to produce larger and more frequent fires. Earlier snowmelt (fact) extends the fire season, and in parts of the west it is already 2 months longer than 15 years ago. 

A small temperature rise can cause an outsized impact on water evaporation. So we get more severe droughts. The southwest can expect multi-year mega-droughts at increasing frequencies.  The rise in global temperatures correlates closely to the rise in carbon dioxide levels and the rise in carbon dioxide levels is related to human activities from human overpopulation of the planet. 

Conservative political interpretation: There is nothing happening here which has not happened in the past and this is just a cycle we are going through. The solution to everything is to foster maximum industrial/economic growth and the way to do this is to give all sorts of tax breaks and loopholes to the wealthiest entrepreneurs and their accumulation of wealth will trickle down and improve the economic standing of the less affluent. This must be a really slow process since this mentality has been in effect now for at least 50 years. 

The average personal response: Few are willing to sacrifice in any way with their own lifestyle to help reduce the rise in carbon dioxide.  Few are willing to pay more for products which are more environmentally friendly.  Few are willing to pay more for alternate sources of energy. Few are willing to purchase energy efficient cars.   On almost all matters, including reduction of the national debt, the battle is always to see which groups are will be forced to sacrifice and which groups will be spared. Strangely, no one suggests everyone sacrifice and the wealthy more than the non wealthy. Self interest, not fairness is rampant. 

So I sit and ponder over all three images I was exposed to in a 24 hr period. The conservatives are right in that the history of our planet has gone in cycles which included ice ages, and flooding from ice cap melts---and evolution went on, albeit there were often hundreds of thousands of years between these cycles.  Animals have gone extinct before, but rarely at the rate which species extinction is now occurring, and never before has such an extinction rate been due to human activity (overpopulation).  So this is a new one for Mother Nature.  Fortunately, Mother Nature bats last, and she will with this situation too.  At my age I just have one more hope---that Mother Nature doesn't step to the plate for another 10 years.  It is never pretty and when the 'shit hits the fan', with nature induced global corrections, there are going to be a lot of eyes that view the world with the same look we now see in the populations being served by Doctors Without Borders.  No big deal I guess, that is the next generation. Let's invade another country with a winless war fought by paid mercenaries and dump the bill on the next generation---the party, for those of us more fortunate, is not over yet, albeit I think most of us have inklings what is waiting down the road.  

Related thoughts:  Ok, let's say there is a Heaven for humans and God will select who goes there?  Who will be favored, the affluent kid at the computer or the kid in a refugee camp painfully dying?  But wait, maybe the dying kid in the refugee camp, if allowed to live, will grow up to be another Hitler. Why should this kid go to heaven?

And if the planet does suffer from human overpopulation, what purpose is served by saving the lives of any of these refugees?  If we do, they will just reproduce and there will be increased human overpopulation.  Population growth is highest in the poorest areas of the world, so maybe we should just let them be, after all, we or I gots mine, so all is well, at least for our, or my lifetime.  But hold it, does it really make any difference where the overpopulation is occurring? The battle for limited resources continues no matter where the overpopulation occurs. Well, maybe so, but we got mega bombs and smart bombs and tanks and drones etc. So we are safe.  Really?  What good did all of this do us in Vietnam, Iraq, or Afghanistan?  We killed 10 of them for every one of us killed and it is always us who tires of it and runs out of money for the massacre to continue.  We have all the heavy weaponry, as do many governments around the world, but the have-nots have terrorism---abroad and at home.  Mass randomized killings are virtually a daily thing now, and the inner rage of more and more people is using this new found retaliation as the final escape from their demons. Is war the right word anymore?  War used to be battles between uniformed armies. The casualties were almost all soldiers. Today there are no uniformed soldiers except Americans (for the most part) who sort of just serve as targets for snipers, land mines, and suicide bombers. The vast majority of casualties are civilians and if we include refugees forced to leave their country the figures become really lopsided. For every active combatant dead there are far more civilians dead, displaced, homeless, and out of work.  We have ceremonies to honor soldiers, who 'volunteered' to do this sort of thing, and call them 'heroes' but I am not aware of ceremonies to honor the dead civilians, and certainly we don't call them 'heroes'.  I guess we really know why we use the term heroes for these soldiers who die from sniper bullets, land mines, and suicide bombers: while we often support these kind of wars, we have no intention of participating ourselves, paying for it, or making any kind of sacrifices, and so those who take our place are 'heroes'.  I, as an adult, have lived through major and minor invasions of other countries and have yet had to, in any way, had to sacrifice to support these wars.  If we ever were to reduce the military industrial complex where would all these soldiers find a job?  Many of them enlisted precisely because they could not find a job.  We lost 35,000 young soldiers in Vietnam.  It turned out to be a total waste of life for so many of our own young, not to mention the far greater death toll on the Vietnamese.  Logic, in hindsight, would seem to indicate the real heroes were the young people who refused to fight in that war.  After all, had they prevailed, all these deaths on both sides would never have occurred.  Life can be so confusing. 

If we were President where would we start and where would all the money come from to attack all the issues bearing down on us from every direction?  I know I could not last as President for a week.  Just last week some Congressman complained the President never calls and talks to him about anything.  Really?  There are like 400 Congresspersons, all handsomely rewarded by lobbyists, and a President should spend his days chatting with them?  They certainly have the resources at hand to make correct decisions on their own. This makes me think about that teaching computer which knows so much about a particular student. Maybe our country needs a computer like that to be our President. We could input all these problems on our country's plate and the computer would make decisions about what to do on every problem. Then, if all of us had a 'personal' computer programmed for our own individual understanding and learning about things, our personal computer would just enable us to understand why the actions of the 'Presidential Computer' are correct. Thus, the best national decisions are made, and all citizens are brought on board by their personal computer and there will be no need for elections anymore, just technicians to ensure all these computers are functioning properly. Ah, never mind, what would I muse about?   

Nature and Contentment

Nature and Contentment

For those who find peace and mellowness in nature, any effective explanation is difficult.  It is like someone trying to explain just how deep their feelings are for their pet. Some people try very hard to communicate the strength of their attachment to a pet, and the harder they try the more annoying they are to others---a sort of 'enough already'.  Same with kids, we all have spent evenings with parents who revolve the whole evening around their children. This transference of emotion between parent and child cannot be transferred to others. Such a failure does not in any way reflect on the positiveness of such a real bond between parent and child or owner and their pet. Having said all this I get more comments when I write about Riva the Horse than most other topics.   

And so it is with nature. Those who spend a lot of time out in nature in contemplative thought will not find it easy to explain to others how meaningful it is. At some point it just annoys others who quickly feel 'enough is enough'.  I spend hours many days out in a nature setting or wandering around in a Chicago neighborhood.  Well, cities are a 'nature' unto themselves of a very different sort.  In some respects cities are not social atmospheres, simply good theatre to see diverse people act out their own essence, a sort of huge crowd of diverse, often eccentric or life/physically-challenged humanity, all being alone together. Cities can't be beat for 'people watching'. Many of these people have little else but a genuine-ness that is intriguing if one manages to interact with them, which surprisingly is not often that hard.       

My parents were spared any boring effusive social demonstration of affection to me (no comments allowed).  Most times, when company arrived, I went out my bedroom window and escaped.  Then, add a not-in-my-face distant personality and visitors were spared.  My parents were annoyingly (to me) social, and this annoyance may well have affected my long standing social aloofness. I still remember we had to be the first ones to church and the last to leave.  At any rate, from an early age nature was a treasured escape for me from the noise of humanity.  Animals love nature too, and that made a perfect pair-up---myself and a pet.  My social world has always been a finely tuned combination of select friends, pets, nature, books, writing, music, and influential human protectors---with nature the crucible for mixing these ingredients in proper proportions.  In a world in which change and diversity predominate, little in life is sustainable, and our adaptation to such constant flux depends on the degree to which we understand nature.  Nature, is, after all, the closest we can come to God.  It is God's laws which govern the evolutionary process, and if we can't get some kind of handle on how nature works, we are left with self-serving beliefs which invariably involve some sort of imagined personal relationship with God.  These kind of self serving perceptions of life never lead to any contented life, but rather a life in which we are always perplexed why God is letting us down over and over.  Passing it all off with a shrug, "Well, God operates in mysterious ways, and this must all be for the best" is hardly an uplifting inspiring mindset.  It is more like the "boys will be boys" reflection a parent may use to justify their son being involved in a gang rape.  Passing off horrible events that happen to us or to others in life, as "God operates in mysterious ways", doesn't exactly make life less scary.  My heavens, what will God allow next---and to who?

Self-imposed social space is not necessarily a measure of hostility to people.  Individual idiosyncrasies are not necessarily offensive or unjust to others.  How we feel about diversity, and how we treat others, speaks as loudly as any polished social mannerisms or intense social interactions.  People have always interested me.  Not to have them in my face a lot, but because the behaviors of so many people, of so many different ilk, is really the best theatre in life.  I probably read more biographies than any other kind of book. The only people who I tend to intensely dislike are those who treat the less fortunate unkindly, and that includes simple indifference to their plight, or a political affiliation which preys on the less fortunate.  No one chooses their parents or their place of birth, or their physical characteristics, or their personality or their mental potential, and so on. This alone removes a lot of the 'I' in life.  Not really all that much of our own personal successes are because 'we' simply earned them by ourselves.  We are are born in certain circumstances to certain parents and we certainly, at that point in our lives, haven't earned anything.  I think any genuine understanding of life starts right there---getting rid of this unrealistic importance of our own selves. If we suffer momentary inflation of our own importance, a walk in a graveyard is a good adjuster. Death is a great leveler. 

Being out in nature helps put things in perspective. We think best in solitude, in peaceful surroundings, right in the midst of an evolutionary process which has gone on for millions of years. It is hard to comprehend the vastness of life and the little itty bitty gleam of time we exist in between two eternities.  Life, for me or anyone else, did not begin at conception.  Before conception the potential "I" existed as two quite-alive LIVING cells, an egg and a sperm. And those LIVING cells were derived from other LIVING cells, and so it goes, and has gone on, for millions of years: Living cells from living cells.   And all of this endless reassembling of DNA molecules to form different forms of life has just never ceased since it first started. Of course we have no real idea how it all started:  

"A million million spermatozoa,

All of them alive:

Out of their cataclysm but one poor Noah

Dare hope to survive.

And among that billion minus one

Might have chanced to be

Shakespeare, another Newton, a new Donne -

But the One was Me. " (Aldous Huxley)

A lot of people like to believe there was something 'special' about their beginning---as if God directed a particular sperm to fertilize a particular egg.  That is really the ultimate ego trip.  Not to mention that this would imply God also created Hitler.  No, it was chance. This whole notion of God arranging to have your parents meet in marriage, or in an alley, to supply the egg and sperm, via the mechanics of sexual intercourse, all the while selecting the right egg and the right sperm, is really over the top. We are entitled to believe anything, and we often do, but beliefs are only worth something if they are arrived at by reason. The more shaky the reasoning the less likely any belief is true. 

Out in nature we begin to understand our own significance to the evolutionary process. It is quite humbling.  Only out in nature---God's laboratory of life---can we begin to grasp any connectedness to the whole amazing process.  It is in nature we can best understand that life, in the broadest sense, is not about us, but God's evolutionary process.  We are not personal favorites of God anymore than any one of our pets, if we have several of different kinds, is our personal favorite in the sense we take better care of this pet than others.  We kind of know this, but much of what we know is inconvenient to grasp, and so we don't.  Go in someone's house and, if their pet is a pest, try drop kicking it across the living room. When they go berserk just explain, "it's just a pet, don't forget God has given us dominion over other animals and I am just 'dominionating' here".  Not satisfied with claiming that they have wonderful 'conversations' with God, humans---or at least select humans--- claim they have been given dominion over all the other creations by God's process of evolution.  Certainly God is a bit smarter than that, or He must not like His other creations.  Human activities have now resulted in one of the greatest species extinction rates in evolutionary history.  It is hard to imagine this is a good thing.   

It is in nature that we can best realize all forms of nature are God's children, in that it was His process which created these 'children' over millions of years of time.  We are not individually special to God, and if we were, God would not let us die.  I know, some think God does not let us die, that we personally are his favorites---via inherited religion---and we will live in Heaven, providing, of course, that we follow the rituals of our inherited or marriage-adopted religion.  But conveniently, even if we don't live ethically, we can always at some point prior to death be 'saved' and still go to heaven.  How amazingly convenient. We will get to Heaven one way or another via one ego trip or another.   So Richard Speck can murder a small mob of nursing students, then at some point in his life be forgiven and 'saved' en route to heaven.  Any of the murdered nursing students who were not saved at the time then went to Hell.  This is a tad absurd.  Some of the people who are least ethical can be found dutifully present in church every Sunday and the rest of the time totally absorbed in themselves, isolated from, and indifferent to the least fortunate in the world. They don't have ethical values, they have 'family values'---sometimes even without the rest of their family and it gets reduced to a 'me value'.

It is when we are given the time out in nature that we can best sort out the meaning of life. This meaning is not best arrived at via 85 inane tweets a day on important issues like what brand of peas to buy or providing a running count all day as to where we are and what we are doing.  It is hard to comprehend on what basis God would really favor our own offspring or relatives or ethnic group or cultural group etc. over others.  It takes a bit of time to accept we are not special to God in any sense different from other forms of nature.  If we have several kinds of pets and one pet starts to pick on another pet, we punish that pet and are displeased.  Why do we think God would feel otherwise?  Actually, if we are honest with ourselves, we haven't the vaguest idea how God thinks or feels. It is senseless to endow God with human feelings and thought processes. God is not human---we are, and need accept our limitations and importance. Nature helps us do all that. 

When the world is too much with us, and our own importance inflated, the rat race commences, and along with it come all the conflicts, the scheming, the prejudices, the selfishness, the cruelty to others, the intolerance to diversity, the increased inability to know when enough materialistic stuff piled higher and higher is enough, and so on.  We justify our participation in the rat race via 'family values', via inherited or marriage adopted self serving religious beliefs, via belief that money brings contentment, via prejudices against this or that group, via claiming dominion over other species, via believing natural resources can be used up indiscriminately, via believing we can overpopulate the earth and all will be well.  After all this, we then gush about how much we care about our kids' future.  Please, cut the bullshit.  We even finance wars now by putting the debt on the next generation and shamelessly using voluntary mercenaries to fight enemies who are not even in uniform or on any battlefield.   When everything is viewed on the basis of I and my family, my friends, my religion, my race, my culture, my country---then we have signed off on any personal responsibility to God's created evolutionary process, and thereby leave the process for nature to correct the damage we do.  And nature will make the correction because it always has.  Why do we think this abuse by our own species will be different?  Why do we pray to God to help the less fortunate, when humans---individually and collectively, can do just that?  Perhaps we should pray, instead, to have the strength to really do our part to help the less fortunate.                                                     

In nature one can feel a part of the evolutionary process, appreciate the process---including other species and our natural resources; appreciate diversity, understand responsibility to others and to our natural resources; and---like all humans everywhere, barring some kind of mental condition, understand the ethics of the Golden Rule.  No one, anywhere, ever declares the Golden Rule to be anything other than an ethical principle.  Just like the human species has a unique ability to reason, to laugh, to remember well, and all the other human characteristics, we also have an innate sense of ethics.  Like many innate abilities, ethics needs practice and reasoning to develop its full potential.  I suppose that this full potential varies just like any other human characteristic.  It is in nature we are best reminded that diversity and change are the key operative laws in God's evolutionary process. With advanced powers of reasoning the human species is able to comprehend the potential significance of our emotions.  Humans, for example, are able to comprehend the potential significance of injury or physical limitations or social discrimination to an extent which leaves us subject to intense emotional stress---we understand all this precisely because we understand consequences better than other species.  To compensate for this emotional vulnerability we also have our innate ethics---the Golden Rule---which enables us to make the playing field more level for the less fortunate.  Survival of the fittest still reigns, some people will be more suited to thrive at this or that, but humans can, in the midst of such a God created process, enable the less fortunate to live a more contented life.  Ethics is an advanced evolutionary trait.  Through ethics suffering can be minimized. 

Too often we refuse to be ethical ourselves for all kinds of self-serving concocted reasons, and then, via some inherited religion, pray to a God to help the less fortunate have a better life, even though we, individually and collectively, have the power to make life for the least fortunate more contented. It is being out in nature, where the stillness and quietude enable us to connect with the 'forces' of nature---these forces being the real essence of life---that enables us to begin to figure out the meaning of life, if I can use the phrase with obvious limitations.  All these molecules, atoms, other various substrates of all life, in all forms, here and everywhere else, are doing their thing---creating diversity and change.  That is the essence of life, diversity and change amidst the only permanence in life---TIME.  Nothing else is permanent including our own existence, except TIME.  The cards of life are dealt, by chance and diversity, not because we are special to God, or after we exist God will protect us from His own created laws which govern the process, but because unless we get dealt some cards, we can't be in the game. If we don't like the hands dealt in a poker game, what rationale is there to blame the dealer unless the dealer is crooked.  I suspect God is fair, not crooked.  For God to be unfair would negate the whole ethical concept of the Golden Rule.  Nature teaches us that all we have is a chance, by chance, to achieve some contentment in our existence. 

Contentment is the only goal in life which is the end point.  No rational person would ask us why we want to be contented.  Every other goal in life is pursued because we believe it will lead to something else.  Contentment is the real end goal of our lives.  Nature teaches us that contentment is not an all or nothing state.  Rather, the more contentment we achieve, the better we are able to handle the frustrations of life.  The whole purpose of any ethical system is to reward those who do right and punish those who do wrong.  There is no other purpose to ethics.  Those who adhere the most to the Golden Rule will garner the greatest contentment in life given their life situation.  All sorts of people, in all walks of life, of all diverse essences, cultures, and environments manage to figure this out and live an ethical life to achieve some degree of contentedness in their life.  A contented person is not without anger, disappointment, frustration, and other emotional aspects of human nature.  If a contented person gets a traffic ticket they are not happy.  Happiness is not contentment.  I can be happy---very happy, that my team won the Championship game, but this happiness is short lived.  It is transient.   Abraham LIncoln is an example of a very contented person whose environment and position in life gave him every reason to go through every undesirable emotion available to a human, yet because of his inner contentment from his ethical state, he was able to achieve contentment from his life actions.  It was his inner contentment and his own understanding of human nature and the nature of the world, which enabled him to provide the steady hand and amazing insight to get his country through the Civil War. 

Thus, it seems, that the real goal in life---contentment---starts with our ability to connect with nature---with the very process which has been controlling life on this planet for millions of years.  If we cannot understand the process of life, of which we a part, then we have lost any ability to comfortably fit in with the process.  We end up being jerked around every which way, blindsided by forces we do not understand at all.  "I am a part of all that I have met" is expanded to "I am a part of all that has gone on before me".  It is our fear of death which often unsettles us, and we often grasp at all sorts of beliefs to assuage our fears.  We did not exist for millions of years and yet we don't lose any sleep over this, or feel depressed or angry that we missed out on most of evolution.  It would be hard for us to be depressed that we personally were not around with the dinosaurs.  We just weren't.  It is all irrelevant to our own peace of mind.   And if there is death for us, what have we to fear?   We can no more be emotionally tormented in the future about our absence from the future than we are emotionally tormented right now about having missed most of the past.  As all of us have been dependent on all life forms in the past, and future life forms will be dependent on our own generation of life.  This is how the process works.  We are stepping stones in the process, not of individual importance.  What we do have personally is simply the opportunity to achieve some contentment in the process---through our own efforts and abilities combined with help from others.  Of course, two people given the same hand in life, make individual choices while playing their hand. These choices do count, and do make a difference, but almost always are dwarfed by the cards we have in hand, and how much help we get from others, and a hefty dose of good luck.  Luck always plays a role in how long we live, the circumstances of our youth, which people are available to give us valuable help, etc. 

That's all she wrote. We have our chance, by chance, to participate in this process and via our participation have the opportunity to achieve some contentment in life.  That is the meaning of life, and the innate reasoned ethical principle for human achievement of contentment---the Golden Rule---is the path to such contentment.  Every other path is a dead end. You don't play the Golden Rule game---you don't get the prize: Contentment.