Tag Archives: philosophy

As I’ve mentioned in a few of my other posts this year, I get really geeked out about how the brain works. I’ve read a number of books either on the subject or which address the subject starting almost twenty years ago. The first of these was Dragons of Eden by Carl Sagan. I heartily recommend it to anyone that hasn’t read it.

Most recently I “read” Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert. Actually I didn’t read it at all, I listened to the audiobook during my very long drive from Texas yesterday. It was a fascinating book. To make a complex thesis as simple as possible, Gilbert asserts that we humans are generally pretty lousy at predicting what will make us happy. He goes to great length to make his point very thoroughly, and along the way describes some psychological studies on related matters which I found to be truly enlightening. Most interesting among them to me were the analyses of how people tend to adopt their circumstances and make themselves happy with whatever they might be, and how people given the opportunity to modify a choice over time are generally less satisfied than people that are allowed to choose once and stick with that choice forever. Also interesting were the degree to which the retrieval of memories actually modifies the memory being retrieved, how thoroughly the frontal lobe is occupied with the business of projecting the future, and how the areas of the brain which are used to process input from the senses are also enlisted to visualize the future.

There is no way I can summarize the book’s nine hour narrative in anything like a reasonably short blog post, but if you want to get the author’s most compact description of his thesis and you have twenty minutes to spare, you could do a lot worse than the video below from last year’s TED conference.

Give it a look. Gilbert was a good narrator of his own book. He is an even better speaker. The story of how he came to be a PhD psychologist is pretty interesting too. It can be found here at Wikipedia.

The financial crisis that has gripped America this autumn has caused me to summon memories from long ago. Among them are a few things from my childhood, things which were taught to me by a notable member of an older generation. They make chilling commentary on our circumstances today.

When I was growing up I was fortunate enough to have guidance and mentoring from a man who came of age in the 1930s. When you hear the phrase “self made man” it is usually applied to someone that has bootstrapped his way to wealth. My mentor was self-made too, but not in that way. He was self-made in the way of self reliance. Forty years on earth have failed to show me an individual more fiercely – and effectively – independent. Many of the lessons he taught me are among those I consider most valuable even today. I will confess now that despite my admiration for him and my appreciation for what he taught me I have not applied all of his lessons equally well.

We’ll call this exceptional man Wilson.

Although Wilson had been an outstanding student and had graduated high school at the age of 16, by 1934 it was clear that he would have to forgo college in order to help support his family. He took whatever work he could get at a time when getting any work at all was damned difficult. Instead of carousing or even resting when he wasn’t doing odd jobs, Wilson taught himself to be a chemist, a pyrotechnics  expert, a magician, a printer, and a radioman.

During the second World War he helped train civilians and military personnel to be properly prepared for chemical weapons attack. After the war he started his own businesses, manufacturing a variety of chemically intensive products including cosmetics and pyrotechnics. He did that while holding down day jobs with the Red Cross and the state of South Carolina. His wife Ethyl worked both out of the home and alongside him in their own businesses. By the time they were in their early fifties they had saved enough to buy a large piece of prime property and build a house on it with cash. Afterward they quit their day jobs and worked solely at their own business for the rest of their lives, selling goods that no one else made and, at times, formulas that no one else knew. Throughout their lives Wilson and Ethyl never used any sort of credit or loans to acquire anything at all. They bought what they could from income and savings, and nothing more. Ever.

There were the other ways in which they were extraordinarily self sufficient. He liked to fish, and in the autumn months when the striped bass would run he would wade out into the surf and catch as many as he could. Ethyl kept a big vegetable garden beside the house, and they would eat, freeze or can everything they grew and caught. What they didn’t eat themselves they traded for venison and fowl and other things from hunters and farmers nearby. They spent as little as they could get away with at the grocery store.

In your mind this might paint a picture of Wilson as an antisocial person, a scrappy someone concerned only with himself. You would be wrong. He volunteered for thankless local government roles, rose to the highest ranks of Freemasonry and was a respected member of the Rotary Club and Kiwanis. Privately, he did even more. Wilson spent lots of time with kids like me, teaching us all manner of things about chemistry, magic tricks (often fun when combined) and countless other things that in my youth seemed like the hidden wisdom of the ages revealed. Least visible of all he did very personal charity, usually helping families that fell on misfortune due to illness or injury. He gave to these families using churches or other organizations as fronts. They never knew who their real benefactor was.

Wilson and I got to know each other starting in the late 1970s and early 1980s when economic times were not so great. The US was, of course, in a prolonged recession then and there were many parallels to the conditions we are starting to see today. Fuel prices were high, credit was tight (and very expensive) and jobs, especially good ones, were much more scarce than they are even now. Of course to Wilson the conditions of the 1970s were no big deal. Compared to the bitter despair of breadlines and the many other heartbreaks of the Great Depression, the doldrums of the 70’s were mild. In any case he and Ethyl had been so prudent for so long that they had little to fear. Their home and everything in it was paid for. They had lots of savings put aside. They grew and caught their own food. If times got really hard people would be coming to them for help, not the other way around.

When I would visit him Wilson talked about the tough times of the 1930’s a lot, and the habits of people in later days just as much. One of the stories that he told me was about a family he had helped back in the 1950s. We’ll call them the Smiths. I remember it vividly because he described their wretched condition so well. They had fallen on hard times when Mr. Smith had lost his job and they could no longer pay their bills. They had a lot of bills.

Wilson marveled at how the Smiths had lived. He said that they had bought everything “on time” which was his way of saying with credit that required making payments over time. Their house, their car, their appliances – even some clothes. All of these things were bought with some sort of credit facility, provided in some way by a bank, a car dealer or a department store. They had no savings, and when their income disappeared their situation quickly became desperate.

Wilson could not comprehend it. Mr. Smith had had a good job for some number of years, and yet there they were living completely in hoc. He couldn’t fathom how they would have no savings to speak of or how they could possibly think it right to owe money on their shelter, transportation and nearly everything else under those circumstances. He recalled that as a young man every family he knew of that was able to buy a home did so only after saving for many years. People who bought things “on time” suffered most when the Depression hit. That anyone in a younger generation could make the same mistake astounded him.

Wilson related this story to me because by the time I was a kid “consumer credit” had just become a reality and it deeply troubled him. He saw everyone becoming like the Smiths. Visa, MasterCard and American Express were coming on strong, and of course by then virtually everyone bought cars with loans and houses with mortgages. This was long before the average household carried the kind of debt burden that it does today. It was also long before the United States itself carried the kind of debt burden that it carries now.

I cannot imagine the reaction he would have to our circumstances now. For decades we have been a nation living “on time,” a country that has become almost wholly dependent on credit for everything.

The average US household carries $8,000 in credit card debt today, has a negative savings rate and little to no equity in the home in which it resides. I’m sure with times turning sour these numbers will only get worse. These frightening statistics are nothing, however, compared to our collective indebtedness we share as a result of being citizens of the United States.

We now carry 15 trillion dollars in debt by some estimates. 10 trillion of that was the accumulated national debt before the current financial crisis. Some sources estimate that the total of all taxpayer-backed bailouts pledged in recent months already totals five trillion dollars and is rising by the week. The two together get us to the 15 trillion mark.

But it gets still worse.

Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and other similar US government entitlement programs now have a future unfunded liability of an additional 41 trillion dollars. In simple terms this means that these programs are currently scheduled to disburse 41 trillion dollars more than they will take in through taxes over the course of their lifetimes.

Add it all up and divide by the number of taxpayers and you get to a truly astonishing and frightening fact. Assuming that the US has about 150 million taxpayers (close enough for this exercise) the grand total of all US government indebtedness including promises of future payments now totals about $373,000 per taxpayer!

If we all had hundreds of thousands of dollars in savings in the bank this would be scary enough, but on average we are all broke in our private lives. The truth is plain and unavoidable. During our lifetimes the government will be faced with a choice – come to each of us paupers asking for $373,000 or renege on the promises it has made to the borrowers that have been lending to it and all of the retirees that are counting on it.

I have no idea what will happen in the end, but I simply don’t believe it’s possible for us to honestly pay our way out of this mess. We have already gone beyond the point where you can raise taxes enough to do so. History has shown over and over again that when taxes are raised beyond a certain level overall productivity declines and tax receipts actually go down, not up. It’s kind of like trying to carry too much stuff at one time. Ultimately you just drop everything. I have to believe that we’ll reach that point long before we can raise the money necessary to pay off our nation’s debts.

The financial markets are starting to figure all of this out. Earlier this week I read here that there is talk in some circles of cutting the credit rating of the United States from it’s current AAA status for the first time ever. This has many implications, but the most urgent will become the fact that the cost of borrowing all of this money to cover the gap between taxes and spending will go up substantially. What happens after that, well… I shudder to think.

The word “calamity” hasn’t been popular for generations but it could make a big comeback. If you want to see how truly hard life was for people in Wilson’s generation I recommend a few movies and books that will give you a feel for it. For movies you could do a lot worse than Cinderella Man and Sea Biscuit. For books I can’t recommend the recent Water for Elephants enough. Older titles like Grapes of Wrath are, of course, indispensable. Of Mice and Men was both a good book and good movie. Absorb those works and reflect on how differently you have lived your life to this point than did the characters you see portrayed. Say a prayer that those two very different kinds of experiences don’t become more similar during the remainder of your life.

For his sake I’m glad that Wilson passed on many years ago. I never saw him become emotional but he was more than a proud man – he was a patriotic one as well. I think he would weep at our state today. Why we all could not have followed his kind of example to at least some degree is beyond me. It was in us I think, but somehow it escaped us in later generations. Just like the Smiths that he helped out in the 1950’s, we have been living “on time” too much and too long.

Time’s up.

My friend James over at the arc of time recently made an interesting post called “minority” that discusses the social dynamics as relates to race. James is a white guy living in Atlanta that began using the public transit system almost exclusively a few months ago. Aside from being a racially and socioeconomically atypical public transit rider in Atlanta, there is much irony in this. James, you see, owns a BMW X5. This may make him the only man on Earth that owns such a nice vehicle and yet chooses to ride the bus. It gives you some indication of just how excruciating Atlanta traffic can be. Do I miss it? Um, no. In morning rush hour here I have rocketed all of the way from my Uptown apartment to my office just south of DFW airport in 22 minutes. The same achievement in Atlanta would require a helicopter.

But I digress. James touches on some pretty sensitive subjects as regards to race, feelings of safety, etc. Essentially, he admits that while considering himself pretty enlightened, it has taken a long while to overcome feelings that imply a sense of danger when he is among many black people as the only white guy, or one of a very few.

You know how when you read something that contains a novel idea you start applying that concept to everything? I find myself doing that with James’ topic here. Over many years I have read some great writing on how the brain is wired. One of the many things you can glean from them is this – there are far more behaviors that are hard-wired into our biology than we readily accept. It is possible for our minds to overcome them, but only with lots of effort effort.

I bet that group dynamic behaviors as relates to race are like this. If you very obviously “don’t belong” in your environment as compared to everyone else around you I bet there are some really deep seated parts of the brain that whisper things like “Watch out!” and “Be alert!” simply because if you rewind the clock far enough into the past, simple differences much more subtle than skin coloring did in fact mean imminent threats to survival. Like it or not, we humans are primates. I think it is instructive to note that there thorough observations from Jane Goodall documenting troops of chimpanzees fighting what can only be described as wars of genocide. Their biological allegiance is not to “chimpanzee kind” but to their troop of chimpanzees. We humans think that all chimpanzees look alike. Apparently the chimps beg to differ.

Take a chimp from Troop A and drop him into a clearing full of chimps from Troop B and you’ve got yourself one very, very frightened chimp. Imminent threat to his survival is simply a cold fact and his biology knows it. The chimps that failed to perceive that threat got weeded out a very long time ago.

Now cut to James walking down Broad Street. His neocortex knows that he faces very little risk from his fellow humans around him, despite the fact that his skin is white and theirs is black. It can grasps statistics, prior experience walking down Broad Street, prior positive experiences interacting with black people, that physical threat could just as easily come to him from a white person, etc., etc.

But his lower brain? The medulla, the limbic system? They don’t know any of those things. They know mostly the same things that the chimp knows, and they don’t like what they see. James’ hair stands up. His pulse quickens. His eye movement increases. Deep under the mountain of his rational mind, James’ own private NORAD senses danger. The airspace above Canada is clear but the general staff nudges the threat level up to DEFCON 3 anyway. Something about those Russkies has them nervous today.

And that’s just the way it is.

But because James does have a rational mind, he does not run away to the “safety” of a crowd of white people. His somewhat embarrassed neocortex over-rides the limbic system and the medulla. “I can take care of this one guys,” it says.

This process is critical to the things that we call culture and civilization, and it is indeed an enlightenment. We fight base biological impulses all of the time. It’s why most every person that’s ever had a job has been able to avoid being fired for punching the boss, or a co-worker, or a customer. Generally it’s why we humans can defer various gratifications, or deny them when they come at the unfair expense of others. At least we can when we try.

Our rational minds enable us to be much more than what our base biology would otherwise allow. But it’s not always easy, and it’s not always fully within our control. Our higher brains can make the decision to keep riding the bus, but other parts of our minds still exercise enormous influence over our adrenal glands.

Those facts in and of themselves are not a failure of character and they do not make us racist. They only make us human. To be a racist you have to either give yourself over to those lower impulses, or otherwise build a world view by construction rationalizations which say that those lower impulses are actually correct.

Of course it complicates matters when statistics tell us that the larger measure of violence in American society are perpetrated by young black men. This makes the case still harder for the neocortex to argue. But not impossible. I think that this is not only why James can ride the bus, but why he can be honest and open regarding his feelings about the experience.

When it comes to feelings of fear created by things like loud noises, falling, reptiles, etc. we all seem to be able to accept the idea that this is wired into us for reasons related to survival. But when we reflect on reasons why we fear each other, we either seem to have trouble accepting that our wiring is what it is, and that we should congratulate ourselves when we can and do undertake the effort to overcome those limitations.

My friend James over at the arc of time makes an interesting post today on the neighbor that wants him dead, and the general sentiments of hate across the political spectrum.

In my experience, the difference in hate between the left and right is, most of the time, as follows: Outward expressions of hate from the right tend to come from the more ignorant and less educated, while outward expressions of hate from the left tend to come from comparatively well-educated (or perhaps indoctrinated?) and even the avant garde.

In other words, your average overt gay hater is a high school dropout. Your average openly intolerant “Christian” is someone who probably didn’t make it through college and doesn’t have a passport. Again, these are on AVERAGE.

The left is quite different. It has a long history of university educated revolutionaries plenty happy to kill off people by the million to achieve their social goals, and not just rhetorically. It also has plenty of modern rank and file that are viciously, outwardly, and visibly hateful toward people with whom they disagree. Let me be clear – this is NOT to say that all people on the left are like this. Quite to the contrary, I believe that for the most part the opposite is true. I think most left-leaning people are broadly tolerant. But those who aren’t can be quite shocking in their dehumanizing rhetoric.

I believe that this disparity in outwardly expressed hate is generally tolerated because the people toward whom the left is hateful are generally not associated with legally protected minority groups. The public is very clearly on guard to hold haters of minority groups such as black people, gay people, etc. to account and even as criminals. This holds true not just for law enforcement, but for employers also. The public at large and these same institutions are NOT tuned in to the idea of being on guard against those who hate Christians, white people, straights, conservatives, capitalists, etc. Popular culture in the form of virtually all broadcast media is tilted the same way. In fact, disdain for conservative values in popular media is palpable. Identifiably conservative, capitalist, Christian, etc. characters in television and particularly film are routinely depicted as evil, conspiratorial and otherwise villainous. Liberal figures, by contrast, are routinely protagonists or sympathetic figures and their values are often presented as the right ones by morality play. This legal and media environment combines to make it absolutely socially unacceptable to express outward hate for groups generally associated with liberals, but (marginally) acceptable to express hate against those generally associated with conservatives.

Don’t believe me?

Try this. Keep a notepad in your car for a month. During that time, count up the number of “F the President” bumper stickers you see, and all others with similar sentiments of disdain or hate which are directed toward groups nominally associated with conservatives. Do the same for how many “God Hates Fags” bumper stickers that you see, or any such similar expressions toward groups nominally associated with liberals. Also, check out the drivers of the observed vehicles. On average I bet the liberal hate is coming from someone that has the appearance of having attended college, while the conservative hate (if you can find it) is coming from someone that doesn’t have all their teeth. By the way, don’t play games of equivocation with this exercise. A bumper sticker that says “Abortion Stops a Beating Heart” is not an expression of hate. A strong viewpoint absolutely, but not hate. “F the President” is a statement of hate. These are your guidelines.

I bet your count is at least several to zero.

While the occasional ooze of hate from the ignorant right nauseates me, I can at least understand that their ignorance fuels their hatred. My question to the left is this: What’s your excuse?