On Being Selfish, Self-Righteous and a Hypocrite

Oh, where to begin?  The topic is so rich that one struggles to find a starting point.

So let’s start with me.  I am selfish, often self-righteous and a bit of a hypocrite.  I accept and embrace the incredible good fortune that has come my way by birth and circumstance, knowing full well that I probably do not deserve it any more than the hapless millions in this world that struggle through life with little or no good fortune.  Yet I do relatively little to rectify this.  

I also espouse and defend fairly liberal arguments for a more equal society, yet I fully enjoy my privileged status and take advantage of it at almost every turn.  I am not quite a classic limousine liberal, but I flirt dangerously close with the concept.  I am also at times self-righteous - more passionate about being right and being indignant at others’ refusal to acknowledge my wisdom than in the actual idea or cause I am advocating.

I know of some liberals who clearly have the courage of their convictions and are working tirelessly to change the world.  But most are like me – believing that there should be a better world yet not quite ready to pull the trigger on changing our lives to match that better world.

I have this thought experiment:  if you could press a button and God would re-order the world in a perfectly fair way to reflect the work rate, ethics and humanity of all its inhabitants, would you do it?  I know I wouldn’t – I fear the outcome.  It’s not that I am a bad person.  I am actually a nice person and I work pretty hard and have pretty good ethics.  But I know that my status and ‘comfort’ level in life would drop significantly in that scenario and I am simply not noble enough to push the button.

And what about conservatives?  Liberals may for the most part lack the courage of their convictions, but conservatives have managed to convince themselves that they somehow deserve everything they’ve got.  They do intellectual gymnastics to justify the inequities in this world and then they fume in almost apoplectic rage at the accusations that they lack compassion or empathy.  So the liberals live with their guilt-turned-to-apathy and the conservatives live with their guilt-turned-to-rage.

Now I know of course that the world is not a simple place and that human relations are complex and that economics is the ‘dismal science’ and that guilt is not all that productive and that fate is pretty damn arbitrary.  So I will not beat myself or others up too energetically on this theme.  But I do feel just a little bit better acknowledging the whole damn mess and how pathetically impotent we all are in this aspect of the human condition.

Democracy is for the Good Times

Democracy is for politics as capitalism is for economics: a flawed system that is justified only because it is generally a little less flawed than other systems.  When times are good, democracy is an affirmation of the best in humankind and a noble effort to enlist everyone in the goal of achieving a higher form of civilization.

But much of the world is currently experiencing one of the great weaknesses of democracy – the ease with which the majority is hoodwinked by a demagogue.  From Trump to Duterte to Erdogan to Putin to Netanyahu to Orban, strong man demagogues are back in vogue, using false bravado, fear and  nationalism to gain and maintain power.

The formula for their success is heavily based on uncertainty.  Even as the world enjoys one of the longest periods of economic stability in the last hundred years there is a pervasive sense that ‘winter is coming’.  The signs are out there – massive immigration, natural disasters due to climate change, power struggles between nations, Brexit and the unsettling social and economic changes that globalization has wrought.

When people are unsure of what the future holds for them they soon adopt a bunker or siege mentality.  The openness and magnanimity that have been slowly nurtured over the decades disappear in a flash.  Hard-eyed realism and a calculated self-interest take over.

Today’s uncertainties are legion – cultural changes, waves of immigration, automation, globalization, climate change, new superpower conflicts – and they rapidly erode the fragile good will of the majority.  And once that thin veneer of hope and optimism is gone, they are easy prey for the most despicable of leaders who will cynically probe and inflame their deepest fears and shamelessly encourage their basest instincts

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We need Plato’s Philosopher Kings now more than ever, but sadly there is little hope for their arrival.  The only Kings available now are the money-bloated plutocrats whose wealth and power have imbued them with massive confidence and arrogance but none of the wisdom, asceticism and humility that Plato specified.  The majority may see these megalomaniacs as realists and strong voices on their behalf, but the world has become too small for such unilateral strutting and bombast.

Democracy is ultimately at the mercy of the herd instinct.  And there is nothing more frightening than a herd gone amok and stampeding out of fear and ignorance.

Broken Countries and Immigration Woes

Sadly, the world is full of broken countries.  At the risk of generalizing, I would characterize most of Africa, Central and South America, and a good portion of the Middle East as seriously broken.  Some of these countries are broken because of war and terrorism.  Some are broken due to natural disasters and limited natural resources.  Some are broken because of tribal and ethnic hostility.  Almost all are broken by political corruption and plundered by oligarchies, plutocracies and military elites.

The wealthy, developed nations have contributed substantially to this brokenness.  The long history of colonization and imperialism by Europe and the United States has tragically altered the evolution of much of the developing world.  It is of course impossible to say how these areas would have fared had they been able to develop independently of the imperialist nations, but it seems clear that there are significant burdens that are a legacy of this earlier exploitation.

There is also a legacy of war and turmoil.  The Middle East and North Africa have been strategic battlegrounds for hundreds of years.  European powers, the Ottoman Empire, Russia and more recently, the U.S., have all contributed heavily to the morass that is the present Middle East. 

Africa and Latin America (not to mention Southeast Asia) were all proxy hot war sites for the cold war.  Every left-wing movement within these countries was met with strong opposition by the U.S., and we often supported incredibly ruthless authoritarian regimes, both politically and militarily, in our frantic efforts to stop the expected domino effect of world communism.  Ironically and sadly, this was a fear that proved to be entirely unwarranted, but it had a dramatically negative effect on many countries.

And then there is the drug war.  The U.S. and, to some extent, the European thirst for drugs has fueled criminal and political anarchy throughout Latin America, Afghanistan, and, to a lesser degree, other parts of Asia.  Central America is currently a dystopian nightmare as a result of five decades of U.S. drug demand and the unending debacle of our related military, law enforcement, immigration and judicial policies.

Central and South America were for the most part dysfunctional long before the drug wars.  The legacy of Spanish colonial oppression and the long and shameful history of U.S. economic imperialism and gunboat diplomacy doomed Latin America to an almost continuous trauma of coups, counter-revolts, military juntas, puppet governments and U.S. military or CIA intervention.

All of these countries have similar characteristics:  a weak middle class, incredible extremes of wealth and poverty, massive political, economic and judicial corruption, an interventionist military elite, and fragile economies that are heavily natural resource-based and/or internationally manipulated.  They may also be torn by racial, ethnic, religious or tribal strife.

They also have the common attribute that many of their citizens are fleeing them in the hope of reaching a less broken country.  Some are refugees from war or other types of conflict – Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Sudan, Myanmar are examples.  Some are fleeing crime and gangs – Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua come to mind.  And many are leaving because of a desperate economic situation.

When broken countries show no sign of improvement and no logical scenario for relief is on the horizon, is it any wonder that mass emigration occurs?  In an age where information about other worlds and opportunities is readily available, and travel is no longer quite as daunting, the decision to leave must be much easier to make.  In many cases, there is no option – war and desperation force one’s hand.

In the last ten years we have witnessed a worldwide wave of immigration from broken nations to advanced economies – mainly Europe and North America – that has unleashed a xenophobic counter reaction and resulted in dramatic shifts away from liberal democracy and globalization such as the Brexit movement, the Trump ascendancy, and the rise of neo-fascist and nationalistic organizations. 

Large scale immigration has often been met with hostility.  The United States touts its unique status as a country that welcomes and thrives on immigrants, yet it has had wave after wave of anti-immigrant fever and has often legislated aggressively against various aspects of immigration.

The fact is that most people will ultimately shed their humanitarian inclinations when they sense their own good fortune threatened in any way.  Jesus said welcome the stranger, but Christians throughout the western world have found it convenient to ignore or water down this exhortation.

Not only are developed nations severely limiting the immigration of desperate people from broken nations, but they are also skimming off the cream of the crop of those nations by offering educational or employment opportunities that later turn into permanent relocations of the best and brightest from the broken lands.

It is capitalism 101 to compete for the best talent in the world to strengthen one’s technical and industrial might, but this only contributes to the shocking further decline of the broken countries.  In some things there is indeed a zero-sum game, and the world may be careening recklessly toward unintended consequences of a very apocalyptic nature.

Is there hope for these broken countries?  Some have called for a Marshall Plan for Central America.  But the Marshall Plan’s biggest beneficiaries (the U.K., France and Germany) were countries that had a long history of industrial and middle-class success as well as political and judicial institutions that were conducive to a positive recovery.  Any aid sent to broken countries is likely to be squandered in great part and end up lining the pockets of the corrupt leaders and oligarchies.  When there is no institutional stability, it is almost certain that aid will fail, as it has so often in the past throughout the developing world.

Fixing broken countries would seem to require a more complete intervention by the world community, which of course smacks of paternalism and would be anathema to those countries.  Furthermore, the United Nations and other global organizations have tepid support from the most powerful nations, who are increasingly seeing their future in terms of aggressive and bellicose unilateralism, the United States under Trump being a prime example.

 And so we once again find ourselves impotent in the face of global problems, and immigration joins global warming, war and revolution, and genocide as cataclysmic issues that the world needs to solve jointly, but has neither the will nor the wisdom to do so.

Happy Easter!

Our Fascination with Celebrity

Read a good book lately?  Seen a good movie?  Listened to a compelling song?  Did you feel the need to research the author, the actor, the musician?  Most of us do.

We human beings are curious creatures.  We will endlessly inquire about the biographies and lives of celebrities while knowing relatively little about those close acquaintances, friends or family we meet on a daily basis.  Why do we find the lives of the rich, famous and powerful so fascinating?  Why do we feel compelled to investigate the background of total strangers?

It is true that biography has value sometimes in helping us understand certain aspects of our history and the development of human traits, foibles, and achievements.  But are the endless number of biographies and Wikipedia entries, with all their infinite detail, in any way necessary for a deeper understanding of the world?  Is it curiosity, sincere admiration, intellectual rigor, or is it simply a shared voyeurism that causes us to read hundreds of pages about some historic figure or a rock star?

Is it not enough to enjoy the artistic output of a singer, a musician, an actor or an artist?  Does it really add anything to our enjoyment to know about their childhood, their marriages, their divorces, their political beliefs?

Are we eager to put people on pedestals, or is it that we are hoping to find some tragic character flaw, some whiff of scandal that will make our own ordinary lives not such a damning indictment?  Or perhaps in some cases we are hoping to deepen our relationship and feel somehow closer to a cherished artist or leader.

Perhaps it is the mystery and the allure of celebrity that spurs us on.  Do we hope to obtain a tiny taste of this exalted status by reliving in detail the ascendancy of some famous personage?

Think of the many ways we worship at the altar of celebrity.  We are thrilled to find a famous person at the same restaurant or on the same airplane and desperate to relate the story of our encounter to others.  We have developed name-dropping into an art form and shamelessly exploit the tiniest association with anyone rich or famous in conversation with others who no doubt are either rolling their eyes or frantically searching their own internal rolodexes for a counter-name-drop.

Perhaps it is fitting that we become such sycophants to the famous, for it creates a wonderfully ironic living hell for them as they are forced to hide themselves from the public and endure endless incursions into their privacy.  It evens things out a bit, doesn’t it?  Poetic justice! 

On Cheap Thrills and Guilty Pleasures

I grew up in the halcyon days of family television in the 60’s.  Our family would gather around the television each evening after dinner and watch our favorite prime time shows until it was time for bed.  Each fall we would await the new lineups with eager anticipation.  Some of my favorites:  Man from U.N.C.L.E, I Spy, Secret Agent, Bonanza, Walt Disney Hour, Get Smart, Green Acres, Petticoat Junction.  I could go on and on because there were SO MANY!

A few years ago, in a moment of misguided nostalgia, I had Netflix deliver the first season of Man from U.N.C.L.E.  I watched the pilot episode for about 10 minutes and then put the DVD back in its package and out for the mail.  It was unbearable, even with all the pent-up desire to reminisce and relive my youth.

I was essentially a TV addict as a child.  Fortunately, my interest in sports and girls (not always in that order) overcame that addiction in late high school.  By college I was clean, and for many years I rarely watched TV.  Other hobbies and passions seemed to have more value to me. 

TV slowly crept back into my life after marriage, but by this time I was a bit more discerning in my viewing habits and very conscious of a certain hierarchy in my choices of entertainment.  Karen, who had rarely watched TV in her youth, and I had a few TV shows that we indulged in over the years - Cheers and ER come to mind – but we made a decision to ditch TV completely once our daughters were born.

Like a former alcoholic, I am now a bit self-righteous about my choices of entertainment, though I am in this, as in most things, a bit of a hypocrite.  At some point I began to demean much of mass media as being a ‘cheap thrill’.  I had become a snob, believing that serious literature, art films, and more sophisticated music (not pop!) were the only media worth one’s valuable time.

This conversion, though generally a salutary development in my life, came with a nasty side effect.  Whenever I engage in any activity that does not measure up to my somewhat arbitrary set of standards, I feel guilty.  After having only watched movies for many years, Karen and I began to sample some of the modern television series a few years ago.  We have seen several that we enjoyed tremendously – Breaking Bad, The Wire, Mad Men – to name a few.  But once we opened that Pandora’s Box, the question of how much TV is bad looms large in my life again.

Is it better to read a good book than to watch TV?  Is it better to watch an artsy foreign film than a Hollywood blockbuster with ever-more-spectacular special effects?  Is it better to play guitar or take a walk than to do any of these?  How many guilty pleasures should we allow ourselves?  Is there really a hierarchy of entertainment or is it all self-delusion?  Is spending all day playing video games no less virtuous than hiking in the mountains?

I suspect I am a bit obsessive about these questions.  I am not sure why I struggle with guilt when I spend time doing anything that I don’t view as ‘worthwhile’.  Perhaps it is my regret over a somewhat misspent youth – a sense that I could have accomplished more in life if I had been less self-indulgent.  Or perhaps it is my ever-increasing awareness of my mortality and with it a need to make every moment count.

The Joys of the Learning Curve

About five months ago I started learning how to play the banjo.  I had an old banjo from my middle school years when I was under the spell of a short infatuation with The Kingston Trio.  I took lessons for about 8 months until a more profound infatuation with high school athletics lured me away.  The poor banjo sat idle (or more accurately, hung idle, since it now adorns the wall of my music room!) for 50 plus years. 

I have been playing guitar off and on for much of my life and have acquired a modest level of competence – no Eric Clapton -  but I am capable of accompanying myself and others and performing short, mediocre solos.  I have always liked the sound of a banjo, so I decided to pick up my old banjo and use the rich lode of Internet lesson videos and websites to teach myself.

There is nothing quite like the first part of the learning curve.  When you start from zero, every advance is exhilarating!  If there is sincere and consistent effort, then there will shortly be a noticeable and pleasurable reward, no matter what one’s natural talent may be.  This acquisition of skill is terrifically exciting – like discovering a new world.  And at first it is quite consistent.  The more effort you put in, the more skill you acquire.  In many cases, it may even seem exponential in its growth because, of course, compared to a starting situation of no knowledge or capability at all, even small accomplishments loom large and excite the imagination.

But eventually the first plateau is reached, and the soaring first flight into the new world ends.  There will be more progress, but it will come in smaller, less exciting steps, and it will require longer periods of hard work where there is little visible improvement.  There will still be very tangible rewards, but not at the accelerated pace of that early, sublime encounter.

It is tempting in life to engage in many passionate embraces with new occupations, to become as the old saying goes, ‘a jack of all trades and master of none’.  There are so many interesting things in this world, and the urge to investigate new activities and develop new skills is hard to resist.

But it is also a good habit to develop some passions more completely, rather than simply fly from one to the next once the initial ardor is quenched.  There is deep satisfaction in having worked long and hard on a skill and slowly developing it over time.  However, there is no assurance that you will become a master.  In the modern online world, where we are confronted with incomparable examples of mastery in every possible category, it is easy to become dispirited and abandon a quest because we suspect we will never attain those levels of expertise. 

The 10,000 hour rule, popularized by Malcolm Gladwell in Outliers, implied that we can obtain mastery if we are willing to devote ourselves to a project.  But in recent years, this claim has been debunked as only part of the formula for mastery of a discipline.  And who has 10,000 hours anyway?  Few of us will become superstars in anything we attempt.  If our goal is to find fame or fortune, then we are likely on a quixotic journey. But the slow, steady progress that is the necessary result of any good faith effort in an activity is reward enough if we cast vanity aside.

As in most things in life, a balance of acquiring many new skills and committing more profoundly to a few is probably the best approach.   Still, I do love the first heady joys of the learning curve.  They seem to be in perfect synchrony with my somewhat restless spirit!

A Sensible Approach to Reducing Abortions

One of the most passionate issues in the culture wars is the question of how the government should legislate abortion.  Abortion has been legal in the U.S. since 1973, when the landmark Roe vs. Wade Supreme Court decision was handed down.  The decision launched bitter disputes between pro-choice and pro-life groups and has had a significant impact on political and judicial life in the U.S. since that time.

What makes this topic so divisive is its intersection with religious, personal liberty and moral questions. To many religious people who feel that a fetus is already a child of God, it is incomprehensible to allow an abortion.  To many others, it is incomprehensible that the state can legislate any control over a woman’s body, including its reproductive organs.

Here are some basic facts about abortion before and after Roe vs. Wade:

• Abortions occurred in large number (estimates vary but range between several hundred thousand and well over a million) before 1973.  Wealthy and middle class women could always get abortions by traveling to a place where they were legal.  Poor women obtained abortions too, but generally through providers with limited medical expertise and/or facilities, and often suffered serious health consequences.
• The history of abortion is closely related to the history of contraception and sexual practices.  It was only in 1965 that the supreme court struck down laws against distributing contraception to married couples, and only in 1972 to unmarried couples!
• The primary quasi-official statistics on the number of induced abortions per year, which the CDC tracks from state-submitted data, are
• 1972 (pre-decision) – 587,000
• 1973 – 616,000
•  Increasing steadily to a peak in 1990 at 1,429,000
• Decreasing steadily thereafter to 2017 level of 616,000
• Public opinions on abortion vary year to year but have generally shown that a majority support some legal abortion at least through the first trimester of pregnancy.
• Individual states have enacted laws to restrict abortions and/or make it more difficult for providers to offer abortions.  Some of these laws have been struck down by the judiciary, but they have definitely made abortions more difficult in some states.

There is debate about why abortions have declined substantially from 1990 to the present.  The availability of contraceptives, particularly long-term IUDs, and the efforts to publicize birth control methods and teach sex education are certainly major factors.  It is also argued by pro-life groups that the restrictions in some states have reduced the number of abortions.  However, abortions have declined almost equally in both states with restrictions and those without.  The number of unwanted pregnancies and teen pregnancies have declined dramatically over that period.  

The rate of teen pregnancy declined from 59.9 per thousand teens in 1990 to 20.3 per thousand in 2016.  An amazing and very encouraging statistic!  This was certainly NOT due to changes in sexual practices, but due to use of contraceptives.  The U.S. still has the largest teen pregnancy rate of any developed country.  I would guess that it is primarily due to lack of sex education and availability of contraceptives, a situation we could fairly easily address.

Does anyone really want to go back to the days of back alley abortions?  Many of those who have rallied to the banner of pro-life were not around before Roe v. Wade and are not aware of how many tragic deaths and medical problems resulted from desperate attempts at abortion.  Unless we establish a draconian police state, a change in law will simply change where and how abortions occur, not whether they occur.  There might be less abortions, but probably not significantly less.  The availability now of chemical forms of abortion has changed the game and these chemicals would certainly go underground if the laws changed.  They would be easily obtained and create a new ‘drug war’ that would benefit no one. 

The obvious middle ground on the abortion issue is for all parties to avoid the emotional polemics and rally around the  common goal of reducing abortions.  We must recognize that the most realistic and effective way to accomplish this is to make contraception readily available to every woman (and man) and to encourage parents to face the facts of the current sexual culture and counsel their children on the use of contraceptives.  Sexual practices may change over time, but it is delusional to think that denying young people contraceptives will somehow result in less premarital or teen sex and the resultant abortions.

We will never completely satisfy those who think that abortion is a murderous sin that can never be allowed.  But neither should we be cavalier about abortion, for many good reasons.

The coming battles in the Supreme Court are likely to cause great emotional turmoil on all sides.  Like so many Supreme Court issues, the constitutional issues are a smokescreen and the war is really over the evolution of how people view our society, our ethics, our morals, our principles, religion and life itself.  The Supreme Court can lead or it can be dragged into the future.  Contraception, like premarital sex, is a fact of life and will never again be outlawed.  Abortion is primarily a by-product of inadequate contraception and ignorance.  Everyone wants fewer abortions – let’s work together to achieve that goal.