Month: September 2010

Most every culture has this notion of stages of history. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, it is what I will hopefully be forgiven for calling the myth of Eden. The Greeks had it. The Hindus had it. The Chinese had it.

In some prehistoric, now inaccessible period, everyone was honest. People did good work, paid their debts, and lived tranquilly with one another from birth to death.

In my view, all modern Fundamentalisms derive from a similar myth, namely that back THEN, all the devotees of their faith were pure, nice, kind, devout: BETTER. To return to the Fundamentals is to return to this state. Yet all modern fundamentalisms, when analyzed, are at variance with what little we know about such periods. They are at odds with the universal patterns of history and human life. We see no perfection today, and it is hard to imagine it really existed back then. What we see ample evidence of, on the contrary, is relatively pedestrian exploits getting turned into myths. Rosa Parks becomes someone who INTENDED to spark a civil rights movement, when in fact she was just tired, stubborn, and wanted to stay just where she was, come hell or high water.

Socialism is a sort of inverted myth. It projects into the future the same sort of paradise, with the difference that it does not go to the trouble of learning about the past and facts of human life in building the myth. Somehow, the Marxist Fundamentalists believe, a brighter future can be brought into being simply by destroying everything that they think is bad. It’s been tried. As common sense would have predicted, it didn’t work. There is no Worker’s Paradise in Cuba, there wasn’t in the Soviet Union, and little but horror in China, until ideological deviants started them on the path from pure totalitarianism to a Fascist oligarchy. Since their government plays favorite with “private” enterprise, and pursues consciously national policies, we might even term their system Mercantilist. Their investment here is intended to get our “specie”–money–there. Then they want to knock us off our throne in the currency world.

Be that as it may, I wonder, though. Consider ancient China. They were not densely populated, and they seem largely to have worked their whole lives in the fields, with periodic ritual punctuations, and then died. Let us suppose that our souls are not in fact equivalent to that biological structure called the brain. Given available scientific evidence, this is an eminently tenable hypothesis.

They lived their lives, then died, then lived similar “lives” in the afterworld, making their religions congruent with reality. They did not know to be unhappy or to reject their lives, since they knew no different. “There is no greater curse than desire”, wrote Lao Tzu some 2,500 years ago. Could that be as good as it gets?

On one level yes, on another no. Yes, because we won’t change the facts of life and death any time soon, if ever, and the reality is that the contentments of good work, good rest, and good company is quite sufficient for most normal demands for happiness.

No, because it seems to me that globalization and the advent of science have enabled the possibility of collating the shared knowledges of not just cultures which exist today, but many past cultures, such that we can do better.

Now, Socialists talk about designing better societies. What they have in mind is scientists in lab coats, doing experiments on rats, which is to say “the People”. They do the thinking, then their ideas are imposed by force.

What I have in mind is GOOD IDEAS, that are ADOPTED willingly by people who see their value. This is how organic, qualitatively rich change comes about. And it is quite possible to see good things in our future, if we are able to hold off those demented souls who want to destroy us. First, they commit moral suicide, then like people who commit actual suicide, they want to bring others with them.

Nothing is certain but change, but one can always still hope for the best, expect the worst, and muddle on in that state of confusion and mystery which our lot here.

This is the German word for “alienation”, and the one Marx used to describe the social effects of industrialization. I am going to “riff” a bit, thinking out loud. This will be choppy, perhaps incoherent at times, but hopefully in the end thought provoking. [I just posted this, and will simply comment that I did deal with the stated topic, but so indirectly very few will follow me. So be it]

I’ve been feeling a bit of languor and listlessness lately, which is an odd combination, like when you simultaneously want to nap and fidget. What I do in my mind’s eye, is try to vision a path forward, using the entirety of my perceptual apparatus, my mind, my emotions, my intuition, and even my kinesthetic sense (I feel a sense of being a battering ram, going again and again against the gate of my own stupidity).

Our world is in constant flux. Everything is always moving, but it moves according to approximate patterns, in the social realm, and what seem to be relatively precise patterns in the physical realm, albeit unpredictable ones in the case of formally complex systems, like the weather.

In the social realm I had a vision this morning, just laying in bed before getting up, of our entire society as if in a corporate cubicle farm. Everyone is talking, talking talking. But there are barriers, like 8′ high cubicle walls, throughout the space. At times they get so dense that you can’t move if you are trapped in them. But still people are talking talking talking. Just imagine the proverbial conversation around the water cooler/coffee pot. Did you hear what so and so said? What do you think about x,y,z?

Everywhere islands, cut off from one another perceptually. They can’t see one another. They can’t hear one another. And they don’t notice or care. In my mind, I removed all the barriers, and you could just suddenly feel the air move again, and realize that everyone had been holding their collective breaths. You can ignore things consciously, but our animal nature is never fooled into thinking an unnatural situation is comfortable. As an emotion, an instinct, it just doesn’t have the capacity to plan. That is what our reason is for.

We are decadent. The Chinese are decadent. The Japanese are decadent. The United States is decadent. I say this not because we are lazy, or dishonest, or any of the other traits the reader may associate with that word (although plainly corruption is endemic in China, whether it is nominally legal or not).

What I mean is this: we have lost the Big Picture, our shared meaning systems. Now, self evidently the meaning system of the Chinese has never been quite like our own. They had Confucianism, some Buddhism, some Christianity, some Taoism, some Islam, and some “other”. They have, now, Communism, which is a dream that faded, that was never really more than a fuzzy image anyway. Their new religion, likely, is wealth, as has been America’s for some period of time.

Now, meaning systems layer on meaning systems. One can pursue wealth through the virtues of hard work and thrift. One can value family. One can value religion. One can value personal integrity and honor. All of these sorts of things are in constant flux. Our specific reasons for living and doing vary in importance day to day and hour to hour. I coined the term “Henomoralism” to describe a philosophical position in which different values can be weighted differently depending on circumstance. Pragmatically, I think we do this of necessity daily. I could be at work, trying to make money, but I decided it was better overall if I stayed home to get my feelings and thoughts out. This does not mean I don’t value work.

In using the word decadent, what I would like to point to is the fact that as far as I know ALL human societies have fallen far, far short of the optimal use of their physical and cultural resources. There will have been exceptions to this–perhaps a forgotten African or American Indian tribe–but in general this has been true.

No large human civilization has valued Goodness in an authentic way. They have not sought to maximize happiness tempered by a tragic sense of life as short, and necessariliy filled with struggle, for optimal personal growth.

I look at nations like Denmark, Norway and Sweden, and they are comfortable. By self report, they are happy. A Dane once told me some high percentage of Danes are literally paid to “test” beds. They lie in them for three hours. They get a year off when they have kids. Students don’t have to pay their way through college. All of these things are attractive, and I’m not sure at some point in our future that we Americans might evolve sufficiently morally to consider some of them. Right now, our Democratic Party is absolutely not to be trusted with anything approaching that sort of power. They will not use it wisely or with justice, since they are corrupt. Theirs is the politics of hatred, not integration.

At the same time, I think many Americans would gladly give up the prospect of “making a million” in exchange for the elimination of the petty worries of life, such as unemployment, deep poverty, and paying for their education. What would be the harm in this, if the people running the government were actually benign, thoughtful, and honest?

The traditional conservative argument is that economic growth cannot happen if risk is not rewarded. Risk is not rewarded if the incentive of wealth is eliminated through taxation. Creation happens in Capitalism because it pays well.

Moving past this, though, it seems to me that you only need so much to be happy. Does life really change when you transition from being worth $1 billion to $2 billion. You have twice as much money, are you twice as happy? I do believe that greed, when directed along the channel of honest competition through effort and innovation, is economically beneficial. This is quite clear. This is the root of America’s success. Yet, how much is enough?

The task, it seems to me, is how to build a global human civilization that will endure happily indefinitely. Socialists have in mind the imposition of global tyranny, and economic rationing directed by, well, them. It is the task of Liberals to imagine an alternative. A true Liberal, in my view, is someone who believes that no final, general, unchanging answer to the meaning of life is possible, or desirable.

In my own view, pain is a necessary component of life. The task is not to eradicate it–as the Danes have tried to do–but transcend it. I picture them lying in comfortable beds, having time for a regular “nooner”, sitting around drinking coffee discussing sports and the weather, and yes doing good work when they make it in the office. This is an attractive image, and the question as to whether or not it is economically sustainable is an empirical one. With a reform of our financial system, such as I have proposed, I think it could be implemented globally eventually.

Perhaps this is the next step. I am so used to struggle it is hard from me to imagine another way.

At the same time, something is missing: a spiritual component. Perhaps the best analogy of this I can think of is from Doris Lessing’s book “The Marriages between Zones Three, Four, and Five”. In that book, there are three different dimensions, as I recall, although they may have been formatted as different lands. Zone Three is the Zone of the women. It is the zone of peace and comfort, and beauty. It is the land of the Danes. Zone Four is the Zone of war, of men. It is an ugly world, whose only real beauty is the magnificent discipline and martial valor of the men. We might perhaps there think of the Prussians. A race of enlightened beings called the Canopeans rules both realms, and they give the order for the Queen of Zone Three to move to Zone Four and marry the King there, the General.

Once there, in their first meeting, if memory serves, he rapes her. Over time, they accomodate to one another, and even feel affection for one another (if that sounds implausible, consider the case of Napoleon and Marie Walewska; we forget the sheer difficulty and horror with which our history is filled, and how tough people used to be, and still are in some places). Then one day the word comes that the Queen is to return, and the King instead married to a warrior princess of Zone Five, a wild place I believe modeled on Afghanistan, which Lessing had visited.

There, they were wild. Unlike in Zone Four, where everything was patterned and regimented, and replicated exactly with precision, the inhabitants of Zone 5 were a bit insane. They would make up songs. They would ride places for no reason. They had a song which went in part: “Teach me to love my hunger/Send me hard winds off the sands.”

The Queen, in the meantime, had tried to visit Zone Two, a much more advanced region, and been unable to breath the air. She lacked what Zone Five provided, which was a certain austerity, harshness, wildness, and yet freedom. She had lived in the order of beauty her entire life.

To live a stable, comfortable, ordered life is to stagnate. The realization of this fundamental truth is in my view one of the reasons for the prodigious success of the Harry Potter novels. They have the freedom there to fail. Their social order incorporates the regular risk of death. It expects its members to think, and does not molly-coddle them, which is the opposite of the nanny culture of contemporary Britain.

There is no straight path forward. There is no simple answer. For many Leftists, the thought of revolution meets for them this need for voluntary sacrifice. It gives them a reason to live. That is the point of Leftism: it is not a political system at all, but a very poorly thought out answer to the meaning of life. This is why I label the malignant, Communistic portion of it “Cultural Sadeism”. Note Cultural includes the word cult. It is a way of life oriented around assuming power over other human beings, such that those people lose their freedom and with it the possibility of making their own way to their own version of happiness. They intend, quite literally, to inflict suffering on others, as a way of avoiding in their own lives the reality that pain cannot be eliminated in this world, finally.

Let us posit that man and machine can be welded together, in what I think futurists call the “Singularity”. Does this solve the problem of what to do? If you can do anything you want, does that make your life better or worse? Does it necessarily mean we all get along? Does it eliminate the possibility of ennui and restlessness? Does it, in short, eliminate pain? I don’t think so.

Again: the task is not to eliminate pain, but transcend it, and that is the point and purpose of what we might term spiritual “technology”. Yoga. Meditation. Ascetic practices. Fasting. Serving others.

To build a non-decadent future we need both comfortable beds, and the risk of sudden death, failure, and emotional, physical, and mental pain. This appears contradictory, but I see no way around it.

Musings for this morning. I feel better. I would recommend to anyone who might be reading this that they pick up Lessings “Canopus in Argos” series. I read them over a Christmas break in college, with some rum. They made a lasting impression. The only quality I value which Lessing seems to lack is a sense of humor. I readily forgive her that fault though. George Bernard Shaw had an excellent sense of humor, and yet he wanted to plunge the Earth into a global tyranny. To seek perfection is to not seek sincerely at all.

I’m tired, so this may not come out well, but I’ve been wanting to do a post on Lady Gaga for some time. I remember the first song of hers I heard, “Poker Face”. That song has two parts: the grim, sadomasochistic part (“when it’s love if it’s not rough it isn’t fun”), and the sort of soaring, hopeful part, where she shows she really does have a very pretty, innocent sounding voice. It’s like there’s this compulsive darkness, punctuated by a dove flying to a cloud on a sunny day.

In my view, this is her split. She broke. She was an unsuccessul singer with a very normal name and appearance, and then apparently decided to play the game the way it is played in this society. She accepted that she had to sacrifice her innocence and–perhaps–protective barriers to make it. She sold and sells sex.

In our day to day relation, I think we often mirror this. I went for the first time to a local nightclub known as what we called a “meat market” in high school a few weeks ago. There was this compulsive energy to it. You could feel everyone looking for someone, then getting ready to dump them. Processing people. Processing relations, like so much pasteurized cheese in plastic wrappers. This corresponds to the dark part of that song, which is where the energy in most of her songs is.

Yet, for most people–and I think this applies particularly to women, who are in general more in tune with their emotions, and more imaginative than men–there is also this hope, that is non-compulsive, of falling in love, or a return–for at least some brief time–to innocence.

We balance these things. Pornography feeds compulsion. Religion, and an appreciation of beauty, and moral imagination feed the second.

I feel pity for Lady Gaga, since I think she feels a lot of conflict and pain. She deals with it, since women are tough. She is an open, creative spirit, with a lot of pressure on her to cultivate what amounts in my view to the pornographic side of our culture.

In general, I think we should use our celebrities less ruthlessly. Our greed for sharing their lives vicariously in some ways makes us vicious. We ask too much, from some.

In her particular case I am simply going to offer a prayer that God guide and protect her from losing her way.

It surprised me to learn that author and activist David Horowitz, in trying to launch and lead a campaign to deindoctrinate/liberalize our universities, met resistance not just from the Left, but from the Right as well.

I read Little Green Footballs for a time, but I found the guy behind it seemingly more focused on attaining a feeling of moral and intellectual superiority than in substantive discussion. Specifically, I noticed that he often used the Leftist tactic of sarcastic mockery, and still does. Now he has repudiated the Republican Party entirely, apparently, which should come as a surprise only to those who failed to see the intellectual package that was on display regularly.

Pondering all of this, I felt I might make a comment or two. First and foremost, we are fighting a well funded adversary, that has been waging a well planned, well executed campaign for the minds of our children for some 50 years or more. They lose some along the way, but the fact of the matter is that most adults in this nation are not able to fully explain or understand some of the most important and basic aspects of our system, such as Medicare, Social Security, the Federal Reserve, and what the Constituation actually says about religion and abortion. Yet, they still have strong opinions.

What I see on the right, often, is good philosophy. I see people taking the time to articulate and defend arguments. Yet, so often, they do not follow up by taking the time to interact with people whose views are similar to their own, but a little different. In fact, sometimes they get nasty with one another, as LGF Charles Johnson did with Robert Spencer several years ago. I’m 100% behind Spencer, BTW, even though I am not quite as pessimistic as he seems to be.

It seems to me that many conservatives either want to be smart, or be heard. Obviously, talkshow hosts are mainly looking for an added source of revenue from an existing fan base. Most of the people who buy their books are already in the fold.

It is not enough to have good, defensible ideas. What we have is a pragmatic problem, and this is reaching across the space that divides us to people who are not already dogmatic and ardent conservatives.

This requires a qualitative shift. We need to not only propose good ideas, but propose them in the context of DIALOGUE. This will start with all conservatives getting along better with one another. The national Republican Party is unsure what to make of the Tea Partiers. They need to talk. They need to communicate.

And in my view they need to do it in this way: screw the political “realities” and calculations: What is the truth? How can we describe, say, the institution of Sociel Security with as much accuracy and relevant detail as possible? Is it solvent? Can it be made solvent? How? How many different ways? Is it the best solution for the problem it is trying to solve? Precisely what problem IS it trying to solve? How well is it working? What alternatives exist which protect what is best in it, and eliminate what is bad in it? Etc.

Human vanity causes so much unnecessary suffering and grief. People don’t start trying to understand first, then discuss later, but rather to propose an opinion, and get it adopted. This is stupid.

Propaganda begins where honest discussion stops. The reality is that conservatives have their propaganda too. Social welfare programs are intrinsically bad. We don’t owe our fellow citizens anything but a chance to succeed. Government is never the answer. True patriots back all wars.

I am what I call a conservative Liberal, where Liberalism is the doctrine that the sole essential role of government is to protect me from my fellow citizens, and from foreign invaders. At the same time, I am not unwilling to grant, say, State governments the authority to implement some sort of minimal social safety net. In time, if we grow the economy sufficiently, or restructure our economy in the right way, there will be no NEED for such precautions, as poverty will be abolished.

It seems to me, though, that we need to be willing to think all thoughts. We need to be willing to compromise at times with people making valid arguments. Now, I see no valid arguments for Obamacare, so I oppose it entirely. But for something like Social Security, or Medicare, there is room for compromise. The simple reality is that these programs cannot continue in the form in which they exist currently for all that much longer. They are broke. This requires us to make decisions, and we will make the smartest decisions if we discuss our options dispassionately, and include as many viewpoints which are at least potentially valid as possible.

The Tea Party is an energy. It is a frustration. It lacks direction. Our problem is not high taxes, but excessive government. Obama has not even raised taxes yet. He has just radically increased our debt, and subverted some key components of personal liberty.

This is a time for personal and collective reflection. We need to think about what we are doing. We need to be humble, and listen to other viewpoints. We need to be as inclusive as possible, and that trait alone will over time destroy the hard left, since most of the people who occupy it don’t really grasp just what the ideological leaders really want. This is a universal in radical movements, where relative moderates are deceived into supporting radicals, until those radicals get power, and throw them in jail, “reeducate” them, or just shoot them for simplicity.

This is not the most cogent thing I’ve ever written, but hopefully some of this makes sense.

For what it’s worth, in writing this, this is the joke I had in mind.

I have no idea if even one person reads this blog, but if you have subscribed anonymously to it, and received the post on the Obamalied, I wanted to say I deleted it, since it failed to meet my own editorial standards. Specifically, it was a bit mean spirited, which is unnecessary. It is not necessary to hate the haters; it is just necessary to fight them as efficaciously as possible, and for as long as necessary.

In point of fact, bitterness, vitriol, sustained anger, and enmity damage the person holding those feelings, without doing anything whatever to the person or people to whom such feelings are directed. It does damage your ability to perceive, and the fact is that we are in both a tactical and a strategic war. Truth is on our side, if we continue to value it. If we value victory over truth, then it won’t be on any side at all. It will fall and lie derelict and prostrate, while warring factions run it into the ground while screaming their religious adherence to it. This, of course, is the pattern of history, one which we are trying to transcend.

I’ll say more in a moment, in another post.

If I had to put what we need to spur job creation in one word, that word would be confidence. The people running our country have never run businesses. They have never had to decide whether or not to risk their own money on a business expansion, or a new employee, or a new location, or a new marketing campaign. They don’t know about the sleepless nights such people spend worrying they have made a mistake.

The people running our country at the moment–I am going to call them Salariatarians, after an off-hand comment by Keynes–have existed their entire lives in environments in which their success depended entirely on their political acumen, which is to say their ability to read a crowd or person, and successfully say the things that earned them trust, and votes. This applies most obviously to holding elective office, but also to sitting on the board at some foundation or other, or even simple corporate politics.

Business owners face the jungle. It helps if they are liked, but in the end they survive or die based on the decisions they make. If they are too hasty they fail; if they are too slow they fail. If they are unlucky they fail, and if they are smart and lucky they succeed.

As things stand, it is impossible to judge the next five years. It is impossible to foresee the full extent of the complications, red tape, added costs, and business restrictions that will attend the implementation of Obamacare, if we can’t get it reversed. It is impossible to foresee the effects if some Cap and Tax law is passed, or if the EPA successfully does an end run around the democratic process and directly imposes limits on energy producers. It is difficult to foresee what the new financial “reform” law will mean. It’s hard to know when the real estate glut will end. It’s impossible to foresee the tax situation in 3 years, except that our choices are massive cuts in spending, massive new debt accumulation, or massive tax increases.

It takes balls to be a producer, to be an entrepreneur, to be one of the people who jumps in the deep end. It’s easy enough to condemn their lifestyles once they succeed, but very few people succeed in a big way in this country without the long term personal sacrifice of leisure, and peace of mind.

These people are worried. I know some of them. They are the people who will be creating jobs, when job creation begins anew.

To say that Obama doesn’t get it is really an understatement. The reality is that the politics in which he was raised, and which he has continued his entire adult life, are ANTITHETICAL to job creation. Like FDR, he has, in the end, an contempt for the Capitalists who provide all the sustainable jobs in this country.

So when you look at the sorts of proposals he is putting forward, like a $50 billion spending spree on things we don’t need, we should see just a bit of violence in there. He is not willing to let things work their course. He wants to DEMAND the creation of jobs, to IMPOSE the creation of jobs, by using taxpayer money to create them.

An economy is like a garden. You can’t know what seeds will come up, but you can know that if you weed things regularly, if you water it regularly, and if it gets plenty of sunshine, it will do far better than if you neglect any of these factors. We can call the sunshine luck–over time, it’s always there, but the extent varies. We can control the rest.

Getting our unemployment rates back down will take time, and the starting point is to stop doing the things that are scaring the very people who are needed to create those jobs. FDR did the same thing. He imposed punitive taxes on the wealthy, and spoke out regularly against Capitalists as a class, even if he didn’t use that word.

They responded by sitting on their hands, and letting things take their course. That’s one of the principle reasons the Recession of 1929 became such a disaster. There are of course other factors, but that is in my view an important one.

First, an extensive quotation from the book “3 Empires on the Nile.”

In the hours after the fall of Khartoum, the Ansar [army] had massacred, mutilated, and decapitated thousands of its inhabitants. They had enslaved thousands more, and had driven many out of the city and into the desert. [Chief British official] Gordon’s mutilated remains had been thrown down a well. After the slaughter, the Mahdi’s three khalifa’s had rounded up the female survivors, brought them to his camp at Omdurman, and divided them into groups according to skin color. Penned up under the sun, many still spattered with the blood of their murdered husbands and sons, they had awaited their division among the Ansar’s leaders.

The Mahdi chose first, taking all the girls of five years of age for future service in his harem. Then his three khalifas chose their concubines, followed by the rest of the Ansar. Those women who were not enslaved were left to starve. For weeks after the fall of Khartoum, women wandered naked through Omdurman’s market, begging for food. Mothers who had given birth in the street lay dying with their babies.

The Mahdi’s emirs took the best gardens in Khartoum. Khalifa Abdul-lashi camped in the grounds of Gordon’s palace; Khalifa Sharif in the Catholic Mission; and Khalifa Ali wad Helu took the house of Albert Marquet, a murdered merchant. The Ansar moved into the houses of the poorer Copts and Egyptians. Mirrors and fine china were destroyed with axes, cloth was hacked into squares to decorate jibbas, and gold and silver were stacked in the Mahdi’s personal treasury.

Smashing up General Hick’s stables for materials, the Mahdi built two wooden houses, one for him and one for his harem. Publicly he continued to urge moderation on his followers, but in private he indulged in Turkish sensualities. The Mahdi developed a taste for Persian rugs. He dressed in fine linen shirts and an embroidered silk cap. After years of sleeping rough, he took to sleeping in a bed taken from the house of a Khartoum merchant. After the hunger, he treated himself to colossal feasts. He had always been heavy set, and the splendour and savories made him enormously fat.

He acquired so many concubines that they could no longer to crammed into their quarters and had to be accomodated in Gordon’s palace. Occasionally he ventured into Khartoum for “pleasure and debauchery” in the palace of his enemies; as in the days of his youth, the largest building in Khartoum was again a seraglio. He received his inner circle reclining on a gold-brocaded pillow; while female attendants fanned him with ostrich feathers or massaged his feet, hands and neck. When he washed, the dirty water was distributed among those fortunate enough to drink it for its magical powers; the palace eunuchs also sold small pouches of the earth on which he walked. When he presented himself to the faithful at the mosque, he changed into his old jibba, waddling through the crowd as his eunuch attendants cleared a path with whips, and women fell to kiss his footsteps. When he returned to his hut, he took off his jibba.

Outside the Mahdi’s hut, a shanty town spring up at Omdurman. In the heat of early summer, with unburied bodies still littering Khartoum and Omdurman, these ramshackle huts become a hive of disease.

Disease is what killed the Mahdi, likely typhus from a flea from one of the many rats in the area.

Several points. First, in our air conditioned homes, equipped with telephones we can use to call the police, refrigerators filled with food, and an alert and well armed military to protect us, we forget that history is filled to overflowing with scenes like this one.

People who literally fear to hurt a fly, in their ignorance, countenance scenes like this. An excellent example is our loss in Vietnam. Scenes much like this played out throughout Vietnam and Laos, and spread to Cambodia, once Pol Pot used our abandonment of the Cambodian government to seize power. There may not have been harems, but can anyone doubt that cruel men–with the literal power of life and death–did not exact “favors” from the women under their control, whether given voluntarily or not? Of course they did.

To do good in the world, you must understand how it works. You have to grasp that evil is an endemic human condition, and that much or most of the evil done is done in the name of the Good. This does not negate the utility of the word Goodness, but it means you have to look at details prior to taking any label at its stated value.

Secondly, this rough process is how Islam was spread. Like Napoleon’s a thousand or so years later, Muhammad’s armies were paid in booty. They got to keep what they “liberated”. They got to set themselves up as rulers, take whatever they wanted immediately–importantly, including as many women as they could handle–and exact special taxes from all non-Muslims and regular taxes from everyone else, like rulers everywhere for all of recorded history. Islam, quite literally, was a way of moving up in the world.

Third, the Mahdi was a saint, according to his followers. He is the namesake of the “Mahdi Army”, which faces us and the Iraqi government even today. And his behavior is here recorded. Most of us would find it repugnant. Colonialism was an evil, but there are many times and places where the British were far, far more just and humane than had been the previous rulers, or than the autocrats who followed them.

Fourth, in pondering various religions, one is struck by the models offered. In Christianity, Jesus heals the sick, says to turn the other cheek, and to love your neighbor. You have a vivid picture of an individual figure doing acts of charity. For most of us, we picture Muhammad on a horse leading military campaigns. There is no picture of him doing good deeds, smiling at small children.

Yet, Islam is not without calls to mercy, charity, and goodness. Here is a piece I found on the internet, that I found encouraging.

For the modern and Islamic worlds to integrate, we need to agree that Goodness is something which is not found within any single religion, and that all religions can and have been perverted from what one hopes were good starts. As an example, the Old Testament records accounts of the Jews putting towns “to the ban”, which meant they slaughtered every man, woman, and child.

Certainly, Christians were scarcely “Christian” in the slaughter that attended the reconquest of Jerusalem. In fact, it likely looked much like the picture we saw above with the Mahdi.

Religion, as I see it, is a template within which perception operates. As I understand it, the core of Islam is simply declaring that there is one God, and that his name is Allah. Saying this several times makes you a Muslim. In addition to this are the pilgrimage to Mecca, 5 daily prayers, charity, and adherence to Ramadan.

None of this is incompatible with Goodness, with sincerity, empathy, and goodwill. In fact, viewed properly, all of these things can work to build better human beings. It is the claim that Islam does just that that causes the faithful to be faithful.

At the same time, it seems to me that people with common sense decency can agree that slavery is wrong, and particularly sexual slavery. It is still practiced in the Middle East and Africa. It is authorized by the Koran, but it is wrong, and I think most reasonable people should be able to see that.

We often see this distinction between “radical Islam”, and “moderate Islam”. To my mind, the distinction is that between trying to do the right thing for the right reasons, and commiting acts of evil in the name of God. No religion has been exempt from this, but at this moment in our planet’s history it seems to me Islam is, of all the religions, most in need of self reflection on this point.

Here are the four core beliefs which to my mind would confirm moderation:

1) The affirmation that Arab nations owe their brethren who were made refugees in the war they started back in 1948 a place in their collective homes, and that Israel has the right to exist.

2) That intentionally targeting and killing non-combatants for political ends is contrary to the Islamic code of combat, international law, and common decency.

3) That Sharia law is subordinate to the laws of the nation in which they live.

4) That slavery is wrong.

Self evidently, it is quite reasonable for Americans to find cause for anxiety when Islamic leaders fail to condemn the intentional mass murder of civilians. Worse still, of course, is when lunatics like Ahmadinejad call for the destruction of entire nations, while working to develop the means to do so.

It is my sincere hope that significant members of the Islamic community do in fact take charity and decency seriously enough to begin to work to build a better world for all of us.

What if religion became a matter of empirical analysis? What if we could speak with the dead, and ask them questions? What if we determined scientifically that the nature of life depends upon an organizational energy that underlies the entire cosmos, that we can call God?

The reality is that it is impossible to understand radical Islam except as a reaction to the materialistic pessimism of modernity. Their leaders, quite often, are Western educated, and use much the same rhetoric that leftists do. Our cultural system is failing–or at least has been failing–and the proponents of Islamism see it as a defensive bulwark against the same thing happening to their culture. Rigid people are always fearful people, and it is fear that leads to the cruelties we see from them.

I do believe we can grow beyond religion as our primary moral narrative, and embrace simple decency and light and goodness as our creed. Such a thing, anchored empirically, would be extremely attractive to most all psychologically normal people.

Recently I have stopped praising my children for success in athletic achievement, but rather asking them how they would grade themselves. If they grade themselves highly, and I agree, they get a high five.

I tell them that only they can fairly judge their level of effort, and if they know it was high, then they don’t need external reinforcement, which in any event will often not be forthcoming in the “real world” of adulthood. And if they know they didn’t do their best, then praise is saccharine, unnecessary, and unhelpful.

Surprisingly, they often don’t grade themselves that highly. My oldest recently gave herself a 20% on a cross country run. This seemed unfair to me, but I didn’t dispute it. I suggested that evaluation be remembered, and taken into account in the next race.

John Wooden once commented something like “I never got 100% out of my teams even when we won the national championship, and asking for 110% is just stupid.” He of course would never have been so unkind (at least, when not under direct competitive pressure) as to say stupid, but the sentiment was clear enough.

Action precedes affect. What you do tells you who you are. You cannot “be” in a moving world, without action of some sort. There is no essential self which is external to action, at least until one penetrates to the very core of Being itself, which is not what the Self Esteemists are talking about.

I think it is useful to get your ass kicked sometimes by events, especially as a child, so that you can learn the basic movement of getting back in the saddle and going again. Too much, of course, and you cringe and shrink from life; but too little and you are a superficial, silly little human being, who has nothing to offer to anyone that is worth a damn.

As a general rule, I don’t like to comment on current issues, since they are normally just foam on the waves, and it is the depths we need to plumb. All of our momentary problems have deeper causes, which in my view is where we should focus most of our time and thought.

Since this it taking up a lot of room on the internet and airwaves, I wanted to add some facts that I feel are relevant.

First off, there is already a mosque at 51 Park Place . Where is the need arising for a new one? Has there been a sudden and overwhelming influx of Muslims? From where? Why?

Secondly, what is currently the largest mosque in the nation is in Dearborn, Michigan. It can house some 1,000 worshippers at the same time.

This is the same size that is being proposed for this new mosque. To be clear, that means this new mosque might well be the largest in the United States, since far more than worship space is being built.

Third, the date proposed for dedicating this mosque is Sept. 11, 2011, which quite obviously is the tenth anniversary of the attacks. This is not a date with any significance to Muslims, except if and to the extent they sympathized with those attacks. What any rational person would expect would be something like the date of the Hajj, or Muhammad’s ascent into heaven, or the end of Ramadan, or something else with religious significance.

The fact of the matter is that this building was so close to the World Trade centers that debris from the airliners–which had been filled with screaming, innocent Americans–hit the building. That is close enough to associate it with the attacks.

In my own view, the only possible conclusion is that the developers want to build this sight to CELEBRATE the attacks. Even if they are never overtly mentioned, not one person there will fail to appreciated the message, and the fact is this could and likely would become a pilgrimage site, for those Muslims wanting to celebrate a Muslim “victory” over we infidels. It will be open to the Islamic public, and anyone can travel to New York.

This conclusion becomes yet more obvious when one looks at the Islamic habit of building their own mosques over captured holy sites, as happened throughout the Muslim world, with the most obvious example being the Dome of the Rock, built over the ruins of the Jewish second Temple.

We are being spit on. I do not dispute the right of people to practice their religion, but they are already able to do so, in the same place they want to build this new mosque. To the precise extent they insist on this exact location, we can rest assured they mean us nothing but harm and enmity, regardless of whether or not they are ever able to express that hatred overtly.

Common sense dictates opposition at least in the court of public opinion.