Category Archives: Life

Important and Timely Advice from Walt Whitman

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It’s always a pleasure finding a website that deserves frequent visits. I didn’t know that Garrison Keillor has a Writer’s Almanac site. It appears to be updated every day.

Yesterday’s entry quoted Walt Whitman’s preface to the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass. Whitman offered some wise advice:

“This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul; and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.”

I don’t generally favor standing up for the stupid and crazy, although it’s good to stand up for the “stupid” and “crazy” (scare quotes inserted).

http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/index.php?date=2013/07/04

What It Means to Really Believe

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At some point along the way, most philosophers came to the conclusion that having a belief isn’t simply an internal state of the believer. One might suppose otherwise — that in order for Mary to believe some proposition P, she simply needs to be in the appropriate internal mental state, perhaps one in which she is silently saying to herself “You know, I really believe P”.

There is some truth to the internalist view. After all, we sometimes reach conclusions without announcing them to the world. Archimedes could have stepped into his bathtub, noticed how the water rose and immediately acquired a belief about how to measure the volume of irregularly-shaped objects — while keeping his mouth firmly shut, saving “Eureka!” for another time and place.

One problem with this view, however, is that it seems wrong to say that Mary believes P if her behavior is (consistently) inconsistent with believing P. Say, for example, that Mary claims to believe that all Americans should pay their required income tax, yet fails to pay any tax at all on her extremely high income. When the IRS comes calling, she is nowhere to be found. Mary might loudly proclaim that she believes in paying her income tax — she often says to herself “We Americans should all pay what we owe to the IRS” — but we would be remiss if we didn’t reply: “You claim to believe that, Mary, but your behavior shows that you really don’t”.

I was recently moved to think about what it means to really believe by an exchange of views on an Internet message board. The subject of this particular board is a certain fairly well-known musician. During a recent discussion, a Christian gentleman, veering seriously off-topic, wrote the following:

I got on here before and some people complained, saying that I shouldn’t be using the forum for a place to discuss God. It started a controversy. The people here who go to church etc, and those who don’t. It starts a conflict. That’s the way witnessing is. That’s the way it always is. I won’t continually use the forum here to witness day to day, etc. That’s not the only purpose of the community here. People have a right to get on here and talk about music without someone telling them that they need God. I understand that. But I can’t deny God when I need to mention Him.

And later:

We don’t have to be preaching every minute of the day…. I am getting ready to take a trip up the road to the place I go to see flowers, etc. I don’t feel that I am lost because of it. There is plenty of time for me to enjoy my life, whether it is music, art or whatever, being with family, etc.

The question that occurred to me was: how should a person behave if he really, truly believes that the Christian God exists and that each of us is going to face an eternity of paradise or damnation? How much time should a person spend “witnessing”, i.e. doing God’s work by trying to convince other people of the truth of Christianity, so that they might enjoy a good afterlife? Should one witness only when the mood strikes? An hour a week? One day a week? Five days a week? Every waking hour?

Charles Stanley, of the First Baptist Church in Atlanta, put it this way: “God’s plan for enlarging His kingdom is so simple — one person telling another about the Savior. Yet we’re busy and full of excuses. Just remember, someone’s eternal destiny is at stake.”

Here’s another example. If you truly believe that every fertilized egg is a full-fledged human being, so that abortion is murder plain and simple, what should you do to stop abortions? If you really believe that there are murders being committed every day in a neighborhood clinic, is it enough to express disapproval to your friends, or to show up once a week outside the clinic and try to convince women not to go inside? Or should you be doing something much more dramatic? If you believed that children were being murdered every day in the back room of your local 7-11, what would you do to stop it from happening?

I go back and forth between atheism and agnosticism (do I believe that God doesn’t exist? Or do I strongly doubt it?). So I’m asking these questions as an outsider. I’m not trying to live according to the supposed dictates of the divine ruler of all creation. But I wonder why more Christians don’t behave like those Asian monks, giving up their worldly pursuits, leaving their loved ones and spending all of their time preaching and praying, relying on donations to survive (remember that comment about rich people finding it terribly difficult to get into heaven).

Do serious Christians truly believe what they claim to believe? I think the answer is “yes”, but why don’t they behave more often as if they do?

One answer is that they think some level of prescribed behavior is “good enough”. It isn’t necessary to be a perfect Christian. You just need to meet some minimum requirements in order to get to heaven, so why do more? It’s only right that we should enjoy life while we can, even if that means a few more souls end up in Hell and some more babies are murdered. 

Another possibility is that the seriously religious don’t feel it’s necessary to be their brother’s keeper. So long as they (and their loved ones, perhaps) are doing the right thing, they don’t have a responsibility to make sure that everyone else does the right thing too. It would be wonderful if lots of other people could be saved and go to heaven. It would be wonderful if there were no more abortions. In fact, it’s your Christian duty to do what you can to make those wonderful things happen, but only within reason. It isn’t necessary to devote your whole life to other people’s problems. 

Or maybe they just haven’t thought too hard about this kind of thing. They grew up in the church, saw how other Christians behaved and followed their lead. That’s human nature. 

P.S. — I could have written about Islam instead of Christianity, of course. It’s doubtful that all Muslims try to be perfect Muslims. Unfortunately, a tiny minority of Muslims take their religion extremely seriously, mixing it with politics to violent effect.

Want to Read Something Really Depressing About America?

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Journalist George Packer’s new book, The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America, has been compared to the U.S.A. Trilogy, the novels in which John Dos Passos used experimental techniques to capture the state of our union in the early 20th century. Except that The Unwinding is nonfiction.

To quote the publisher:

American democracy is beset by a sense of crisis. Seismic shifts during a single generation have created a country of winners and losers, allowing unprecedented freedom while rending the social contract, driving the political system to the verge of breakdown … (Packer) journeys through the lives of several Americans, (interweaving) these intimate stories with biographical sketches of the era’s leading public figures … and collages made from newspaper headlines, advertising slogans, and song lyrics….The Unwinding portrays a superpower in danger of coming apart at the seams, its elites no longer elite, its institutions no longer working, its ordinary people left to improvise their own schemes for success and salvation.

Packer summarizes his view of the past 30 years in the newspaper column below: “Decline and Fall: How American Society Unravelled”. He doesn’t meet Marx’s challenge in these few paragraphs to change the world (not merely understand it): such as explaining how to get more people to vote intelligently, how to overcome the power of money in our democracy, how to avoid a race to the economic bottom in a global economy. But maybe more of us need to clearly understand what’s happened before we can do something about it.

(Or should we simply get out of the way, relying on our children and their children to do what needs to be done? Like the man said: “Your old road is rapidly agin’, please get out of the new one if you can’t lend your hand, for the times they are a-changin’ .”)

When we talk about America’s decline, it’s tempting to wonder if the situation is as bad as it seems. Packer’s book and the column below are honorable attempts to counter that temptation.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/19/decline-fall-american-society-unravelled

A Kind Word for Some Local Bureaucrats

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In French, “bureaucracy” means something like “rule or power by the desk or office”, the idea being that powerful desk-bound officials exercise a type of political authority over us. According to Wikipedia, the term was invented in the mid-1700s by a French economist and was a “satirical pejorative from the outset”:

The first known English-language use was in 1818. The 19th-century definition referred to a system of governance in which offices were held by unelected career officials, and in this sense “bureaucracy” was seen as a distinct form of government, often subservient to a monarchy. In the 1920s, the definition was expanded by the German sociologist Max Weber to include any system of administration conducted by trained professionals according to fixed rules. Weber saw the bureaucracy as a relatively positive development; however by 1944, the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises noted that the term bureaucracy was “always applied with an opprobrious connotation,” and by 1957 the American sociologist Robert Merton noted that the term “bureaucrat” had become an epithet.

I was once a bureaucrat myself, working as a court clerk in Los Angeles County’s vast judicial system. My job was to keep track of stuff and make sure that the rules of civil and criminal procedure were followed.

Nevertheless, the world being the way it is, I wasn’t optimistic today when I needed to get some information from our county government. Bureaucrats!

The Union County website didn’t have the answer to my question, so I called the county’s toll-free number. As the cliché goes, imagine my surprise when a county employee answered the phone after a ring or two. I explained my problem and he told me that I needed to speak to someone in the county clerk’s office. Well, imagine my surprise again when another county employee answered the phone after another ring or two. We had a brief, pleasant, even humorous conversation, and she turned me over to a third county employee, a nice woman named Laura. By this time, it was hardly surprising at all that Laura was very helpful. She quickly took my information and promised that the required document would be mailed to me forthwith.

What? No automated phone buffer (“our numbers have changed”)? No staring into space while on hold (“your call is important to us”)? No confusion? No impatience? No rising blood pressure? A remarkably pleasant, efficient, person to person encounter with some local bureaucrats.

A cynic might conclude that these Union County employees clearly had too much time on their hands, and that our tax dollars aren’t being used efficiently. An automated phone system might achieve substantial savings (“see you around, Laura!”).

I prefer to think that these particular bureaucrats were doing their jobs efficiently and patiently. And that, after our encounter today, they felt good about helping me and I felt good about them and the service they provided.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bureaucracy

Hope I Die Before I Get Old

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Well, so much for that plan.

Definitely still alive, I’ve spent the past 2 weeks reaping the benefits of modern medicine. The problem that put me in the hospital and the medical treatment I’ve received have added up to something approaching “advanced interrogation techniques” (I’ll tell you anything — make it stop!).  

I did have a lot of time to think, however, while lying in bed waiting for something good to happen. I reached some small conclusions and a big one.

One of my small conclusions:

A doctor who is “on call”, responsible for off-hours phone calls from patients, shouldn’t be unavailable for hours at a time. But if an “on call” doctor can’t take calls for some reason, there should be another doctor who serves as the first doctor’s backup. Then, after repeated failures to reach Doctor 1, the answering service can contact Doctor 2 instead.

Another small conclusion (with apologies to the nursing community and anyone offended by discussion of bodily fluids):

If you have fluid draining into a plastic bag, and the bag becomes rather heavy as it fills up, in such a way that the drainage mechanism may no longer function properly, reject your nurse’s advice to empty the bag “when it fills up”. Instead, empty the bag “before it fills up”.

And my big conclusion, with a little background first:

Some people are extremely careful about diet and exercise. Others eat whatever they want and avoid exercise whenever possible. Most of us occupy some middle ground. Personally, I eat too much food that isn’t good for me and don’t exercise very often. I’ve never seen the point of doing otherwise, since I’ve never been very concerned with the state of my body and never wanted to live an extraordinarily long time. I’ve been content to drift along, eating what tastes good and avoiding perspiration if possible.

Having been hospitalized twice in the past 12 months for kidney-related problems, however, I now understand that I’ve been missing something important about diet and exercise. I’ve always thought the point of eating well and working out was to achieve a positive, healthy state — to be one of those happy, early to bed, early to rise types who can be so annoying to the rest of us. But that’s not the point at all.

The point of eating well and working out is to avoid the incredible pain and discomfort of serious illness and the medical treatment that goes with it. It isn’t a matter of getting something good; it’s a matter of avoiding something bad.

You might say that, in this case anyway, getting something good and avoiding something bad are just two sides of the same health-related coin. You can’t have one without the other. There is certainly some truth to that, since there’s a single path leading to both goals. But in terms of motivation, there is a big difference between trying to achieve something really good and trying to avoid something really bad. In my case anyway, I’ve never been interested in achieving a wonderfully healthy state. Mediocrity has been fine with me. 

Having experienced the extremely unpleasant downside of a poor diet (and, to a lesser extent, limited exercise), I find it much more motivating to try to avoid this kind of downside in the future, if I possibly can, than to seek something positive. At this point, if I have any sense at all, I’m going to eat better and exercise more. Of course, there’s no guarantee that changing my habits will insure that I won’t have to go through this kind of crap again. We all know that life isn’t that predictable. On the other hand, if you want to avoid something really bad, you should do what you can, if the cost of doing so isn’t that great. That’s just being rational.

Hence, my big conclusion:

Not being motivated by the prospect of getting something good, I’m going to focus instead on what I’m desperate to avoid. Avoiding pain can sometimes be a much better motivator than achieving pleasure. If I don’t want to be tortured again, I need to try something different. 

Philosophical addendum:

It occurred to me while writing this that philosophers (Western philosophers anyway) have tended to discuss the pursuit of pleasure more often than the avoidance of pain. As you might expect, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has an article called “Happiness”, but none called “Unhappiness”. The article on happiness contains 397 uses of the word “happiness” and 6 uses of “unhappiness”. 

To be fair, however, Jeremy Bentham defined “happiness” as the predominance of pleasure over pain. He argued that: 

Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we shall do. On the one hand the standard of right and wrong, on the other the chain of causes and effects, are fastened to their throne. They govern us in all we do, in all we say, in all we think … 

Yet how can one serve two sovereign masters? Do pleasure and pain somehow work together, like the two ends of a seesaw, always giving coherent direction (“You, boy, go up now!”)? I don’t think so. Pain isn’t merely the opposite of pleasure. It’s its own phenomenon and deserves at least equal consideration, maybe more consideration, than pleasure gets. But we have a cultural prejudice that says it’s better to search for the good things in life than to avoid the bad. That isn’t always the case.