The Queen of Eene

Dear Reader,

The ongoing challenge in our household is to introduce our new kittens Rashid and Surya to our seventeen-year-old cat Morgana, aka The Queen of Eene. Morgana is very verbal, having much to say about things, and very particular as is typical of tortoiseshell cats; she's a tortie's tortie, and she wants things the way she wants them. She would rather not eat at all for days on end if the food, its presentation, its timing, and everything else about it isn't right, and as with food so with most other things. She's a gentle cat, surprisingly tolerant of children, very affectionate on her own terms, loving the rhythms of her day spiced with occasional novel curiosities. She used to be an unbelievable jumper, but settled down over the years. She still hates noises and loves fires and sunshine.

We got Rashid and Surya particularly for her, since after Shakti's death she has wandered about the house crying and looking for her. Unfortunately, so far she is very uncomfortable with the kittens, and they with her. Most likely, we will need to just let them work it out with however much hissing and posturing it takes for them to figure out their new relationship.

Yours truly,
Rick

Something New to Think With

Dear Reader,

Albert Einstein is supposed to have said or written "The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them." Or perhaps it was "The problems that exist in the world today cannot be solved by the level of thinking that created them." Maybe "Problems cannot be solved at the same level of awareness that created them." Or is it "We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them?" Could it be "No problem can be solved from the same consciousness that created it?" Perhaps he wrote or said none of these things. Perhaps all of them.

These are popular quotes to attribute to Einstein, but most people attributing any of these things to him do not seem to care whether or not they are really his words. They are putting words in his mouth to strengthen what they want to say with an appeal to authority, which I wrote about in an earlier blog entry. If we are fortunate, the words they are putting in his mouth are indeed his own. They do not know, and neither do I.

Whoever wrote or said these words, I believe them. Or more correctly, any mode of thinking permits an individual or a culture to solve certain problems and requires them to create others, and those it creates it cannot solve because they tend to accumulate around its blind spots and Achilles' heels. These occur as the necessary flip sides of its strengths, and so cannot be removed without also removing those strengths and indeed the very character of that mode of thinking. That is, the distinctive strengths of any system simultaneously and necessarily generate equally distinctive weaknesses that can only be avoided by radically transforming that system at its roots, changing the very strengths that gave it its character and identity. To break free of those genetic defects, the only option is metamorphosis, which unfortunately is anathema to hubristic ego, so the defects stay.

We create most of our own problems, and not by accident but by the very forms of our character, by our mentalities, that is, our forms of reasoning and motivation. This is why technology will never solve our primary problems. New science and new technology are something new to think about, but we think about them with the same minds that created the problems in the first place. Science does not lead to enlightenment; the Nazis loved science so much that to advance certain scientific programs after World War II America had to import Nazi scientists. Science is proudly value-neutral, focused on utility, a tool at home in the hands of sinners and saints alike. Tools operate upon extrinsics. Our core problems are intrinsic, where tools cannot reach.


Somehow, mysteriously to us, every new promise of utopia ends up just another market commodity. We focus on changing the externals that were never truly responsible for our predicaments, then wonder that the problems persist or even accelerate under the new conditions, like bacteria growing ever more virulent under the pressure of our wonder drugs. Alfred Nobel, inventor of dynamite was appalled when his fabulous new tool for construction was promptly put to work blowing up his fellow human beings, and created the Nobel Prizes as an apology to humanity, or so the story goes.

In other words, the problems we face are primarily ad hominem. There is nothing so noble that a barbarian will not put it to barbaric purposes, and in the great scheme of things we are all barbarians. The problem is not the tools at our disposal, not the things we have to think about. The problem is what we are thinking with. If the human race is to survive, we need something new to think with. The current model is dangerously defective. And no, the answer is not artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, or genetic engineering; those answers represent more of the same level of thinking that got us into this mess.

My friend Kenneth Smith likes to say "Every other field of study gives you something new to think about. Only philosophy gives you something new to think with." This philosophy is not the empty academic cataloging of philosophical writers and their dates and titles and quotations, nor is it the abstracted, schizophrenic elaboration of complex but arbitrary schemes of ideal forms and their interrelationships beloved by timid intellectuals. Rather, what gives us something new to think with is the lifelong project of cultivating a better character in the Ancient Greek sense, of striving to develop eudaimonea,a coherent inner cosmos, of struggling against ourself to find our blind spots and feel out the architecture of our character so we can figure out how to grow beyond what we are today - to deliberately undertake our own maturation.


In a culture like ours, none of us has eudaimonea. We all have dysdaimonea - dysfunctional characters that afflict us so that we in turn afflict the world. In the immortal words of Walter Crawford Kelly, Jr., creator of the classic comic Pogo, "We have met the enemy and he is us." If we want to make a better world, we must first make better people. The kind of world we have is what the kind of people we are can and must create. Above all, the problem is not all those other people - it is ourselves. We must make ourselves better from the inside out. Doing this will change how we see the world, how we value it, and how we think about it, and that will change what we do about it.

Yours truly,
Rick

Verbal Medicine

Dear Reader,

When I was younger, I believed we were all created equal, that anyone could do what anyone else could do. I well understood some of the depths to which we could sink, having read extensively about the Holocaust, but I believed education and communication could save the human race. I idolized and idealized science.

Step by step, I was compelled out of these illusions. I came to understand that most people work very hard not to hear or learn anything that requires them to transform, that they resent anyone who tries to reach out to them through their walls. I learned that science is what it is, not what it could be, and the two are worlds apart.

So, step by step I learned to say less and less of what I truly believed outside my circle of friends. Ironically, in some quarters of my life this too was unacceptable: I could neither say the things I believed without incurring arguments that seemed never to progress to understanding, nor was I to be permitted to withdraw from those pointless, soul-killing conversations. My faith in communication has bounced off the bottom many times in the last few years.

I learned, though, that it is too late in my life for me to stop trying to communicate. It has become a need. Verbal Medicine may be a pun, but for me it is also serious business. Even if no one listens or understands or responds, I cannot be healthy unless I strive to put my thoughts and feelings into words, unless I try to reach out not just to those I know and love but also to others I do not yet know but who may find in my words a kindred spirit.

It is a bit ridiculous to do this, to cast my words out and entertain even a faint idea that they may find their intended audience. I am put in mind of that first tarot card: The Fool, stepping off the cliff, as we are all fools who try to make anything happen in this world, never even remotely comprehending what we will set in motion nor how crazy it is to imagine the cosmic forces that invisibly crowd our lives will ever permit our arrow to hit the mark we intend for it. Yet without that ridiculous hope and effort we would be no more than jetsam.

We attract more flies with honey than vinegar. I could be much more entertaining in this blog than I am. I do know how. I have written for decades now, and have run Dungeons and Dragons games since 1978. I could spin the fun stories, be witty, work harder to be the entertainer, but I do not want flies. I want to reach out neither to the walking appetites who make up the vast ballast of our culture, nor to the walking calculators who run it. I hope my writing style and topics are as unentertaining for such people as possible. I hope that somehow the fewest of the few, the adults out there, the ones who bring their heart and head into everything they do, the ones with the endless curiosity, the paradoxically playful and serious ones, the ones who care more about truth and justice and art and hope and other people and other species than they do about feeling good or acquiring status or power . . . crazy as it may be, I hope that something in my vinegar writing draws such people.

Because the verbal medicine I really need is not just self-expression, which I worshipped as an end in itself as a teenager and which now I find fairly futile, but dialog with other nuts like me. I know you are out there. We are not alone. We are just atomized, segregated from each other by the lack of the kinds of social contexts that would nurture us as a permanent community. Perhaps we could consider some kind of mutual activity together other than merely satisfying our appetites or indulging in temporary pretend-escape from this mess we all find ourselves in. Maybe we could heal ourselves with a little help from each other. Maybe we could heal more than that, if we worked together. Who knows?

Like I said: crazy; The Fool. But there it is. I gotta try.

Yours truly,
Rick

Gender in English, Ancient and Modern

Dear Reader,

Many writers have remarked on the problem of expressing or not expressing gender in Modern English. Women ask why man is the generic form, as in mankind, and why woman is derivative, as though lesser. I have heard people attempting to justify this on religious grounds, since Eve was created from Adam's rib, and is therefore derivative.

Efforts to correct the perceived male bias in the language has resulted in fireman being replaced with fire fighter, mailman being replaced by mail carrier, and so on. Although these efforts to repair our lopsided language are now a fait accompli, and occasionally strengthen the term so changed, they all miss the point. The use of man as the male form of human is a corruption of the original definition in Old English, which was balanced with respect to gender. The reason we sometimes use Man in a generic sense, as in "Man is a tool user" is because Old English Mann meant human only in the generic, gender-independent sense of a person. A male human is a mann, and a female human is a mann.

Woman is a corrupted form of wifmann, or wife-person. As Kathleen Herbert writes in Peace Weavers and Shield Maidens: Women in Early English Society, the origin of wif is a bit of a mystery, but the best guess is that it is related to wefan, to weave. Old English writing is full of references to the primary role of wife-people as Peace Weavers. This weaving role of wife-people was not restricted to physical weaving. A study of Old English social rites and rituals, legends and stories, makes the original gender role of wife-people very clear as the bearers of culture and the weavers of civilization. The whole purpose of the striving of the males, the wars, the hunting, the building, was to create a safe haven within which wife-people would create civilization. Their role originally was not to be a mere helpmeet; that is a foreign gender role introduced into Old English culture later.

The lost word in Modern English is the specific term for a male person. In Old English that was waepmann, a weapon-person. The Old English world was very dangerous, and every weapon-person carried a spear starting in boyhood. The role of a weapon-person was to place his body and weapons between wife-people and danger, to protect the hall, the village, the gardens, and the fields where the wife-people worked to create the civilization that made life worth living. The weapon-person was a living contradiction, on the one hand striving for individual prowess and excellence at any cost, on the other needing to submerge his ego for the good of society, to bond together with other weapon-people to create a reliable shield wall. Weapon-people bound themselves together by personal oaths and vows not to abstract, corruptible organizations, but to each other and to their future actions, and the cornerstone of that Old English culture was the witnessing of those oaths and vows and how they were carried out. It was not the original role of weapon-people to rule the world and dominate the wife-people; that is a foreign gender role introduced into Old English culture later.

There was a pun in the name weapon-person, one noted by Shakespeare and others, as to whether the male's weapon referred to his instrument of war or his instrument of sex, captured in the modern word tool. This pun was seriously meant, because the other role of the male was to beget children, but this latter meaning was more directly captured by a second word for a male person: wermann. This prefix is related to the modern were as in werewolf. It meant male specifically in the sense of a person capable of getting a woman with child, which after all is pretty much the core definition of male. Were also meant a husband, the companion of a wife, so a newlywed couple were pronounced were and wife, that is, man and woman.

Obviously, the noun forms are not the only ones lacking balance in Modern English. The adjectives (male and female) and pronouns (he and she) both lack the general form as an option, though English is clearly evolving toward having they become the general pronoun, and the adjectives also perpetuate the false sense of the male term as the original and the female as the derivative (curiously, the two terms male and female come from two different languages and were originally unrelated and spelled unalike).

Language permits thought in human beings, and limitations or deformations of language limit or deform thought. It is a typically Modern thing to do to let the limits and deformations of our gender terminology spread throughout the language rather than repair them even at the foundations of the language.

These ancient gender terms were not the denatured, abstracted, empty designations of sex to the Old English that man and woman are to Moderns. They carried powerful cultural meanings that went to the heart of how ancient English society was structured and why. The loss of so many unreplaced terms, and the erosion of meaning from those we have kept, has left holes in our ability to comprehend ourselves and our respective roles in the world. As those roles shifted over time, the meanings of the words could have shifted with them, but instead most such meaning has been stripped from them, leaving them empty abstractions. The many new terms borrowed from other languages or invented wholesale have not filled those gaps, but rather have expanded our language and ideas in new directions, changing the overall shape of our minds and culture, altering what we can or cannot express or even conceive of. We imagine that the changes must be improvements only because it flatters us to believe it. Rather than striving to skip past these changes with quick judgments of whether they constitute progress, we ought to look at their pattern and ask ourselves what they mean. As individual personalities and as a culture, over the last two thousand years how have we been changing? What are we becoming?

Unless we honestly examine that question, we cannot know ourselves.

Yours truly,
Rick

Don't Fear the River

Dear Reader,

Prior to Serge Mouraviev's current project, there have only been a handful of serious efforts to collect together much of the Heraclitea. In general, scholars have been too busy advocating their interpretations of Heraclitus to be bothered with evaluating the whole field of prior interpretations. Likewise, few authors have bothered to review and evaluate even just the variant sources for the surviving fragments, to assess the discrepencies and try to understand what the original text may have been. Most translators have simply selected a trusted or favored collection, such as the Diels-Kranz collection, and assumed that their chosen collection adequately separates genuine Heraclitus fragments from spurious ones.

This is a dangerous assumption. With so few surviving fragments, many of which are so profound as to cast all of Heraclitus's philosophy in a different light, omitting even one genuine fragment can cause the translator or interpreter to misread everything.

I happen to have an example with which you may be familiar. Both Plutarch and Plato write that Heraclitus said you cannot step twice into the same river. This must be the best known Heraclitus quote, and for many of us it represents one of perhaps a half-dozen truly crucial keys to understanding his philosophy. If you accept this as a geniune Heraclitean quote, it changes everything about how you read Heraclitus.

For that reason, numerous scholars have labored to discredit it. If Heraclitus is a philosopher of universal flux, then he stands in opposition to Parmenides and Plato, who argued that only unchanging ideal forms are real and that all flux is illusory. To many, Plato is a sacred ox who must not be gored. Heraclitus's philosophy is too potent to ignore, so for Platonists Heraclitus must either be discredited or coopted.

For years the standard approach was to discredit him by arguing that he did indeed advocate universal flux, and that the idea of universal flux leads to such logical inconsistencies that his entire philosophy collapses in upon itself. The problem with this approach was that it is patently untrue, and philosophers and scholars free of the sway of neo-Platonism continued to explore the coherency of his philosophy.

In recent times, therefore, Heraclitus's opponents have changed tactics and tried to coopt him by a variety of devices, all of which hinge on demonstrating that universal flux is a misreading of Heraclitus, that perhaps after all he was a safe proto-Platonist. All such attempts have to deal with that river quote, along with its two friends. Here are all three along with their sources (I am using Charles H. Kahn's translations from The Art and Thought of Heraclitus: An edition of the fragments with translation and commentary here, and can recommend his book to others readily, though Philip Wheelwright's Heraclitus is my favorite interpretation):

First: As they step into the same rivers, other and still other waters flow upon them. This is quoted by Arius Didymus, and also by Cleanthes, and most scholars accept it as a legitimate fragment of Heraclitus's writing.

Second: According to Heraclitus one cannot step twice into the same river, nor can one grasp any mortal substance in a stable condition, but by the intensity and the rapidity of change it scatters and again gathers. Or rather, not again nor later but at the same time it forms and dissolves, and approaches and departs. This statement is from Plutarch and contains the most familiar form of the fragment, that one cannot step twice into the same river. Although this is a paraphrase, it must be very close to Heraclitus's original form, because another paraphrase of the same idea, this one by Plato, uses the same wording: Heraclitus says, doesn't he, that all things move on and nothing stands still, and comparing things to the stream of a river he said that you cannot step twice into the same river. Charles Kahn's analysis of these two independent yet converging paraphrases is compelling, i.e., that none of the attempts that have been made to make them go away carries anything like the strength of the evidence itself, that the convergence of these two separate but reliable sources almost certainly means Heraclitus wrote something very much like this.

The attempts by Kirk, Marcovich, Reinhardt, and others to argue that this most famous fragment of Heraclitus is merely a misquotation say less about the evidence than they do about the intentions of those making the attempt. Their arguments amount to little more than the a priori decision that Heraclitus would only have made one statement that mentioned a river, so they can reduce the discussion to arguing over which is the most authentic or the most clearly a literal quote. Since the second statement is a paraphrase, if a close one, they discard it in favor of the first one. Of course, why there can only have been one statement about a river is passed over by these interpreters, since that assumption cannot bear scrutiny, and once one questions that the next question that comes to mind is why these commentators are so eager to get rid of two of the river statements. Given the profound, two thousand five hundred year history of hostility between the philosophers of change and the philosophers of permanence, it cannot be a coincidence that the form favored by these scholars is the one most compatible with a philosophy of permanence. Scholars like to pretend to objectivity, and for this reason they especially need their motivations scrutinized closely to understand the real import of their arguments.

Other scholars, not motivated by the age-old antagonism, may yet be misled by the fragmentary nature of Heraclitus's surviving text into believing the original was fragmentary as well, but we do have a couple of compound fragments. In those compound fragments we have from Heraclitus, we can see that he loved to juxtapose similar statements that clarified one another, especially if the second amplified or developed the paradoxes of the first, and these two statements fit that pattern very well. Kahn rightly argues that these first two statements most likely occurred together, one after the other, in Heraclitus's original text.

Before Plato, Cratylus amplified this second statement of Heraclitus's about the river with his own argument that you cannot even step in the river once, since you are changing even as you make the attempt. Although Kahn reads this as Cratylus seeking to one-up Heraclitus, I believe it was meant more as explanation, since it is an inescapable conclusion of Heraclitus's philosophy of dynamic flux if you fully come to grips with it. With Cratylus's statement in mind, consider this third statement about the river attributed to Heraclitus:

Third: Into the same rivers we step and do not step, we are and we are not. This is quoted by a much later writer named Heraclitus Homericus, who wrote a commentary on Homer; that is, the later commentator Heraclitus Homericus is quoting the earlier philosopher Heraclitus, if we accept this as a genuine fragment. The later Roman writer Seneca also quotes this line as the philosopher Heraclitus's. Scholars tend to agree that Seneca and Heraclitus Homericus were quoting a common source, but disagree about whether that source was the philosopher Heraclitus or perhaps some later writer, possibly a skeptic. For example, despite Kahn's position that those discounting the second statement are defying the evidence, three seems to exceed Kahn's own limit, for he argues that this third form is not authentic, despite reasonable sources. His argument: he "can only see it as a thinly disguised paraphrase" of other fragments. That's it. No careful evaluation, no additional evidence not available to the reader, just a strong feeling based on its resemblance. Ironically, this is the same reasoning in Kirk, Marcovich, and Reinhardt that he earlier dismissed, rightly, as flawed.

How can Kahn fall prey to the same reasoning himself that he so clearly identifies and refutes in others, and on the same subject? Even a casual reading of Kahn reveals he lacks the motivation of the others to miscast Heraclitus as agreeing with Parmenides and Plato about the unchanging nature of the true cosmos; after all, he is quite careful about showing the many ways Heraclitus exhorts us to see flux as the true nature of the cosmos. We cannot really know, but a reasonable guess would be that most common of human failings that afflicts us all, fools and wise men alike: hubris, in this case the temptation to mold the material with unwarranted confidence, to feel that even without access to the original text he nevertheless knows its character so well that he can feel his way to the truth. Unfortunately, if this is the case, and he gives us no reason to doubt it, then he like so many others has forgotten that we all know things that are not true, and so we should beware such confidence.

All we have of Heraclitus are fragments attested by later writers. We must tread very cautiously, ruling out possibilities with the humble recognition that we have not one original scrap of his book with which to make a definitive statement. We must resort to that proper default position of the natural philosopher in the face of the cosmos, humility, the acceptance of the limitations of our own reason, and consequently the need to become comfortable with uncertainty. If the only defensible criteria we have for choosing legitimate fragments are 1) the reliability of the sources, and 2) the consistency with the style and content of other fragments accepted as legitimate, then we have to accept this third fragment, however tentatively as legitimate, no matter how we may feel about it or how clever an argument we may construct about it. Kahn's failure to define his criteria and stick to them, left him making judgments based on how they, in his own words, "seem to me," which is ironically precisely the translation of the Greek expression doke moi, origin of the term doxa, which the Greek philosophers including Heraclitus defined as the uninformed, unphilosophical, unreliable opinions of the masses; they held doxa in the utmost contempt, which is why they became philosophers.

As a development of the previous two statements, this third one shifts the emphasis from the flux of things to the paradoxical nature of things in flux, a necessary development of the explanation, especially to Heraclitus whose writing thrives on paradoxes. He implicitly argues repeatedly throughout his writings that the mathematician's aversion to paradoxes is perverse in a cosmos that teems with natural paradoxes. Indeed, he argues that the cosmos can only be understood through layers of paradox, both in the contradictory forces that bring about the phenomena we perceive, and in the paradoxical resulting nature of things. After all, if you are continuously changing, as science would agree, then you both are the same person from one moment to the next and also are not exactly the same person. Likewise the river into which you step changes and becomes different, even as it remains identifiably the same. Identity, according to Heraclitus, is a paradox, and this third statement is completely in keeping with his emphasis on paradox, making it a fitting conclusion to the argument developed by the first two statements, whether or not they originally appeared in that order.

All of which is to say I agree with Kahn in accepting the validity of the second statement, and I disagree with him by accepting, however tentatively, the third as well. I see no good reason to doubt that Heraclitus wrote all three statements and placed them closely together to illustrate the nature of our relationship to the cosmos when both it and we as part of it are in endless flux. Although he has a reputation for being obscure, in the few compound fragments we have and in the other potential ones we might try to reconstruct by rearranging closely related fragments Heraclitus does appear to make some effort to explain his ideas through metaphor and development rather than restricting himself to the most pithy, paradoxical possible formulations of these concepts.

After all, later in the same dialogue in which Plato paraphrases Heraclitus's second statement, he adds another paraphrase: panta rhei, that is, all things flow. This is the most succinct form of this thread of Heraclitus's teachings, and all three river statements, as well as Cratylus's extension, are inevitable implications of this two-word explosive nugget of wisdom. Had Heraclitus been the obscurantist he is reputed to be, he would have left it at that, but instead in the image of the river he worked out a reasonable metaphor for explaining the flow of change. These three river statements by Heraclitus are therefore not problems to be avoided but opportunities to more fully comprehend the profound and vital nuance of his philosophy.

Returning to the subject of hubris, if you conduct a few careful web searches for variations on the famous "You cannot step twice into the same river" statement, you will find truckloads of authors declaring with great confidence that smart people know Heraclitus never actually wrote this. They ape the empty reasoning of Marcovich and others on this subject without actually working out even so little on their own, yet present their "conclusion" with authority. Here again, as in so many other ways, humans display their love of appearing wise without working for wisdom, of pretending to authority they do not possess, of attracting followers they can not lead, of simultaneously casting themselves as unusually observant and independent-minded when they are instead typically blind and prone to follow the lead of others unquestioningly. As Heraclitus argued, most people do not know why they want the things they want, nor why they believe the things they believe, and you certainly cannot trust them to tell you those things accurately. Even the most seemingly objective and rational person builds his arguments as mere rationalizations of his prejudices and urges.

Critics of the World Wide Web decry its lack of quality control, but the information you can observe about human nature on the web is worth all the misinformation about lesser topics. Here are all these people laboring to miscast Heraclitus as not fundamentally in conflict with Parmenides and Plato, and most of them clearly do not even realize what the larger conflict is about or what the implications might be of their position. Truly, most of what people do with their brains should not be called thinking, and most of what is written does not qualify as communication. This is part of makes Heraclitus and his work so remarkable, and also part of what makes Serge Mouraviev's Heraclitea project so welcome and necessary.

Yours truly,
Rick

Rashid and Surya

Dear Reader,

The picture is of Rashid sleeping on Surya the night we brought them home. He's all black except for pale nipples when he rolls onto his back and stretches, and he tends to express affection as fiercely as he plays, butting his face into yours and purring passionately. She's a tabby with tortoiseshell coloring, as you can see in the stripes on her leg; she's more likely to curl up and purr in your lap, and in play she's more careful in her stalking but more determined in hanging onto her kills. Although they are not brother and sister by blood, as you can see they act like it. They have only two speeds, and here you can see them in their lower gear, when they purr and purr. Neither has yet mastered the meow, although Rashid occasionally mews, but Rashid has been making hilarious efforts to growl and hiss during play; Surya is remarkably silent when not purring, though she is the more ardent purrer.

The collar tag you can see is a thing of the past; she stripped him out of his in the second week--what a great toy!--and we had to remove hers last week because it was too tight and the end had been cut too short to loosen it successfully. Fortunately they are strictly indoor cats; more than that, until tomorrow they are strictly guest-bedroom cats. We introduce them to the rest of the house, at least the parts we are opening up to them, tomorrow.

Yours truly,
Rick

Kitty Day

Dear Reader,

July 12th in the Phinney Creek household will hereafter be known as Kitty Day, when in Shakti's memory we brought home a pair of kittens for Morgana. We are busily engaged in preparations, and hope to have the kittens home by 2:00 this afternoon. We are adopting them from the Progressive Animal Welfare Society (PAWS), at their Cat City location at 85th and Greenwood. I go now to gather toys and other supplies.

Yours truly,
Rick

The Gifts of Grief and Fear

Dear Reader,

When I was young, I wanted to be like Mr. Spock from Star Trek, free from emotion and able to think rationally at all times. At least, that is how I interpreted the character when I was young.

Later, I came to understand that he was not free of emotion, as the alien Vulcan race on that show is described, because only his father was Vulcan; his mother was human. He was trying to be a pure Vulcan, but he was not. He had feelings, which he did not want, so he repressed them, and several episodes and movies hinged on the difference.

I followed suit in part, and struggled to supppress feelings I believed were negative, such as fear, anger, and grief. I succeeded to a surprising degree, but in doing so I incurred the liability of all those who separate their intellect from their feelings. Seeking to become free of certain emotions, I instead made them invisible to me, lost that sixth sense most people have that allows them to use their feelings like antennae to help them think, lost the ability to keep my feelings in true balance by integrating them into my personality (since I was unaware of them) and instead became controlled by them. They had free rein down in the dark places of my unconscious. For decades, it was as though I had lost a sense other people have, a kind of blindness, and also could not at times predict or explain my own behavior.

When I began counseling in April of 1987, my counselor noticed these blind spots in my emotions and struggled for years to get me to even realize they were there. For almost nineteen years despite discussing sometimes harrowing things I never cried in therapy. About halfway through that time I finally came to agree with my counselor about the consequences of my emotional blindness, and particularly came to agree that my cycles of depression were directly related to it, that escaping from those debillitating crashes was in part going to require regaining the use of those feelings. After much work we finally began to push through and find the anger, but we never did get to the grief and fear in any depth . . .

. . . until my kitty Shakti fell seriously ill in January, rapidly weakened, and died February 21st.

Her illness and death changed everything for me. It was very much like the experience of someone blind since childhood regaining sight. I cried more during that month and even since than in the last thirty years combined. I can feel sorrow and grief in response to movies and songs, in parting from friends and relatives, in thinking back on other friends and relatives who have died--in short, I am beginning to feel appropriate shades of grief now at all those times when an emotionally healthy person would.

And during my recent vacation on the Navajo reservation, I discovered fears I had never known while hiking on steep cliffs, not crippling fears, but good, healthy responses to risky situations. I am starting to feel the nuances of concern and fear that characterize emotional health.

This restoration of my so long atrophied inner senses is precious to me, a parting gift of emotional alchemy from Shakti, as her gradual loss dilated my heart. Although many people are so dead to the living world around them that they cannot imagine why a person should feel any strong attachment to a cat, Shakti is probably as close as I will ever come to having a child. We were part of a family together for seventeen years and eight months.

When I was young, I imagined that the feelings I categorized as negative were bad, weaknesses even, and I struggled to overcome them. It took me decades to undo the damage I inflicted on myself as a result. If you can help it, do not make the same mistake I did. We have our suite of emotions for a reason. We need them. We cannot think rationally without them, an idea that only sounds confusing because we have such screwball ideas about the nature of intelligence. Also, as easy as it may be for us to inhabit our feeling life so exclusively that we remain infantile and self-involved, nevertheless we cannot even perceive the world accurately with intellect alone. Reason, sanity, happiness, and health depend on integrating analysis of information with subtle and fluid assessment of our shifting emotions. We cut ourselves off from those emotions at our peril.

My fear and grief were restored to me by my cat's illness and death. If you too have lost part of your inner sight, may you also be lucky enough to receive such a gift to help you find your way back to health and wholeness.

Yours truly,
Rick

A Few New Links

Dear Reader,

If you have not yet fallen in love with Judith Martin's column for the Washington Post, Miss Manners, you are in for a treat. She explores the crucial but neglected realm of etiquette with insight and wit worthy of Jane Austen. Yes, crucial. Without the refinement and nuance of manners we must resort to the law to try to club each other into submission, that is if we don't descend outright into violence. How do you think America became so litigious and violent? We mock Miss Manners at our peril.

Speaking of Jane Austen, a team of admirers has created a snarky blog about all things Austen.

And now for something completely different, dessert from Jim Woodring, one of the few artists whose claims to originality we acknowledge trembling. He will furrow your brow, slip your moorings, and shiver your timbers.

Yours truly,
Rick

The Big Picture

Dear Reader,

Beverly just handed me the following quote:

If we would only give, just once, the same amount of reflection to what we want to get out of life that we give to the question of what to do with a two weeks' vacation, we would be startled at our false standards and the aimless procession of our busy days.

--Dorothy Canfield Fisher

Yours truly,
Rick

Culture and Cultivation

Dear Reader,

Of course, even if we do cultivate our characters we will suffer the fatal consequences, since character is fate; cultivating our character changes it, and therefore changes our fate, creating new fated consequences.

Those who believe in free will do not bother cultivating their character, because they do not understand that they are constrained by it.

Those who believe in determinism do not bother cultivating their character, because they believe it is futile since everything is predetermined, which represents a different kind of misunderstanding of the way in which their character constrains them.

The interesting thing is that those who believe we have free will end up with the same conclusion as those who believe we do not; they are on the same side. They are united against the Ancient Greek position that only by cultivating our character can we influence the main dynamo of our fate, our own naive character, cultivate it into something more worthy, something that might truly create a small space of meaningful freedom in our lives.

This is not a difficult idea, but almost no one in the Modern world seems capable of grasping it. We all let the terms of the debate about how much freedom we have in the world be dictated to us by those who think in simplistic, polarized ways, even though out of the range of possibilities we are effectively only offered a single choice in two guises. Idiot and genius alike find themselves completely fooled by this simple and misleading framing of the question of personal freedom, and argue back and forth about which of the two falsehoods is true.

The reason we are all stumped by this is the same reason we are all stumped by most things.

Just as there is no viable species anywhere composed of a single member, so too there is no such thing as an individual person, or an individual mind. Without the help of a cultural framework, a person cannot learn to speak a language, nor even to think in any meaningful way. Our culture is so much a part of who we are that it is more accurate to say we are a part of it. Cultures frame the world for us in such a way that only certain ideas are considered possible; everything else is truly beyond the pale for us. Although when young, or tired, or feeling playful we may toy with a wide range of choices, our serious debates inevitably fall back on what seems realistic to us, plausible, and that determination of plausibility is fundamentally an irrational process that is done for us by our culture.

Each culture rules out different swaths of reality as stuff that only crazies or extremists would believe; whatever pitifully small field of possibilities remain "plausible" becomes the range of allowable "responsible" discussion in that culture. Even more clearly put, even the narrow range of ideas allowed to extremists and crazies is defined by the culture; ideas outside those bounds are not even expressible in the culture's language without extreme wordiness, awkwardness, and distortion. No matter how rational we think we are, no matter how much the scientist, the iconoclast, the rebel, the outsider, the freethinker, the genius, nevertheless our range of "independent" thinking remains within the boundaries set by our culture, or cultures if we have been deeply enough influenced by more than one.

We cannot meaningfully cultivate our character to create some kind of personal freedom for ourselves unless our culture imagines the possibility for us, unless our language expresses it, unless it comes within our limited range of conceivable thought. The reason we cannot imagine a choice other than free will or determinism is that those are the only two positions allowed within the range of responsible thought; those who want to prove how smart they are may choose from refinements of determinism, such as nature versus nurture, so that is how they express their "individualism" and "free thinking," in the culturally approved way. We pick off our culture's menu of ideas and call it creativity.

Since the Ancient Greek position on personal freedom isn't on our cultural menu of ideas, it is quite literally inconceivable to us unless we immerse ourselves fully enough in that quite different, almost alien culture of Ancient Greece, and even then it requires enough immersion in the corresponding language to even be able to express the ideas clearly. When I write "character is fate" in English, I am misusing the words, trying to bend them enough to convey something they do not naturally convey because of their culture of origin (character used to be an Ancient Greek word, but in English we have long since smoothed down its rough edges to redefine it in terms we find more comfortable). I could write a book on the problem of what Heraclitus meant when he wrote that character is fate, and still most Moderns would be incapable of grasping it, whereas most Ancient Greeks would readily appreciate the import in the original language. Each language naturally expresses a different range of possibilities to its culture.

So, the problem.

To create some limited personal freedom we have to understand it the right way, so that we can understand why cultivating our character is necessary and what that might mean, but that requires the support of a culture that conceives of fate, character, and freedom in the right ways. Our culture does not, which is why we end up splitting into hedonists and nihilists, none of whom are free nor understands why not.

We also need a culture that supports our efforts to become better people. Without that, even those who through exposure to Ancient Greece or other cultures do stumble upon the right ideas about personal freedom and how to develop it are extremely unlikely to get very far in becoming better people. For example, in Modern culture the struggle to stay afloat financially trumps all other concerns, especially anything with as negligible market value as the struggle to become a better person.

So there is some pithy saying missing here, something to add to "character is fate," something about culture framing character. Maybe that is among the many things Heraclitus wrote that we have lost, or maybe it was so obvious to the Greeks it didn't occur to him to write it down. If we want to make it easier for people to cultivate good character, we need to find the words to help them conceive of doing so, and then we need to change our culture to make it possible.

Anthropoculture must be the highest priority for a good culture, a sustainable culture, but in our culture it is barely expressible.

Yours truly,
Rick

Free Will and Determinism

Dear Reader,

We are taught to believe we have free will. We are also taught not to question that teaching. In the spirit of Modernism (i.e., nihilism--ah, the awesome power of the negative), let us question it.

Free how? Free from what? Free to what?

The answers to all these questions are the same: Don't ask. The implication is that we are infinitely free because we say we are. This is patently false.

First, nothing is true just because we say it is, or because a document says it is. Belief that we can dictate terms to the cosmos--I can fly because I say I can fly; you are a bad person because I say you are--is properly called nominalism, and it is a common and obvious fallacy, bad logic.

Second, we are obviously not infinitely free. Your freedom interferes with my freedom, and vice versa, and once you spin that web of interferences out across six billion people you find quite a tangle of unfreedom. Further, reality intrudes on our precious fantasy of infinite freedom. The sun will not rise one instant sooner just because I will it to, nor will I live one moment longer than the cosmos permits. We are profoundly bound. And finally and most importantly, we obstruct ourselves. An alcoholic reaches for the bottle even--especially--when that is exactly the wrong thing to do to achieve what he believes he wants, and we are all special cases of the alcoholic: the neglected child, the victim of bullies, the overachiever, the exhibitionist . . . the more psychology identifies the patterns of human behavior, the more we realize these patterns constrain us.

So long as we believe the choice is between free will and determinism, any reality-seeking person has to choose determinism, because there is no good argument to be made for free will in the face of a cosmos of evidence to the contrary.

But why should we believe free will and determinism are the only options for explaining the human condition? Contemporary writers may lack the profundity to imagine any more than two explanations, but fortunately we have the far more insightful authors of the past to consider.

The Ancient Greeks did not believe in free will because they weren't that stupid, but neither did they settle for the simple determinism of Moderns. Put more bluntly, contrary to what the brilliant Philip Rieff writes in Sacred Order/Social Order Volume One, My Life among the Deathworks: Illustrations of the Aesthetics of Authority, the Ancient Greeks believed in fate but not in fate alone. To characterize them as fatalistic is one of those partial truths that is better characterized as false than true.

The Ancient Greeks believed that Man is ruled by his character, and that character is fate--Êthos anthrôpôi daimôn, wrote Heraclitus--but what is the source of character?

Each of us inherits a character (whether by genetics, or upbringing, or some combination, or something else, really does not matter for this discussion) from our parents, and by the time we figure this out (if we ever do) we have been living under the rule of that character for some years, usually decades. If we are lucky, we have eudaimonia, a good daimon, giving us good character; if unlucky, dysdaimonia, a bad daimon, giving us bad character. Our character is a daimon that rides us and steers us as a man rides a horse, nudges us through our unconscious mind, through our appetites, desires, urges, and impulses, toward certain ends and away from others. Because, as psychologists have known for over a century, the conscious mind, the ego, although it imagines itself to be in charge of the self is really just the plaything or tool of the unconscious mind that does all the steering, we often find ourselves doing things we never would have imagined, living lives quite different than those we consciously chose when we were younger. The intersection of fates where the teleology of our character meets the web of causes and effects of the cosmos steers us on an unpredictable but (from a divine perspective) fated path.

So far this accords with Rieff's dismissal of the ancient world view as organized around fate, but here is the crucial ingredient missing from his perspective: the Ancient Greeks believed in a second source of character as well.

Just as a gardener, regardless of whether the garden begins as glory or travesty, may either let it go to pot or may carefully coax it into a wonder, so each of us may cultivate our own character or not, may give in to our worst impulses and so strengthen them or may work to improve ourselves internally. We act upon our own inner cosmos or character, and thereby shift it continuously. Heraclitus wrote that all things change, and our innermost character is no exception. Our character is not software or genetics, it is more like an organism that learns and responds, changing. In the end, our character when we die may be unbelievably different than when we are born, depending on how we tend to our character, on how the cosmos treats us, and on how our character reacts.

This is a far more complex relationship to both freedom and fate than is embodied in the trivial, reductionistic, childish, Modern opposition of free will and determinism. The Ancient Greeks believed that although our character drives us to our fates, the forces both internal and external operating upon our character were so complex that not even we can know ourselves well enough to predict for sure what we will do until submitted to the trials of life. Indeed, this was the sacred purpose of story, to put a protagonist under just the right pressures to compel the truth about that character to emerge, to remind ourselves of the limits and liabilities of character and self-knowledge in an attempt to keep cancerous ego in check.

Thus, the ancient worldview is not about strictly fate but about nature, which is a domain of fate and choice, each of which influences the other in complex and changing ways. Here, in this endless dance of powers, we can imagine forces of human nature intricate enough to explain the complexities of observed human behavior far better than with any trivial choice between free will and determinism.

Character is fate, so we must cultivate our characters or suffer the fatal consequences.

Yours truly,
Rick

Heraclitea by Serge Mouraviev

Dear Reader,

In Chapter VII, "Heraclitus," of A History of Greek Philosophy, Volume One: The Earlier Presocratics and the Pythagoreans, page 403, W.K.C. Guthrie wrote in 1962:

A discussion of the thought of Heraclitus labours under peculiar difficulties. His own expression of it was generally considered to be highly obscure, a verdict fully borne out by the surviving fragments. Both in the ancient and the modern worlds he has provided a challenge to the ingenuity of interpreters which few have been able to resist. Perhaps not altogether unfortunately, most of the ancient commentaries have perished, but the amount written on him since the beginning of the nineteenth century would itself take a very long time to master. Some of these writers have been painstaking scholars, others philosophers or religious teachers who found in the pregnant and picturesque sayings of Heraclitus a striking anticipation of their own beliefs. If the interpretations of the latter suffer from their attitude of parti pris, the former may also be temperamentally at a disadvantage in penetrating the thoughts of a man who had at least as much in him of the prophet and poet as of the philosopher.

There is, then, an army of commentators, no two of whom are in full agreement.

Leaving aside the question of whether Heraclitus is especially difficult to interpret, Mr. Guthrie rightly identifies three other crucial obstacles facing the Heraclitus scholar, paraphrased:

1) Detail-oriented academics lack the temperament to comprehend the essence of Heraclitus's philosophy, without which all of his statements must seem obscure indeed.

2) Philosophers and religious teachers tend to have rather large axes to grind, leading to the most remarkable misreadings, such as those neo-Platonists who argue Heraclitus never wrote "You cannot step in the same river twice" and denied he believed in eternal flux.

3) Many, perhaps most, of Heraclitus's text has not survived, and most of the ancient commentary about him that might have allowed us to reconstruct and understand that text have likewise perished.

German publisher Academia Verlag, in their commentary on Serge Mouraviev's massive ongoing project with them, Heraclitea, identifies another, rarely discussed reason for the wide divergence of interpretations among Heraclitean scholars:

. . . until now the Heraclitean corpus has never been published in its entirety. Previous editors disregarded many texts. Other texts remain inaccessible for the average reader because of the rarity of the books in which they can be found. The lack of a complete corpus is one of the reasons why the scholars' opinions on Heraclitus' ideas continue to be so widely and so wildly divergent.

These and other difficulties have inspired Monsieur Mouraviev to embark upon an eleven-year, twenty-volume writing project in which he proposes to collect in one place everything written about Heraclitus from 500 BC to 1561 AD, with criticism and analysis, and to attempt a reconstruction of the book itself. This is indisputably the most ambitious work of Heraclitean scholarship ever undertaken. Academia Verlag published the first volume of the series in 1999, six volumes so far.

After ordering them a few weeks ago, I bought them today from my local bookstore, Santoro's Books, to whom I have been shifting much of my book-buying business lately in an effort to strengthen my neighborhood.

It is because they are written in French that I have recently renewed my interest in multilingualism. For anyone interested in Heraclitus, Serge Mouraviev's project is too important to miss. French and Ancient Greek are the languages I will be starting with this year, with this very series in mind.

Oddly, I find even the mere single year of college French I took proves enough to follow about a quarter of the text, but I am sure the remaining three quarters will require more study than I have put into any language other than English.

Yours truly,
Rick

Discrete Silence

Dear Reader,

Today I deleted a few lines from one of my past blog entries. I am returning to my original plan for this blog of never discussing anything specific related to my work.

Yours truly,
Rick

Anna Lee Walters

Dear Reader,

I have collected some information on the wife of our host Harry Walters. Here are two online biographies of Anna Lee Walters:

Voices from the Gaps: Artist Biography: Anna Lee Walters

Hanksville: Storytellers: Native American Authors Online: Anna Lee Walters

Here is a list of books she has written, cowritten, or edited:

with Peggy V. Beck and Nia Francisco. Sacred: Ways of Knowledge, Sources of Life. Navajo Community College: 1977. ISBN: 0912586745 (paperback).

The Sun Is Not Merciful: Short Stories. Firebrand Books: 1985. ISBN: paperback = 0932379109, hardcover = 0932379117.

The Spirit of Native America: Beauty and Mysticism in American Indian Art. Chronicle Books: 1989. ISBN: paperback = 0877015155, hardcover = 0877016518.

Talking Indian: Reflections on Survival and Writing. Firebrand Books: 1992. ISBN: paperback = 1563410214, hardcover = 1563410222.

with Carol Bowles (Illustrator). The Two-Legged Creature: An Otoe Story. Northland: 1993. ISBN: 0873585534 (hardcover).

ed. Neon Pow-Wow: New Native American Voices of the Southwest. Northland: 1993. ISBN: 0873585623 (paperback).

Ghost Singer: A Novel. University of New Mexico Press: 1994. ISBN: 0826315453 (paperback).

The Pawnee Nation (Native Peoples). Bridgestone Books: 2000. ISBN: 073680501X (Library Binding).

If you spot any errors or omissions in this list, please let me know.

Yours truly,
Rick

Home from Dinetah

Dear Reader,

I arrived home an hour and a half ago, though half my heart is still in Dinetah with the family of Harry and Anna Walters. Jerry and I had an unbelievable time we will never forget. Our thanks to the wise and warm Walters family for accepting us into their homeland, to master photographer Gary Tepfer for organizing this spectacular trip, and to our fellow travelers for their humor, experience, and camaraderie.

Yours truly,
Rick

Vacation

Dear Reader,

I will be off for the next two weeks hiking and photographing in the southwest with my friends Jerry and Gary. See you when I get back.

Yours truly,
Rick

Adulthood

Dear Reader,

At age 18 (or is it 21?) what magical transformation occurs that turns a child into an adult?

Nothing.

Watching quality reality shows like Frontier House, Black + White, Texas Ranch House, and so on, is an exercise in disappointment with the state of adulthood today. Or rather, disillusionment, for I am not aware of a coherent theory of what adulthood means in America other than making a living, paying taxes, and obeying the law. Even voting in America is optional, let alone fuller participation in democracy. We shove people into the responsibilities of adulthood whether they're ready or not as soon as they pass the magic age, and then punish them if they can't rise to the occasion.

This explains why so many "adults" are petulant, defensive, self-centered, appetite-driven, confused, incoherent, clannish, simple-minded, even unethical--in short, why so many "adults" are children. Many of the stories of popular culture hinge on the childishness of modern adults, and much of the chaos of current events and politics only makes sense when we look closely at the immature psychology of the people involved.

The most childish quality I see is competition over victim status. I mean, there are people like Dr. Martin Luther King or Malcolm X who no one would have blamed for giving up considering the adversity and outright unfairness they faced, yet they continued fighting for what was right even unto death, whereas I have met privileged, middle-class white men who feel oppressed and whine endlessly if you disagree with them about their pet theories about the world. The inability to distinguish great tests from irritating inconveniences (lack of perspective) and the complete immersion in their own private feeling life as though that were the extent of the world (egocentrism) help such people justify wallowing in victimhood even when they have the upper hand in life.

This lack of adults leads so many situations in modern life to devolve into resentful clans sniping and feuding over who has been the most unfairly treated by the other. I used to know a white employee at the VA hospital who felt victimized by the black employees there, not because of anything they did to him but because he imagined them shirking work and whining about how unfairly they were treated--precisely what he was doing when he came into my office to complain about them. I never told him what a racist he was because it was far more interesting just to watch him and try to understand the mind of the bigot, the adult child who has singled out categories of people to be his oppressors. Most adult children just blame life for being unfair, or specific people for picking on them, but bigots need a grander sense of drama so they imagine whole abstract categories of people oppressing them.

Two of the core lessons of adulthood are impossible for the victim to imagine, let alone act upon.

First, we contribute to many of the problems we experience in life, sometimes because we do not adequately prepare for adversity, sometimes because when bad things happen instead of rising to the occasion we wallow in our feelings of being victimized, the unfairness of it all, and sometimes because we are broken and recreate in our lives over and over bad situations from our childhood that we still haven't acknowledged and dealt with. I speak from experience, here.

Second, regardless of whether bad things that happen to us are our fault, as adults it is our responsibility to clean up the resulting mess. That is one of the defining qualities that distinguishes an adult from a child--an adult has learned that infantile responses do not make things better, however personally gratifying they may be, and they often make things worse.

By all means, sometimes things happen to us that are not our fault, and some people are definitely singled out for mistreatment for a variety of reasons. Anyone who believes racism, sexism, and other forms of bigotry and persecution are things of the past is kidding himself. But where a child may let himself be defined by that unfairness, an adult has to be the parent, has to step up and start cleaning up the consequences.

I wish there were a handbook for adult behavior that children could read and strive for, but as it happens part of adulthood is learning to think for ourselves, to look past appearances, not to blindly trust authorities to tell us the truth or have our best interests at heart, so such a handbook would subvert what it purported to teach.

Still, our criteria of adulthood are so lax that even a clever psychopath qualifies as an adult, as long as he can survive for 18 or 21 years. Not one shred of decency or genuine human empathy is required to qualify as an adult in our culture. Can we be surprised at the quality of adults we have selected for?

Surely we can do better than this, but first we are going to have to think about what adulthood ought to mean and figure out how we could select for that. The Ken Lays and Jeffrey Daumers of the world clearly were not ready for the responsibilities of adulthood. We can proclaim that all men are created equal--and maybe they are--but they sure do not end up that way.

Yours truly,
Rick

Postscript: This is not intended as a slight on children. I have met children who are fundamentally more adult than many "adults," and plenty of children are sweet and adorable and clever and good even if they are not yet ready for the responsibilities of adulthood. The problem is not childhood per se; it is the lack of standards for adulthood.

Noted Polyglots

Dear Reader,

According to a Wikipedia article on polyglots, if you learn six or more languages you are known as a hyperpolyglot. If you learn ten or more languages, you can be listed in their article on noted polyglots. It is a bit scary how few there are, and also a bit scary how many languages some people can or could speak. If I follow my own advice, I could be listed in this article in ten years.

Yours truly,
Rick

Polyglot

Dear Reader,

We should be or become multilingual. It is not optional for being a well-rounded human being. The limits of language impose limits on our thought, and different languages impose different limits and open up different areas of thought more easily. No language opens up the complete range of human thought, and probably not even all human languages taken together would do so, but learning more than one language at least lets us expand our mental horizons. There are other arguments to be made for multilingualism, such as the utility and improved harmony of being able to communicate with more of the world's people, but you have heard all that before.

So, if we should learn more than one language, which ones should we learn?

First, we should master our own native language or languages, in my case English, since I'm such a mutt that I don't have a short list of ancestral family languages to add. Only death should be the end of that learning process: we can never be fluent enough to justify quitting. Even as we should push at the boundaries of our thinking with philosophy, so should we push at the boundaries of our fluency.

Second, we should learn the languages of large numbers of our immediate neighbors, so we can be good neighbors. In most of the world this is more of a challenge than where I live, but even in the United States, we have Mexico and Canada as neighbors, and numerous immigrants from around the world in the U.S. Wikipedia has good information on languages used in Mexico, Canada, and the United States, but I will offer a summary. For good neighborliness, any North American should be at least bilingual, speaking English and Spanish, each of which has over a hundred million speakers locally. It would be better for North Americans to speak French as well, since almost ten million of our neighbors do. Millions of our immediate neighbors speak Chinese (2.85), American Sign Language (between .5 and 2), German (1.84), Nahuatl (1.5), Maya (1.5), Italian (1.48), Tagalog (1.37), and Vietnamese (1.13). Hundreds of thousands of our immediate neighbors speak Korean (975), Polish (878), Arabic (810), Russian (804), Hindi & Urdu (716), Japanese (514), Greek (490), Persian (404), Gujarati (297), Punjabi (over 271), Armenian (227), Navajo (178), Ukrainian (over 148), and Dutch (over 128). I will be refreshing my French this year, trying to tune it up enough to read a massive French series on Heraclitus. I want to refresh my Spanish after that, next year or the year after, depending on how long it takes me to improve my French enough. After that, in the years ahead for neighborliness I want to pick up American Sign Language and Japanese (because of Seattle's special relationship with Japan).

Third, we should learn our religious and philosophical languages, including Arabic, Ancient Greek, Latin, Ancient Hebrew, and the other languages of the world's great ethical systems. I will begin with Ancient Greek this year to support my cultural and philosophical studies. Arabic will be next, but not for a while.

Fourth, we should learn the languages of the First Peoples where we live, in part to show respect, in part to learn the languages of people who lived where we live far longer than we have and whose languages may well be more fully and subtly adapted to our homeland than our "native" tongues. As a Seattlite, I need to learn Salishan, but it will be a few years before I begin.

Fifth, we should learn the major languages of the world. The Linguasphere website has a great article on the languages most spoken around the world. Two languages have a billion speakers: English and Mandarin (aka Putonghua). Two pairs of related languages have a half billion speakers: Hindi + Urdu, and Spanish + Portuguese. Three more languages have over 200 million speakers: Russian, Bengali, and Arabic. Four more have 100 million or more speakers: Japanese, Malay + Indonesian, German, and French. From among these I am initially interested in adding Mandarin and Hindi + Urdu.

Sixth, there are always the languages we pick up because of our own personal interests. Because of my history studies to improve my Dungeons and Dragons games, I have sporadically studied Anglo-Saxon. Because of my love of The Lord of the Rings, I used to haltingly speak and write Tolkien's Sindarin and Quenya. Because of idealism, I spent some time learning Esperanto. Because of its long history as a scholarly lingua franca in the three millennia BC like Latin later became, I am very curious about Sumerian.

Of all of these, I am only fluent in English, I can reasonably understand and make myself understood in Spanish (which I used to be fluent in enough even to understand Portuguese), and I can hobble along in French. For German, Italian, Japanese, Chinese, Anglo-Saxon, and Ancient Greek, I only have a few words and phrases and some practice with pronunciation. This is not nearly good enough. For at least the reasons outlined above, we all need to become polyglots, and it is not even that difficult. If we pick up a new language book and tapes every year or two and read and practice in our spare time over the course of the year, we can at least become fluent enough to understand and make ourselves be understood in the basics in a surprising number of languages.

It is a big world full of many interesting people. Let's make it easier to meet them by learning their languages, and by doing that work make ourselves more interesting to meet as well.

Yours truly,
Rick

Raymond and Bryanna Scott

Dear Reader,

Today's Seattle Times ran an article in its Northwest Life section about the amazing efforts of Raymond and Bryanna Scott of Renton, Washington, to transform his clan's estate and ancestral village in Sierra Leone. There have been four articles so far, and you should read them to remind yourself how much of a difference a few people can make:

Sunday, October 10, 2004: Native son works for a better Africa

Tuesday, November 30, 2004: Aid for Sierra Leone becomes more than a one-man mission

Sunday, May 29, 2005: Native son delivers aid, hope to ancestral village

Sunday, May 7, 2006: Helping Sierra Leoneans reap full benefits of a coveted resource

We can make a difference, but we have to be organized, and persistent, and patient, and focused, and gregarious, and we have to do something we believe in, and do it with people who believe in us.

Yours truly,
Rick

Visualizing Heaven

Dear Reader,

As a post-atheist, or whatever I am (I detect the need for some terminology), I am not inclined to trust to the afterlife to provide an experience of heaven for humanity; rather I feel we must work to create heaven on Earth. Or, as the camper's motto puts it, to leave the world better than we found it.

The problem is that the Modern world so relentlessly exterminates any conception of alternatives that we find our very imaginations invaded by the delusion of an endless present whose only positive development will be technology, e.g., the simplistic optimism of Star Trek or the noir optimism of Bladerunner. The more we take a hard look at the state of the world the more the relentless Modern myth is replaced by a relentlessly grim fear that our future will be dystopian--totalitarianism, corruption, plagues, ecological devastation, ignorance, religous wars, and technological incompetence--if not outright extinction. The unconscious sense that our future will be dystopian is part of why interest in reading science fiction is collapsing as readers turn to fantasy and other forms of escape.

Reading about the ancient Greeks, I notice one crucial ingredient in their success is a sense of what the future could be, based on generally agreed upon shared values and a shared ideal of what all people should strive to be, of arete. A central motivator for such a drive for excellence is contempt for the default human condition, a belief that we are obliged to strive to become better than we are if we are to be even crudely civilized. Without this vital ingredient the Greeks could never have advanced in so many different ways in such a short time.

Maybe we need to spend some time taking a long hard look at how things are and coming up with a clear idea of how we would prefer things to be. For example, maybe we want in a world in which there are some fisheries left. Maybe we want some forests so we don't have to live on a desert planet. Maybe we want people educated enough to tell when political candidates are lying about their positions. How about a world in which it's easier to find true friends? I would certainly prefer not to financially support torture. What if vote-tampering consistuted treason? How about making a world with so little pollution that mother's milk isn't laced with poisons?

Such an exercise could be fun or it could be daunting depending on how we approach it, but let's face it: each of us has to make this list. If we cannot even imagine what a good world would be like, then of course we will despair for our future. Give yourself a timeframe, say thirty days, to try to figure out what the most important issues are facing humanity, what things you most want to see improved. Do some research on the Internet and elsewhere to get your facts straight on each issue so you can propose something useful, if brief.

Let's put this another way. Aren't you sick of all those compromised political-party platforms drafted by committees, which you know the parties will never institute anyway even if they were good ideas? Wouldn't you like to see at least once in your life a platform that reflected your values and priorities? Well you can: write it yourself. That alone would take political discussion in this country a huge step forward by making possible concrete discussion of specific problems and possible solutions. Rather than political discussions consisting mainly of identifying sides and throwing stones, we could begin focusing on looking for ways to improve our personal political platforms. When we talk politics, we could be searching for who has come up with better ideas than we have on the things that matter to us, so afterward we can amend our lists with the improvements and note who we learned them from.

Imagine: productive political discussions, in which we compare our personal ideas about what a little bit of heaven on Earth would be like.

Yours truly,
Rick

The Language of Homer

Dear Reader,

Gilbert Murray's The Rise of the Greek Epic continues to impress.

A few samples of Homer:

They two in front of the high gate were standing like high-crested oaks on a mountain, which abide the wind and the rain through all days, firm in their long roots that reach deep into the earth.

. . .

So spake he, and the old man trembled and obeyed his word; and he went in silence by the shore of the many-sounding sea, and prayed alone to the Lord Apollo, whom fair-haired Leto bare.

. . .

And a herd he wrought thereon of straight-horned kine. The kine were wrought of gold and of tin, and lowing they wended forth from the byre to their pasture, by the side of a singing river, by a bed of slender reeds.

. . .

I look upon thee and know thee as thou art. I could never have moved thee, for the heart is iron within thy breast. Therefore beware lest I be to thee a wrath of god, on that day when Paris and Phoebus Apollo shall slay thee in thy valour at the Scaean Gates.

. . .

As riseth the screaming of cranes in front of the sunrise, cranes that have fled from winter and measureless rain, screaming they fly over the streams of ocean, bearing unto the dwarf-men battle and death.

. . .

As glorious as the language of the Iliad and Odyssey are, what makes these epics most astonishing is that they describe how the greatest heroes of the Greek heroic age essentially squandered everything they had over a domestic quarrel, and then screwed even that up over a temper tantrum. The Greeks exalted as very nearly their national bible a tale of how the best efforts of the best of men led to ruin, shame, and despair. They put their highest aspirations and deepest shames on display, and in their finest language painted a portrait of how their glorious ancestors destroyed their own civilization, collapsing the Aegean into a dark age that lasted for centuries.

The ancient Greeks taught their children from the Iliad! It is difficult for us as Moderns to fully believe there could ever have been a great people who put their own shame and weaknesses front and center, exalting them in their finest language. Of the many things they changed over time in this living traditional book of theirs, they never tried to obscure the domestic quarrel that launched the war, nor the petty squabble between Agamemnon and Achilles that forms the heart of the epic, and in tragedy after tragedy written about the consequences of that great war, the Greeks immortalized in art the terrible devastation awaiting each of the surviving victors. They did not write of these things for entertainment, or out of boredom, or to make money, or because they had run out of other things to say; they wrote of these things because for them art like every other facet of culture had to serve the purpose of anthropoculture--helping raise each new generation to be the best people they could--and that would only be possible if they learned from their mistakes.

I, too, wish to learn from my mistakes, and from our mistakes as a people.

Yours truly,
Rick

Getting to the Root

Dear Reader,

It is 2:21 a.m., and I cannot sleep, so I blog. I should have been in Eugene with Beverly, sleeping at Beth and Jerry's house in anticipation of a day of hiking and art, were I not ill.

My illness has six layers.

1) Infection. The colloidal silver turned that around within a couple days, and the infection is nearly gone now.

2) Inflammation. So now the color of the congestion is gone but the coughing continues. I must deal with this layer next.

3) Weakness. Battling this thing is always exhausting. After I beat it, I will still need to rest and recover my strength. It was brought on by weakening myself with a marathon twenty-four hour patching session that came on the heels of a month of nonstop work.

4) Poor physical condition. I get sick because I sacrifice my health maintenance, especially exercise, for work. This has to stop.

5) Stress. This is why I can't sleep. I have known for four months what I need to do to fix what's currently most broken in my life, to drive down the stress in my life, but because it is an emotionally difficult step for me to take I put it off and am now suffering the consequences.

6) Attachment. After four years of investing my heart and mind and time and money and energy and spirit and identity into something, it's hard to let it go, even if it is making me sick. I keep wanting to find the right argument to convince, to perform the right miracle to earn enough trust, but these are losing battles. As Jerry says, you cannot convince someone who does not want to be convinced, and you cannot teach values to adults, especially those who mistakenly believe they already have those values. It is far easier (though by no means easy) to find people who already share your values, and in that regard I have been very very lucky, yet still I have continued fighting a futile battle to be understood by and convince the others.

I may be an extraordinarily slow learner--and that is not false humility but the voice of bitter experience--but my great virtue is that sooner or later I do learn, and then I fold the lesson into my very soul and change everything about myself to take it into account. Here are a convergence of lessons pointing to the root of my problem. Wake up, says Heraclitus, from your sleepwalking dream and see things for what they really are. It's time, says the Christian, to exercise some long overdue wisdom and accept this thing I cannot change. A little less attachment, suggests the Buddha, for a lot more serenity.

Yes. I see. I will.

Yours truly,
Rick

Happiness and Eudaimonea

Dear Reader,

In Oedipus Tyrannus, Sophocles has the chorus sing "Count no mortal happy until he has reached the very end of his life free from misfortune and pain."

A Modern would read that in the most literal and judgmental way possible: obviously Sophocles is just a pessimist, so we can disregard what he says. Thus the banausic reflex--do not pursue the truth, only what seems useful to machine minds, and disregard the rest. The Greeks considered this play the masterpiece of one of their masters, this statement a pinnacle of insight into the human condition. As with Heraclitus, this statement rolls up layers of wisdom into a deceptively simple package.

It only seems pessimistic to those for whom it is most intended, those who foolishly believe happiness is the highest human achievement, to be captured by deserved good fortune. The Greeks believed happiness is fool's gold, the wrong thing to want, because happiness is transient and outside of our control. To attempt to will the cosmos to satisfy our personal desires is a fool's errand. To wish for happiness is to wish for luck, and the wheel of fortune turns. If we achieve our ends by luck, then we will eventually lose them the same way. Oedipus starts out on top of the world and ends up on the bottom, afflicted by the most terrible crimes and situations, because he has relied upon luck and overweening ego. His life is an object lesson for the rest of us, indeed, it is the object lesson we are most in need of but least likely to heed because it challenges the core of our beliefs.

To the ancient Greeks, the only thing worth having is not happiness but eudaimonea, which is its opposite. Eudaimonea is the condition having cultivated a good daimon, a well ordered inner cosmos that allows one to rise to the occasion at any time, not just when fortune smiles upon us, because the wheel of fortune turns, so sooner or later we will need the resources to be able to rise to the occasion when fortune frowns upon us. With eudaimonea we will often not be happy because that is not within anyone's control, but we may make the best of the hands life deals us. Unlike the pointless and self-atrophying quest for happiness, with the quest for eudaimonea the longer we are at it the better we will get, and thus our efforts are not wasted but grow into something more and more worth having. This is the true gold without which even the richest and most powerful man on Earth remains but a slave to fortune and his own demonic appetites and delusions, but with which even a pauper in a death camp is free. Eudaimonea is the only property you can truly own, that cannot be taken away from you, and therefore the most important thing to seek in life, and the only way to acquire eudaimonea is to work for it your entire life long.

That one line from Sophocles is pregnant with all of that and more, and this one play from ancient Greece is in many ways the signature of their entire civilization. Too bad we don't teach it that way.

Yours truly,
Rick

Comparing Silver Products

Dear Reader,

Here is the best report I have read yet comparing and contrasting the three forms of silver, including their advantages and disadvantages. Particularly, the discussion of why ionic silver is less effective in the body than in a lab--due to its tendency to react with chloride ions and precipitate out of the body as silver chloride--is something I would like to see the proponents of ionic silver solutions address, and was decisive in my decision to go with true colloidal silver instead for my experiment.

Yours truly,
Rick

Colloidal Silver

Dear Reader,

I'm very tired today, but making progress against the bronchitis.

Until this morning, each day I woke with more congestion than the day before and more infection as measured by the deepening color, and longer and more exhausting process of clearing my nose, throat, and lungs before the day could begin. Last night was the first time I got the sinus flooding procedure with the colloidal silver right, and this morning I woke with dramatically less congestion, color, and time to get clear. I had nothing in my lungs at all when I awoke, as opposed to the hour and a half of coughing it took yesterday to get clear. My sinuses were not clear yet when I awoke, so I'm not done, but it only took me a half hour to get clear, so this morning was quite a reversal in the right direction.

Yours truly,
Rick

Postscript: Here is another informative website on colloidal silver; I particularly like their article about argyria. These writers do not share the disdain for ionic silver of the authors of the Purest Colloids website, but since both agree on the efficacy of the true colloidal form, I'm still satisfied with my choice of experiments. I am not recommending any of these colloidal-silver resources as factual, just better-than-average grist for your colloidal-silver mill.

Medical Independence

Dear Reader,

Today I began treating myself with colloidal silver, a universal antibiotic with no negative side effects (despite misinformation propagated by the FDA about a condition called argyria, which is caused by silver protein compounds or ionic silver but not by true colloidal silver), effective against most single-celled pathogens and to which they cannot develop immunity. In an era when the antibiotic industry is facing its end in resistant strains of pathogens created by the use and misuse of those very drugs, the once well known properties of silver ought to be front-page news, yet the medical industry remains strangely mute. Could the FDA's willful disregard for the truth about colloidal silver have more to do with its unpatentability? Here in a nutshell is the tug of war between profit and health.

The FDA would prefer to regulate all potentially healthful nutritionally based treatments, banning any it has not approved. It argues that we need this protection because we the patients are too stupid to care for ourselves. Patients are portrayed as superstitious children easily duped by snake-oil salesmen. We are to believe that patients need parents, and the drug companies and their favored government agencies are volunteering for the job. That this industry is so profitable that it is strangling the American economy is not supposed to matter to us. If we are afraid enough, maybe we will pay any price--even national bankruptcy--to be coddled like children.

The analogy I see is to the days when people were considered too stupid to have their own relationship with God, when the Bible had to be kept in Latin--not in the vernacular of the people--to ensure they could not read it for themselves, that they could only approach God through intermediaries. So, too, we are not to approach health except through the sacred intermediaries of an industry that not too long ago tortured the mentally ill, denied the existence of allergies, and treated a whole range of gynecological problems by extracting women's reproductive organs. Today, medical error is among the top five causes of death in America, a staggering, shameful number--comparable to the days of leeches, bleeding, and bonesaws--yet the industry's response is to attack alternative medicine because it might be harmful! I believe Jesus had some advice for those obsessed with the faults of others. That's a Hell of a beam in the medical industry's eye. Let it clean its own house before it worries about its neighbors.

If anyone is going to experiment on me in the quest to make me healthy, let it be me. At least I have the correct vested interest in the outcome--health rather than profit or ideological correctness.

I will let you know how my experiments with colloidal silver proceed, for better or worse.

Yours truly,
Rick

PS: If you are interested in exploring the possibilities of colloidal silver, spend your time researching it, because misinformation by opponents and supporters dominates the Internet. Try here and here to start, then contrast what the FDA, Quackbusters, and other supposedly neutral organizations have to say.

Labeling Redux

Dear Reader,

I spoke with Maria at Source Naturals and learned that the labeling change reflects not a change in ingredients but a change in law. The Food Allergen Labeling and Consumer Protection Act of 2004 (Title II of Public Law 108-282) went into effect January 1st of this year and is being enforced by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). It increases the strictness of the rules governing labeling of the top eight ellergens in food and supplements, but unfortunately the wording is vague enough to be too strict.

The law is intended to ensure that even subtle amounts of allergens in products are listed, such as might result if an ingredient is not actually present in the product but was present in the factory where the product was produced, but the law as written requires exactly the same wording as if the product contained that ingredient. For example, Wellness Formula contains no dairy or soy, but some of the ingredients come from machinery that is also used at other times to process dairy or soy. Under the new law, Source Naturals is required to say their product does in fact contain those ingredients, even though it probably does not and if it does it contains at most trace amounts by accident. Prior to this law, there was a common wording used for such situations, namely "processed on machinery also used to process dairy and soy," which it would have been good to require Source Naturals to add, but instead the new law requires them to use this wording: "Contains milk/dairy and soy." The required wording is probably false, or at least false most of the time, but they are required by law to use it.

In such clumsy ways are the good intentions behind laws perverted in their execution.

The good news for me is that since the FDA-required label is false, since Wellness Formula contains at most trace amounts of dairy, I can continue to use it. Likewise, I can hold Source Naturals blameless for the confusing labeling and place responsibility where it belongs, with the drafters of this new law.

As you may know, the FDA's soul is split between protecting consumers and protecting the profits of the drug companies, and the agency has been responsible for some more or less corrupt activites, such as protecting the poisonous sweetener Aspartame by banning the marketing of the healthy natural alternative Stevia as a sweetener. FDA has lately been serving its drug company clients by trying to whip up an atmosphere of public fear of vitamins, supplements, and other alternative medicine products, thereby supporting lobbying efforts to "regulate" (i.e., restrict access to or put out of business any companies that sell) these alternatives to patentable drugs. Given this background, it is reasonable to wonder whether the FDA will enforce this law unevenly, using it as a club to put more pressure on the purveyors of alternative medicine. Certainly companies like Source Naturals have to be prepared for that and ensure that they adhere to the strictest interpretation possible of this ambiguous new law, if they want to avoid the product seizures and punitive fines FDA can levy.

To have at least part of the FDA so in the pocket of drug companies is Orwellian, since the organization is theoretically charged with protecting the public. Having worked for so many years for the federal government, I know no agency is monolithic, and the FDA will still have many career employees thoroughly dedicated to its original mission, employees who will be the first to acknowledge that some in the upper layers of their organization's management will be the usual rotating political appointees who are there to ensure the agency's primary mission does not interfere with the interests of the administration's political clients. The outcomes, good and bad, from any U.S. government agency tend to take their shape primarily from such tugs of war between these two populations of employees--those there to serve the mission and those there to serve their political masters. Where the former predominate, usually by accident or oversight, the occasional great government program can result, but usually the results more resemble this FDA law in their hamartia, missing the mark, in subtle but important ways.

Yours truly,
Rick

Postscript: For more information on the new labeling law, an article in Natural Products Insider gives a brief overview.