Citizen of the World

"If the things are true which are said by the philosophers about the kinship between God and man, what else remains for men to do than what Socrates did? Never in reply to the question, to what country you belong, say that you are an Athenian or a Corinthian, but that you are a citizen of the world. For why do you say that you are an Athenian, and why do you not say that you belong to the small nook only into which your poor body was cast at birth? Is it not plain that you call yourself an Athenian or Corinthian from the place which has a greater authority and comprises not only that small nook itself and all your family, but even the whole country from which the stock of your progenitors is derived down to you? He then who has observed with intelligence the administration of the world, and has learned that the greatest and supreme and the most comprehensive community is that which is composed of men and God, and that from God have descended the seeds not only to my father and grandfather, but to all beings which are generated on the earth and are produced, and particularly to rational beings - for these only are by their nature formed to have communion with God, being by means of reason conjoined with Him - why should not such a man call himself a citizen of the world, why not a son of God, and why should he be afraid of anything which happens among men? Is kinship with Caesar or with any other of the powerful in Rome sufficient to enable us to live in safety, and above contempt and without any fear at all? and to have God for your maker and father and guardian, shall not this release us from sorrows and fears?"

- Arrian, The Discourses of Epictetus, ca. 108 CE, quoting Epictetus paraphrasing Socrates

The Triumph of Folly

"Democracy is the worst form of government. It is the most inefficient, the most clumsy, the most unpractical. No machinery has yet been contrived to carry out in any but the most farcical manner its principles. It reduces wisdom to impotence and secures the triumph of folly, ignorance, clap-trap and demagogy. The critics of democracy have the easiest of tasks in demonstrating its inefficiency. But there is something even more important than efficiency and expediency - justice. And democracy is the only social order that is admissible, because it is the only one consistent with justice. The moral consideration is supreme. Efficiency, expediency, even practical wisdom and success must go by the board; they are of no account beside the categorical imperative of justice. Justice is only possible when to every man belongs the power to resist and claim redress from wrong. That is democracy. And that is why, clumsy, inefficient, confused, weak and easily misguided as it is, it is the only form of government which is morally permissible. The ideal form of government is an enlightened and benevolent despotism; but that is an absolutely unrealizable dream much more visionary than any democratic Utopia. There can never be an adequately enlightened and justly benevolent despot. Your philosopher king is not a practical success. Put a Sir Thomas More in power, and you have a Torquemada; your ineffectual Marcus Aurelius is succeeded by a Commodus. Justice is only possible through a diffusion of power, and it is in point of fact by the progress of democratic power that the progress of justice has been brought about."

- Robert Briffault, The Making of Humanity, 1919, twenty-eight years before Churchill's famous speech before the House of Commons

Give a Small Boy a Hammer

"In addition to the social pressures from the scientific community there is also at work a very human trait of individual scientists. I call it the law of the instrument, and it may be formulated as follows: Give a small boy a hammer, and he will find that everything he encounters needs pounding. It comes as no particular surprise to discover that a scientist formulates problems in a way which requires for their solution just those techniques in which he himself is especially skilled. To select candidates for training as pilots, one psychologist will conduct depth interviews, another will employ projective tests, a third will apply statistical techniques to questionnaire data, while a fourth will regard the problem as a 'practical' one beyond the capacity of a science which cannot yet fully predict the performance of a rat in a maze. And standing apart from them all may be yet another psychologist laboring in remote majesty - as the rest see him - on a mathematical model of human learning.

"The law of the instrument, however, is by no means wholly pernicious in its working. What else is a man to do when he has an idea, Peirce asks, but ride it as hard as he can, and leave it to others to hold it back within proper limits? What is objectionable is not that some techniques are pushed to the utmost, but that others, in consequence, are denied the name of science. The price of training is always a certain 'trained incapacity': the more we know how to do something, the harder it is to learn to do it differently (children learn to speak a foreign language with less of an accent than adults do only because they did not know their own language so well to start with). I believe it is important that training in behavioral science encourage appreciation of the greatest possible range of techniques."

- Abraham Kaplan, The Conduct of Inquiry: Methodology for Behavioral Science, 1964

[possibly a variation on an unrecorded quote by Mark Twain]

Dragging Us Whither We Do Not Know

"I propose to evoke for you the disorder in which we live. I shall try to show you the reactions of a mind as it observes that disorder: how, when it has taken the measure of what it can and cannot do, it turns inward to reflect, and tries to picture for itself that chaos, to which, by its very nature, it is opposed.

"But the image of chaos is chaos. Disorder is therefore my first point; it is this I ask you to think about. A certain effort is needed, for we have come to be accustomed to it, we live on it, we breathe it, we add to it, and sometimes we feel a real need for it. We find it all around us and within us, in the newspapers, in our daily life, in our manners, in our pleasures, even in our knowledge. It sustains us; and what we have ourselves created is now dragging us whither we do not know and do not wish to go."

--Paul Valéry, "Politics of the Mind" [1932], in The Outlook for Intelligence

Earth-bound Creatures

"While such possibilities still may lie in a distant future, the first boomerang effects of science's great triumphs have made themselves felt in a crisis within the natural sciences themselves. The trouble concerns the fact that the "truths" of the modern scientific world view, though they can be demonstrated in mathematical formulas and proved technologically, will no longer lend themselves to normal expression in speech and thought. The moment these "truths" are spoken of conceptually and coherently, the resulting statements will be "not perhaps as meaningless as a 'triangular circle,' but much more so than a 'winged lion' " (Erwin Schrodinger). We do not yet know whether this situation is final. But it could be that we, who are earth-bound creatures and have begun to act as though we were dwellers of the universe, will forever be unable to understand, that is, to think and speak about the things which nevertheless we are able to do. In this case, it would be as though our brain, which constitutes the physical, material condition of our thoughts, were unable to follow what we do, so that from now on we would indeed need artificial machines to do our thinking and speaking. If it should turn out to be true that knowledge (in the modern sense of know-how) and thought have parted company for good, then we would indeed become the helpless slaves, not so much of our machines as of our know-how, thoughtless creatures at the mercy of every gadget which is technically possible, no matter how murderous it is."

- Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition

The Sick, It Made Ever Sicker

"There are people who are opposed to all philosophy and one does well to listen to them, particularly when they advised the diseased minds of Germans to stay away from metaphysics, instead preaching purification through physis as Goethe did, or healing through music, as did Richard Wagner. The physicians of our culture repudiate philosophy. Whoever wishes to justify it must show, therefore, to what ends a healthy culture uses and has used philosophy. Perhaps the sick will then actually gain salutary insight into why philosophy is harmful specifically to them. There are good instances, to be sure, of a type of health which can exist altogether without philosophy, or with but a very moderate, almost playful, exercise of it. The Romans during their best period lived without philosophy. But where could we find an instance of cultural pathology which philosophy restored to health? If philosophy ever manifested itself as helpful, redeeming, or prophylactic, it was in a healthy culture. The sick, it made ever sicker. Wherever a culture was disintegrating, wherever tension between it and its individual components was slack, philosophy could never re-integrate the individuals back into the group. Wherever an individual was of a mind to stand apart, to draw a circle of self-sufficiency about himself, philosophy was ready to isolate him still further, finally to destroy him through that isolation. Philosophy is dangerous wherever it does not exist in its fullest right, and it is only the health of a culture - and not every culture at that - which accords it such fullest right."

- Friedrich Nietzsche, Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, translated by Marianne Cowan

Passage to Freedom

The culture crisis, when we realize our culture isn't the only choice, is our passage to all true personal freedom and higher development. It's also a test, a filter.

Granted, too many people flunk this test and remain behind. Totalitarians, jingoists, bigots, and idealogues do their best to avoid other cultures or drive them into extinction in a misguided effort to resolve their personal crisis by eliminating from the world any choice but the one they know and trust. After all, if there are no other choices in existence, then we don't have to suffer the anxiety of having to choose.

The rest of us, though, realize that if other people can live and think in different ways, then so can we, that we do not have to remain the person we have been up until now, the person our parents and culture molded us to be, but can instead begin to mold ourselves into whoever we want to become.

That is, we can give up the passivity of our mental and cultural childhood to become active participants in creating our adult selves. We can be more than other people's creations; we can become creators of ourselves.

After all, no one and nothing is perfect; every parent and culture does things right, but we also do things wrong and make mistakes. Until we become co-creators of ourselves, we must passively accept not just the strengths our parents and culture imparted to us but also their weaknesses. If we see ourselves only with the ideas they had, we will usually make the same mistakes they did and overlook and therefore preserve and pass on the same weaknesses.

Our development is limited until we transcend our upbringing. The only chance we have to keep the strengths while repairing the weaknesses is to get involved in the process by learning to think about ourselves in different ways than the ways that produced those weaknesses in the first place.

When we instead begin to use more than one culture at a time to evaluate ourselves and the world, our relationship to our ideas and culture becomes qualitatively different - different in kind - than it was before, and we move into a new stage of human development in which we can finally gain perspective on these things, to understand them more fully than the limited framework of their own self-justifying rationalizations would allow.

Resolving this crisis in a healthy way is the pivotal moment, the most important passage, in any person's life between birth and death. Only through this realization is it possible to become an actual adult instead of just the child in an adult's body that so many "adults" remain. We cannot understand ourselves nor can we create any meaningful personal freedom of action unless and until we can see ourselves with new eyes, to gain a new viewpoint on ourselves and our choices that reveals how much more range of thought and action we have than our culture and upbringing alone would have given us.

After passing through this crisis, everything looks different to us, and we need a new way of relating to ideas and opinions. This new way, the way of personal freedom and responsibility, is very different than the childish opinion-mongering that passes for politics in the modern world.

Outside the Box

It's relatively easy for human beings to think outside the box because we have so little instinctual box left.

Here's the bad side.

We have a powerful instinctive drive to fill the psychological hole where other species keep their instincts with a culture instead, and to bind ourselves to that culture as fiercely as though it were instinctive rather than learned. This is one of the main ingredients in the negative side of our flexibility, in which we can have a complete disregard for the truth because of our fanatical attachment to an arbitrary view of the world.

Unfortunately, the challenge for us is that we unthinkingly accept the assumptions and prejudices of our cultures with such tenacity that we often deny the existence of alternatives (or at least deny their right to exist). Psychologically, human culture is a form of monomania, of obsessions and compulsions orbiting a single idea or cluster of ideas we can't seem to escape, as though our adopted culture were biologically hard-wired.

Here's the good side.

Fortunately, the opportunity for us here is that biologically we don't care which culture we slavishly follow. Almost any conceivable culture, no matter how bizarre, will satisfy our craving. This is why we have created so very many different cultures throughout the world over time. In other words, we throw ourselves into our acting roles with unbridled conviction, but we're more or less as happy in one role as another.

In the absence of one instinctual box for all human beings, our species creates many different cultural boxes to replace that missing box.

This is a very, very good thing for our search for the truth, because it creates the opportunity for us to be jarred out of our cultural monomanias when we are shocked by exposure to other cultures. Magic happens to us in that crisis, because we acquire however briefly a glimpse of the essential human truth that our most beloved, cherished ideas and behaviors are not in fact God's own truth, merely an arbitrary choice imposed on us through the accident of our birth.

After all, from within the soap bubble of our own culture, no other culture seems desirable or perhaps even possible, and to us in our naivete that feels like the essential truth of both our culture and the world, so to see other human beings who not only successfully exist within an alien culture but are even happy and fulfilled within it creates an overwhelming problem for our worldview. Their existence simply cannot be reconciled with our worldview, and one of the two has to give.

When we resolve this crisis constructively, we begin to escape the box of our culture and create true personal freedom.

I Stand Aside

Three words that should be better known are "I stand aside."

Because consensus-based decision making is so prone to gridlock, it includes decision-making tactics that other political systems overlook. Chief among these is standing aside.

Standing aside lets us disagree with a decision without interfering with it. That is, we don't always have to act on our opinions; just because we don't like something, that doesn't mean it should be stopped. After all, there's nothing sacred about opinions; most of our opinions are poorly informed ones. When we can't make an informed decision, we would all be better off if we stood aside and let more informed people make the decision.

Life's too complex and too short for there to be enough time to become informed enough about every subject to make good decisions. We need to choose the subjects we care enough about to prioritize, and then then we need to become educated enough about them for our opinions to do more good than harm; on other subjects we need to learn how to let go, to stand aside.

This is a problem for most of us because we think standing aside might somehow be irresponsible. As with our irrational fear of acknowledging our ignorance, our fear of standing aside is learned in school.

We teach our children that adults in America are free to have their own opinions, but we forget to teach them that they are also free not to have opinions - as well as not to act upon the ones they do have except when they matter most. As a result, it is widely though unconsciously believed that having opinions should be the normal state of affairs, along with pushing those opinions on everyone around us.

Looking at the state of public discourse today, the pointless, endless squabbling and name-calling, surely we can agree that we're long overdue to try something different.

Fortunately, in the search for the truth there are better options than holding and defending opinions.

I Don't Know

In the search for honesty, the three most powerful words are "I don't know."

We teach children that "I don't know" is a failure to answer a question, not an accurate answer. Students are graded down for saying they don't know, thereby teaching them that aditting ignorance is punishable behavior. When in popular fiction we try to portray a genius, we always (foolishly) portray someone who knows all the answers.

This is a source of great folly in the modern world.

Open-minded, scientific or philosophical inquiry is impossible for anyone ashamed to say the words "I don't know," yet even in science classes we punish students who say that.

As we learn in childhood education, so we practice in the modern adult world.

One of the worst problems that afflicts both our democracy and our economy is the combination of willful ignorance - people who have no idea what they're talking about and yet are unwilling to admit it. Both a market economy and a democracy depend upon people being able to act in their own best interests, but the majority of people act against their long-term interests - and frequently even against their short-term interests. Modern adults are surprisingly ignorant of what is healthy or empowering for them and instead act according to how ideas have been marketed to them, that is, they act in ignorance.

Sadly, although it is de facto considered acceptable to be ignorant, it is not considered acceptable to admit to being ignorant.

In almost all of the adult world, to tell someone they're ignorant about a subject is considered an insult - but it shouldn't be, any more than telling someone they have brown eyes is. People should know when they're ignorant, and they should deal with it tactically, as a condition to be taken into consideration when planning.

After all, the best thing every human being can do for themselves most of the time on most subjects to get closer to the truth is to forthrightly admit that we don't know the subject. That recognition gives us the chance to learn, because until we admit our ignorance we aren't likely to recognize that we need to learn.

Montaigne, the inventor of the essay, wore a medallion around his neck that read Que sais-je? (What do I know?) to remind himself and his friends that acknowledging ignorance is the beginning ot any honest inquiry.

If we all did likewise, perhaps we would be better, more honest people, and the world would be a better place.

Willing the Void

"Man would rather will the void than be void of will." That's what Nietsche wrote for the final sentence of The Genealogy of Morals. As usual, Friedrich spotlights an uncomfortable human quality.

Some parents of adolescents notice how often their children will do something self-destructive of their own choice rather than take the healthier action proposed by a parent or other authority figure. Like the terrible twos, adolescence is another period when human beings feel the compulsion to exercise their will for good or ill.

Of course some people never get over the need to overuse their will. I continue to be surprised in life when I run into people who insist on making decisions even about things they know little about. The urge to have an opinion, however poorly formed or misguided, and to impose it on others is irresistable to each of us from time to time - and to some people far too often. Some people would rather be wrong and suffer terrible consequences than let others decide for them - or even let others decide for themselves.

This compulsion is not as widely recognized as it ought to be because it makes so little sense, is so difficult to reconcile with our popular conceptions of human nature. Why would people do this if we are reasonable or spiritual beings?

Likewise, that some people suffer from this affliction (or more accurately inflict it on everyone around them) while others rarely behave this way is yet another example that refutes the idea that we're all the same. There are crucial patterns of differences among people, mental subspecies of the human species, and the unrecognized conflicts among these nongenetic subspecies cause untold suffering in the world.

Reasonable people can usually sympathize with the occasional frustrated cry of "Let me drive," but when the same people always insists on being in charge (and often with an aggrieved air), patience wears thin. Anyone who has served on committees or attended panel discussions is familiar with the type, the one who can't share control.

The Greeks noted that democracy only works when you have a demos (people) fit to kratein (rule). Among the requirements of being fit to rule is knowing when to let other people make decisions - which should be most of the time in any properly functioning democracy. True democracy in this more sophisticated Athenian sense rquires more than elections and polls, requires more than everyone getting a say. It also requires that people lead where they have expertise and needs but follow when they don't.

Whether in democracy, aristocracy, or tyranny, to be an effective ruler requires that we create the conditions in which we are not usually the one making the decisions. To rule effectively requires the ability and propensity to follow as well as to lead.

Man and Beast

Human beings think they're better than other animals.

When we want to insult someone for acting crudely, we accuse him of behaving like an animal. Almost no one uses beastly as a compliment. Some religions describe the superiority of the divine by arguing that God is as far above us as we are above the beasts.

The problem is that we're not better than the animals. We are animals.

This is why biologists and the biologically sympathetic work so hard to argue that man is an animal, not to be treated as better than other animals but as a peer. Over the years, some of us have taken this too far and made the mistake of treating man as identical to the other animals, not different at all.

That exaggerated position overlooks the obvious. After all, no other animal is exterminating other species at the pace we are nor changing the face of the Earth as dramatically as we are. Nor has any other animal developed the technology to travel to the moon and back. Certainly, we are animals, with seemingly endless similarities to our species-cousins, but at the same time we are also different than they are in myriad ways we find difficult to characterize.

Here's my first attempt.

We are not better than the other animals, nor as some animal-rights activists would have it are we worse. We are to the side of them, on a different scale. It is foolish to say human beings are either better or worse than the other animals. The reason is simple.

Biologically we are animals, but psychologically we are something else entirely.

Psychologically and behaviorally we are more variable than any other animal. We are both better than the other animals and worse than them. Lumping all human beings together behaviorally is deeply misguided, let alone comparing them psychologically as a whole to any other species. We may or may not all be created equal as Jefferson asserted, but we sure don't end up that way, as Dr. Mengele and Dr. King demonstrated. Our legal equality is not the same as being psychologically or behaviorally identical.

That variability is our essential character, as Shakespeare noted.

At heart, human beings are actors able to assume many roles in the world rather than a single role. As I wrote in Sleepless almost two years ago, it was our evolutionary neotony that made us so flexible, freeing us from the frame of our old instincts to create the widest range of psychological and behavioral possibilities of any animal on Earth. That wide range created both the possibility of behaving far better than any other animal but also far worse. We can be angels or demons or anything in between.

Our freedom from instincts and our dependence on nurtured culture to replace those instincts is both our heroic strength and our tragic weakness. It is precisely that one evolutionary leap that makes it possible to be passionately consumed by the quest for the truth or to have a complete disregard for it.

What I posted yesterday described the downside of that flexibility where the truth is concerned. What I post tomorrow will describe the upside.

We Hold These Truths . . .

Everything in the cosmos is self-evident - it is what it is to anyone with eyes to see it - but not to us. We do not have such eyes.

The human mind is not only capable of deceit and self-deceit, it is rarely capable of anything else. Unlike the inherent truth of everything in the cosmos, everything we believe is flawed by our Midas touch, which sucks the truth out of our every idea and replaces it with what we want to believe or have. The philosopher Heraclitus was right to warn us about the things we want.

The same passions and ideologies that lead us to engage dishonestly with the honest world also lead us to misunderstand everything about it, to project our priorities upon it. Those interpretations and meanings we project do not directly change the real world. They change the picture of the world - the map - we carry around in our heads. They create inaccuracies in that map, flattering the things we like, insulting the things we don't, and generally omitting everything we fail to recognize.

The picture of the cosmos in our heads is the only one we really perceive most of the time, which is why human beings repeatedly do the wrong things - they would have been the right things to do if their picture of the world represented reality, but it doesn't.

So as bad as the problem of truth is for human beings when we just consider the ways in which the surface appearances of things can deceive, the problem reveals itself to be shockingly, confoundingly worse when we realize that we rarely perceive even the true appearances of things because we're too busy reacting to the imaginary appearances of things in our heads, the ones overlaid with years and decades of assumptions, desires, prejudices, and defense mechanisms.

Clearly put, if we were such fools as to treat the appearances of things as though they held the truth, we would still be vastly wiser than we are, because we are a step further removed from the truth than that, treating instead our mental pictures of the appearances of things as though they held the truth.

But the problem is far worse than that. Each of us holds our own picture of the world, with our own idiosyncratic prejudices standing between us and reality. It is not one labyrinth of assumptions we have to navigate to reach to the true appearances of things. It is six billion competing labyrinths.

Then it gets worse, because in any modern culture the political process takes us further from reality. As history shows repeatedly, compromising between those labyrinths suppresses the vestigial truths left in them, because the average human delusion - the things we can all agree on - is what is least likely to be true because it's most likely to be what we want. Instead of correcting for our labyrinths, we build a new one that takes as its bricks and mortar not even the appearance of the truth but instead our manifold delusions.

The idea that anything can be truly evident to us as a species is refuted by the human condition. The idea that any "truth" can or should be "self-evident" to humanity, that we do not even need to work for certain truths because it's obvious that they're true - that's trying to make a virtue out of a human defect so vast it is the very wailing abyss where our respect for the truth ought to be.

The most certain thing you can say about the sef-evidence of truths is that the actual truths of the cosmos are indeed inherently self-evident, but never to human beings. We are indeed special among animals in the profundity of our benightedness.

Story and Anthropoculture

Once upon a time, stories were sacred, dedicated to the gods, designed to accomplish culture's highest calling - anthropoculture, the cultivation of good human beings.

The classical Greeks (among others) recognized that human nature is extremely variable, that people can be as good as angels, as evil as demons, or anything in between. The people who come out on the evil side of the human spectrum together with the many average people who foolishly follow or support them are the source of most of the problems humanity has faced since long before the dawn of history. Of the remaining problems, most of those are caused by people who come out on the good end of the spectrum, since even the best human being is still deeply flawed. In other words, as the wise cartoonist Walt Kelly wrote, "We have met the enemy and he is us."

The Greeks realized - as did other cultures such as the Navajos and Hopis - that to make a safer, better world we have to learn how to make better people. Anthropoculture, then, is our most vital responsibility, to make sure that people come out on the good end of the human spectrum.

These cultures also realized that it's very hard to succeed at anthropoculture. Therefore, they decided that to count as truly civilized a culture would need to reinvent every part of itself so that every part of the culture helped cultivate goodness and virtue in people.

For example, the Greeks deliberately reinvented their entire religion. They replaced their many separate tribal faiths with a new Olympian religion, that helped them reduce civil warfare and that also helped them replace their old tribal conflicts with peaceful competitions at festivals like the Olympic games.

As another example, the Navajos integrated their religion so completely with every aspect of their life that when European invaders first met them they couldn't identify a separate religious part like they had. Europeans mistakenly concluded the Navajos had no religion, instead of realizing that on the contrary the Navajos were profoundly more religious than the Europeans were. Everything about Navajo culture, including the layout of their houses and even the structure of their mocassins was designed to reinforce their cosmological and ethical beliefs, which made separate churches and periodic religious services superfluous.

In the cultures that made this breakthrough, those that committed themselves to anthropoculture, even the spinning of yarns was reinvented to replace a simple pastime with an indispensible tool in the struggle to understand and improve human nature.

Maybe we should do likewise.

The Discovery of Story

In the modern world we overuse invention as a metaphor. For example, we call even language an invention even though it seems to be built right into the structure of our brain. A few specific languages are inventions, sure, but language itself clearly isn't. We invented it no more than we invented our hands, or our DNA.

Lately I've begun to suspect that story itself is not an invention either, though almost all specific stories are. Story may be an innate property of our minds, something we discovered rather than invented, the discovery that our minds need to understand events in a certain kind of way or else we can't pay attention to or remember the truth no matter how important it is.

This builds off an earlier observation by Harold Bloom that Sigmund Freud's revolutionary invention of psychoanalysis may be completely dependent on Shakespeare (!), that it was Shakespeare who first began writing about characters who could speak aloud their feelings and plans, listen to their own words, react to them, and decide to change their minds about what they would do or who they wanted to be based upon overhearing themselves. Bloom noted that Freud had studied Shakespeare's revolutionary introspection and written about it early in his career, that Freud created a therapy out of Shakespeare's art.

Bloom's theory is worth investigating partly because it's so surprising, but partly because it holds water. The more you study Shakespeare, the more depth you find to his portrayal of human characters. After all, a great writer must first be a great observer of human nature.

Once we throw off our assumption that Shakespeare was mainly an artist in the modern sense of an entertainer and instead begin to consider him as an artist in the archaic sense of one who searches for profound insights into reality that can be captured and represented in ways that move us, his works surprise us again and again.

For example, his "All the world's a stage" quote seems more profound the more thought we give it, shedding the initial appearance of a metaphor and taking on increasingly the shape of one of the most important observations ever made about the core of human nature, that above all we are mimics, that almost everything we do or think or feel is some kind of monkey-see-monkey-do role playing, the memorization and imitation of other people's behavior. In this Shakespearean sense, the path to enlightenment has to begin with the realization that very little of our behavior is intrinsic to us, that we are the actor, not the role, and that we contain within us the potential to behave very differently than we now do if only we can break out of our roles long enough to remember who and what we really are. Much of human behavior and history only makes sense if this is true.

If Shakespeare is right, and I've come to think he is, then not only is the acting we do more than mere entertainment, so too are the roles we play and the stories we tell. That is, if we are essentially mimics then we can learn more about our species by studying how we imitate, the kinds of roles we adopt, the kinds of stories we try to create around ourselves, and what all of those stories have in common - the deep structure of story itself.

Story may be more than an arbitrary means of expression. It may be a universal, innate mental template that helps define what we can and cannot remember and learn, an essential characteristic of the human species.

If we are not essentially rational beings, if we are instead fundamentally mimetic creatures, it changes everything. The discovery of story might then help tell us who we are, which we need to find out to solve the greatest problem facing the human species.

Ourselves.

The Two Threads - Plot and Story

Stories have to be told as two threads.

On the surface, stories seem to consist of just one thread. Words follow each other to form sentences, which follow each other to describe events. That's the obvious thread, the first thread, one event following another from beginning to end to create the plot.

That first thread, though, cannot stand alone. We've all read or watched or heard too many plots that tried to make do on their own, and the results are always bland and empty. No matter how clever a plot may be, it cannot satisfy us on its own. The characters won't interest us. The events won't matter to us. Soon after reading, we forget such plots because they aren't memorable; they don't seem to matter.

A subtle, invisible thread must be woven into the plot to make it come alive for us and stay with us. The author needs to choose the characters and events well to weave that second thread, so that hidden under the surface events of the plot will be a sequence of emotional and philosophical charges set off by those events.

This thread acts as a hidden harmony within the story. It is where we come to care about the characters, come to have expectations about what will happen to them. Those expectations make the events of the plot matter to us; they alternately reward and frustrate us as they occur so that we are emotionally and philosophically involved with the story until the end, and they're what make the ending matter to us.

It is the interplay between these two threads, the plot and its hidden harmony, that create a story. When a story fails to satisfy us, it's almost always because too much of the author's effort has gone into the plot and not enough into the story. When they're properly woven, though, there's something about stories that captures us heart and soul. We crave them as though our need for them were stamped into our blood and bone or written in our genes.

Maybe it is.

Charter for Compassion

The principle of compassion lies at the heart of all religious, ethical and spiritual traditions, calling us always to treat all others as we wish to be treated ourselves. Compassion impels us to work tirelessly to alleviate the suffering of our fellow creatures, to dethrone ourselves from the centre of our world and put another there, and to honour the inviolable sanctity of every single human being, treating everybody, without exception, with absolute justice, equity and respect.

It is also necessary in both public and private life to refrain consistently and empathically from inflicting pain. To act or speak violently out of spite, chauvinism, or self-interest, to impoverish, exploit or deny basic rights to anybody, and to incite hatred by denigrating others - even our enemies - is a denial of our common humanity. We acknowledge
that we have failed to live compassionately and that some have even increased the sum of human misery in the name of religion.

We therefore call upon all men and women ~ to restore compassion to the centre of morality and religion ~ to return to the ancient principle that any interpretation of scripture that breeds violence, hatred or disdain is illegitimate ~ to ensure that youth are given accurate and respectful information about other traditions, religions and cultures ~
to encourage a positive appreciation of cultural and religious diversity ~ to cultivate an informed empathy with the suffering of all human beings, even those regarded as enemies.

We urgently need to make compassion a clear, luminous and dynamic force in our polarized world. Rooted in a principled determination to transcend selfishness, compassion can break down political, dogmatic, ideological and religious boundaries. Born of our deep interdependence, compassion is essential to human relationships and to a fulfilled humanity. It is the path to enlightenment, and indispensible to the creation of a just economy and a peaceful global community.

Twenty-five Things about Me

On Facebook, ideas for things to write about pass over the Facebook community in waves. Many of them are like this one, in which you are supposed to answer a set of questions or build a list based on some idea.

Usually the instructions urge you to write as quickly as possible according to the questionable idea that your first impulses are the most authentically you. I reject this idea. I spent twenty-three years in therapy exploring what is authentically me, and during this time I discovered over and over that my first impulses are my defenses, not my core self. Sometimes my first answer to a question represents my truest answer - rarely - but usually it represents the least true, least authentic answer, the rehearsed answer, the practiced answer, the pretense.

Plato wrote that Socrates said "The unexamined life is not worth living," in criticism of the many people who lack all introspection. Sometimes I think this "answer as quickly as you can" meme is unphilosophical "culture's" crude attempt at revenge, by trying to spread the idea that introspection should not be trusted, that only thoughtless reflex is authentic.

Preferring a mindful way of life, I answered this particular essay slowly and carefully, thoughtfully, paying attention to things that I have strong feelings about, that mean a great deal to me, but that maybe I hadn't yet shared with a lot of people. I wrote it between Thursday, July 1st and Monday, November 22nd this year.

Likewise, preferring communication to mere self-expression I also wrote more than a word or two about each thing, on the theory that the short, generic answers are rarely as interesting as the whole truth in personal context.

So, for what it's worth, here are twenty-five things about me:

1. I almost never have nightmares; even the dreams with death and monsters in them are happy or exciting dreams. I rarely remember my dreams because I don't sleep enough, but when I do about half of them are lucid dreams in which I know I'm dreaming and can fly or change the dreams at will.

2. All day long - while I'm talking to you, while I'm programming, while I'm hiking, while I'm thinking - and even all night as I sleep, one of the seven or so tracks in my brain is playing music nonstop. You can ask me any time what I'm listening to and I can almost always tell you; sometimes I'm listening to two songs at once, and let me tell you, that's weird (when I started writing this on July 1st, my head was playing both Ryan Star's "Brand New Day" and Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade; when I revised it in September it was alternating between the second movement of Brahms's Symphony #4 and the second movement of his Piano Concerto #2; as I finish it in November, I hear Wilhelm Kempff playing the first movement of Beethoven's Piano Sonata number 8 in C minor, "Pathétique"). I rarely listen to music out loud any more because in my head I hear it all the time, in perfect detail, the way I imagine Mozart must have heard music. For example, while Scheherazade is playing in my mind, I can hear every single instrument, their pacing, their expression, the pauses, the musician's inhale before playing a note of woodwind to break a momentary silence, everything. Sometimes I think I chose the wrong profession, that I should have been a composer or a musician, but ironically, I never learned how to play an instrument, though I love to sing.

3. That said, although I took a long time to start playing Rock Band after my cats bought it for me for Father's Day a couple years ago, once I started it immediately became my favorite video game. I love being physically immersed in the flow of music.

4. I remember tasting colors even before I could walk. Sometimes I still do.

5. I was born an alcoholic. I grew up surrounded by alcohol and alcoholism; almost every adult member of my family for generations on both sides has struggled with the bottle. I never have, at least not as an adult. The only time I drank was before first grade, when a friend taught me to steal the nearly empty bottles out of the trash behind a tavern across the street so we could drink the last drops out of each one. I haven't touched alcohol since, though I have no problem with people drinking around me. When I smell a fine wine, I remember my childhood, that tavern, those bottles, but I also feel safe knowing I can trust myself not to go down that road again.

6. Likewise, no drugs. I'd rather suffer with a headache than take aspirin. When my fillings were all extracted and replaced in my early twenties, I had the dentist drill on my teeth without any painkiller at all. No drugs, except under extraordinary medical conditions. There are worse things in life than pain.

7. When I was a young boy, maybe as a result of my drinking out of empty bottles, Grandma Ann taught me to avoid alcohol, cigarettes, and drugs. She used to teach me little slogans and rhymes, which she would encourage me to say around my other relatives, especially my Grandma Pat. I'm sure it made me seem like a sanctimonious little brat at times, but it also helped keep me safe from peer pressure growing up.

8. Speaking of Grandma Pat, she once saved me from drowning. Her alcoholic boyfriend du jour thought he'd teach me to swim by throwing me in the deep end. I remember splashing frantically and inhaling water. Grandma Pat was also an alcoholic, and drunk at the time, and even in the best of times throughout her life she was often self-destructive and had scarily bad judgment, but that day something clicked for her, and she dove in and fished me out. I'd probably have died that day if she hadn't saved me.

9. My dad wouldn't let me eat candy as a child, so I did so every chance I got when he wasn't around. Even in first grade I used to spend my lunch money on candy from the little store near my elementary school. I remember vividly how many different candy flavors there used to be - by second grade I thought myself quite the candy connoisseur - but as I grew older and companies began cutting back on quality to save money, candy all started to taste more and more just like sugar and chemicals. I wouldn't touch candy today, and I'm allergic to most of it anyway, but I still remember those old wonderful flavors fondly.

10. My dad also preferred that I not watch TV, except for nature programs, so at midnight on Friday nights, after he went to sleep, I would creep downstairs to watch horror films on Nightmare Theater with the volume turned almost off. I still love horror films, the way they take me back to my childhood, the way they let us explore and come to understand otherwise taboo subjects; the way the classic horrors help us learn sympathy for the monster, the misunderstood outsider, the tragic loss of control of madness; and the way horror can help us reconcile ourselves to the inevitability of pain, loss, grief, and death. I believe the reason I have no nightmares is that I was able to experience these things in my own life and because what I couldn't directly experience I was able to explore in horror films.

11. Were it not for my Aunt Marilyn, my nephew Alex and my nieces Elizabeth and Wyatt would never have been born, because their father - my brother Rob - and I would never have been born; she introduced my mom and dad to each other.

12. I was born honest. Childhood neighbors and classmates taught me to lie in first and second grade, but my father and my stepmother Jean beat it out of me before adolescence, so I went back to being honest. I'm grateful to them that I was punished so severely for lying. It helped to make me who I am today.

13. I'm intensely curious, like everyone in my family. I find just about everything fascinating and will read voraciously about anything. The less I know about a subject, or the more an opinion disagrees with my own, the more I want to read about it.

14. I like to be criticized, but not insulted. Pseudo-criticism, insult disguised as criticism, really pisses me off because I hate to be reminded how petty and vicious some people are. Real criticism, though, I love, the more deeply insightful the better. If someone can rock the foundations of my worldview with a revelation, I'm delighted and grateful, even if I'm frowny and grumbly at first. It's not easy to do, though, because I'm always looking for new ways to criticize myself, for opportunities to become a better person, so most of my obvious flaws I already know about and am working on. I assume there are vast attics and basements of serious but subtle flaws just waiting to be found.

15. Jerry Gould, my karate sensei from third through ninth grade, is one of the most important influences in my life. He taught me discipline, respect, spirit, character, philosophy, hard work, tradition, standards, the aspiration to become something better, how to teach, how to defend myself, but most of all how to be truly gentle from a position of true strength. I use his teachings in my life every single day, and I think about him and the things he taught me all the time.

16. I remember my Grandma Ann driving me with her in her old VW as she did errands. After dropping some letters at the post office in Edmonds, she saw a small moth fluttering against the inside of the windshield, she grabbed a tissue, reached up, and crushed it, while saying in a sing-song voice "Kill kill kill." As I write this, it's so vivid to me that I'm sitting next to her as she does it, but if you and I talk right now I can't repeat any of the conversation word for word afterward - I only remember the meaning, the conclusions we came to, the sound of your voice, where we were sitting, everything but the words themselves.

17. When I was a young boy starting out in middle school, my friend Jason Richards (later Jason Nealy), taught me to shoot a gun, a pellet gun. We were in his bedroom in south Seattle on that sunny day. He opened the window, and the sound of birdsong lit up the room. He pointed to the bird that was singing in the bushes in his back yard, showed me how to hold the pellet rifle steady, how to aim, how to squeeze the trigger. Click! The bird fell out of sight. The backyard was silent. I felt a cold wave spread over me, felt a powerful shame. The ringing in my ears seemed so loud. I handed Jason back the rifle, and I never fired a gun again at a living thing. I've never forgotten that happy bird, that silent backyard, or what it feels like to commit an evil act in lighthearted, confident ignorance. This is when I learned that evil does not come from The Devil, or from The Bad Guys. It comes from us.

18. I used to want everyone to be happy. It took me many many years to understand that what makes some people happy is hurting other people. Even for people who aren't angry and cruel, most people are made happy by things that indirectly make other people unhappy, or that otherwise injure the world - and they really don't care. A surprising number of people have no empathy at all, though in their personal lives they may try to simulate it. Either they were born without it, or somehow it withered and died, either way leaving them going through the motions of being human but without a soul. If you try to point it out to them, they just get bored with or angry at you. Most people are perfectly happy making other people unhappy as long as they don't have to notice it or think about it. I also learned early on that many of the things people think will make them happy actually make them unhappy or even sick. When I learned these things, I stopped wanting everyone to be happy. Now I want everyone to be healthier, better, kinder, and wiser. If they were, I think they would be sadder but also more content and more deserving of happiness.

19. When I walk down the sidewalk on a sunny day, I step carefully to avoid stepping on beetles or ants. When I walk down the sidewalk after the rain, sometimes I pick up worms and move them to the grass so they won't get stepped on. I worry about the health of the spider who lives behind the driver's side mirror of my car, and I adjust my driving to be sure she doesn't get blown away.

20. I'm often ill. It gives my life a stop-and-go quality that makes things difficult for me, my coworkers and clients, my friends, and my family. I strive to become heathier and steadier, but intermittently the decision is taken out of my hands. This contributes to my odd views about the nature of human will and whether our choices are free or predetermined. I think the answer is . . . yes, some of each. Many of our qualities and choices are predetermined, and unless we intervene to prevent it we become more and more predetermined, more and more caricatures of ourselves. But, if we strive to master ourselves, to tend the garden of our character, to increase our discipline and self-awareness, and to focus on those things we can influence and change, we can instead over time grow a larger and larger part of our lives in which we can freely choose who we will be and what we will do, clear more and more of our time to awake from our dreams as human sleepwalkers so we can know ourselves enough to do some good in the world. It's too much to expect for us to always be healthy and free and truly conscious, but if we always try to do better when we can, eventually we will do better.

21. I often fail, and I often need breaks to recover, but I keep trying until I succeed. This often frustrates people, some of whom wish I would either always succeed or always fail so they'd know which bucket to sort me in. Sooner or later, I frustrate everyone, but sooner or later I will also delight them.

22. The road to Hell is paved with good intentions, but so is the road to Heaven. I abound with good intentions, but I figure I'm bound for the soil of the good earth. I hope I can become worthy of such an honor.

23. I'm a goody two-shoes. I want to be good, to do good, to give back, to make things better. Like the track in my brain that's always playing music, another is always looking for ways to do some good in the world, to make things better. I'm not naive or idealistic about it - I'm darn near cynical about it - but I am sincere and persistent about it. Don't believe me? Next time we're in a conversation, listen to me from this perspective and you'll hear it. I can't stop thinking about it, and whenever I'm talking about something I'm always also talking about this. As a child, I never wanted to be the cool bad boy; I always wanted to be a good boy. As an adult, I'm always thinking about how to be a good man and often reflecting on the ways I fall short.

24. I have a dark view of human nature. As a child, I was conspicuously naive, trusting, and hopeful, but I became a student of history and learned how far short we fall. If we want to survive as a species, we're going to have to do much, much better. I also have a bright view of human nature, because I know that when we make up our minds to do the right thing, we have a remarkable capacity to make things better, including ourselves. Here's hoping the better angels of our nature prevail.

25. I'm susceptible to cuteness. I think my wife is adorable, I adore my nieces and nephews, and my cats ply me shamelessly.

Human Nature, Part 2: We Do Not Know What We Know

Shakespeare is widely acknowledged as the greatest writer of the English language, the person most able to express insights powerfully and memorably. One of the best things he wrote is that deceit, pretense, play-acting, role-playing is at the core of human nature.

Of course, since we're so sure we know who we are, we cannot possibly hear even the great virtuoso of the English language when he tries to tell us as baldly and eloquently as possible that we're wrong about who we are, that we're not who we think we are, that we're people pretending to be who we think we are. As Simon and Garfunkel wrote, A man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest, or as William Blake put it so pithily long before As a man is, so he sees.

So there's another part of our answer - we can be wrong about anything. We are even capable of being wrong about the most central issues in our lives (like who we are) and yet be completely convinced that we're right. The idea that we're capable of meaningful objectivity about the things that matter is refuted even before we open our mouths, just by the things we imagine about ourselves - like who we are. The truth is a foreign language to us; we speak something else. As the Christian apostle Paul put it rather poetically in his First Epistle to the Corinthians, we see through a glass, darkly. As Heraclitus put it rather philosophically in his lost work On Nature, Most people do not take heed of the things they encounter, nor do they grasp them even when they have learned about them, although they suppose they do—and, more bluntly, Human nature has no real understanding; only the divine nature has it.

Our essential subjectivity, our incapacity to recognize, observe, or understand the truth shows clearly in our efforts to be objective—we can collect "facts" (Hegel: There is precisely no such thing as a fact.), but nothing ensures we collect the right facts, nor that we interpret them correctly. Oh, does E equal MC squared? Surely that must be true so that I can find a new way to dominate the other monkeys. Obviously, the profound truths of the cosmos exist so we can pursue the pettiest of aims with greater efficiency! The twentieth century all by itself is sufficient to disprove any possibility that human nature is essentially capable of objectivity.

Too often we choose between either lying to ourselves and others about our biases and pretending to be objective or else abandoning that pretense and openly embracing superstition, bigotry, and other forms of extreme irrationalism - which is just another forms of pretense. There are better choices open to us, if we have the courage to take them. At our best we could openly acknowledge and accept our subjectivity and try to approximate objectivity not through pretense but through taking our biases into account, factoring them into our decisions - and then embrace humility and acknowledge that our ideas are tentative, that we do not really know anything but are guessing as best we can.

To get closer to the truth, we first have to admit that we don't already know the truth. If knowledge is power, then for human beings humility is the root of all real power.

A Journal is Not a Story

Not everything can be expressed as a story.

A story is a specific kind of thing, and as most books, movies, fans, and reviewers show, most people don't know what that kind of thing is. Most people think a plot is a story, for example, or a rollercoaster, something that has a beginning, middle, and end, and uses up time in a satisfactory way. I suppose that would make sex a story, or going to the bathroom.

Story, specifically, is a kind of tale invented to tell difficult or subtle truths about human character by subjecting a character to stresses in a specific way to reveal things the character may not have known and certainly would not have wanted to reveal about themselves. Story is a tool for exploring human character in ways that would be cruel and unusual to inflict on actual living people, a way to clarify some things about life by creating a simulacrum of it.

Hardly anyone writes actual stories any more, though there are plenty of writers creating plenty of things that substitute for stories in modern culture.

I, for example, am not a story-teller. I appreciate stories greatly and study them voraciously, but I don't create them. If I am required to express my life in stories, it will have to go unexpressed because I can't do it.

More importantly, stories can only represent certain kinds of truths, not all truths, nor even most truths. As incredible as it may seem to people living in a culture most of whose pleasures derive from fictions, fiction is a limited form of expression. It can only describe things that fit its form. When we try to squeeze other things into the form of a story, we do violence to the truths of those things. That is, we lie.

I don't want to lie. I am journaling so I can tell the truth, as best I can, so I can tell truths that matter to me and to my family and friends and maybe to others, and especially so I can tell truths that are not often publicly discussed, to break the code of silence and secrecy that surrounds so many important truths.

I can't do that in story form. I'm not convinced anyone can, since many of these truths have the wrong form for a story, but I know I can't. Therefore, I'm not going to try.

At the same time, though, I won't be dissuaded from trying to express these things in my chosen form, as journal entries and short philosophical essays. If that means I write boring things, dry things, repetitive things, confusing things, then that's what it means. If it means I never command a large audience, nor even a medium-sized one, then so be it. I don't want to be famous anyway.

I need to express these things in part because it's therapeutic for me, in part so my nieces and nephews have the opportunity to get to know me better and be exposed to these ideas, and in part because there is a powerful social value to coming out of the closet as who one really is rather than continuing to pretend to be another "normal" person. The only way people give up their hateful and violence-catalyzing prejudices about unusual people is when they get to know them for real and come to realize that they don't fit their stereotypes, that *gasp* maybe they need to change their opinions about their fellow human beings rather than eliminate them.

So, I'm writing a journal and some short essays, not stories. Most of it won't be to most people's taste, and it won't be fun or easy or comfortable enough to help you pass the time. That's okay. There are better things to do with life than just to get it over with as quickly and entertainingly as possible.