On “Modern Psychology’s God-problem”

“The Biblical account of Noah’s Ark and the Flood is perhaps the most implausible story for fundamentalists to defend.  Where, for example, while loading his Ark, did Noah find penguins and polar bears in Palestine/”

Judith Hayes

 “We have fools in all sects and impostors in most; why should I believe mysteries no one can understand, because [they were] written by men who chose to mistake madness for inspiration and style themselves Evangelicals?”

Lord Byron

 The eminent and brilliant (though fiendish and fictional) psychiatrist Hannibal Lecter, MD, had no respect for psychology.  He simply did not believe it was a science.  Cutting Ray Liotta’s skull open, lifting off the top,  and sauteeing parts of his brains while talking to him (in the movie “Hannibal”) – now, THAT’S science.

Science – and therapy

 But psychology can be science – when it concerns itself with the description of behavior or the measurement of cognitive capabilities. 

Psychotherapy, on the other hand, is not science.  It’s hard to say what it is.  All too often therapy, supposedly curing by talk, is a bitch session; the therapist is a paid listener, because no one in the client’s world will listen to his/her complaints.

 Classical psychoanalysis can go on forever.  Back in Detroit, I knew a psychiatrist who for years spent tens of thousands of dollars annually on three- and four-times-a-week therapy sessions with another psychiatrist.  Apparently he found himself endlessly interesting, because the analyst is supposed to say nothing.

 Goals of therapy?

Insurance companies eventually caught on to this racket and started holding therapists responsible for goals and outcomes.  Usually this means helping the client to better cope with his/her situation (because it’s typically unchangeable), perhaps helping the less sophisticated clients understand their problems, or enabling the client to deal more constructively with difficult people. 

 So far, so good.  But what happens when the client’s belief system enters the picture?  In “Modern psychology’s God problem,” Boston Globe, 10/16/11, Gareth Cook states the problem in the following words (and by “psychology,” he means “psychotherapy,” according to the above distinction):

“Modern psychology has a serious God problem.  America is a deeply spiritual country.  More than half of American say religion is ‘very important’ to them, and more than 90 percent profess a belief in a higher power.  Yet psychology, as a scientific endeavor, has done almost nothing to understand how spiritual beliefs shape psychological problems or affect treatment.”

Let’s all get spiritual

Let’s first stipulate that “spiritual” (i) is taken to be a good thing (note the praising adjective deeply, as opposed to, say, rabidly or fanatically); (ii) can mean ANY interest in imaginary supernatural entities, whether Christian, Jewish, Hindu, Sufi, Hawaiian, Native American (to New Agers, the last three, and all native cultures, are VERY spiritual). 

So spirituality is a very big tent: all you have to do is invest yourself heavily in an imaginary belief system, the older the better.   In the context of the article, Cook refers only to mainstream American religions.

Voice of reason

 OK, at this point the atheist hits a wall.  What is therapy if not reality adjustment?   We humans love to deny.  The therapist can be the sober, kind voice of reason.   He/she can pull the client out of denial and gently urge the client to face the reality of his/her situation and/or personality. 

This approach goes under various names: cognitive/behavioral, rational/emotive, and others.  For most neurotics, Albert Ellis’ list of Irrational Thoughts is all the therapy they need.

Debt of truth

The therapist owes the client the golden nugget of truth and insight – else what is the client paying for?  (I know, the right to gripe and have an interested listener.  If only clients knew how the therapist’s mind wanders as they prattle on.).

That’s why this atheist has serious problems with the thrust of Cook’s article: the solution to the “God problem” is “spiritually integrated” therapy.  My 2^nd wife was “deeply” into this – this craven pandering to the client’s fantasies.

 Cook correctly notes that “for those who are not religious, it is hard to understand how important religion may be to a patient, and how off-putting it can be when a therapist steers the conversation away from the spiritual.”

 And why not?  If the therapist were to blend religion with therapy, he/she would be no better than a cleric, larding his/her advice with fantasy and imaginary friends.  How does perpetuating the client’s delusions help the client?

Religion and therapy

Oh, yeah, maybe it’s a band-aid, a psychological mind-trick.  Thus Cook cites the example of a therapist who might encourage the client to think about all the things that God has given you, and this gratitude exercise will help reduce anxiety. 

How does God help?  Can’t I just list the things I’m grateful for, without crediting God?

 God harms as much as he helps.  Encouraging people to think of misfortune as “part of God’s plan” can make them passive and helpless.  People who trust in God (in a survey Cook cites) were more tolerant of uncertainty and  less prone to worry.  Yes, and less likely to see the piano falling on them. 

Plus, every day, religious clients bring their miseries to psychotherapists and ask why God would allow such a thing.  In dealing with evil and sorrow, again, God is no help.  He’s a hindrance. Didn’t he make or let it happen?  Such conundrums make it harder, not easier for the believer to cope with the traumas that life deals out.

“Meeting patients where they are”

Cook ends with the idea of offering a treatment option to the deeply faithful [there’s that adjective again – does the therapist have to first evaluate the level of the client’s fanaticism/fundamentalism? – AMP].  It’s about the field of psychology shedding its prejudices and preconceptions and returning to the first principles of therapy: meeting the patients where they are.”

 ROFGAR (rolling on floor, gagging and retching).   Earlier in the article, Cooks says the same thing: therapists must “modify the tools of psychology to treat the devout.”

This is why I could never be a therapist.  I would want to deal with the underlying delusion, religion itself.   A religious client would leave before the first session was over. 

Pandering and faking

 And what exactly happens if an atheist/agnostic therapist encounters a “deeply religious” client?  Is the therapist to pander, to fake it, to buy into the client’s fantasy/psychosis? 

And what if the client is a Hindu or a Sikh or a Wiccan or a Druze?  Must the therapist bone up on every faith, every imaginary friend of every client and play along with it?  How can you look yourself in the mirror if you do that?

Is the goal of therapy to dissolve delusions – or to encourage them?

Miss my old boss? You gotta be kidding!

CEO stands near Dilbert’s cubicle.  He says:

“Uh-oh. I’m lost and I’ve wandered into the grimy habitat of an underling.
“I feel the cold desperation of your drab and meaningless life.
“I need to roll in money to get the smell off me.  Where’s the nearest pile?”

Keene Sentinel, 9/24/12

Is it my imagination or is Dilbert getting darker?  Anyway, I think Linked-In has taken a wrong turn by offering a link that helps you reconnect with your old boss.  Who wants to reconnect with a tyrant, a petty dictator, a micromanager, a clueless ditherer (as in Dilbert)…the bad bosses are 80% of all bosses, and the types of bad boss are as numerous as the sands of the beach.

Bosses drawn and quartered

Most people would like to re-connect with their bosses only if they can watch them being drawn and quartered.  Down through the decades and centuries of the Industrial Age, as steam is replaced by silicon and robots, one thing has remained constant: most bosses practice the military/authoritative kind of managing that was supposed to have gone out of style, with so many schools of management and armies of consultants spreading the gospel of “treat people like human beings.” 

But no.  Basic as it is, they don’t get it – because they don’t have to.  The military system works, sort of: whatever the top people want is what the peons carry out.  If senior execs are lucky and the economy and marketplace are right, their strategy succeeds and they’re geniuses.  If not, they take a golden parachute and start somewhere else. 

Managing is independent of content, said Harold Geneen, and he proceeded to prove it by amassing many different companies under one corporate banner, ITT.  I don’t think it really worked out that well, though many execs change industry, with varying degrees of success.

Absolute power

The boss.  Imagine one individual with the power to cut off your livelihood at whim, and this individual is a control freak or a humiliator…or any of the countless bad-boss types.  No wonder inability to get along with one’s manager is one of the leading causes of workplace dissatisfaction and stress.   You’re in a very clean, quiet and pleasant…concentration camp. 

You are at the mercy of the guards. As in the camps, you can be targeted because of your race (white) or gender (male).  At one company where I worked, diversity was a managerial metric, just like profit and loss, headcount, and other things that really matter.  And my boss took it seriously, packing the department with women -- black and Hispanic ones where possible.

Face time: no give

Not only do they maintain totalitarian boss-cracy…THEY WILL NOT BACK DOWN ON FACE TIME.  You’d better not be seen coming in too late or leaving too early, no matter how well or thoroughly your work is done.  Today, in 2012, when so much work can be done anywhere, Robert C. Pozen of Harvard Business school describes this very scenario and adds: “You don’t want to come off as a slacker.” 

The article that reports this scenario (Keene NH Sentinel, 10/10/12) laments the “cost of long work days,” the relentless toll on body, mind and spirit.  Europeans are just as productive and they have at least six weeks of vacation a year.  The article sugfgests, again, that if workweeks were shorter, more people could work.

Happy voters

Apparently the election is to be decided in Ohio.  What’s this have to do with abusive bosses?  Bear with me.

Ohioans are an extremely important group to win over.   As I watch all the happy voters in Ohio cheering the man who saved their jobs with billions of taxpayer dollars (have they paid it back?), I cannot but point out that the root issue in the auto industry’s woes…is management (quality expert W. Edwards Deming said that quality is 85% management’s responsibility): boss-ocracy and face time, especially a cruelly repressive workplace environment (until quite recently) were the ultimate cause of GM’s distress and failures. 

The company bought the union’s compliance with lavish contracts and benefits but continued to practice the Shit Theory of Management: “I was treated like shit, so that’s how I’ll treat everybody who works for me.”

The Japanese, on the other hand, practiced a more participatory approach.  They built quality cars on American soil, with American workers!  Authority was still strong and hierarchical, but at least workers could take responsibility for quality instead of “shut up and get it out the door,” which was Detroit’s quality strategy for way too long.

Other scenarios

Auto industry jobs mean votes in crucial states, so there was no thought given to alternatives to bailing out the auto companies.  They could have broken up GM, as was suggested when GM was too successful for some people. 

Surely there would be buyers for the Cadillac and Chevrolet brands, for the components divisions, investors who could pare down these operations and make them successful as standalone companies (which they once were), instead of making the taxpayers foot the bill.  The industry could have sold off excess assets and given generous buyouts to anyone who wanted one.

I worked in the food industry, where acquisition, divestiture, and portfolio adjustments were ongoing.  We can’t make money in this (margarine, ice cream, etc.) business, but maybe somebody else can, so we’ll divest. 

Kraft Foods was independent for decades, then merged with General Foods, renamed Kraft, and spun off a decade after it was acquired by Philip Morris (renamed Altria). 

So there were other possibilities for GM – just not nearly so politically attractive.   But the company went bankrupt fundamentally because for too long they allowed cronyism, loyalty, tenure, and union contracts to replace competence. 

Reconnect with my boss?  I wonder how many takers they’ll get.

Granite State affirms “live free or die” by one vote

“I just think it’s shocking how many of these young people wind up in prison and they get turned into hard-core criminals because they had possession of a very small amount of controlled substance. . .It’s time we stop locking up people for possession of marijuana. We just can’t do it any more.”

Pat Robertson
Imagine the slow, rhythmic, grim, sarcastic clapping that greets a mediocre or half-hearted performance. That’s about the size of my applause for the New Hampshire House’s passing, by ONE vote, the decriminalization of possession of cannabis up to a half ounce.

They defeated by a resounding 228-91 a measure to legalize sale of marijuana by anyone over 21. What’s wrong with you people? What have you got against freedom? New Hampshire should be a leader in enlightened drug policy.

That puny approbation is well short of medical marijuana, and I will be writing to my state legislators about that. It is nowhere near legalization, which I doubt will happen in my lifetime. The state motto, in reality, refers mainly to firearms; all other freedoms are conventionally or, as in the case of pot, retrogressively administered. New Hampshire lags many other states. Vermont has medical marijuana. Massachusetts has decriminalized larger qualities.

What part of “live free or die” do our legislators not understand? I’ll tell you: the part where freedom begins with self-ownership. If you don’t own your body, who does? The state?

By now, nearly every un-brainwashed, literate adult knows the basic facts, which are that marijuana does not induce violent or psychotic behavior, that it is no more harmful than beer, that it has a large number of medical and practical users. BUT IT’S STILL ILLEGAL!!!

I suppose this should be no surprise, since the Abrahamic religions that dominate Western politics are abstemious. What if a drug-centered religion had gained worldwide popularity and power? If everybody smoked dope, would it be a more peaceful world? Just speculating.

I’m still a 60s hippie at heart: I’m all for women’s and minority rights, against foreign wars and the excesses of capitalism…and I was sure that if we didn’t have free love by now, at least we’d have legal weed.

But NOOOOOOOOO!

A large proportion of Boomers either never got on board with drug liberalization…or got all hypocritical and didn’t want their kids doing drugs the way they did. There are all kinds of rationales. Many more found the state-approved drugs, alcohol and nicotine, both far more toxic than pot, satisfactory for their mood control. Caffeine, the other state-approved psychoactive drug, is perfect for capitalism. Gives us lots of pep to accomplish our corporate mission.

Plus: laws and policies are made by each generation’s self-selected cohort of busybody/control freaks, otherwise known as politicians. They will absolutely lie about the relative harmlessness and many benefits of marijuana. They will take a vow of hypocrisy and keep the damned drug war going strong, because they get off on making moral rules for other people…and, as politicians, can’t admit they were wrong about something as big as this.

They’re followers, not leaders – spineless, gutless followers. Easier to keep the brainwashing in place. I didn’t know of such people in my generation until I saw them in government and law-enforcement positions, perpetuating the drug war.

But it’s not unanimous. Through LEAP and other organizations, law enforcement personnel can and do express their opposition to the drug war.

Still, I couldn’t believe my eyes. People younger than I are arresting 800,000 marijuana “offenders” every year. Even Pat Robertson disapproves of that.

In the Sentinel story (March 11, 2012), Rep. Mark Warden specifically linked pot freedom with the state motto. Yes!! But Rep. Tommy Soltani made the usual slippery-slope arguments: drug dealers will lead to more criminal activity like prostitutes.

The governor’s mouthpiece, Colin Manning, repeated the party line that we’re going to make the job of law enforcement harder by saying that “some marijuana use is acceptable.”

Well, of course, SOME is acceptable -- by ADULTS. People over 18 – we regulate cannabis the same as we enforce liquor and tobacco laws. It’ll be much easier to keep kids from pot if it’s controlled.

As for other so-called, “crimes,” look, I know I’m decades ahead here in this Puritan land of ours, but there is a way to make prostitution legal. Take a trip to Amsterdam. More important, Tommy, is that the reason WHY the drug trade brings in criminals is that pot IS ILLEGAL. Black markets lead to crime, always.

Make it legal and tax it, and crime goes away. Most of the drug war is about marijuana.  We no longer have gangs fighting over liquor distribution territory. I lived near Chicago, site of the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. Real movie stuff: guys murdered in cold blood in a basement on Clark Street, the violence of another failed drug war. Brutal black-market territorial politics. But I will bet you that the same number of people die each week in Chicago because of the current drug war, which the government will not abandon.

This willful blindness, this insistence that the horrors of the drug war are caused by drugs themselves…is the lie politicians have been spinning for decades, ever since the LaGuardia Commission (1947) found that “marihuana” posed no threat to society, ever since a DEA Administrative Law Judge in 1989 found that cannabis had medical benefits and could properly be used as a treatment.

I recall many years ago reading of a drug activist who maintained that pot was the wedge issue, the linchpin issue: if the government would do this ONE thing, admit it had been wrong all along, and just legalize pot…well, then he would seriously consider anything they say, because there might be some truth in it.

But they will not tell this fundamental truth. If so blatant a lie can be kept in place decade after decade, what, if anything, is the government telling us that is not a lie? But if they told truth about cannabis (in tincture form, it was used, in the 19th century, as a remedy for “wedding night jitters” – sounds good to me)…well, then I might consider what they have to say, since there may be some honesty in it.

But not now. Not when they can keep this most obscene of lies in place.

If there’s a hero to this sordid story – sealing the victory and affirming the truth by one vote – it’s Speaker William O’Brien, who refused to vote and thus allowed the measure to pass.

Well done, Bill. We’ll have to share a joint and talk politics sometime.

Jewish Atheist takes on Sacred Cow, Forgiveness

The latest eruption of forgiveness worship almost made my breakfast erupt from my stomach. Dear Abby (Keene NH Sentinel, 3/7/12) printed DECIDE TO FORGIVE in its entirety, and to give the enemy his due, I will do the same:

“Decide to forgive For resentment is negative Resentment diminishes and devours the self. Be the first to forgive. To smile and take the first step And you will se the happiness bloom On the face of your human brother or sister. Be always the first Do not wait for others to forgive For by forgiving You become master of fate A doer of miracles. To forgive is the highest, Most beautiful form of love. In return you will receive Untold peace and happiness.”

Bah. Humbug. Forgiveness is one of the products of New Age psychologists (i.e., often MSWs, usually women, who consider themselves psychotherapists). In this it merges with religion. It is wrought with happy, sappy, feel-good talk that is far removed from human experience.

Let’s get real. Forgiveness cannot be a warm, fuzzy blanket for all foul deeds. In real life, people do horrible things to each other. To achieve the syrupy forgiveness that the New Agers preach, one must somehow understand the offender’s circumstances (it’s society’s fault!)…and even, they advise, rewrite history to make the subject the hero/ine. This is often unachievable except by lying to oneself.

Criteria for forgiveness

Why not face reality? Some things, especially when (i) it’s a minor offense, (ii) the intent to harm you wasn’t there, (iii) the person genuinely intended to do otherwise and (iv) is genuinely repentant. This covers a wide range of behaviors – e.g., you get somewhere late because of unexpected weather or traffic – and true forgiveness is possible. Your relationship is unchanged. (BTW, forgiveness always comes from people. Having it come from the deity is a bad idea, because it allows clerical middlemen to decide when you're forgiven. Way too much power.)

Ah, but how often is the offense heinous, the evil intentional and voluntary (even allowed by the regime in power), the offender unrepentant?

Here I submit that the best we can achieve is understanding of why the offender did what he/she did and of what our role was, if any, in making things worse. This is not forgiveness.

Remembrance – and justice

I’m not referring to vengeance. Even as primitive a moral code as the Bible tells us not to bear a grudge. Just memory. To forget human evil is to allow it to be repeated.

You see, the sweet syrupy kind of forgiveness is tricky with words. It’s either forgiveness or resentment. Why not both? Or a third? You can have a little forgiveness (because of the offender’s circumstances), more than a little resentment, and a desire for JUSTICE to be done. Typically offenders (e.g., prick VPs and colonels) get away with it, and there is no justice.

Maybe that’s why we like to believe in karma.

And it does happen that offensive people offend the wrong person and get what they deserve.

The sweet syrupy kind of forgiveness says you have to forgive first, and by doing so you’re master of your fate. I would say: you’re responsible for what happens next. My guess is that your torturer, your abusing spouse, boss, or employer, will laugh his/her ass off at that.

Sadists don’t give a shit about forgiveness. If you’re in the wrong setting, a declaration of forgiveness might get you an extra shock to the genitals.

So forgiveness means understanding, to the extent possible, remembering what happened but – and this is crucial, because it’s often all the New Agers can accomplish – don’t DWELL or obsess over it unnecessarily, get on with your life, but remember…and see if justice is ever done.

Getting what they deserved Why do we love to see celebrity assholes get their comeuppance? Because it satisfies our yearning for a narrative of crime and punishment -- a narrative often missing from our own lives.

After centuries of persecution and passsivity, Jews are taking responsibility for their own defense and doing a magnificent job (not without $4B/year of American aid). They’re arguably a special case: persecuted and massacred with impunity for so long by so many nations. They had to kill back; they had to show that you cannot kill Jews with impunity. Hence the revenge killings for Munich, the hunting down of Nazis, the assassination of Muslim extremist leaders, etc.

But every group wants to close the arc, land the KO blow.

Osama hiding among our so-called friends (they knew, believe me)? I don’t think so. The US government/military was accuser, judge, jury, and executioner, and you didn’t hear a peep of protest from this nation, which was spared the spectacle of trying this man.

Sometimes justice is served quickly and quietly. (I hear the SEAL team op is going to be a great – and controversial -- movie.) Not every criminal deserves his day in court. Yeah, I know, there are probably liberals who think Osama should have been be tried in NY. Maybe, but it’s better this way. He killed 3,000 people because there were Americans on his stupid holy soil. Deserved what he got.

Yes, the most the ladies accomplish if your offense is grievous (child abuse, torture) is to get you from allowing rage and vengeance to consume your life.

Widening circles of forgiveness

The Dear Abby column also includes an ever-widening circle of daily forgiveness affirmations, but as soon as it get beyond people and off into “forgive across economic lines” and “forgive other nations,” it’s total nonsense. Nations aren’t people. They act crazy because they are collectively crazy, run by incompetents who mean me no personal harm. Nothing to forgive. Ridiculous.

I certainly don’t forgive religious fanatics – or believers of any stripe. They allowed their children’s brains to be molded at a crucial age, just as theirs were. Their pastors/rabbis/imams may be in the grip of a psychosis, but somehow, but they don’t have to close themselves off from reality, not all of them, at least. There are some secular Muslims out there – I know there are. Asif Mandvi?

Others I don’t forgive? A long list, certainly including my last wife, who refused even the most reasonable requests, and David Dirt (pseudonym), the tyrannical, employee-marrying ex-boss who’s been rewarded by retiring to photography in the Southwest. I don’t think much about him, but when I do, it’s with the hope that he gets bitten by a rattlesnake.

I was fortunate in that I never once endured bullying. Are you going to tell me that that you can forgive a bully, that the humiliations don't stay with you forever? No, you can't. Don't forgive bullies. Bullies unforgiven do not endure consequences and are simply encouraged to continue their bullying into adulthood.

Forgiveness and choice

The sweet, syrupy forgiveness is not only unrealistic (cannot realistically be applied to all offenses); it’s anti-humanistic. It completely abnegates the choice that the offender had to do what he/she did. Did Jeffrey Dahmer have a choice? Does everyone have a choice, even the schizophrenic whose voices are telling him to do it? But to blanket-forgive is to take away choice.

Was there choice? That’s for the justice system to decide. As we all know, it seldom delivers justice and can be forgiving to a small degree (i.e., mercy seasons justice, as in the famous “quality of mercy” speech in The Merchant of Venice): minor offenses are played down or pled out. There’s time off for good behavior. And a pardon from Haley Barbour because you controlled your murderous instincts long enough to be his houseboy, polite and docile (this is the setup for a murder movie).

Aside from that, there’s justice: do the crime, according to the system, and you do the time. Some of the crimes, including all drug offenses, are immoral, but the overlap between the justice system and actual justice is only occasional.

The unpunished

As for those offenders who go unpunished, we must not let them obsess us. Nor can we forget what they did. We cannot condone or excuse, much less forgive them. We can show that we disavow them. Modern Germans have made an outstanding effort at repentance, but the original offenses of the Third Reich won’t be forgiven. It’s just that today’s Germans won’t be blamed for them.

One last manipulative use of words, preceded by an implied “You are to take it as true that…”: “Only the brave know how to forgive. A coward never forgives.”

It’s NOT true! I submit that forgiveness has nothing to do with cowardice. A simple practice of realism and remembrance, coupled with the desire for justice or karma, and a general getting on with one’s life – that’s much easier than excusing the inexcusable and rewriting history.

Latinos? Hispanics? The power of a political artifact

"I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."

Martin Luther King

Here’s my suggestion for what Spanish-speaking callers should hear when they press 2 to hear the message in Spanish:

“It is obvious that by pressing 2 you do not feel it necessary to learn the language of your adopted country. This attitude is not acceptable. Please hang up and call again when you are able to do business in English. Thank you.”

I mean, really. Why Spanish? Why not have callers press any of 50 or 100 buttons to enable the conversation in any language spoken in America, from Cantonese to Urdu?

Lots and lots of them

The answer is simple: sheer numbers, Hispanics outnumber any other immigrant group, so, the reasoning goes, concessions have to be made.

Can you imagine what would have happened if my father, along with other American Jews, insisted on being able to conduct telephone business in Yiddish, the language of their immigrant forbears? What if Italians or Chinese insisted on it? There are quite a few of them, after all.

But no. Dad, along with millions of other second-generation immigrants from a hundred countries, was expected to learn the language of his new native land, and he did.

Livin’ in a Jewish paradise

To be sure, some Jews still refuse to make the full transition, but that’s because they live in an urban Jew-bubble with very little contact with the outside world. They communicate by liberally sprinkling their speech with Hebrew words and phrases – so many, in fact, that the meaning may completely elude an outsider. My wife calls it “Hebglish.” It’s an intermediary language, like Spanglish, a temporary solution until one can learn English – that is, unless one doesn‘t have to.

Ten centuries ago, some time after the Norman conquest of England, words from French and Latin (the lingua franca of science) began to creep, then to flood into the language. There were so many new and unfamiliar words that the first dictionaries listed only these, and not common words. But the grammar was and is English.

In an alternate universe, where William the Conqueror is defeated at Hastings in 1066, the French retreat across the Channel, and modern-day English sounds a lot like Dutch.

Admittedly, many Hispanics want their kids to speak English, and their desire to assimilate is commendable. They can still speak Spanish in their private lives, of course: this is all about having a single language for the public discourse and activities of the nation. Linguists call this phenomenon “code-switching.”

Division and exclusion

But companies and the government, afraid of losing sales and votes, respectively, won’t encourage that. Instead, because of their spineless political correctness, they hinder assimilation and encourage isolation by providing a Spanish alternative at every turn.

And of course, we have to brag about how color-blind we are (the truth is just the opposite, of course, by singling out the special groups. One company I worked for was so PC that in addition to Black History Month, it added Hispanic AND Asian Heritage months. The later is transparently bogus, based only on geography. Why no Women’s Achievement Month?

So for one quarter of the year, they were celebrating some ethnicity or other. A very poor way of making employees feel that they’re members of one company (which, after all, is the primary reason they’re there together – to make money as a group).

There is no better way to exclude someone – right to his/her face, in fact – than by speaking another language. All over the world, we see the problems that beset multi-lingual societies. In India, there are so many competing languages with millions of speakers that the government decided to continue using the language of the British conquerors. A good, practical move, I’d say.

So do we call them Hispanics or Latinos? A Google query generated two million hits, with answers all over the map. One questioner even asked which variant is “politically correct.” In trying to get it right for a speech, I was told that “Latino” is more common in California, while “Hispanic” predominates elsewhere.

A political artifact

There’s no authoritative answer, and it doesn’t matter. The group is a political artifact, throwing all Spanish speakers and Spanish-descended Americans into a single, artificial political group which has become so numerous (and so aware of the government benefits it can get by voting as an artificial group) that TIME magazine predicts (March 5, 2012 cover story) that they will pick the next President.

What a crock of shit.

Other than speaking Spanish, what do the people from two dozen countries have in common?

Are you going to tell me that if you put an Argentinian, a Mexican, and a Venezuelan in the same room, that they would eagerly embrace each other as Hispanic/Latino brothers? Or would national culture, pride and identity (not to mention regional and social differences in their Spanish) get in the way?

Would a Spaniard feel more affiliation to his/her country – or to his/her so-called Hispanic brethren and sistren in, say, Peru?

And how about Brazil, which is right down there with the rest of them and way too big to ignore. They don’t speak Spanish, but are they considered Hispanic on other grounds? What grounds? It’s a puzzlement!!

BTW, and as noted above, “Asian-American” is an even more ludicrous designation for people who come from even more countries and speak many different languages.

When did they start to be Hispanic?

I ought to do some research into the origin of Hispanics as a unified political group in this country. And yes, I know they were treated harshly early on. Indeed, their white bosses and masters were probably the first to lump them together as “Hispanic,” because that master/boss didn’t care about geographic differences.

But every immigrant group was treated harshly at first, including Jews from many countries. At some point, Jews started ignoring national origins and regarding their shared culture (which Hispanics do NOT have, unless you count being conquered) as primary.

In Chicago, Julius Rosenwald, the enlightened Sears CEO and philanthropist (whose foundation, BTW, helped educate large numbers of Black children in the South), encouraged the sophisticated, assimilated German Jews of the North Side to help their impoverished Jewish brethren (more recently arrived from Southern and Eastern Europe) on the city’s South Side.

Assimilating through language

But, as noted, Jews, along with every other immigrant group, did not demand linguistic equality. They did not demand bilingualism. They did not care to be educated partly in Yiddish, which would have definitely retarded their progress toward becoming full participants in American life, just as bilingual education (yet another arm of PC) does today.

Why curry favor with Hispanics? Because their high birth rates make them a political treasure – and for corporations, a potential gold mine. By some inexplicable calculus, hiring enough Hispanics in high-profile positions (and Hispanics generally) translates into market-share points – that is, if the company makes a big deal out of how many Hispanics it employs and makes sure everyone knows about it (that’s called good PR), more people will be favorably disposed to buy its products.

A hypocritical sham

Hiring Hispanics is part of the pandering diversity/affirmative action game. As I’ve pointed out in numerous posts, the whole idea of “diversity” is a hypocritical, disingenuous sham, carried out under the philosophy of “essentialism”: each Hispanic embodies some magical “Hispanic-ness” that will enable the company to better reach its Hispanic consumers.

This is anti-humanistic in the extreme, this pretense that a person’s language and ethnicity are more important that his/her individuality. I was once quoted to this effect in an interview with a PR/speechwriting publication. I asked, “What’s the point of our looking different if we all think alike?”

My boss chewed me out over that. I was proud of my stand, and I suppose this toady was just doing his job, but I will still give him a swift kick in the groin if we ever meet again. I even got a rebuke from the CEO herself, who informed me that “diversity is company policy” (translation: “your days here are numbered, white man”).

Gimme a fucking break. How exactly is some IT or finance staffer with a Spanish surname going to come up with winning product and market strategies that will score points with Hispanics? Company executives probably never heard the word “essentialism,” but that’s the doctrine they’re following.

Wasting time and money on “diversity”

Enormous amounts of time and money are wasted each year on “diversity”-related activities – not only the month-long celebrations, but recruiting and mentoring, which uses the employees as free labor in raising the company’s diversity numbers. There are Diversity councils, company-wide diversity conferences, and more.

It all distracts significantly from the resources needed to make the company competitive and successful. If you’re planning a diversity conference, that’s time and effort subtracted from the actual work of the company.

Diversity activities are a self-imposed handicap, a ball and chain that the organization drags around, despite the fact that there are no – repeat NO – empirical studies that clearly demonstrate that a diverse company performs better. Yet they keep this crap up, year after year.

You can bet that the Asian and European countries currently eating our lunch and/or owning our debt don’t give a shit about diversity. The same goes for smaller American firms that stay off the radar screen. Think of all the high-tech companies populated by Asian and Caucasian nerds. They don’t whine about proportional representation. They prefer to put their time, energy, and other resources into more practical pursuits – like winning in the marketplace.

Gotta “look like America.”

But to the diversity-mongers, there apparently is some advantage to an organization that “looks like America.”

In fact, according to the tenets of diversity policy, there must be “proportional representation:” because America is such a successful country, the logic goes (there’s room for doubt on that one – we’re surprisingly low among industrialized nations in many measurements of educational achievement and quality of life), we have to have the exact same proportion of blacks, Asians, and women as in the country at large.

Just those three. We didn’t need a Frenchman, a Zulu, or an Australian aborigine. In one company I worked for, “Diversity” was one of the managerial performance criteria, along with actual business measures like P&L; it’s one more goal the manager has to achieve.

Again, what a crock.

Do they not see that because of Hispanics’ high birthrate and immigration, they will, by mid-century, be 30% of the population (actual demographic prediction)? Are they prepared to make their company 1/3 Hispanic?

Nobody thinks about that. Instead, it’s a race for horseflesh and numbers. I’ve seen the bar graphs. They do keep count. A sharp Hispanic or Black woman (or even a seemingly sharp one) is a double-dipper and can practically write her own ticket.

Enough already!

Diversity and affirmative action will go on forever, just like farm subsidies and any other government policy that benefits a large number of voters. It’s been in effect for a generation, so can’t we say enough already? There are now Hispanic professional network and mentoring organizations (organizations of Hispanic accountants, lawyers, etc.) to help young people move up. Same for Blacks. Women are fantastic networkers. Everybody has access to an “old boys’ network.

Enough already! Why do Hispanics and others think the bar must always be lowered for them? When will we stop “race-norming” life for the no-longer-oppressed who are forever allowed to be less competent?

How many more decades of special preferences do they need before the fake debt of discrimination by people long ago is repaid by today’s while males, who suffer for crimes they didn’t commit?

Downsides of diversity

No matter. Reverse discrimination will continue to benefit this fake, made-up political artifact, far, far, into the future, even though it is not only ineffectual, diverting and wasting resources on a false goal, but also because (i) it creates resentment in the white men who are discriminated against through no fault of their own (as a Jew, I know a lot about “racial guilt”) – thus dividing the organization – and, (ii) perhaps worst of all, it allows the “protected classes” (that’s what they actually call them) to operate according to a double standard (how can they endure the humiliation?); it allows their mediocrity to pass for adequacy, thus undermining the competitiveness of the company, which needs all the brainpower it can get.

Language of the conquerors

A doctor I know is making his third attempt to learn Spanish. Again, that’s because there are so many of them infiltrating our PC society. It’s almost as if he’s learning the language of the “conquerors.”

Consider: English is the international language of aviation. It is the de facto language of scholarship, science, technology, and business. Machine-aided translation is better than ever. Given all this, if you are a native speaker of English, you are sitting on top of the world.

If you want to learn an important world language, try Mandarin Chinese. If you’re going to live and work in another country, then by all means learn the local language. Too many American businesspeople and diplomats fail to do that (e.g., there are way too few speakers of Arabic in the State Dept.), to the detriment of their organizations and our country.

But to me, absent the above conditions, learning Spanish is a retreat, a defeat for a unified America. It flies in the face of the dynamic of assimilation. I assure you this doctor does not expect to work side-by-side with Spanish-speaking physicians who know no English. No, this is a concession, such as one would make to a conqueror.

Except that here, matters are reversed: you learn Spanish if you want to speak to the hired help or the clientele – or if you’re a politician eager to kiss Hispanic ass and get Hispanic votes.

Who will dare?

What company will dare to be first to point to the Emperor’s new clothes, to note that we’ve been at this diversity thing enough, that grouping people by gender and ethnicity is odious and bogus, that it’s not worth the investment, and henceforth all hires and promotions will be made on the basis of competence and experience alone?

Do you think that someday some CEO will have the balls to do that? I‘m not holding my breath.

Suggested Obama speech draft: Response to Muslim rioting over Quran-burning

My fellow Americans…tonight I’d like to talk with you -- AND at the same time address the entire Muslim world…on recent events that have grave implications, not only for peaceful international relations…but in fact for the civilization we have so carefully built in the West for the last five centuries.

I refer to the Muslim fury, now in its fifth day, at the burning of their holy book. It is appalling and repulsive to the rational mind, this furor over a book, and I call upon all Muslims who believe that theirs is a religion of peace to join with me and ALL civilized people to demand an immediate end to these demonstrations.

I now realize that Speaker Gingrich was right. THEY should apologize to US for the murder and mayhem – two things that Muslims seem to be very good at – that have accompanied these latest perceived offenses.

To Muslims I say: we are sick and tired of your one-way touchiness. You regularly burn our flags. You burn our Presidents in effigy. You never apologize.

Tolerance is a one-way street with Muslims, and that stance will no longer be acceptable to America. We will speak out emphatically against Muslim intolerance. If American lives and property are endangered by these demonstrations, we will respond accordingly.

But I don’t want matters to escalate, and that is why I call for an end to the violence. There have been over 30 deaths over this, and only two were American. Enough, I say to Muslims everywhere: enough.

And I also say this: we are a free country, and if someone wants to burn a book, be it Shakespeare or the Quran, he or she is free to do so. We as a society – and I personally – do not condone book-burning. But free speech comes first.

All religions say they are religions of peace. All have their share of violent fanatics. There are enough such people on all sides, but especially Muslims…to keep the world in a constant state of turmoil. This is why religion is such a clear and present danger to the future of humanity.

Religious people fail to understand that only THEY have to respect their holy books. The rest of us do not.

[PAUSE]

I look at the newspaper pictures of the shouting faces of young men, probably unemployed and full of anger, which their clerics cleverly redirect at the West. I feel sorry for those poor puppets who are incited to violence over the burning of a book. A book! I look at those shouting faces, and I see the demonic and total mind-control of which religion is capable.

So no, President Karzai, and all of you who cling to and revere barbaric medieval books: I will not apologize. Americans can burn the Quran or not, as they choose.

It is you, the shouting faces in the pictures and the cynical clerics who pull their strings, who should apologize…for your failure to transcend the 8th century in your thinking, for failing to join the modern world, for ignoring (or even rejecting) modernity and living by the psychotic fantasy you call a religion, for doing nothing, until very recently, to depose the regimes that keep you in poverty.

The Muslim world should join the 21st century. They should, but they probably will not – not when they riot over books and cartoons. If they want to wallow in tribal warfare, that’s their business. But the rest of the world must be allowed to live in peace and to progress as best it can. The vision of a Muslim world must be abandoned.

[PAUSE]

Once again, I deplore the violence over perceived slights. To Muslims, I say: Many religions, including Jews and early Christians, have endured far worse and survived. If your religion is truly strong, it will survive a little book burning.

End this violence now. And keep your religion in your homes and houses of worship…and off the streets and out of government.

And, my fellow Americans, I leave you with these words from Ralph Waldo Emerson: “As men’s prayers are a disease of the will, so are their creeds a disease of the intellect.”

As never before, the disease of religion threatens the very existence of humanity. People who become violent at the burning of a book are capable of flying planes into buildings and committing all manner of mayhem.

America stands on the side of science and reason. It is these, and not religion, that have always created -- and always will create -- a better life on earth.

I call on all peaceful and moderate Muslims to speak and act against the book-burning violence and to isolate and condemn their murderous brothers.

If you cannot control them, then we will have to do so, by whatever measures are necessary. We cannot allow Muslim barbarism and violence to govern our lives. We know that the battle against religious orthodoxy, fundamentalism, and fanaticism is a fight for civilization itself.

Thank you…and may America live long and prosper.

GM comes back: time to PAY back

“The way to conquer the foreign artisan is not to kill him, but to beat his work.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

“In the business world, everyone is always at legitimate cross-purposes, governed by self-interest.”

Harold Geneen, CEO, ITT, “Managing” (1984)

“In business, the competition will bite you if you keep running; if you stand still, they will swallow you.”

William S. Knudsen, 1939

On the eve of the Michigan primary, we are reminded of Mitt Romney’s roots, and sometime Michiganders like me (1974-91) recall his father’s car company, American Motors, and their horrid little cars like the Gremlin and the Pacer.

At least John DeLorean had a commendably cool car to market against the Big Three. AMC never did, it seemed. (It’s hard to believe that there were once hundreds of automakers in the US, but mass marketing and economies of scale helped consolidate the industry.)

I worked for a while at AMC’s Southfield MI headquarters, which had been leased out to other companies, including my employer, Michigan Bell.

One word

As I recall, one word doomed Mitt’s father’s 1968 Presidential candidacy: brainwashed. George Romney said he’d been brainwashed on Vietnam, in other words, told the government’s version, not the truth about how the war was going. He plummeted in the polls, and his candidacy disappeared.

I don’t see that Romney had anything to be ashamed of. We now have plenty of accounts of what it was really like in Vietnam. Maybe Romney didn’t back in '68. He wasn’t especially gullible. He was first lied to by his government, then found out the truth. What was the BFD?

Seven billion! Anyway, we’re on the eve of the Michigan primary, and General Motors, my former employer (1984-91), is posting record profits of seven BILLION. When I was there, four billion was considered a damn good year.

People in Michigan are happy. I doubt that the Flint MI -- the middle-class, clean, smiley-faced paradise of Michael Moore’s youth -- will ever return, but GM is back.

It’s hard to believe that GM once owned so much of the North American vehicle market that there was talk of breaking it up. When I was there, market share was accelerating on a slippery downward slope – but was still in the low 40’s. I predicted that Oldsmobile would go out of business. I didn’t see much of a future for Pontiac. And Saturn was a fine car but simply a decade too late.

How they screwed up

They got where they did by consistently underestimating the competition and taking their customers for granted. As late as the 1990s, GM executives had to be reminded, in internal speeches, that a returning car purchaser could tribute hundreds of thousands to the corporate coffers in purchasing and finance fees.

They failed to adopt Japanese quality methods, which – this was really radical – involved treating workers with respect; everything flowed from there: stopping the production line, treating parts carefully during assembly, consistent improvement, and much more.

Of supreme irony is the fact that an American quality engineer named W. Edwards Deming propounded these same truths. He said quality was 85% management’s responsibility. He was rebuffed by the postwar automakers, who couldn’t build cars fast enough to meet the pent-up demand.

Deming went to Japan, where the auto industry, rising from the ashes of WWII, listened to him, built quality cars (even, later, on American soil, with American workers!), and relieved Americans of those annoying trips to the dealership for one repair after another (one of my friends joked that he had his own coveralls with his name embroidered on the chest).

Labor problems

As for the labor problems created by shitty militaristic management, they had unions, contracts, elaborate grievance procedures, everything carefully negotiated between these two antagonists, who really had to work together to build better cars, faster; that was the essence of many management speeches I wrote.

Michael Moore just celebrated the 75th anniversary of one of an early Occupy action – the Flint sit-down of 1937. A really low point, from a humanistic point of view. Nothing to celebrate. The two sides fought like children for decades.

“What future?”

GM was late in adopting Deming’s methods. I remember one management seminar where the old codger was asked what he thought of the future of American management. He waited a beat, then said with a sneer, “What future?” He foresaw a lot of downsizing and outsourcing, a lot of job loss by workers and managers alike.

I soon realized why. I actually visited a union-management retreat, where no one knew who was who till the end. It was an enlightening exercise. I hope it helped a little.

In culture, GM remained counterproductively military, including the buddy/old-boy system and relentless boss-ocracy. The #2 man in the company, for whom I wrote speeches, referred reverently to the one person whose authority exceeded his as “my boss.”

Much incompetence rose to the top. Empty suits. Non-performers could flourish if they were nice, go-along guys.

White bread

Demographically, the company was relentlessly Midwestern, Protestant, and white bread. They built cars that they and people like them would like. Big, roomy, for family vacations Up North. Good heaters and A/C for the Michigan climate.

But they blew it. Top of the ninth, 10-run lead, and they blew it. Sort of like the Steve Bartman Cubs (Chicago in-joke). Let’s count the ways.

They refused to believe they could make money on small cars.

They didn’t provide for the aging and death of Cadillac’s core clientele.

They saddled themselves with impossibly expensive labor costs, including heath care and retirement. These commitments remain part of the cost structure, as far as I know.

Worst of all, in the interest of immediate cost-cutting, they made all the brands look alike. This despite the fact that each had been prospering on its distinctiveness and brand image, according to the aspirational ladder that Alfred Sloan had so craftily built: you started with a Chevvy and, per the American Dream, worked your way up to the Caddy.

I was aghast. Even a lowly PR staffer like me knew it was a dreadful error to trash all those generations of brand image and equity. Fortune magazine published a front cover with the lookalike cars.

This was the height of the “they’ll buy anything we build” arrogance. No, they won’t buy a Chevy with leather and called a Cadillac.

Starting from scratch

So GH had to start from scratch. Cadillac has done a magnificent job. Elegantly angled, jewel-like cars. And expensive! Just right for the investment banker, black rapper or other aspiring plutocrat. Buick has receded as a brand, preferring to emphasize its various models. Chevrolet continues to successfully pursue its link with patriotism and America, a truly appalling piece of marketing flimflam worth of Edward Bernays himself, but it works.

And the cars are much better. RIP, Pontiac, Oldsmobile, Saturn.

I remember writing a speech for the 80th anniversary of Olds, in 1983. The banks of the Grand River, in Grand Rapids MI -- that most American of American towns -- were lined with lovingly restored, glistening Oldsmobiles from every era. Will these people still continue to bond over Oldsmobiles? Maybe more than ever. They’ll never build another 442.

Creative destruction - NOT

The creative destruction of capitalism continues, but retarded and reversed by the heavy hand of Obama socialism. Was GM too big to fail? I don’t see it that way. Many of their operations were viable and could have been sold off. They could pay off the remaining workers and dealers the same way they presumably paid off the workers and dealers of the brands that disappeared.

As for Flint, I have some sympathy, but it’s limited. They allowed all their milk to come from one teat, which was fine as long as it kept flowing. No one had the foresight to diversify the economy and invite other businesses in when Flint was prospering.

So Michael Moore’s paradise turned to a toxic slum, and it was supposedly all GM’s fault. I don’t think so.

First of all, Moore has the timing wrong. It was AFTER the recession of the early 80s that GM started moving jobs south of the border.

More important: Flint paid the price for depending on one company and has only itself to blame for what happened.

Roger and Me

BTW, the Roger whom Moore kept trying to meet in his movie, CEO Roger Smith, was the Roger that I wrote speeches for. A very nice, smart guy who tried a lot of things to shake up GM’s culture of dependency, bossocracy and cronyism -- H. Ross Perot (a story in itself), legal luminary Elmer Johnson, Superstar economist Marina Whitman.

Nothing worked.

At the same time, the government was closing in with impossible fuel-economy requirements (30 years later, we’re still just as dependent on foreign oil), making it necessary for the company to lose money on small cars in order to sell enough of them.

It was still taking way too long to get new products to market. And the trashing of brand equity was a fatal error, guaranteeing the death of one or more brands.

The great irony was that GM was recklessly proliferating parts that the customer could NOT see. Nine different air conditioner hoses where one would do. Repeat that error a few thousand times and you have a major cost burden.

A car just for you

Add to that the customization that GM promised but found extremely expensive to deliver. I recall a presentation at which it was explained that a Toyota Corolla came in 32 variations. With the equivalent car, a Chevy Cavalier, the number of possible cars, because of the plethora of options, was in the tens of millions.

One of the things Roger tried and was almost successful at…was Saturn. I also wrote the executive speech delivered to the first group of Saturn dealers.

Sigh. These auto entrepreneurs, already successful, had put their money on the line for Saturn. And GM failed them. They had a car culture going there for a while, driven by the gravel voice and homey commercials of Hal Riney, but they couldn‘t sustain it.

They started building Saturns at other plants, although the Spring Hill, Tennessee facility itself, state-of-the art and environmental to a fault, had been part of the Saturn culture. And, as mentioned, they were ten years too late.

Doing what they’re supposed to do So GM’s back, doing what capitalism is supposed to do: generating wealth for the senior executives and the shareholders, especially the large pension funds. They’re once again building cars that people want to buy.

Now it’s time to PAY back. I have not heard or read one thing about that. A portion of the annual revenue must go back to the American people, who, trusting business-whore Obama’s judgment, allowed GM and Chrysler to survive. Payment every year, whether they make money or not, until every cent is paid back.

I don‘t wonder that execs who are now back in Fat City (there’s no beating the corporate jet for travel comfort) lose no sleep over not paying back the Americans who rescued them. That’s what they’re paid to do.

The cat, the flashlight, and the fragility of science

“Science is the father of knowledge, but opinion breeds ignorance.”

Hippocrates

“If the kind of God exists who would damn me for not working out a deal with him, then that is unfortunate. I should not care to spend eternity in the company of such a person.”

Mary McCarthy

“Prayer is like a rocking chair: It’ll give you something to do, but it won’t get you anywhere.”

Gypsy Rose Lee

If I weren't already concerned about the fragility of science, I would be more than a bit disturbed by the comments of Robert N. McCauley, a philosopher of science at Emory U., in an interview by the Boston Globe (January 8, 2012).

But I was already concerned. Two centuries after the Enlightenment, I saw the persistence of religion, generation after generation, saw my contemporaries grow up and repeat the same old rituals. I started to feet like an idiot who had gotten it completely wrong. Thirty years ago, I saw some weakening of religion in Western Europe and Scandinavia, and I thought the progress of reason would be halting at best. But there would be progress, right? Exceeding expectations: ”God’s match for you”

Well, reality has exceeded my worst expectations. Fundamentalist religion is alive and well in most of the world, exerting a powerful influence on society and politics. The primitive Abrahamic religions ruthlessly occupy center stage all over the globe.

More bad news: Technologies created by science are blithely turned into vehicles of fantasy. Christianmingle.com, with membership in the millions (that alone is cause for alarm), advertises that if you join, you’ll ”find God’s match for you.” So the deity is wired into cyberspace, and Chrstianmingle.com merely does his will. A bold claim. What other commercial site claims that it delivers God’s will?

Religious wars continue to flare. Muslims fight themselves and many other groups around the world. No news there.

Perhaps worst of all, huge majorities in this Puritanical, evangelical land of ours, profess belief in God, consider America a Christian nation, and connect patriotism to Christianity (hence the Christianization of the military and the mistreatment of atheists). From somewhere there appeared $27 million to build a Museum of Creationism.

Wrong museum!!

I think the old USSR had the right idea. In the 1960s, in (then) Leningrad, I visited the Museum of the History of Religion. It was all there, in gory detail: the Inquisitions, crusades, persecutions, and atrocities. Life-sized replicas of torture instruments. I loved it. Why is there no such museum in the US?

So yes, I have been concerned about the progress of reason for many years. And Dr. McCauley has made me even more concerned: “If you consider how the human mind actually works, science faces challenges even when it seems ascendant. Religion is too intuitive, too natural a style for thinking, to be gotten rid of.”

He notes that “science is extremely unnatural. That's why scientists have to take courses in all these things – and then it's still hard. The products of scientific reflection are inevitably radically counterintuitive. They challenge common sense."

Religion and politics

That’s certain true of much of modern physics, beginning with quantum mechanics. Now much of the language – of ‘branes and multiverses and strings -- verges on the poetic. There may be physical or mathematical data supporting the concepts, but they’re probably beyond the reach of non-specialists.

The unnaturalness of science vis-à-vis the human brain may account for its infrequency in our world, which is a real problem, because, as the professor notes, political leaders seldom have the scientific understanding to make enlightened decisions. On the contrary (my comment), political and policy decisions are all too often driven by religion (did God tell Dubya to invade Iraq?).

McCauley also says that "If you look at the wide range of human cultures over human history one thing that quickly jumps out is how rare [science] is. There are many cultures where science is not pursued at all, to this day."

Indeed, there are places in our great land where science, if not rejected, is given equal status with religion, as politicians try to “teach the controversy” between “competing theories” and to get more and more Christianity rammed into the curriculum. A bill in my home state of New Hampshire (“Live Free or Die” on the license plates – what a joke) would mandate the offering of an elective course in the Bible.

The real deal

One more time: Let us not be mealy-mouthed about “teaching the controversy” (there is none; evolution wins, hands down), “reconciling science and faith” or their “compatibility” or their “respective domains.” THIS IS ABOUT REALITY AND UNREALITY, SUBJECTIVE AND OBJECTIVE. They are two mutually exclusive ways of viewing the world.

But so many people seem to adopt them both! Some of those are no doubt sincere (as opposed to pretending or posing for social reasons). How in the hell do they convince themselves of the truth of the Bible, of what cannot possibly be true and had been conclusively proven false by every scientific approach that has investigated it, from physics to archaeology to linguistics?

Understanding religion

Religion will be with us as long as we fail to understand it, as long as we fail to understand how deeply the religious impulse, to believe without proof, is buried in our brain. (This is distinct from the tribe/herd instinct, which is what motivates the wishy-washy Jews who occasionally attend shul, pretend they believe, and stage monstrous bar/bat mitzvahs.)

Is religion socially programmed, or are our brains hard-wired for it (whatever that tired metaphor actually means, since we'll never be able to find the complex neurological interaction, synapses, and pathways that produce religious belief)? Are we somehow predisposed to structure our world according to unproved beliefs?

Evidence from reality strongly supports the role of social programming. Dawkins rightly laments that religion always gets first crack at the kid, who’s never allowed to make independent religious decisions. He regards this forced programming as a form of child abuse, and I agree.

But there’s a lot of evidence on the “predisposed” side too. Evidence from my own brain suggest hard-wired. I was fortunate to have Bill Perlman, my father, leading the way; he was the first skeptic I ever met. If both parents had been more than superficially religious, it would have been harder, but I can’t see myself a believer, especially since, back then, happy to report, you could actually get a secular education, which enabled you to stand apart from religion and realize that it fails the reality test..

On the other hand, my brother, raised in the same environment, does his minimal bit of Judaism – 1-2 days in the synagogue at High Holidays, plus Seder, plus bar/bat mitzvahs -- and is quite happy with it. Go figure.

Never felt God’s presence

Although I spent the required amount of time davening, none of it felt as if I was talking to somebody. I never had the intuitive feeling of belief, felt the presence of God in my life, or any of that abstract, subjective BS.

Here’s where the cat comes in.

We have recently increased our family group by one, with the addition of a very sweet and trusting four-year-old female, whom we adopted from the Humane Society and named Oreo, since her coat is black, except where evolution has elegantly painted her with white markings along her chest, front paws, and haunches. When she curls up, she is perfectly camouflaged, which is why I closed the piano lid on her after she’d gone to sleep inside – but that’s another story.

Oreo is a prodigious leaper who can get to the high molding in our cathedral-ceilinged house, about 10 feet off the ground, in two leaps – first the cabinet, then the frig, then the molding. On the way down, she goes right from the fridge, which I calculate would be a 75-100 foot leap for me.

She is a perfectly tuned machine. Her best leap is from one cupboard top to another, across the stove, particularly impressive because the exhaust fan’s duct descends between the two cabinets, giving her a window of only a few inches to jump through. Makes it every time.

Chasing the light

Oreo has one weakness which does not reflect well on her species: she is attracted to the beam of a flashlight and chases the moving reflection as if it were prey. My stepson is able to strobe out her little cat-brain and get her running in circles, truly a whirling dervish. Her legs blur and her torso swivels as she tries furiously to nail the elusive prey. Dammit, gonna GET it this time!

This game never gets old. Each night the beam holds the same allure and is equally untrappable as the previous night. Sometimes she contemplates it, as if trying to process in her little cat-brain the difference between a thing and an image. But it will not compute.

When will she lose interest completely? When she processes the concept “uncatchable,” or whatever the feline equivalent of it is? Maybe never.

I thought long and hard before falling for the all too easy comparison between this behavior and religion. Religious people are forever chasing something that does not exist: heaven, salvation, eternal life, whatever. The more I thought about it, the more it seemed evidence for predisposition/hard-wiring.

The cat chases the light because it resembles prey – small and mobile. It does not know what light is. Hell, WE barely know what it is. But at least we know it’s not in the “grabbable object” class of phenomena, just as heaven and angels do not exist in the same way as cars and buildings.

And we shouldn’t be too condescending to the cat, because the response to light, the seeking of light, runs the length of the phylogenetic scale. When plants do it, it’s called phototropism. When moths do it, it’s often suicidal. When humans do it, it’s called lighting Hanukkah candles or jetting to Cancun. “Light = good” examples run throughout our English lexicon and our culture (and many others, I’m sure). What do you see at the moment of dying? Light!

A deep-seated impulse, indeed.

But the light is a chimera in the cat’s world, a non-computing concept, just as religious belief and all its trappings – stories of virgin birth, divine revelation, gods with thunderbolts and gods with multiple arms and gods with snakes for hair. Not real, never was.

Religious believers chase the illusion of gods and afterlife the way the cat chases the light. There is no evidence for anything in the Torah, so why believe in it? Why keep chasing the light of fantasy, twisting yourself every which way to believe it and accommodate it (e.g., keeping kosher – FOUR sets of dishes)?

Getting right with God

The religious answer: If only we chase the light, pray enough (= get right with God), kill enough infidels, whirl around enough, we’ll capture it. We’ll be saved. We’ll go to heaven, Valhalla, Paradise. We won’t die. Sometimes humans have decreed that finding the light requires you to kill others or yourself.

Who’s directing the flashlight beam? Again, a concept the cat’s brain doesn’t seem to grasp. Similarly, religious people don’t question the origin or validity of their practices (for sheer ridiculousness, see “tefillin”), beliefs, or stories – that’s doubt, blasphemy.

I’m not saying that religious practice does nothing for you subjectively. Some religious believers get off on the communal activity and hymn-singing, which correlates to the high pain threshold discovered in rowers moving in unison. High Church officials get off by dressing in effeminate brocade. I saw one bishop’s hat that belonged at a transvestite New Year’s Eve party.

Let’s just recognize that ALL progress comes from the scientific method. (Even the Iranians know that Allah isn’t going to build their bomb, no matter how hard they pray.)

The battle with religion will be long and arduous (the NH bill also requires that those who do not believe be defined as “atheists” and burned at the stake – ha ha, just kidding, but only about the last part). It will not end in my lifetime, for sure.

Walkin’ with Jesus

Science, though its rewards are abundant, reveals the complexities of life and the mysteries of the universe (some of them, at least), but it takes effort. Requiring evidence, documentation, experimentation, experience, independent verification – that’s BO-ring. Takes too long to get to the truth, if you ever do. Feels much better to walk with Jesus (whatever that means).

People want to believe. People love to believe. Believing makes them feel good. Believing assuages mortal fears with false promises. That’s what we’re up against.

The price of their feeling good about their retarded mythologies is very high: perpetual strife and even wider war among groups, each of whom is convinced it has the truth.

The best the rational minority can do is, as Jesse Jackson might say, is “keep science alive; keep reason alive” -- until the world is really ready for them. Keep pushing back against the forces of darkness, which threaten from every side.

Bible’s overrated reputation goes on and on

“Imagine the Creator as a low comedian, and at once the world becomes explicable.”

H.L. Mencken

“Infidel, n. In New York, one who does not believe in the Christian religion; in Constantinople, one who does.”

Ambrose Bierce

“Properly read, the Bible is the most potent force for atheism ever conceived.’

Isaac Asimov

“Our Bible reveals to us the character of our God with minute and remorseless exactness….It is perhaps the most damnatory biography that exists in print anywhere.”

Mark Twain

Here in the land of “Live Free or Die,” the government purports to dictate educational curriculum – not a good sign in a supposedly free society. The legislature, as reported in the Feb. 3 Keene Sentinel, is contemplating a law that would require schools to offer an elective course on the Bible.

Say what??

Isn’t the damn thing in our faces enough as it is? Are there no other collections of folk-tales, pseudo-history and kindergarten morality that merit our attention? Is there no civilization, however primitive, that doesn’t have its version of how things came to be and how people are supposed to act? This is just forcing the dominant religion’s version to the fore once again. What is this, Saudi Arabia?

Fortunately, opposition was quick in coming. The best quote came from Claire Ebel, of the NH ACLU: “This is a specific attempt to hold one religion over others and hold a religion over no religion.”

Inflated importance

The problem with the Bible is its inflated importance, maintained by both civil and clerical authorities. The cause and effect is circular: It’s important because it’s always been – and that's partly because clerics have filtered and whitewashed its more primitive stories. Massive numbers of rabbi-hours have been invested in giving the Torah far more respect than it deserves.

Once again: the Bible is not inherently unique. It is very special mainly TO CHRISTIANS AND JEWS, who exert a disproportionate influence on the actions of Western nations. A heavily armed, religious nation like the US is a threat to the stability of the world. I wouldn’t mind if Denmark had nukes. But religion drives policy in many other non-Christian nation as well.

God and the Presidency

And of course, there is no way an atheist could be elected to lead this great land of ours, even though a person free of religious superstition (I’m willing to believe that Obama’s such a person; he just goes through the motions) is a much better choice, because he/she can make decisions without having to believe that God is on our side (they ALL believe that).

Milllions of people believe the Bible represents history, despite all efforts to disprove its truth (especially the most primitive parts: why do people cling to the psycho-killer God in the Torah?). Disturbingly large numbers of people believe without proof. There’s no debate about the folk-tales of other religions; they’re false.

NOT a Christian nation

Another factor that's inflated the importance of the Bible is the fallacy that every time the Founders said anything about God, it bears on the question of whether this is a Christian country. WTF? I hate the way religious believers cherry-pick their quotes, but that is the way of ignorant, devious people.

The truth is that some of the Founders were outright atheists. Jefferson cut out all the mythology and isolated the parts that were relevant and worthwhile. Maybe some of the Founders mentioned God because they were politicians and the rabble expected it.

The point is that the government they created in no way rests on religious fantasy. And before that, they didn’t rely on prayer to deliver them from the British. They acted exactly opposite to the church poster I saw in Troy, NH: “Put your faith in God, not yourselves.” Passivity, always. God will take care of everything.

God as underachiever (Woody Allen)

Except that he takes care of nothing. He didn’t stop the Holocaust (sorry, cheap shot). His resume is thin. Prayers may or may not be answered. Anything clerics say come from God – forgiveness, grace, salvation, strength – comes in fact from people themselves.

The NH proposed law is just another example of creeping Bible-worship. I’m sure it’s not the only such legislative proposal in this great religious land of ours. But give it a rest. There’s plenty of Bible study going on. Way too much, in fact. Along with all the Bible courses, formal and informal, that we already have, there are entire institutions devoted to obsessing over it.

Who the hell do these politicians think they are, deciding what knowledge is important? As one of the measure’s opponents said, the Roman Empire is just as important to our history and culture – why not mandate that?

Politicians should get out of education, stick to the Constitution, and concern themselves with the threats to our rights and liberties, chief among which right now is the government itself.

The existential message of "Groundhog Day"

Zen monk: "How should I escape birth and death?"
Zen Master Shih-kung: "What is the use of escaping it?"

"In this world, we eat, shit, sleep and wake up. After that all we have to do is die."

Inkyu

Once again it's Groundhog Day, which was nothing more than a rather witless locally-oriented celebration until Harold Ramis’ brilliant movie of the same name. It became -- and still is -- my all-time favorite message film.



Groundhog Day explores the everydayness of life with an ingenious premise worthy of Kafka, Camus, or Ray Bradbury: an arrogant newsman from Pittsburgh (Bill Murray, named Phil, as in "Puxsatawny Phil," the groundhog) finds himself trapped in Puxsatawney, PA, where, over and over, he wakes up at 6:00 a.m. to Sonny and Cher singing “I Got You, Babe,” and he and his producer (Andie MacDowell) and cameraman have to do the same local-color Groundhog Day story, day after day after day.

At first he can’t believe what’s going on. When he does catch on, he uses his newfound “power” to learn more and more about an attractive local woman (who’s always meeting him for the first time) and get laid. Of course, that’s what any guy would do.


Coping strategies


He then decides: what the hell? He becomes a libertine, a freedom-abuser. He consumes large quantities of sugar; he smokes. He even tosses a live toaster into his bathtub.


He realizes he can do anything – even kill himself -- and still wake up to Sonny and Cher the next morning. There’s no way out.


So bit by bit, his coping strategies turn positive. He starts to acquire wisdom. His Groundhog Day broadcasts become more thoughtful and philosophical. He starts to take piano lessons (every lesson is the “first” one for the teacher) and gets better and better. He rescues people from predicaments that he knows are going to happen.


He makes many attempts to bed his beautiful producer Rita (Andie MacDowell) and, after many slaps in the face, sheds his arrogance and snarkiness, becomes a real person…and one day awakes to Sonny and Cher – with Andie in bed beside him. Something has changed!


Existential message


Just as Secular Humanists have begun to adopt Festivus and make it a festival of their own, so should we consider co-opting Groundhog Day as a celebration of the predictability of life as a context in which it is WE who must change.


I see it as a pan-Humanist festival. It wouldn't matter if you were Jewish, Chritsian, Muslim, Hindu...we could all watch the movie and celebrate our own power to change.


Same old, same old


Think of it: you will awaken tomorrow morning, with the same fundamentals all in place: the same mind in the same body with the same partner (or no partner) beside you, in the same house, with the same job and relatives. The people around you will continue to be who they are. If your boss was a demented tyrant yesterday, he/she will still be one today.


The macro environment changes a little, but it doesn’t affect many of us directly. Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, politicians will preen and spar, insane religions and political doctrines will still have the same powerful grip on the human mind. Muslims will still be killing each other, Christians will still be trying to take over the US, and people of all "faiths" will continue to believe literally in their holy texts.


Ancient superstitions and rivalries will be as strong and destructive as they were yesterday. The battle between scientific truth and religious fantasy will continue unresolved. At least one Muslim will blow him/herself up, and Americans will continue to die in foreign wars.


People will continue to blather about saving the planet even as they destroy it. Politicians will promise change, but the only change will be that government will get bigger, and there will be more war.



Reactions to life


Marvelously predictable, isn’t it? And we react just like Phil – we can’t believe it (SURELY my wife/kid/boss/situation can change; it MUST!). We can't believe there's no way out.


We try all kinds of things to get away from it. We go to bars, football games, churches, and casinos. We run away to addictions of all kinds. Anything to “get away.” We even try to kill ourselves, quickly (suicide) or slowly (drugs, alcohol, work).


But perhaps on Groundhog Day, we can realize, as Phil eventually did, that through it all, the only thing that we can certainly change is our own mind and behavior. Like Phil, all we can do is keep at it until we get it right.

__________________



Alan M. Perlman is a secular humanist speaker and author -- most recently, of An Atheist Reads the Torah: Secular Humanistic Perspectives on the Five Books of Moses. For information, go to www.trafford.com/06-0056.