Ruminations on Everything

Changing the US Constitution: Some Suggestions

2012-01-04T18:36:00.000+01:00

Wrote late last year about the Articles of Confederation and the possibility of working through the states to call a constitutional convention according to Article 5. This would mean seeking and supporting candidates for state legislatures whose sole purpose would be to have their state call on Congress to call such a convention – an “Occupy the Constitution” movement to allow us to assemble, debate and decide on draft amendments while enjoying our Tea. It's only fair, therefore, for me to outline a few of the ways I think we might use the amendment process to change the way our government works and make it more responsive to the majority.

Simplicity in representative government may be best – a one-house Congress elected for four years choosing a Prime Minister with a ceremonial President. Whatever party wins the majority gets to implement the policies it was democratically chosen to enact. But the USA may be too big and complex to give so much power to any one institution. The Founding Fathers may have been on to something when they provided for checks-and-balances. For checks and balances, I would not touch the Supreme Court much. But it might also do to re-invigorate the role of the states both to decentralize power and to provide some degree of check-and-balance at the federal level. Here's my suggestions:

Increase the size of the House of Representatives to allow for greater and more diverse membership and points of view. Article One, Section 2 says the number of representatives “shall not exceed one for every thirty Thousand.” Congress changed this by law in the 1920s to fix the number at 435. One for every 30,000 would now mean some 10,000 representatives. That seems much. But why not 1000?
Elect the House for four year terms so its members can do something other than campaign all the time.
Allow the House to choose the Prime Minister. He/she would be head of government, commander-in-chief and choose the cabinet and senior government officials (including ambassadors), assuming the powers contained in Section 2 of Article 2 without the need to seek advice and consent.
The House would originate all bills and approve all treaties, assuming all the functions and limitations contained in Sections 7, 8 and 9 of Article 1.
No commitment of US troops abroad for any time and any purpose would be possible without a majority vote in the House specifying the duration and terms.
Repeal the 17^th Amendment on popular election of the Senate. Make senators appointed by state legislatures to two year terms. Senators would represent the States at the federal level.
The Senate would have the authority by majority vote to reject laws and treaties passed by the House. The House could overcome the veto by a 60% vote. (We want to have checks and balances without completely tying the hands of the majority.)
Members of the Supreme Court would be nominated by the Prime Minister and approved by majority vote of the Senate to serve single terms of 15 or 20 years.
The President would be chosen by the House and be confined to being the ceremonial head of state. (Or we could abolish the office altogether.)
Congressional campaign funding would be limited to public sources – money collected by the national treasury and doled out equally to candidates gaining sufficient support through local petitions – and individual contributions limited to some modest amount, say $200.

It might be good as well to take a hard look at the proliferation of government departments. We might grandfather State, Treasury and War – the first created – as well as Justice. But some of the others may be doing things better left to the states or society?

November 22

2011-11-21T14:18:00.000+01:00

Tomorrow is the date in 1963 that President Kennedy was shot. Every American alive then can tell you where he or she was at the moment they heard. We are getting old and it is history. But the hatred that may be the real story of that day is not history. America has always had this deep vein of hatred running through it. I saw this weekend a local production of a play about the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858. The hatred goes back even farther than this. It is rooted in our Declaration of Independence and our central lie that all men were created equal. We had slaves, all thirteen states had slavery. Slavery defined us and it still does. At bottom, the hatred aimed at Lincoln, Kennedy and Obama is about the feeling that while we are slaves - to all kinds of forces beyond us - we have none. It's about powerlessness and the inch-deep popular culture that cannot really sustain us. It's about not really controlling ourselves or much of anything and not knowing what to do about it. It's about being owned and having nothing we can really own.

The Case for a Constitutional Convention

2011-11-17T17:41:00.001+01:00

I wrote several days ago on the usefulness of rediscovering the Articles of Confederation. But it is clear that the crisis – economic, political and moral – facing the United States today cannot be resolved by simply returning to the past. For years now, things seem to have been getting worse. Income disparity has been increasing, wars proliferating, politicians squabbling. Government has become overbearing, inefficient and too beholding to money. The American people's growing sense that things need to be fixed has energized both the Tea Party and Occupy movement.

Change is necessary but we the people cannot trust others to do it for us. Our politicians seek nothing more than power. Once elected, they spend most of their time and energy raising money in order to get re-elected. Our leaders do not lead because taking necessary actions might lose this or that constituency. So we need to start the change ourselves.

We need to begin pushing for a Constitutional Convention to change the way our government works and to ensure it better serves the 99%. A government lean, more responsive to our needs in the 21st Century and more focused on achieving economic prosperity with justice and liberty.

The Occupy movement has been criticized for not having any overall objective. How about occupying the Constitution?

The Tea Party wants fiscal responsibility, free markets, and constitutionally limited government. Let's do that the right way.

The US Constitution in Article V allows for various ways to amend the constitution:

The Congress, whenever two thirds of both Houses shall deem it necessary, shall propose Amendments to this Constitution, or, on the Application of the Legislatures of two thirds of the several States, shall call a Convention for proposing Amendments, which, in either Case, shall be valid to all Intents and Purposes, as part of this Constitution, when ratified by the Legislatures of three fourths of the several States, or by Conventions in three fourths thereof, as the one or the other Mode of Ratification may be proposed by the Congress;

Leaving constitutional changes to the Congress would be to leave it in the hands of the professional politicians. The most reliable way to ensure real change would be to use the mechanism of a Constitutional Convention. None has been called since the first in 1787. But if the Occupy movement – perhaps alongside the Tea Party – focused now on electing in 2012 state legislatures committed to calling a Convention, a new era of American democracy could begin.

A Constitutional Convention would surely be a hotbed of democracy. Whether Occupy or Tea Party, Democrat or Republican, liberal or conservative, everyone would come into it with different ideas. Reaching agreement on amendments to the constitution would probably be difficult and require equal measures of consensus and compromise. But such a convention would offer a real opportunity for the people to once again assume control of their government. The process of reaching agreement and then ratification by 3/4s of the states would offer further opportunities for democratic participation.

Some are no doubt afraid – whether they say so or not – of such direct democratic participation. They are comfortable with the way things are done today and do not want anyone to mess with that. But we, the great law abiding majority, the 99%, have nothing to fear from coming together to discuss and enact change.

Taking Back The Articles of Confederation - Concluding Reflections

2011-11-05T18:45:00.000+01:00

Introduction    Part 1    Part 2    Part 3    Part 4    Part 5

   The victory of the Founding Fathers in 1787 put the Articles of Confederation into the dustbin of American history. But the debate between anti-federalists and federalists never entirely disappeared. A fundamental difference in political vision has continued to run through the American political tradition like twin rivers. The source of one river is the impulse, typical of Americans, to rise above local and individual differences to grasp the elements of a national, even global, commonality. A rich and powerful mass democracy with universalistic pretensions has been built along this river.

   The source of the other river is the impulse, equally typical, to do it ourselves, to keep it small. Upon this river have floated the various proposals and efforts over the years to reduce or limit the size and powers of the federal government. Politics in America has often been the attempt to sail upon both rivers at once. Those on opposing sides have had various labels: Federalists and Anti-Federalists, unionists and states-righters, liberals and conservatives and now Occupy and Tea Party.

    Since the Articles were cast aside, the federalists have generally been ascendant. Those who have sought to advocate states rights or who have fought to preserve state powers against encroachment by the federal government have been handicapped.   The Articles were judged by its opponents to have failed. Memory of the 13 years of confederal government faded. This is not to say that the idea of state sovereignty has not returned at times to haunt American politics. The southern Confederate States of America, in its mixture of states rights and an unholy effort to maintain slavery, was the final nail in the coffin not only of state nullification but of an historical consciousness of what was lost with the victory of the Federalists.

    What has been lost can be seen most closely in the failure of government in the current United States to serve the majority, the 99%. One could say that this failure was inevitable in the age of nation-states, superpowers and globalization. Governing a large modern nation in a world of fierce ideological, political and economic competition must entail enormous bureaucracies and incomprehensibly large budgets. In our case, the attempt to guarantee the “pursuit of happiness” of all citizens - as much a necessary requirement of centralized, representative government as the gladiatorial games were for Imperial Rome - requires great effort and considerable resources and organization. It gives great scope to the power of money.

   Yet the voices raised against “big government” and "big business" express true insights. The role of the average citizen in government has dwindled to the vanishing point while that of big money has come to predominate. In the 19th and 20th centuries, Americans experienced the full range of challenges -- collective and personal -- associated with the growth of modern industrial society. These difficulties included wars and cyclical economic downturns. The growth of the central government in response to these challenges – especially during the Civil War and the Great Depression -- was dictated, at least in part, by practical necessity. But the Constitution gave the government a mandate to provide for the “general welfare” and “common defense.” It armed Congress with all “necessary and proper” power for doing so and vested in the president whatever "executive power” might be necessary. With each major crisis, the focus shifted to what “government” could do to resolve the situation and, thus, from local efforts to the central government. Along with the “welfare state,” the seeming imperatives of economic development made the government in Washington the ultimate provider The Cold War, as well as the “hot” ones, levered the presidency into what can fairly be described as an imperial throne. Meanwhile, as government receded from the people, it fell more and more into the hands of those with the cash to fund the politicians and manipulate the bureaucracy to their own ends.

    In 1787, America reached a fork in the road. It could have chosen to stay on the course it was marking out for the first time - confederal democracy - or it could return to the well-trodden path of centralized government. Perhaps being “too young to know what we are fit for”, we chose the old road, and that has made all the difference.

    There are, however, two features of confederal democracy that might lead one to see in it a workable model for self-government. First, by leaving decision making in the hands of those most directly affected, confederal democracy provides the citizens of the relevant community a public space in which to confront each other and work out jointly what is to be done. They enjoy what Arendt called the pleasures and benefits of public life. Tempered by the experience of mutual recognition and cooperation between citizens in the process of self-government, local government can become, as it was for the Greeks, an arena for collectively seeking the good life. Politics in confederal democracy therefore would be vigorous and complex and would mirror the full range of interests, values and tastes in the community.

   Second, by leaving primary responsibility for living the good life where it most belongs, with those most immediately affected by the results of collective decisions, confederal democracy leaves less space for others to operate in the shadows. Power flows not from beyond but from below. Problems are solved at the level of government at which all affected can participate - town, county, state, regional, national - but no higher. Citizens face each other directly in full transparency to solve their common problems and to resolve their differences. A confederal polity requires citizen initiative. Confederal democracy - built on active citizen participation in their polis - is the unrealized potential of the American tradition of local self-government.

    Certainly, the need to guarantee social justice and political equality amidst the strains of modern society assures that even a confederal central government would be an important political actor. But perhaps the load might be more evenly placed, resting more directly where in a democracy it should, on the people. However, the road chosen in 1787 followed the premise of maintaining government as far from the people as the new notions of popular sovereignty allowed. Under the shocks of industrialization and war, Washington came to monopolize political space and government became someone else’s concern: citizens became subjects.

   The result is ironic. The fate of over 300 million Americans - and essentially the entire globe that we have come to dominate - rests with a mere handful of people often far removed from the results of their decisions. The Constitution that took the place of the Articles of Confederation set up a powerful central government and left we the people with no place else to turn. But the call to resurrect the vision of that other, more democratic America still echoes. Those who hear this call should ensure that they go back to the source to be sure they understand what they are hearing.

Taking Back The Articles of Confederation - Part 5

2011-11-03T18:07:00.000+01:00

Introduction    Part 1    Part 2 Part 3 Part 4

Confederation, Community and Bodies Politic

   The anti-federalists saw the question of power from the bottom-up. The Constitution would establish a government with too much power, too far away from the people. They feared the return of aristocracy. To set up one government in place of thirteen, and to endow that government with the law, the purse and the sword, would be to destroy democracy. No matter the supposed guarantees, the states would eventually be reduced to the administrative agents of the central government. Without the intermediation of the states, the power of the central government could be brought to bear directly on the individual.

   The anti-federalists therefore opposed establishing a “great” power. Instead, they favored granting power in small pieces, close to what they held to be the only reliable check, the people. In place of one preponderant national government, they wanted to preserve the division of government among the states. The state legislatures, more accessible to the citizenry, more closely tied to local politics, and with membership in the hundreds, could better reproduce the full variety of local interests and opinion than could a handful of representatives in a national legislature.

   Those who supported the Articles tended to see the representative in the legislature as a delegate (or ambassador) - as someone bound to vote as his constituents would if they could be there - rather than as a trustee - who would be free to vote according to his own judgement. The delegate model could not work in a national parliament because of the great size of the country and the correspondingly greater number of people each legislator would represent.

   The national congress envisioned by the federalists would not represent the views of the citizens but pass them through a chosen few who would end up doing whatever was to their own advantage. The anti-federalist view of representation as a simple transmission of the wishes of constituents fitted with their reliance on state and local politics, where interests are more immediate, communication more direct and government more subject to majorities.

   The Articles were based upon the assumption that people live in communities that mean something to them and reflect what they hold in common. They supposed, in other words, that the natural community of man is not a mass of competing individuals but real local groupings based upon shared activities and characteristics. Such groupings were not abstractions but were well within the reach of each person, where he lived his everyday life in his town, village, city and region.

   In building a national government based upon sovereign entities within the traditional sphere of life of their people, the Articles kept government from becoming a Leviathan confronting individuals as something above and beyond them. Real politics took place at the local level. What mattered, happened there, where people could see it and directly participate in the decisions affecting them. If democracy works best when people actively participate in government, then keeping government as close to them as possible to facilitate participation would assist the development of democracy.

   One may argue that confederal government is less “efficient” than unitary government. Under even the amended Articles, if a majority of the states resisted a particular requisition or other action proposed in Congress, nothing would happen. If a majority of states agreed and complied with a congressional decision but a minority did not, there would ultimately be nothing beyond moral suasion to enforce compliance by the holdouts. Thus an action that many might judge rational and necessary might fail to be adopted. It might also be that a majority (or minority, for that matter) might desire a particular course of action with considerable intensity and feel corresponding frustration on being unable to gain collective agreement or compliance.

   But in practice, confederal government may be, in its own way, more efficient by allowing a greater range of political spaces. Based on the premise that the expression of self-interest is unavoidable, the confederal government embodied in the amended Articles would have allowed for cooperation at various points along a continuum of mutual commitment and judgement of interest. Finding the right node for achieving consensus takes its place along side intensity of interest in resolving political issues. All states might agree and actively participate in joint national-level decisions. Or, a majority of states might decide to act anyway, either through bearing the costs of collective action unequally - i.e. by themselves - or by acting as a subgroup outside the mechanism of the national congress. A minority might well decide to do the latter as well. Politics would no doubt be dense, as states jostled for both advantage and, at least occasionally, to avoid being left out. But in a flexible and fluid situation where there was more than “one game in town,” things that needed to get done would mostly likely get done and lone holdouts or interstate differences would not necessarily block all further action.

   The Constitution of 1787 sought to ensure that the body politic would speak only when a sufficient number and diversity of interests had sufficiently checked-and-balanced each other to be able to say one thing. As we now know quite well, this leaves the Leviathan either powerless or impelled by intensely interested minorities.

   Confederation provides for many voices to be heard on many levels. The Continental Congress was a forum for the states but the states could act outside that forum, in groups or singly. The Articles also left entirely unregulated the political forms that might exist within states. A confederal united states offered the possibility of a structure of multiple bodies politic. Government or associations could exist at each level - local, state, regional, and national - to exercise authority on specific matters delegated to it from the level below. This meant local approaches for local issues, regional for regional and national for national. Local government, possessing the sovereignty of immediacy, would anchor a framework of legitimacy and decision-making built from the bottom up.

   In the continental-sized federal system that grew out of the Constitution of 1787, final authority - exercised in the name of the “people” - is far away from where the people actually live. The government in Washington has understandably come to feel alien to many, who have been reduced to being political spectators assembled once every few years to cheer from the stands.   The states remain, but as political “backwaters” bypassed by the present constitution.

   Is it not, however, inevitable that as we become ever more immersed in the emerging global context, we will require more and more that government make sense of the resulting web of complexity? And who will trust the government to do that if it seems more a part of the external environment rather than something that belongs to us? And as the World Wide Web and economic globalization connects us in ever more complex ways, does a sovereign “central government” per se still play a necessary role?

Taking Back The Articles of Confederation - Part 4

2011-11-01T17:14:00.000+01:00

Introduction   Part 1   Part 2   Part 3

The Federal Leviathan

   In the debate over what to do to go beyond the Articles, the issue, for confederalists and federalists alike, was power. Both shared the belief that great power, concentrated in one place, is an open invitation to abuse. However, the Federalists did not object to centralized power. For them, a strong central power was a necessary element in holding together and directing a continental-sized nation. In a large, powerful and wealthy society, preponderant force must exist as the basis for rule. The Federalists sought only to check the powers of a strong executive with a strong parliament.   They proposed, in other words, to grant this great power to the center but divide it.

   The Federalists’ fundamental charge against the Articles was that they provided for a government both too weak and inefficient and too open to local majorities and interests.   It could be argued that even the confederation of the amended Articles would continue to depend on the voluntary compliance of its member states and thus remain fatally flawed. Without the ability to enforce compliance on the states, the central government could not perform that one function necessary in a community of individual entities each seeking advantage, to enforce cooperation and contribution to the common good.

   Throughout the brief confederal period, some states failed to fulfill commitments to the central government and there were always inter-state and inter-regional rivalries.   Clearly, without the states’contribution and active participation, the confederation could not prosper. The Articles, even if amended, would not have done away with this problem. Indeed, the Constitution of 1787 did not do so. The Civil War had to be fought, hundreds of thousands of Americans had to die, and the federal government had to settle by force-of-arms the question of where ultimate authority resided before the Constitution could be “perfected.”

   Seeking the common good is a classic political conundrum that has called forth various responses. The most obvious, and the one perhaps most used, is the Hobbesian option, constituting a “Leviathan” which can force obedience. Although not all supporters of the Constitution of 1787 were so motivated, the option for creating a strong central authority had great appeal to many of the Federalists and their supporters, and most clearly for Hamilton.

   According to the Federalists, the government of the Articles did not create a national polity that could manifest the broad interests of the people. Rather, it represented the states. Dividing America into localities, it allowed local majorities to hold sway. Holding power in the states, these “local interests” – or “factions” – did not seek the public good but their own. Thus, the Federalists argued that the confederation lacked not only efficiency but also representativeness. The new government that the Federalists proposed would merge these many local majorities together into one polity where they would have to contend with each other on equal grounds, i.e., as minorities. Through the several institutions of government, the public view could be “refined” and a national will -- stripped of factionalism -- could emerge. The Constitution would, in effect, arrange the political machinery so that a “nation” would form around the polity.

   The Founders as much as hoped to create “America” as to supply it with a government. In this sense they were indeed “nation builders.” The confederation stood in the way of this intended act of creation. That in some cases the local majorities that governed in the states used their power against their “betters” -- such as in the chronic confrontation between debtors and creditors -- further motivated some of the Federalists to look to establish a federal government out of the reach of these local majorities.

   The Constitution of 1787 was a document of predominantly nationalist, not democratic, sentiment. It took the politically necessary tact of presenting in republican form the Hamiltonian vision of an imperial America. The Constitution stripped the states of sovereignty and established an what was in effect an “elective monarchy” with a president/commander-in-chief – chosen by a collection of local notables called the Electoral Collage – and checked by a national parliament. In establishing a separate executive branch, the Constitution also provided the new federation with a nascent bureaucracy.

    Because the contemporary political reality was based upon the sovereignty of the thirteen states, the Federalists did not highlight the issue of the states’ relationship to the proposed federal government. But the anti-federalists were aware of the potential in the new document. The Constitution sought to submerge the states within the framework of a national government that largely dispensed with them as localized aggregators of political input or prime vehicles of political output. It established a national government with broad undefined powers and with legal precedence in those areas in which it was given authority. It provided for taxes raised independently of the states and gave the central government a standing army and control over the state militia.

   To the confederalists, the changes proposed by the Federalists did not seem to guarantee the continuance of the political preeminence of the states. If their fears were often exaggerated, the subsequent shift of the political center of gravity to the central government has supported their fundamental concern. The states have not completely disappeared, in large part because of the strong American tradition of local government and a concomitant fear of big government. But the growth in the size and importance of the federation’s central government -- and the increased power within that government of the president -- have filled in the mere outline of electoral monarchy established by the Constitution.

   It was the “genius” of the Founding Fathers to move beyond the states to structure the basic political dynamic around the contention of “faction” writ large. Implicit was the notion that the “natural” community of man was the mass of individuals competing in the “state of nature.” In the face of this abstract “community”, the states added nothing and, indeed, got in the way. As long as the central government followed its own rules, there would be nothing between it and the individual and little role for state governments. It is not surprising that even some Federalists were alarmed enough by this prospect to push through the first ten amendments to the Constitution of 1787 even before it was adopted.

Taking Back The Articles of Confederation - Part 3

2011-10-31T17:53:00.000+01:00

Introduction    Part 1 Part 2

The Articles Amended

From 1781 to 1787, attempts were made to amend the Articles in three areas: (1) to give Congress coercive power to compel the states to comply with its decisions; (2) to allow Congress to collect an impost (export and/or import duties); and (3) to authorize Congress to regulate trade. James Madison sought to accomplish the first through a proposal in 1781 to give Congress a military and naval force, which could be used against the states if needed to enforce its authority. Congress ignored the proposal and no other coercive authority was considered again until the Constitution of 1787 (or used until the American Civil War). The latter two areas for change were seriously considered throughout the decade.

    Although contained in the original Dickinson draft, the Articles as finally accepted denied Congress the power to regulate trade. It became increasingly clear, however, that trade suffered from the lack of uniformity of tariffs and regulations from state to state. The states also came to agree on giving the Congress its own source of funds. Focus centered on the collection of import duties, which would complement Congress’ role in regulating commerce. By 1786, all the states had reached tentative agreement to grant Congress (for 15 years) the authority to regulate commerce. However, the various forms of approval passed by the state legislatures remained to be reconciled. All states except New York had agreed to the impost. New York demanded that the states collect it, not the central government. Congress resisted this provision. In order to pass these final hurdles, the Congress decided to review the amendments for final passage by the states. Congress formed the Grand Committee to accomplish this review and received its report in August 1786. Congress delayed action on the report because of a heated debate over the Treaty with Spain. The Federalists seized the initiative and Congress never again had the opportunity to return to the Grand Committee’s report. Still the report may be taken as the confederation’s last words on itself.

    The Grand Committee’s report took the form of seven proposed additional articles of confederation. Article 14 gave Congress the sole power to regulate foreign and domestic trade as well as the authority to levy import and exports imposts. To meet New York’s objection, the revenue would be returned to the states where it was collected. The impost would have to be passed by nine (or 9/13) of the states but would then be binding on all.

    Articles 15, 16 and 17 were to meet the problem of assuring Congress a reliable income. They called for an elaborate system for collecting the requisitions on the states. Any state that failed to meet its quota of funds (or military forces) could be assessed an additional sum of ten percent of the quota. If the state still failed to deliver its assessment within ten months, and a majority of the states had already complied, Congress could then collect the sum itself. It would do so by assessing and collecting taxes in a manner, and at the rate, last used by the state itself using state tax collectors supported by state sheriffs. Congress could appoint its own assessors, collectors and sheriffs to enforce collection if the state refused to allow its officials to be used. Should the states or its citizens still resist, the state’s conduct would be considered “an open violation of the federal compact.” As a last resort, Article 18 empowered Congress, with the support of 11 of the 13 states, to institute a new tax system, which would be as binding as though passed by all the states. This latter grant was to be provisional, expiring after 15 years.

    Article 19 gave Congress the authority to define treason and piracy. It also established a national judicial court (appointed from the states as divided into seven regions) to try and punish all officers appointed by Congress. This Court would also serve as the Court of Appeals from state courts on treaty matters, law of nations, trade and commerce regulation, and collection of confederal revenues. Finally, Article 20 bound the states to fill their delegations in time for the first session of Congress and compelled the attendance of individual members.

    The amended Articles would have left the confederal nature of the central government unchanged as Congress would still have been denied the ultimate power to coerce the states into obedience. Yet the amended Articles would have allowed the states a forum for agreeing on a uniform structure for foreign and domestic trade, thus finalizing the American economic union. The amendments would have provided the Congress with a source of confederal income – the impost – while leaving it to the states to collect and funnel the funds back to the national government. If, in the face of majority agreement, a state refused to participate in this system, only the moral force of the compact remained as Congress’ ultimate support. The amended Articles also would have made provision for a supreme court that would help legally bind the states, but only in those areas where they agreed to establish national law.

    The proposed amendments were in accord with the Articles as a whole. They were consistent with a confederation of states that was not a sovereign entity but one in the service of sovereign governments. Only when a significant majority of the states “lent” their sovereignty to the confederation did it assume the semblance of superior power, and then only a kind of “moral” superiority as the institutionalization of the compact the states had made with themselves. This is the defining characteristic of a confederation: power flows from lower levels and “resides” at the top only at the pleasure of the confederated entities. The amended Articles went perhaps as far as a confederal system can go to empower the center without altering the nature of the system fundamentally.

Taking Back The Articles of Confederation - Part 2

2011-10-30T18:14:00.000+01:00

Introduction    Part 1

The Articles Tested

    The Articles of Confederation responded to the practical necessities of the time, which at first centered on maintaining an army in the field to fight the British. In this, the states shared one great purpose, to secure the independence they had declared together in the Declaration. In spite of the difficulties the Continental Congress had in funding the war, the united states outlasted the British, and with the help of the French, defeated the chief world power of the day. The confederated states passed one of the most difficult tests of any new government, winning independence. This essential fact has been often overlooked in judging the Articles.

    The problems that the successful war left behind, however, severely tested the new confederation. The chief problem was the debt. The debt, incurred in order to pay for the war, threatened the ability of the new country to borrow further oversees. Domestically, the inability to fully meet commitments to the army almost led to a military coup against the new government.

   Perhaps the chief result of the debt was the controversy over paper money. A severe post-war depression had ensued as the ex-colonies suffered a cut-off of their traditional source of finished goods in Britain. The lack of specie held back domestic industry from taking quick advantage of the new home market. It also became the focal point of a nascent class struggle between debtors - who favored cheap paper money to pay their loans - and creditors - who wanted a strong currency that would preserve the value of the debts owed them. In state after state, the paper money question -- and the related issue of imposts (taxes) -- became the main political conflict. The conflict over paper money contributed considerably to the premature abandonment of the confederation.

    In theory, the Articles empowered the Congress to requisition funds from the states to pay the debt represented by its paper securities. The states, however, often fell in arrears. Congress lacked its own taxing authority or the power to enforce its requests on the states. This complicated efforts to retire the debt as quickly as its holders wished. The conflict between debtors and creditors, exacerbated by the post-war recession, erupted in bitter state politicking and rioting. To some, the violence (especially Shay’s Rebellion) appeared to threaten the ability of Congress to adequately preserve domestic peace and stability. Thus the debt problem highlighted an apparent twin flaw in the Articles, Congress’ lack of taxing and enforcement authority.

    The United States faced apparent danger on the international front as well. The overseas representatives of Congress felt that foreign governments were not according the new nation sufficient weight. Spain threatened to close outlets for western trade and seemed poised to cut off any of the western territories of the states that became disaffected. England still held on to several western forts in lieu of payment of money owed English businessmen. These factors contributed to the fear on the part of some that the confederation might prove too weak to protect itself from foreign aggression and intrigue.

    In spite of the confederation’s apparent shortcomings, often exaggerated by its opponents, it did not in fact perform all that poorly. Given what we now know of the difficulties of developing nations and their foreign debt, the Congress and the states retired the war debt rather quickly. The treasury received an average of $600,000 a year from the states. Although the debt incurred during the war totaled about $200 million, by 1783 total domestic debt fell to about $34 to $42 million. By 1787, the debt was essentially liquidated. Throughout the 1780’s, the states and the Congress paid off their debts in whatever way proved acceptable given the shifts in relative political strength between debtors and creditors. Without doubt, the general economic recovery during the decade contributed to the progress in dealing with the debt. By mid-decade, domestic industry had expanded to fill the gap left by the British. Foreign trade also increased greatly, surpassing pre-War levels. If the confederation could not take full credit for this recovery, neither did it deter it.

    In the field of international relations, in spite of the various threats, the confederation delivered the United States intact to the government of 1789. The fear of intrigue and war remained a factor even after 1789, witness Aaron Burr and his “western empire” and the sacking of Washington during the War of 1812. Indeed, the confederation achieved its greatest success in regard to settling the western lands. To settle the question of western cession by the eastern states, Congress passed the Northwest Ordinances (during 1784-87). These acts provided for an orderly process of admitting new and equally sovereign states into the confederation and became, in fact, the basis upon which future states were added to the union.

    Undeniably, there were flaws in the Articles. Chief were the inability of Congress to assure itself of a reliable income and to regulate foreign trade. Congress and the states recognized these problems and attempted before 1787 to address them. These attempts failed because of a third problem in the Articles, the need for unanimous approval of the states to amend them. But it is far from proven that these problems could not have been dealt with within the confederal framework. That ultimately forces conspired to move outside the Articles of Confederation should not deter us from examining what the amended Articles might have looked like.

Taking Back The Articles of Confederation - Part 1

2011-10-29T18:24:00.000+02:00

Introduction

The Articles

The government of the Articles of Confederation fought and won the American Revolution. The confederation lasted 13 years, until 1789, the year that George Washington became the first president under the new constitution. The Articles established a confederal legal order, a national system of exchange and communication, and a permanent congress of the states to oversee common affairs. Yet Americans are largely ignorant of the existence of this distinctly American government founded as the political union of individual sovereign states.

The Articles were founded on the principle of state sovereignty and contained a pact of “perpetual union between the States.” Each state retained “its sovereignty, freedom, and independence” except in those areas in which power was “expressly delegated” to Congress. (Preamble; Art. 2) The need to provide for a “common defense” motivated the states to enter “a firm league of friendship with each other.” (Art. 3) To promote this friendship and to further intercourse between the states, Article 4 extended to the citizens of each state the “privileges and immunities” of citizenship of whatever state to which they might travel. It also guaranteed free exit and entrance across state borders and forbade duties, taxes or restrictions on out-of-staters that a state government did not also impose on its own citizens. Article 4 called for extradition upon request and recognition by each state of the “records, acts and judicial proceedings” of the others.

A congress made up of delegates appointed by the state legislatures was established for “the more convenient management of the general interests of the united states.” The delegates could be recalled at any time. Although a state could send from two to seven delegates, each state had only one vote in congress. (Art. 5, 10 and 11)

The Articles forbade any state from pursuing its own foreign policy and regulated the terms under which the states could enter pacts with each other. Although the congress served as a court of appeal in conflicts between the states, the Articles protected the control of each state over its militia (reserving to Congress the authority to appoint general officers). (Art. 6, 7 and 9)

The Articles expressly denied congress the power to tax. But all defense expenses were to be paid out of a common treasury filled through requisitions levied on the states “in proportion to the value of all land within each state.” The states themselves would decide how to raise the money within the period allowed by congress. (Art. 8 and 11) Congress, however, received the authority to regulate the value of coin – national or state – as well as to fix the standard of weights and measures. Congress could also organize a postal system, charging fees to offset operating costs.

The Articles established, in short, a confederation, a non-sovereign union of sovereign states. That this first government of the United States should be confederal should not be surprising. Under British rule, the colonies had been politically independent of each other. When the tie with Britain ended, it left the colonies as a collection of independent, sovereign states with no formal political ties between them. During the Revolution, these newly independent polities saw a need for cooperation. They therefore sought a practical balance between independence and cooperation: they would work together to the extent it would benefit all of them, but no further.

In spite of the limited nature of this first effort at national cooperation, the motive of reciprocal advantage propelled the states far beyond a mere mutual-defense treaty. The Articles provided for a common, yet confederal, legal framework. The laws and legal proceedings of each state were mutually recognized. The Articles protected the freedom to travel and to do business across state lines. Such activities were subject to no more regulation that a state imposed on its own citizens. The Articles provided for a national mail system, a national system of weights and measures and a national currency in order to facilitate interstate communication between persons and traffic in ideas and goods. By these measures, the Articles assured the necessary minimal ground for the development of a national community.

The states further agreed to establish a legislative body to pursue the “convenient management” of their collective interest. The Congress became the vehicle to determine this “national” interest. Insofar as the national interest required coordinated action, Congress itself acted as the executive organ of government. This combined legislative and executive function of Congress was partly a reaction to the colonial experience of arbitrary executives. States such as Georgia and Pennsylvania went so far as to establish unicameral legislatures to avoid an “aristocratic” upper house. The newly constituted Continental Congress followed this same tradition, serving as the unicameral common legislature of the states and without a separate executive.

As a confederal assemby, the Congress could not escape the fact that the states held ultimate power. Given the responsibility of working toward the national interest, the Congress remained a body in which state met state to decide what that interest might be and how to realize it. A separate executive branch would have implied an authority greater than that of the states themselves. It was Congress, as the institutionalized committee of the states, that conducted the war for independence, and foreign policy in general, and directed whatever other joint undertakings the states found convenient.

The confederal framework established by the Articles went a long way towards providing the means by which the thirteen sovereign states could achieve a working social, economic and political unity (and went beyond the degree of common institutions found in today's European Union). The confederation made possible a degree of cooperation and exchange that could have allowed the already culturally bound states to build a nation without necessarily having to construct a nation-state. Certainly, this revolutionary course of development needed time to be tested and to be modified in light of experience. The forces of reaction gave the experiment just 13 years.

Taking Back The Articles of Confederation - Introduction

2011-10-28T17:28:00.000+02:00

In the summer of 1787, a group of counter-revolutionaries met in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. They were asked by the Congress of the United States of America to gather and work on necessary amendments to the existing constitution. Instead they decided to throw the old document away and write a new one. The new document minimized the role of the people, divided the government into parts so that it would make majority rule difficult and moved the center of power beyond the reach of the common man. These counter-revolutionaries became know as America's “Founding Fathers” and the document they wrote the US Constitution.

Over the last two hundred years, the original government of the United States under the Articles of Confederation has became lost to history. Yet – as has become clear to many in the Occupy movements and the Tea Party – the current government of the United States is not serving the majority of the American people but rather a small elite who use it for private gain and political power. We need to recover awareness of the thirteen years during which the United States were governed under the Articles of Confederation. These were years of great accomplishment, the establishment of an independent North America and the beginning of a new experiment in confederal government where power remain close to where people lived.

There exists a profound neglect of this beginning. One might assume there would be interest in these years, in which the government of the United States was fundamentally different from the government that we have come to know. But the confederal period has never been fully assimilated into the great American myth of the “Founding.” Nor has the model of confederal government expressed in the Articles gotten much respect from those who have commented on the period. The confederation and the Articles either have been ignored or have been dismissed as a thankfully short-lived detour. This neglect and disregard is not justified. Indeed, the neglect of the Articles helps explain both the failure of conservative critics of the present American regime to go beyond mere criticism of “Washington’ and “big government” and the failure of its defenders to offer meaningful reforms of their own.

Reconsideration of the Articles of Confederation is an indispensable step in educating the impulse toward less government that has become one of the dominant strains of American politics. Reconsidering the Articles can tell us something not only about how confederal government might work but also refocus attention on the advantages for democracy of renewed governance at state and local levels. The Articles are crucial in this regard in that they stress not “less government” as much as “more politics.” And they are as deeply rooted in the American political tradition as the Constitution of 1787.

In upcoming installments I will try to cast some light on the Articles. This does not imply that a simple return to 1786 would resolve our 21st century problems. But it seems clear that our current government is too big and too much in the hands of the 1% to allow us to meet the challenges we face in the globalized world of the new century while also preserving the justice, progress and fairness by which America has prospered. Reminding ourselves of the beginning may help us find a way to begin again and perhaps prepare the way for a new constitutional convention and a new way to do our politics.

Note: “Confederal” denotes a political system in which the member states, not a central government, are sovereign. A “federal” system is one in which ultimate sovereign authority is exercised by the central government and not by the individual member states. The European Union is a confederal system while the government of the United States is now a federal system. The Articles refers to the union of states as a “confederacy.”

A Riff on Modern Capitalism

2011-10-18T17:38:00.001+02:00

During most of human evolution, we lived by hunting and gathering. Our daily activities were focused almost entirely on getting enough food to survive today and tomorrow. Around 10 thousand years ago, we started replacing hunting and gathering with agriculture and animal husbandry. Along the way, we no doubt began engaging in trading and bartering. But the pursuit of today's bread and meat remained the central part of our daily existence. By now, in industrial and post-industrial society, the actual production of food has become an activity which most people in developed - and increasingly in developing - societies do not directly participate. Instead, we earn our daily bread - and much else we now find essential for "modern life" - through buying and selling, earning and spending.

Production is now just one small part of the process of sustaining human life and society in the modern world. People must buy and must be encouraged to buy. Advertising is essential in this process so we get bombarded constantly with it. All of life can seem built around being incessantly offered opportunities to spend our money. If people stop buying - perhaps because they cannot earn - then selling becomes difficult, production may falter and more people end up not earning.

As production becomes more remote from the actual consumption processes - buying/selling, earning/spending - that feed us, space has grown for some to profit mightily from satisfying and creating needs. This is not always bad. The Internet and iDevices vastly open space for human interaction and productivity. But the space for profit has become quite big and indeed can be thought of as a kind of petri dish for growth of a "tumor" - the mythical "job creator" - in the middle of the human enterprise.

The problem is how to even conceptualize a way of organizing our society around some other way of life. We can't really all return to hunting and gathering. Making and trading also cannot sustain our seven billion. For each according to his needs and from each according to her ability would rely even more on an "invisible hand" than our current capitalist system as no mere human hand could sort out all our needs and capabilities.

For now there seems no good answer other than trying to reduce the size of the tumor.

Human Nature and National Character

2011-06-05T17:33:00.000+02:00

How one sees “human nature” probably reveals a lot about one's self. The range of views is broad. Some may deny there is such a thing, seeing human beings at birth as blank slates. Some may see humans as intrinsically good and others as essentially evil and still others everything in between.

However, it must be that human beings are by nature social. Our species had to evolve this way to survive. But beyond being just “social,” human beings all want to love and be loved. Yes, perhaps there are those born with some failed wiring who we call psychopaths. In the normal case, we are born wanting to be immersed in warm relationships with others, quite apart from sex. This suggests that by nature, most of us are born being “good” people, eager to talk and listen, eager to learn and share, eager to exercise our minds and bodies while exploring our world. This is what it means to be homo sapiens.

Nurture takes us from this starting point and either allows us to grow strong and mature as self-confident, wise and kind beings or it tears us down. We either develop as secure and open egos with positive character traits – honesty, compassion, loyalty, inquisitiveness – or we become encased in what Freud called reaction formations, negative character traits formed as defensive mechanisms against the bad things that we suffer as we age. Few of us are saints or outright devils. Most of us come out somewhere in between and some shine even when surrounded with sorrow and want. By nature we are good. Departures from this owe mostly to the inequalities and inadequacies of our social organizations.

National character is analogous to individual character. The humans that make up any language, ethnic or social group start out and grow as we all do. But they are confronted by the “character traits” built up over history and many of these traits are collective reaction formations, expressing those events – real or as imagined – that have defined that history. Nations are departures from a common human inheritance and nature. But they are also real. And it seems that few of us are ready to live without them.

Possibilianism

2011-04-23T21:09:00.001+02:00

That nothing exist is the logically more stable state of being. Nothing needs anything further and ought to be unchangingly nothing. That there be something requires a departure from nothing, requires explanation. I.e., nothing should be being.

But we are, and the universe is. We don't know anything about what preceded the Big Bang, what dark matter and dark energy are and mean, what consciousness is, where it comes from, or where it may go. It may be that we will never know. It may be that as St Thomas Aquinas suggested, when reason can take us no further, that is the finger pointing to God. In any case, we know too little to rule out what science cannot explain and too much to believe much of what we take for certain.

An adherent of possibilianism is called a possibilian. The possibilian perspective is distinguished from agnosticism in that it consists of an active exploration of novel possibilities and an emphasis on the necessity of holding multiple positions at once if there is no available data to privilege one over the others. Possibilianism reflects the scientific temperament of creativity, testing, and tolerance for multiple ideas.

Eternal

2011-04-22T18:37:00.000+02:00

To be eternal is to exist no where, in no time.

Civilizations in the Goldilocks Zone

2011-03-12T18:38:00.000+01:00

A "Goldilocks" planet is a one that would be neither too hot nor too cold to support life. This is the catchy term science has given to describe those hypothetical planets orbiting stars in the "comfort zone" that would permit liquid water and perhaps life such as we might recognize.

Perhaps one can talk of intelligent life and civilizations in an analogous fashion. Intelligent life would arise from creatures with the potential for intelligence as man arose from more primitive primates. In some of these cases, while creatures might arise with a degree of intelligence they would not progress far or they would evolve much more slowly. Perhaps their environment would be relatively undemanding with conditions allowing the species to flourish without elaborating itself into large civilizations that then enter a cultural/technological evolution of their own. These might be termed "Garden of Eden" species. They might never leave their own planet or solar system and could be stable for very long periods of time.

At the other extreme, there might be intelligent species that evolve very quickly - perhaps to keep up with a more dynamic environment or perhaps out of some dynamic internal to its unique cultural/intellectual makeup. These civilization would tend to be unstable and the most extreme of them would grow beyond the ability of their planet to support them. These civilizations would suffer catastrophic declines and perhaps extinction. They might never survive long enough to go beyond their own atmosphere.

In between these two ends of the spectrum, civilizations would evolve at a fair pace, perhaps suffering precipitous events but eventually settling down to a sustainable level of dynamic evolution and change. These civilizations would be the Goldilocks ones in which the rate of change is neither too slow nor too fast for their intellectual, social, cultural, economic and political systems to keep up with. They might be the ones to go as far afield into the universe as physics and their own culture allows.

It would be nice to think that the human species of Earth is in that Goldilocks zone. But it is too early to say and the 21st Century may decide the issue.

Bits of Consciousness

2011-02-14T03:53:00.000+01:00

It seems that all the minutia of our mental activity - our mind - is governed strictly by physical matter and biology. It must be so, consciousness is pure awareness and without content. (That mental activity is physically-based suggests that higher processing speeds are possible.)

Conscious is analog, not digital, not quantized. However, physical reality, including time, is quantized.

In the beginning was awareness. That without end is without meaning.

Language and the Soul

2010-11-21T18:36:00.000+01:00

Language – the ability to create and exchange meaning between individuals – is what makes us human and different from all other of earth's creatures. Without the ability to use words and grammar, we would not be able to think, plan and act. Thus its evolutionary value. Through language – and with the help of that other great discovery, control over fire – we have conquered the world and subdued nature. It was the bite of the apple that got us tossed out of Nature's Garden to make or break our own.

Think about thinking without words. Not really possible. Without words we might be able to store and recollect images – as we do in dreams – but we could not give them meaning, nor relate one to the other. We might be able to put images together into sequences – for example, how to shape an ax head from a piece of stone – but we could not pass that knowledge to anyone else except by showing. Teaching that way can work but is very inefficient. Perhaps this is why the technology of the Neanderthals changed so little over tens of thousands of years. Images could also be painted on cave walls or drawn in the sand. This would be a bit more efficient. But with language, what we learn can be codified and passed around and on. Knowledge explodes.

We are not the only animals that can communicate with each other. Apes, dogs, whales, ants and others do it through various means. But we are the only animal with words and grammars. Grammar allows words to become veritable skyscrapers of meaning. With language we can develop society, culture, technology, and history.

But think too about what language does for us. It allows each of us to become an individual self. Without words, we remain prisoners of our instincts and reflexes. We can only react to the outside, input determines output. After millions of years of evolution, the early hominids were very clever reactors. But to become an individual cable of rising above simply reacting to inputs, we must be able to think, to tell ourselves – to construct – stories of who we are, what we do and how we do it. We are what we can say we are. With language we move from being an “it” to being an “I.”

Everything modern science tells us leads to the conclusion that our mind is based on our brain and our brain on physiology. Yet we are also conscious, and that science cannot explain. It may be consciousness that provides the space for using language. Where does the next word that you will say come from? Who or what process is behind the curtain stringing our narratives together? Where exactly does it take place? Within our consciousness, we somehow generate our self using language. Then we somehow cross the boundary into the physical and our thoughts emerge from our mind and radiate outward through our brains into action, including speaking.

Perhaps we can call this something within a soul, with no judgement about where that might come from? And what might become of this soul when the body that provides it the mechanisms of perception, thought and language is no more?

America is waiting for a message of some sort or another

2010-10-11T17:46:00.000+02:00

Americans of all political persuasions apparently are disappointed with our dysfunctional government. We want most of what government does for us – even in health care – but it seems that the system is broken. It feels like our leaders, parties and the way our government works just may not be up to the challenges we face in this 21st Century. Yes, Washington seems sunk in partisan bickering and knee-jerk attacks on whoever tries to do anything. But the very mechanism – designed in the 18th Century and last updated 100 years ago – seems woefully incapable of helping us make and implement the decisions we need to survive and prosper in the bewilderingly complex world we now find ourselves in. The Senate has become an arena for power politics fueled by all the influence that money can buy. The federal government – and most of the states – are spending more money than we have. Fortunately, the Chinese have little choice but to hold our dollars for us. But the debt we have run up measures a collective addiction greater than the most pernicious drugs. The Presidency is enmeshed in a bureaucracy of vested interests – within the government and within the ruling party. We seem to have entered the age of permanent war in which only the professionals fight and die. The whole system has become the tail on the dog of the military-industrial complex that Dwight Eisenhower warned us about.

We need to update how we do business, bring the constitution into this millennium. Whether by constitutional convention or through amendments, we need to seize back the initiative. The Founding Fathers were great men for their time, we need great men and women now for our time. Change in America is usually incremental. Our political system's great strength is our reliance on stable and solid rules of the game. But we need change; we all recognize this. Some may fear it. Certainly some may worry about opening the Pandora's Box as widely as a constitutional convention might. But we really cannot go on this way much longer and still maintain our leadership in the world and offer our children and grandchildren a return to the American dream that we boomers have let slip from our grasp. We need the sort of grand national conversation that a convention would bring on. Being democrats, sharing a belief of government of the people, by the people and for the people, we should have nothing to fear but fear itself.

Perhaps our national dialogue can be channeled through serious consideration by the Congress and then through state ratification of amendments we might agree on? Or maybe the Tea Party has accurately measured the times and we need something from outside the existing structures. Article Five of the US Constitution provides the various alternatives.

What might we need to change? Perhaps a parliamentary system might be best. Parliamentary government is more agile, allowing majorities to rule yet quickly recallable. But we Americans do like our change in small steps. So a couple of more modest suggestions:

To improve the efficiency and representativeness of our national legislature.

- Increase the term of office for Representatives from two to four years so they can spend more time focusing on legislating rather than running. Stagger the terms so that every two years, half the House is up for election.

- Increase the representative and deliberative nature of the Senate. Change the distribution of the Senate seats so that no state can have more Senators than it has Representatives. Distribute the extra seats to states according to population with no state having more than three. This would mean that states would have 1-3 senators roughly distributed every ten years according to the latest census. All senate terms would be concurrent and for five years timed to be open the year following the census.

To improve the efficiency and representativeness of the administration of government.

- Increase the presidential term to six years while retaining the limit of two terms.

- Mandate constitutionally that the federal government operate on a two-year budget.

To build into government and law some regular process of review that includes popular consideration.

- Mandate that all Acts of Congress be reauthorized every 25 years either by a 3/5's vote in each house or failing such action, by national referendum.

- This would apply as well to all departments and agencies of the federal government not explicitly named in the Constitution.

Change is the order of life. We Americans have lived in a political system resistant to change. That is mostly good. But the time has come to dig up the roots, prune the tree and replant in soil we can grow on. Let's talk....

The Largest Quantum Object - The Toilet?

2010-09-27T18:14:00.000+02:00

Science News, in its September 25 issue, runs a piece on suggestions that gravity is a matter of entropy and information. I had a hard time getting this one. It seems to be a matter of looking at space as bounded by holographic screens that establish boundaries that create gradients leading to movement we call gravity. A black hole's event horizon can also be considered as such a hologram, containing on its curved, flat surface, all information about the black hole's interior entropy. I can follow the illustration of how a two-dimensional surface – a mirror – can contain all the information needed to record the three-dimension surface it reflects. But even if I understood how all this creates gravity, it would still leave the question of why the universe obeys the 3rd Law of Thermodynamics.

Anyway, what I really want to ask now is why toilets seem to work best when one lifts the top of the tank off? Improper flushing is a common problem with these wondrous contrivances. Sometimes handles get stuck or maybe the mechanism operates with insufficient oomph. When that happens, it seems that simply lifting the tank lid to see what is going wrong pretty much guarantees it will work properly (and that you will not see what the problem may be). Could it be that when the lid is closed, the toilet is a quantum object and the tank containing the water like Schrödinger's cat-box? When the lid is opened, the wave-function collapses and the object settles into the functioning state? This would make the toilet the largest quantum object know to physics. (It might also argue for transparent tanks.) Could this also somehow be related to black holes?

Freud and Plato - The Politics of the Soul (Pt 1)

2010-08-15T00:13:00.000+02:00

Freud -- with Marx, Darwin and Einstein -- ranks among the intellectual fathers of the 20th Century. The core concepts of Freudian psychoanalysis still pervade Western society. We talk about the meaning of dreams, make "Freudian" slips, appreciate the power of unconscious desires and accept the influence of childhood experiences on the adult. However, Freud’s relevance for the 21st Century lies more in his call for a renovation of human consciousness. Freud's concern with the health of the soul and the support he sought to give to reason and intellect places him in a dialogue with Plato and gives psychoanalysis roots deep in Western culture. Both Freud and Plato practiced statecraft of the soul, reforming the “inner city” that determines individual and collective character. Both attempted to help the individual gain control over desire through establishing proper order among the parts of the soul.

As we move through these first years of the new millennium, it sometimes appears that the world has become too large, too complex and more dangerous and inhospitable every day. We seem beset by nightmares: terrorism, fanaticism, fascism, communism, tribalism, nationalism, racism and the other -isms that have prevented us, as individuals and as societies, from thinking clearly and acting with humanity. We paid dearly for these nightmares in the 20th century and the end is nowhere in sight. We feel increasingly challenged to preserve a minimum sense of security and well being in the midst of the planet-wide struggle of billions of others to do the same. In this struggle, our political systems -- the governments that oversee our domestic and foreign affairs and the organizations that connect us internationally -- often seem overwhelmed by the effort to stave off ever-threatening crises and disasters of one kind or the other. No place, no one, no system appears immune to difficulty. At a time when the major ideological and systemic competitors to Western liberal-democracy and free-market capitalism have collapsed, neither democracy nor the market appear to offer, by themselves, the answers we need to our many problems.

We in the West have been especially blessed by history. But with an abundance of natural and human resources, a long and secure tradition of democracy and individual rights, and the strongest and richest mass economies the world has ever seen, we nevertheless remain afflicted by poverty, prejudice, racial injustice, declining living standards and political system mired in parochialism and shortsighted partisanship. We have proved incapable of preventing the death of innocent men, women and children from terror, war, famine and disease -- which are, after all, largely the result of human action or inaction. And although the world has providentially taken a step back from nuclear Armageddon, we are still poisoning our environment and degrading its capability to feed, care and comfort us. To be fair, it is not that we are at a loss for ways to resolve many of these problems. One can imagine solutions to most of them that could succeed if we were determined enough, worked hard enough and sacrificed enough. Yet, when we are not dreaming, it seems naive to believe that we could ever achieve such outcomes in the "real" world. So, our feet firmly planted on the ground, we hope for the best while fearing, more and more, the worst.

In all, it seems hard to avoid the conclusion that we have reached a point in global history that demands finding new ways to live, individually and collectively. We have lost our faith in ourselves and in our ability to reason our way forward. After the terrors of the 20th Century, the Enlightenment and its faith in the ability of human intellect to help us perfect our world have come to seem like a bad joke. The nightmares have entered our very souls and made us doubt our ability to think, reason, discuss and decide with our fellow human beings the many problems that we face. Some believe that the only response is to trust instinct, listen to our blood, and fight to protect what we have while seizing the high ground before others do so. Reason must be rescued if we are to find a better way.

Freud can yet help us begin. His conception of the human soul and the conflict within us reconnects our problems with the similar concerns of Plato and Aristotle. Freud's work recalls Socrates' invitation, in the Republic, to establish within ourselves the rule of reason without which we cannot have just and well-ordered societies. 2300 years later, this solution remains difficult to achieve. But after all this time, we have even more cause to believe that "knowing thyself" may be the only way to leave the nightmares behind.

Lost

2010-07-17T18:35:00.000+02:00

I followed Lost since the beginning, on TV while home and however I could abroad. It was good TV and in the end, as profound as TV ever gets. The ending tied things up well and was quite satisfying. We can discuss the details maybe forever, but these are the basic insights I take away from Lost:

o The struggle between good and evil is real on the Island and in the world.

o This struggle never ends, some fall, others take our place.

o We are at our best when we are part of that struggle.

o The people we are closest to are the people we share the struggle with.

o Our guide in the struggle is -- as it was for Plato -- the light of the good. We can never grab that light but we can go where it shines brightest.

o We should do all we can to preserve the light, to do the good. That is the struggle.

o Life is a mystery and there are things that we will never be able to explain.

o Love is all that really counts.

The meeting in the Church at the end of Lost is just a bit of hopeful wishing. But who knows what comes after this life? Maybe there is a Valhalla.

A New Patriotism

2010-07-01T18:23:00.000+02:00

The weather has been glorious these past two days. Went biking in Virgina this morning on the W&OD. On the way back, came to a stop sign on the trail where it crosses a road. A guy in a pickup, wearing a cowboy hat and playing country music on his radio, stopped, when he didn't have to, to let me go by without stopping on my bike. It was an act of kindness. Made me feel good and to realize how much we are missing when we don't try to treat each other with kindness and tolerance. What I think we have been missing for a long time now is the sense of being citizens, fellow citizens, comrades in a great adventure to see if government by the people, for the people and of the people can rise to the challenges that face us. We need a new form of patriotism in which we all recognize that whatever our different views, we are all trying together to get it right. This new patriotism - maybe just good, old fashioned civility - should start with recognizing each other as fellow citizens of this great country founded on the notion that freedom and democracy works better. Friendly kindness and mutual tolerance and understanding is patriotic and good for us.

Some Conclusions about Brain, Mind and Consciousness

2010-06-02T08:02:00.000+02:00

The brain’s many organic processes most likely utilize quantum effects as well as classical ones. The classical elements include the physiology, chemistry and electro-dynamics of the brain. The quantum elements may include synaptic connections and large-scale, non-local coherence of brain functioning. The organization and dynamical functioning of these processes in networks and “mappings” – in the context of the shear complexity characteristic of the human brain – produces a tangled hierarchy that emerges as mind. Mind is non-conscious. Much mental processing goes on of which we are unaware. (We can be mindful about things that we remain unaware of at any particular moment.) Some of what mind contains may be/can be offered up to consciousness. The intersection of mind and consciousness produces self.

Socrates said: know thyself. Freud said: where It is, I shall be.

Consciousness itself is primary.

The Role of Chaos in Human Evolution

2010-05-04T09:16:00.001+02:00

Two terms need immediate clarification. The chaos I am referring to is the deterministic yet unpredictable kind. And I take human evolution to include that change accruing from cultural, social, political and technological processes as well at the slower progression through genetic natural selection.

The conception of natural selection as a form of progression flies in the face of the current politically correct tendency to question the notion that life is evolving toward anything. But the constantly increasing complexity resulting from chaotic processes applied to existing complexity has clearly driven an ever increasing individuation of life since its start a few billion years ago. Natural selection feeds on the random and unpredictable variation characteristic of all life - indeed of all material existence - and results in this progression from lessor to greater complexity.

Down to quantum level, all material processes occur according to deterministic laws even when the outcomes so generated are statistical probabilities. And as interactions between matter and energy become more complex according to these laws of nature – we live in the kind of universe that they do – the processes also become more chaotic. The result is that as complexity increases, it begets greater complexity. And whereas one stone is pretty much like any other stone, every single live organism is a unique individual. And the process of each individual organism interacting with its environment – also always changing – results in achieving various degrees of fitness. The important points here seem to me to be two: that it is individual differences that determine fitness and fuel evolution and that the more individualized the organism, the greater the possible points for chaos to operate.

A human being is a marvelously unique and individualized organism. We vary at almost every interesting point from all other humans. Our cultural and social variability adds extra dimensions to our individuation. Our accelerating technology allows ways of interacting beyond calculation and is a true chaos multiplier. The human race is by this point of time a realm of complexity that the earth has never seen before. Evolution from this basis promises to take us places that we cannot now imagine, if we survive at all.

Thus, everything that we do – to test our boundaries, to right the world’s wrongs, to struggle for our daily bread – and the way that we do it provides the raw material for evolution, for greater complexity. We drive change when we seek to effect our environment in our own way, even though we do not always succeed. In the chaotic processes of life, some win and more lose. (As Crash Davis put it: some days you win, some days you lose and some days it rains.) And in the end, it is not about us but about the fact that our species will survive only if there are enough folks pressing forward even when most of our individual efforts seem to fall short.

Gods, Monsters and Americans

2010-04-12T08:21:00.000+02:00

Was reading a book putting forward the theory of monistic idealism. The author notes an observation attributed to Mother Theresa that Americans are the most materialistically blessed but impoverished in spirit people on earth. This could actually be said about most of the people in the Western world but maybe of Americans the most.

The author (Amit Goswami, The Self-Aware Universe) attributes this to America’s unquestioned materialism. We have lost connection with the world of enchantment in which we felt connected to something greater and more mysterious. I won’t gainsay this. But it may not be the whole picture. To judge from American popular culture – especially in the movies and TV that we export to the whole world – we seem to yearn for what we are missing. Living far from the US for the past few years, I see the reflections of this American preoccupation with particular clarity. We flood the ether with vampires, superheroes, ghosts, wizards and witches, psychics, aliens, magic, lost dimensions, time travelers, alternate realities, undead, formerly dead, demons, angels, devils, gods, mythical beasts and monsters. And I have no doubt left some out. We seem to have an utter fascination with things and beings which we in our day-today life know do not – cannot – really exist. What are these if not expressions of something deep inside of us that we feel the loss of, something beyond what science and modernity have left us? (There are other manifestations of this as well that lay at the root of the various forms of fundamentalism, including the political ones.) Some seek this missing dimension in religion, many look for it on the Sci-Fi network and Beyond.

Freud called this sort of thing the return of the repressed. For Nietzsche, it was the eternal return. It almost certainly is a return, a deep echo, of the pagan gods buried in our walls so long ago. And those gods themselves a kind of short-hand for that sense of horror and magic human beings first experienced when, a few hundred thousand years ago, we woke into conscious awareness of who and where we were. Americans are not materialistic as much as just a long way from home and very unsure of how to get back. And from the appeal of what we broadcast to the rest of the world, we are not the only ones.

Tolling Bells

2010-03-22T13:28:00.000+01:00

Siddhartha is said to have discovered in his youth four basic truths: that life contains suffering, that we grow old, that we die and that suffering originates in desire. The fourth is certainly an existential dilemma. But it is realization of the other three that brings home the existential truth of life. We of course know intellectually that we suffer and someday will grow old and even die. But the truth only becomes real when we feel these things in our bones, when we finally realize in our stomach that they apply to us.

A colleague recently died. He was a good man and just a bit older than me. He turned 60 which I will face next year. I’ve meanwhile experienced a certain minor but annoying health problem that affects my ability to experience the world. All of a sudden, I do feel quite mortal. This is not a profound discovery. After all, we already know not to ask for whom the bell tolls. It is always for us. But it is perhaps the start of true wisdom. For a long time I followed Socrates in believing wisdom lies in knowing that in the end we know nothing. But maybe it is really in learning what Siddhartha did.

Rise and Fall

2010-02-20T03:32:00.000+01:00

Been reading an excellent history of Egypt, Greece and Rome. We sometimes forget that there were three thousand years of fully human history BC (and of course tens of thousands of years of human life, love and struggle before that). During the past several days – reading on the Esplanade in Darwin – it was the rise and fall of Rome. Very instructive. The reality was much more complex than simple rise and decline and Rome left an immense lasting legacy. But in reaching imperial heights – though its movement to empire was not in any sense planned, sort of like the rise of America as a “superpower” – it surpassed its ability to maintain itself. Is this what is happening to us too?

The world we live in offers an entirely new level of complexity (what John C Wright calls the Era of the Second Mental Structure in his excellent The Gold Age Trilogy). The many aspects of modern technology – the Internet and our growing ability to manipulate matter and biology – offer many more opportunities to correct, and also cover up, our shortcomings. So maybe decline can somehow be put off. Perhaps all this new stuff that we have seen grow into our civilization before our eyes will provide new forms of monasteries, hermitages, walled communities and the like for the next dark age (which was not so dark anyway). Maybe even some cyber urban centers where the barbarians won't be able to get us?

What can we do to keep the barbarians from the gates? Fully support those leaders who lean more toward empathy and adaptability even when they are imperfect, as they must be to be leaders in the world we live in? This means supporting guys like Obama and doing all possible to avoid the Republican dogs who just want to eat our bones while preaching at us.

Another may be to keep trying to be heard by talking with those who will stop to listen and talk back. This approach has not made great headway since Socrates tried it but the Internet provides more street corners to stand at. The other side of this is the need to be persistent, civil but persistent, in order to be heard. And then we must build on what we find with whom we find. (Socrates got hemlock for persistence so we do need to watch where we step even if we step anyway.)

These Tea Party folk show a possible further step. A movement of the civilized for civilization. Possible?

Tragedy

2010-02-10T14:20:00.000+01:00

The Greeks elaborated tragedy out of the Dionysia, yearly festivals of sexual abandon. Yet their central theme and pre-occupation was the realization that we can never know for sure the results of our choices and actions but must nevertheless choose and act. We can never know for sure the right path to take nor once chosen can we be sure we have avoided the wrong path. We can never be sure what the gods have in store for us. Sometimes, we must chose between alternatives both with equal claim on us but also mutually exclusive. Often we must choose between alternatives mixing the good and the bad. And yet we must choose.

The tragic flaw is that in our character, in our pattern of being, which leads us to err, to choose, in a way that we and others may be able to predict but which we are powerless to avoid. Confronted by choice and even knowing the good, we choose through emotion, our reason overcome, and in a way that lends a special sense of doom to our actions.

Bad choices are bad choices and often tragic in their outcome. Tragic in that they force good people into situations where their choices are between actions equally bad. Witness Bush's decision to invade Iraq with the many compromising choices it forced on the millions of people affected by that decision.

Tragedy lies in those occasions where their are no completely good choices but we must nevertheless act, when even inaction would be a choice. To create tragic situations is evil, as the Greeks came to understand of their gods.

Words and desires

2010-02-06T07:04:00.002+01:00

Freud noted that we try to control our desires -- assimilate them into our psychic unity -- by fixing them to words. Words are old friends with whom I grapple constantly in the hope that somehow, they will free me. They do for the fleeting moment it takes to finish that thought. It is the desire that always remains sovereign and free.

As of Now, what I believe

2010-02-03T08:53:00.000+01:00

After years of thinking about consciousness, quantum mechanics and cosmology, I have come to believe that Mind had to come before Creation and that each of us individual consciousnesses is part of the larger Consciousness. I expect to rejoin that One some day, though hopefully not too soon. Of course, none of this is certain. And in any case, it doesn't always seem to help much in my trying to be as good a person as I would wish to be. I don't believe in original sin per se, but I do believe that we never really learn. What we say we are, what we say we want, is always at best more aspiration than reality and more often just another story we tell ourselves.

A Wave Function

2009-12-10T11:22:00.000+01:00

From moment to moment we are both particle and wave. I've never had exactly this thought before. I'm not high or drunk but perhaps sliding between whatever is and is not.

There are times of crystal clarity and you wonder how and when and then, can you ever go back to earth and be an earthling.

Darwin Sunset

2009-10-18T04:48:00.000+02:00

The sun was the first god, his power, majesty and light intimating the true god of the big bang. He is a light so bright that he provides our life across 93 million miles of emptiness. He rules the day, giving us colors even after he sets. The moon rules the night, though she demurely veils and unveils herself slowly, showing all only when the sun is in his deepest slumber.

While it is remarkable enough that the sun gives us just enough but not too little or too much, how much more beyond understanding is it that the sun and moon appear to us the exact same size, each ruling in its realm, each at times covering the other to show us even more. But all is in motion. The moon recedes from the mother, born from earth but like every daughter eventually going her way. The sun, burning through crushing matter, will one day reach out and swallow us, leaving all that went before in ashes. But here and now, everything is perfect, for us.

PowerPoint

2009-10-06T02:28:00.000+02:00

Something wonderful happened today. We have daily morning briefings from our Joint Operations Center. At the end, we usually have presentations from the various sections of our UN mission. They ALWAYS include PowerPoint. And it often seems they spend as much time -- more even -- on silly effects than content. I had to ask recently that they at least do them in colors we can read from. Today, someone got up and apologized for not having PowerPoint and then proceeded to talk to us. In response, I actually paid attention to the speaker and his speaking. In so doing, I realized how much is lost when we eye the slides instead. I remembered how often I wished the speaker would just hurry up to keep up with my reading speed. This is not communication. Listening to a human being address me as a human being is communication. We convey so much more meaning face to face than can jump off a slide presentation. PowerPoint should really be banned or limited to those who treat it as one part of communication and not the communication itself. PowerPoint presentations are as ubiquitous as plastic cups and bags, littering and spoiling our human interaction as the plastic litters our environment.

Games

2009-09-25T06:17:00.000+02:00

Why do people, certainly guys, take so fundamentally to computer games? What does it tap and what did people do with that part of themselves before the computer age. Was TV a transitional mode, a passive way of preparing for the shift from attentiveness in the real world to attention to the unreal?

Walking through the woods of Washington DC one winter day, I wondered what Indians would have done during that season. Certainly they would have been warm in their houses while it was cold outside. They would have told stories, sang songs and maybe played games. These stories, songs and games were communal things, passed down over generations, played communally and adding to the cohesiveness of the community. Game software is communal too in that it is created by and part of a context supported by a community and the Internet allows multi-play. But we generally interact with computer games in a solitary way.

Yet we play. Can it be as simple as an urge or need to hunt? Testing oneself against the environment, to damage it or win victory? If this is true, one conclusion to draw might be that it is advantageous for men and boys to play games for recreation. It channels what may be a dangerous, anti-social part of ourselves into safer outlets (since we, as a society, don’t earn our living hunting anymore). In Freudian terms, at least for males, these games – including ones that you don’t actually kill things (like puzzle games) because the urge to do violence may diminish with age as boys become old men – provide for sublimation in the service of culture. And maybe in this age of virtual rather than actual interaction, computer games also provide a service for civilization in providing expertise in interaction via computer that goes well beyond the keyboard or the linear?

Lost Human Time

2009-07-13T05:40:00.003+02:00

With everything we know today about human prehistory, seems safe to say we have been around for a long time, in our terms. A couple of million years evolving into Homo. Then some 150-200 thousand years ago, some crucial mutations occurred and the consciousness of a very capable ape – homo erectus/neanderthalis – was able to climb to the next level -- Homo sapiens sapiens (us). Over the next thousands of years language evolved gradually giving consciousness the tools to understand and master the world. Eventually those groups with the most capable languages established local supremacy. 8000-9000 years ago, people began farming in the Crescent. 7500 years ago it came together in Sumer where language became writing and farming became agriculture and both together became empire. Sumer lasted 15 centuries. People like us hunted in Europe for 30 thousand years before the first farmers. Think about the centuries of fully human life lost to us. What was that like? What might have risen, been lived and then disappeared lost in the mists of the past?

Justice

2009-05-25T07:28:00.005+02:00

What kind of world would we want to live in if we couldn’t know for sure our place in it ahead of time? Presumably, we would not want a world where we might be born in the wrong place, the wrong nationality or the wrong sex. We would probably define as a just world one that we would not regret being born into. John Rawls suggested this approach.

We can take this in three directions: 1. We can use it to design a model world that we would not mind being born into wherever. Odds being what you would feel comfortable in terms of number of chambers loaded before pressing trigger. 2. We can use this standard to judge the actual world we live in. 3. We can talk about why a person or people in general would be satisfied (or not) with their actual place in the actual world. Here we can also talk about why reason – and the need for others – should take us into a concern with justice for others even if pleased with our own situation. This last seems a call to action.

E-mail

2009-05-13T07:13:00.004+02:00

Writing is better than speaking because the individual letters can be directed in their flow much more precisely than words rushing out of our mouths. Speech is more autonomic, less conscious. It must originate from within our reptilian brain. Writing is very much a conscious activity. It allows us to be more ourself.

E-mail is in between. Its writing that can flow more like speech because we can use all those shortcuts, such as LOL and leaving out punctuation etc. So we need to me a bit more careful too.

There is a Ghost in the Machine

2009-04-09T06:23:00.003+02:00

Fascinating to think that all the minutia of our mental activity is governed so strictly by physical matter and biology. It must be so. We are at base material objects descending from the Big Bang.

Consciousness however is not reducible to mental activity. Consciousness is pure awareness. Through consciousness we can be aware of our mind -- physical processes become thoughts, feelings, emotions, dreams, visions, sensing. The good bit about this is that awareness continues. In the beginning was awareness. It also means that higher processing speeds are possible.

Consciousness is not quantized. Nor is it digital but “analog.” Physical reality and time are quantum.

The Prosthetic Gods

2009-03-28T04:23:00.003+01:00

Our technology has begun in earnest creating a “prosthetic god” in the form of the Internet/globalized economy that we experience as a force over and above us. We feel the need to gain control -- or in some cases, to free or protect ourselves -- from this power. We have become like the ancients confronting a fickle fate we barely understand. Our mobile devices help us intercede with these new “gods” and we pray through them incessantly.

The best way to do work through this dependency -- to bring the gods to ground -- is to ensure that we pay attention to everywhere that there is no love and to try to fill them somehow. The absence of love we know as evil. The Christian philosophers understood this: God the father was the prime mover; god the spirit was the mind reaching toward the good through reason and science, Christ was the necessary element of love in the universe.

Spring

2009-03-25T13:03:00.001+01:00

Trees are great fingers of live earth reaching for the sky and sun.

Spring is the blood returning to the fingers.

Faster Brains

2008-10-05T09:01:00.003+02:00

A while ago I saw an article about a gene discovered to have a relationship to dyslexia. The wrong form of it seems to entail difficulties in processing visual and aural information. Most interesting was that our nearest great ape cousins don't seem to have this gene at all. Got me thinking. Dyslexia is a problem processing sounds and symbols. Apes don't have the gene necessary to do so. Maybe we needed this to be able to do language. What do you need to do language? You need the ability to process incoming data quickly. Lots of animals use sounds. Apes can understand or use simple words and symbols. But to speak/understand/read a language you need to process lots of often complex information quickly. So, to become human we needed to have our mental processing speed increased. Now, what is the speed of thought? It does not make sense to understand consciousness as bound by any speed limits short of those imposed by quantum reality. I.E., if the information could be presented to consciousness at light speed, we'd understand it. So, the limitations on processing must be biological in our cases. This gene may have unlocked faster processor speeds.

Or maybe it was about providing a substrate -- or format -- for a storage medium so the incoming information could be assimilated more quickly and usefully. Language is necessary for our human form of consciousness. Words condense thought and perception into manageable blocks and grammar allows them to relate meaningfully, indeed to create meaning. Perhaps this gene in someway provides the bio-chemical structure for storing and manipulating structured bits of information and the "programs" for storing and using them?

Consciousness and Creation

2008-04-19T13:51:00.003+02:00

In the beginning there was someone, someone in the sense of consciousness, in the sense of intending or being able to intend. Either one of many such or alone, though if one of many, only this one having been the cause of our universe and being knowable by us. This consciousness caused or is coterminous with what we understand, looking back at it, as the Big Bang and the quantum substratum from which it emerged and from which emerged the material universe of which we are part. Act of creation itself, of the material universe, must be considered, from the point of view of the universe as a whole, as being timeless. For consciousness, everything that was or will be was present simultaneously. The physical manifestation of this is that the first light of the Big Bang, traveling at the speed of light, and therefore from that perspective without time duration, fills everywhere along its path instantaneously and simultaneously and thus exists at the very moment across eternity and everywhere. Within that context, creation is an act of constructing a grand cosmic stage for consciousness to enter into and play a myriad of parts as it buds off each individual consciousness, as it became particularized. Shakespeare presented the world as a "stage" in exactly this way. Perhaps he too is in some sense a “son of god”, someone with direct access to the larger perspective of the grand consciousness, giving us insight into the perspective of the one consciousness of which all others are pieces of. Raises too, then, the possibility that the whole universe is a diversion, a very complicated diversion to keep One occupied for all eternity, whatever that means. Nevertheless, leaves us particulars the traditional question of the meaning of life, our lives. Western culture suggests meaning is created and purpose is to understand, master, control and change reality. Other cultures see nature as something to be venerated, respected, and/or entered into in a cooperative manner. What accounts for the West’s distinctive answer to this question? Is our approach good or bad, verdict is still out. But if our world is this diversion, then we in the West -- in being ourselves intent in writing the play -- are more active participants in it. We give this diversion its spice. If “god” can be said to speak more clearly, more “actively” at the micro-level in which we live in the West -- from the Jews and Greeks on -- it is also true that we perhaps more needed the message of the other “son”, Christ, of love and concern for others, to rein us in and draw our attention to the good. Maybe the one consciousness has made many or all possible stages.

Life in America

2007-12-29T17:40:00.000+01:00

We can divide daily existence into three modes: 1. the time we spend directly and immediately immersed in the world in some specific activity such as working, fishing, driving, planting, reaping, rowing, watching TV, whatever; 2. the "personal" time we spend in reflection, self-observation, thought, or just plain mindlessness; 3. the time we spend with others, in social interaction of all sorts. Often we are in all three modes at once, like talking to a fellow worker while running the forklift or losing ourselves through hours of flipping through the TV stations with a friend.

Life in modern America provides a neutral context for our existence; neutral in the sense that the space exists for whatever we need or choose to do. The activities we pursue are constrained by what it is we physically do as work and to make our way through the day and by what is available to us. But our activities are slotted into our existence pretty much free of taboos, traditions, history and culture. The biggest determining factor here is our personal wealth (which offers lesser or greater variety of needful and possible activities) and the current technology. Our leisure time -- for example -- is now often watching TV. Before TV, we passed our mindless leisure time in other ways, though there was probably less of it because with increasing modernity, we have in general gained more leisure time, as well as more ways to use it. Indeed, what we DO is subject to constant change as a result of “progress.” We work with and entertain ourselves through an ever-expanding number of technologies and devices. Yet, and here finally is my point, while what we DO can look pretty "modern" -- because what we do it with is “cutting edge” -- the neutral context in which we live allows us to continue to live in a variety of traditional and self enclosed environments when we are in our personal and social modes. That is to say, we may drive cars, watch DVDs, and play video games but we still live within an assemblage of patterned existences that goes straight back to the medieval life of town and country. Many of us are still peasants.

Truth

2007-11-04T12:20:00.000+01:00

In the bare-bones of things there lay veins of truth, and the veins run together.

Reading Cosmology

2007-10-27T12:38:00.000+02:00

I don't really understand the equations, but I think I get the gist. Einstein was one switched-on fellow. His insights go way beyond what he is famous for. Seems he also laid the groundwork for modern cosmology by postulating that the universe is homogenous and isotropic. That means that on a large enough scale, it has uniform density and no direction. If this is true, the universe is a bound but expanding surface. Like the surface of a balloon that expands as you blow it up but remains a sphere. Observations, by Hubble and others since, confirm that the universe is homogenous and isotropic. Einstein apparently reasoned that it would be absurd for the universe to -- in my words, not his -- be doing any "work," i.e. to have a non-uniform density (what would keep it or make it non-uniform but "work") or to be "going anywhere" (moving where?). Physics is confirming his cosmological constant and an accelerating expansion. He spent the last years of his life working on a unified theory that may be worth taking a closer look at.

Can stars think? They do shine.

2007-07-08T09:56:00.000+02:00

What is consciousness’ role in quantum events? Is it creator or arbitrator of events which we know as quantum probability? What would it be like to be that bit of consciousness attached to a rock or a mountain, or a quantum particle? What is an experience of the interactions of such things over their “lifetime” if indeed consciousness adheres to such things? Does level of organization determine what consciousness adheres to or does everything have a bit of consciousness in it.

Interaction is the data of consciousness.

What sort of sensory interfaces might there be for stars? Magnetic fields?

To Expand a Bit

2007-07-01T11:37:00.000+02:00

One day wondering down Glover-Archibold trail, I took my musing on cosmology to the point of asking the most basic question: why is there something rather than nothing? After giving this some thought, I realized that nothing cannot give rise to something all by itself. The Big Bang by itself explains nothing. And to suppose something always existed doesn't answer the question of why it exists. Much more straightforward to suppose that someone existed. Nothing cannot bring into existence something, only someone can do that, can intend that. This train of thought follows on my earlier musings on consciousness, which obviously exists but also seems to lead back to a someone rather than something. The most straightforward story to tell is that either the universe -- cosmos -- of matter and consciousness simply always was or there was a consciousness that always was that at some point intended that there be matter. What would that consciousness or any consciousness be when conscious only of itself or of nothing?

Why is there air?

2007-06-23T15:24:00.001+02:00

Nothing cannot bring forth something, only someone can do that. Nothing is complete unto itself. It would take a someone to desire a something.

Consciousness Riff

2007-06-17T10:28:00.000+02:00

My starting point is the assumption that the physical laws of the universe do not explain consciousness. This is where I have come out on this: nothing in the physical makeup or evolution of the universe or of humans can explain how consciousness arises. It is possible to provide a physical explanation of how the mind works -- neural nets, neural maps, etc. -- but the additional aspect of consciousness remains unexplained. Consciousness must therefore be a fundamental property of the cosmos just as is space-time, the four basic forces and the elementary particles and the laws of physics. But while consciousness is not physical, it adheres to everything physical, crossing the physical at an oblique angle. Consciousness is the ability to receive information. Information is derived from processes of emission, transmission and exchange of particles, waves or whatever else it is that conveys change and effects in and on the physical things the universe is made from. Consciousness converts this potential information into actual information by being aware of the exchanges and processes. Consciousness makes the exchanges into information by perceiving them.

So: Take a rock. Is a rock conscious? What is a rock but a swarm of particles each in a certain quantum state and each bound through an exchange of other particles to everything else? There is lots of information in that rock about individual particles but nothing about the rock itself. Therefore, there is no state-of-being of the rock to be conscious of. The rock is not conscious. Okay, are the individual particles conscious? No, same argument, there is nothing it is like to be a particle. So what is conscious? Whatever it is that is the consciousness of all the particles and waves in the universe across time. What would you call that?

So how do we get to be conscious? At some point in animal evolution, the organism begins to gather and process information -- through nerves -- about itself. The human brain is the mightiest of such processors. Of course, that complex processor can operate without consciousness. You can imagine (lots of folks use this example) a zombie that looks and acts just like a human but is not conscious. So who adds consciousness and when? And maybe, no one adds it put it just coalesces around the information being handled by the brain?