A Weekend with a Theme

I entered this past weekend with one thought. "This is the anniversary of my mother's death." I don't know what I expected of this anniversary. There is nothing about a 22nd anniversary that should mark it as special.

What's more, as I have noted in other places in this blog, I believe I have long since outgrown the religious habit of seeking signs; a habit that bound me closely to my mother in my youth. So, why would I expect this kind of anniversary to yield any thoughts of significance?

During my mother's illness, I sought signs more than ever, and thought I found them. I saw them everywhere. My mother would be OK. I only felt betrayed when they did not bear out.

In the years that have followed, my advanced education and teaching of critical thinking has taught me too much about confirmation biases and other quirks of the mind to allow myself to get so carried way again. Better to wander with no "signs" at all, I have thought, and see what happens. Reality has other ways to hit you in the head.

But perhaps this weekend, I still wanted something. Perhaps I am still a child who wants something from his mother. Perhaps also, the lingering effects of baptism are not so easily washed away. And the foolishness of religious sign-seeking is permanently embedded in me.

As I awoke this morning, one thought occurred to me. Whatever I thought I sought from this anniversary, I may have received. More on that after this necessary explanation.

My mother died 22 years ago from a brain tumor. Her death was traumatic to our family. She was the center of it. A source of strength. In the days that followed my father did not do very well, and things looked very shaky for all of us. Somehow, though, we managed to survive.

Her death also seriously shook my religious faith for the first time. In way that never recovered, thanks also to reinforcement from the events of 9/11 and a few years of natural disasters that followed, and other, deeper personal crises.

All of which revolved around hopes and dreams being snuffed out. My mother had just turned 48 when she died. The last of her children would soon go to school. And my mother would be free, finally, to pursue dreams she had put on hold for many years.

Her potential would go unfulfilled.

When I saw the infamous photo of the man falling to his death on 9/11, upside down, I meditated on what his hopes for the future were that morning, before he found himself in that nightmare. The same could be said for the water-swept dead bodies in the photos of "The Tsunami" and Hurricane Katrina.

I have always been an actualization person. I want very much to grow. I value the desire to grow in others highly. It inspires me and attracts me.

I have suffered as an idealist in Fortune 1000 to Fortune 100 corporations for 7 years now. I have learned many things about growth there, and grown enormously during that time. But I found those places did not really create the cultures they preached about. And it frustrated me terribly.

I despise statism for many reasons, but perhaps most importantly, because it shackles the natural growth potential of human beings.

I have come to learn over the course of my life that personal growth is highly important to me. And I continue to think about how it is frustrated quite often in life. And I wonder how a God can make that part of his plan, for his inherently forward-looking creatures.

***

I find myself in perhaps the toughest situation of my professional career. Out of work for now seven months, I have struggled like never before to understand my marketability, and myself. I have made unprecedented, expensive investments of time and energy in myself and my own career. And I am, for whatever reason, struggling to show for it.

Not in personal growth. I have learned a great deal about myself. I have valuable clarity about a number of important issues.

But in more tangible ways, things are very tough now. I won't be able to get by much longer at all. Things could become very bad, as winter approaches. And that will affect the "growth" of possibilities for the four shining stars of my life, my beloved children. Thoughts of their suffering, and restricted possibilities in life have haunted me in recent weeks.

***

My weekend began on Friday night with an unexpected phone call from my sister Susan. She had a baby just a few weeks ago. We don't often talk on the phone. Now would seem to be even less opportune for her. And yet, she just wanted to say hello, and to offer encouragement, and financial help if necessary. I was deeply touched by her call. It carried me for hours and hours after with a bit of hope.

On Saturday, I had many plans to continue my networking, my job search, and the daunting plans to build my own business. But I felt exhausted. The thought of continuing with all this effort for yet another, fruitless day, where there was only I and no RO on the I was not appealing.

My two sons roped me into the "Rocky Marathon." I would watch one with them perhaps. I didn't think they would watch the first Rocky movie for long. Too much Paulie and Adrian and not enough slugging in the ring. But, to my great surprise, they did watch. Along with Rocky II, III and even part of IV. With me right along with them. My plans would go to hell for Saturday, and I felt better. I also appreciated Sylvester Stallone's screenwriting like I had not before. Recognizing adult themes of suffering, and hope, and redemption like I had not as a kid, when I saw these movies for the first time.

Sunday morning, I returned from church, which I left earlier than ever in my life, to find the boys ponying up their own money to watch "Rocky Balboa" on demand. OK, another Rocky movie. I'll bite again. And more admiration for Stallone, especially when he, playing a "has been" in the movie, lectures his son about the importance of getting up again after being knocked down.

Sunday afternoon we took the kids to Sunken Meadow State Park, where the kids just swam. I took their pictures along the rocky beach, confident that some day we would all look back on those photos fondly. And I forgot nearly all of my worries.

And then, Sunday evening, when everyone was asleep, I read a small pamphlet from the Five O'clock Club, which talked about the daunting challenges of the new economy, as well as the great rewards that would follow if workers would only take charge of their own careers. New growth, new flexibility and constant change in response. But all built around a vision that comes from deep inside, which, when acted upon, can be deeply satisfying.

And then, oddly, a chance encounter with Joel Osteen on my television. A man who combines religious preaching with a gospel of self-help and success. I respect his conviction, but I don't accept uncritically his assertions. To me, they often lack evidence.

By strange coincidence however, this night, I found him repeating the same theme I heard from Rocky Balboa earlier in the day. When life knocks you down, he said with his trademark squint and a smile, you have to keep getting up. He cited his friend stricken three times with cancer, and other anecdotes. What can you say to that? It's not an argument. To me it simply seemed self-evident. What else can you do, unless you want to lay down and die?

In the silence of Sunday evening, I found myself wondering why some people choose to look at the good anecdote, the hopeful one, and not the bad one, as I often do. Why is our world half beautiful and half horrible? Which makes you more of a fool? Despair? Or hope?

As I awoke this morning, I realized that my entire weekend, which went nothing as planned, was filled with themes of hope. From start to finish.

An anniversary gift from my mother? Perhaps.

Confirmation bias? Perhaps.

Article: What Would Reagan Do About Torture?

Steve Chapman, writing in Reason magazine, sums up feelings I have long had about the debate over so-called "enhanced interrogation methods" practiced by the CIA against Al-Qaeda suspects.

Political conservatives, including those at the Wall Street Journal and my old employer, National Review, have been far too uncritical of these methods and the people who practiced them.

Partly they do this for political reasons, it seems to me. Because in a political prize fight with the left, fought for current advantage, they are rooting for their old warrior Dick Cheney. Who is flat out wrong about this issue.

Partly they and Cheney make this case because they are all uncritical about the underlying moral principle they are embracing. Which Chapman notes, is "the ends justify the means."

Chapman makes two important points, which I would like to elaborate on.

The first is that no less than Ronald Reagan denounced torture and supported legislation banning it.

From Chapman:

"He would get an argument from Ronald Reagan, who signed an international ban on torture, which made no allowances for grave security threats. 'No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture,' it says.


"Reagan undoubtedly knew what modern conservatives forget—that once you rationalize torture, there is no logical place to stop. If threatening a prisoner with a power drill is permissible, why not drilling holes in him? If choking is OK, why not strangulation? If threatening to kill a detainee's children passes muster, why not actually killing them? If 30 wall slams don't do the job, why not 100?"


Reagan's moral logic was unambiguously clear. The ends never justify the means.

What would conservatives say to that?

Perhaps they might argue that Reagan had the luxury of saying such things because he was not faced with "an immediate threat."

Perhaps. But I find, as I noted in a previous post, a disturbing eagerness for some conservatives to adopt the morally liminal persona of Col. Nathan R. Jessup. Perhaps in a need to feel culturally "important." To make a patriotic contribution.

Jessup, you may recall, is a character in the play and film "A Few Good Men" who is both proud, and tortured by his existence in a morally liminal space from the rest of society:

"Son, we live in a world that has walls and those walls need to be guarded by men with guns. Who's gonna do it? You? You, Lieutenant Weinberg? I have a greater responsibility than you can possibly fathom. You weep for Santiago and curse the Marines; you have that luxury. You have the luxury of not knowing what I know: that Santiago's death, while tragic, probably saved lives and that my existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, saves lives. You don't want the truth because deep down in places you don't talk about at parties you want me on that wall, you need me on that wall. We use words like honor, code, loyalty. We use then as the backbone of a life trying to defend something. You use them as a punchline. I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a man who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very freedom I provide and then questions the manner in which I provide it. I would rather you just said "thank you," and went on your way. Otherwise, I suggest that you pick up a weapon and stand a post. Either way, I don't give a damn what you think you are entitled to. "

The morally arrogant Jessup embraces ends-justify-the-means thinking to "save lives." In so doing he inflates his own sense of importance as a kind of morally liminal superman who lives on the boundaries of society.

Yet, when he returns to civilization, to a world of laws, he finds himself, paradoxically, disoriented in being charged with a crime for ordering the death of someone under his command.

Why do societies have laws at all? Just laws. To protect people from those who think they can do good and "save lives" or other morally righteous things by trampling over what man possesses from God and nature." In other words, law itself is a rebuke to utilitarianism.

If some conservatives do not seek to "conserve" the idea that the ends do not justify the means, or that there are, in the same vein, limits on the power of the king rooted in nature itself (Magna Carta anyone?) then they stand for the conservation of nothing.

I have long thought about this debate, and even the so-called "conservative" position on the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the firebombing of Toykyo and the total war assault on Dresden, that the right has adopted utilitarian ethics in direct contradiction of all that they stand for otherwise.

Reagan may have had his own moments of "utility" emanating from his perceptions of immediate threats. That is a longer debate.

But in a choice between Reagan conservatism, or today's regnant "Nathan R. Jessup conservatism" on this issue, I have always been a Reagan conservative.

The second point Chapman makes is a good one, and more philosophically subtle, but supports the first and needs to be looked at more carefully.

The CIA Inspector General's report on these methods, Chapman notes, came to no conclusion about the "effectiveness" of their use, because, as the author of the report noted, you cannot. The reasoning is utilitarian, which is inherently shaky in its attempts to calculate the long term benefits of any act, since you have no alternative to future to test it against.

As no less a conservative than Hadley Arkes, a contributor to National Review and other conservative journals, noted in his book "First Things" "The effects of Ceaser crossing the Rubicon are never all in."

Which sums up perfectly the philosophical criticism of utilitarian reasoning. Only by selectively looking at the "effects" of such actions as atomic bombings, waterboading and more, can you say that they "worked."

Worked for whom, and for how long?

Leftists are wrong about many things, and far too eager to attack America. They also embrace their own utilitarian reasoning when their "emergencies" seem to justify them. They would break down the rule of law just as quickly, if not more so, than libertarian-minded rightists.

But their criticism and reminders about what "works" here are useful. They are not automatically wrong to see utilitarian acts in war as inherently generative of, if I may borrow a term from another field, "codependent" responses. Or, as the CIA calls it: "blowback."

More concretely, President Barack Obama is wrong about so many things, and I find his policy positions dangerous. That is worth emphasizing.

But his being wrong about those things is not a good reason to stop up our ears and reject outright the argument that emanates from his mouth that America will be hurt by acts like these. To reject an argument because we reject a person or persons politically is anecdotal and illogical folly.

Only by selectively looking at torture from the perspective of an American public relations campaign can one say it worked, while ignoring all the things that may yet happen as a result: in generating more terrorists, or destroying the American brand abroad, which leads to easy rationalizations of acts of terrorism and total war against America.

Maybe not in ways that are immediately tangible, but America can be hurt by ends-justify-the-means acts.

Consider this possibility. We are rightfully outraged against the attacks of September 11th. They violate all known moral principles of just war and are repugnant.

But they are, without a doubt, some of the unintended consequences of all acts of total war that preceded and the selective calculations they entailed. Including Truman dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Acts of terrorism against America are acts of total war against a country which in the minds of the fanatics of Al-Qaeda has is collectively "guilty" and has embraced total war itself.

They are wrong about this of course. Collective guilt is morally impossible, except in the minds of fanatics.

"America" has not embraced total war. Even if, as bin-Laden argued, all Americans pay taxes to support the American government.

All Americans live today in a country which is the way it is because of all of its previous choices.

The mistake, made by Osama bin Laden, and Dick Cheney, is that all Americans see it as Jessup's blanket, which we embrace, or in the minds of Cheney, should embrace.

But we do not all embrace it that way. Many Americans have supported total war. Many Americans have not.

What makes a country "innocent" in this regard is that its morality is not determined by the choices of some in power. Even if those in power are supported by a majority.

It is precisely in the room under its laws for moral and political deliberation that all countries are "innocent." And even where there is no room for such deliberation, in totalitarian regimes, a vast majority of the people under such regimes remain "innocent" and deserving of the protection emanating from venerable rules of just war thinking.

Because government exists for the protection of individuals, not groups.

Finally, a personal note, which might provide some political insight.

Growing up as a Roman Catholic, in a Reagan Democrat household, I believed in moral certainties. They were the blanket I embraced, and seemed to provide a simple, straightforward path to self-discovery, self-awareness, individuation or whatever else you might call it.

As I learned only later in my teaching of the venerable myths of all of mankind, liminality and disorientation must follow.

Adulthood did follow, where I experienced the codependent and tribal behavior of politics, 9/11, natural disasters, and my own personal experiences of evil, and tragedy and all the confusing inclinations of my own complex and sinful mind.

At the root of all this confusion is the Creator. The comforting God of my childhood is now perhaps the primary source of my disorientation. I find myself questioning everything about him, and the tangled pattern of his world.

Why the need for emergencies, and moral liminality? Why so much scandal, and confusion? Why is there no simple path in life, where one can relax about oneself and one's choices?

During this time of confusion, I cling instinctively to the principle articulated above, as a last vestige of hope in the Creator himself. The ends do not justify the means.

Because if there are no praiseworthy paths written into the nature of things on behalf of individuals to follow to get where they must be, there is no Creator.

If there are only "circumstances," from which elites help us escape at times, but for no greater purpose for the individuals who do escape; if there is only escape, there is no ultimate "arrival." Life is reduced to mere escape, for as long as possible, and nothing more.

Yes, as Thomas More says in the play, "A Man for All Seasons," "our natural business lies in escaping." Of man serving God "in the tangle of his mind."

But that is individual man, not collective man, or some individual mind making tangled calculations on behalf of the collective. It is an individual act of escaping real evil and choosing real goods.

I find myself disoriented at this point in my life about many things, but not about this one principle. It is the last wall between me, and nihilism.

Logically related to this, is something that has always stayed with me from the Gospels: Jesus, when confronted by individual sinners, never treated them with contempt. It is as if he recognized that even in their sin, there was at some point also personal confusion and disorientation. That all of life entails this disorientation. Jesus forgave them, as a way of righting them again, and encouraged them to keep moving forward.

Perhaps at this time, the proper answer to this political fight is to reflect more on the principles in question, and how individuals in our government have fallen short of right action, during a time when confusion is easily possible. Confusion which lessens, but does not eliminate guilt.

The correct answer is to pardon those involved in our government who were confused. And to move forward.

Improvisation One Hundred Years Later

When I was a teenager learning about music from my bass teacher, who was an ardent fan of Charlie Parker and Lennie Tristano, the notion of improvisation intimidated me immensely. After listening intently to these guys on vinyl, and observing my teacher's raptured looks, I thought to myself, "how does one choose?"

Being far away from technical mastery of my instrument didn't help. Licks were not yet embedded in my consciousness, even as my teacher urged me to "play what you hear." I didn't as yet hear much of anything.

Yet, if that genius was intimidating, what would a brilliant improvisational genius look like today, or even years from now, given all the tools that are available to us thanks to the likes of the late Les Paul (multitrack recording and editing) and Robert Moog (synthesis)?

Our ability to alter the parameters of sound extend to timbre, waveforms and more. Things the great Parker and Tristano did not have to calculate in their amazing minds.

What will the next great musical "genius" show us? (There are so many geniuses running around, perhaps there will not be a "one" or "two" greats.)

DJ's and remixers stir my imagination. (See the Pandora Musicology Series Episode below for a description of but the smallest of sampling thinking.) Because they are fluent in thinking about the alteration of musical parameters, quite often in live settings. Granted some electronic dance music is highly repetitve. Granted also, the audience is not always paying attention to the nuances, because they are dancing instead.

But some live performances with sound remixing are truly amazing. How do these artists' minds work? What exactly is their "instrument?" How do they "play what they hear" when what they can hear is literally the entire panopoly of what they have heard before in not just music (vinyl, CDs and MP3s) but what they have found in life (movie clips, sounds of nature, the human voice and more.)

How far could a contemporary Charlie Parker go in improvising sound?

And why stop with sound?

More on that in the next post.

From Pandora:


The three members of hip hop group V.E.R.A. Clique, one producer/beatmaker (Dan Craig) and two MCs (Anderson Ray and Macsen Apollo) join producer/beatmaker Johnny Igaz to talk about sampling. We look at hardware vs. software sampling, hear how different drum tones are layered to make for fuller hits, and dissect a sampled production. Craig and Igaz both work here at Pandora as well. (11 mins.)

That link above is to V.E.R.A. Clique's site, but this one is to their Pandora artist profile.

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A Simple Philosophy to Help Mankind

I am a recovering political junkie. I don't like the controversy of politics, or how crazy it makes people. I prefer not to wade into political controversy when there is very little chance of winning. I have learned a lot of hard lessons about this activity over the years and I try to stay on the wagon.

But now, when wild charges are being lobbed around about why people don't want so much government spending and debt and intervention into various sectors of the economy, we see some people, our leaders in government, engaged in the most outrageous ad hominem attacks and demonization against anyone who disagrees with them and their wild, self-serving activities.

I don't like being called a member of some conspiracy or a hateful person simply because I don't have faith in government's (read: mediocre, headline-chasing politicians) ability to save us from ourselves.

Embedded below is a very simple, powerful statement of facts about our current government programs. And a clear articulation of why markets work to improve the general well being of humanity and government does not.

There is no hate in this. There is no "code" or conspiracy. There is nothing here that well-intentioned progressives can take umbrage at. (Although, they will never give me the same credit of good intentions if I say that I truly believe the market, not government, is the best way to make life better for my fellow man.)

For the self-righteous progressive, people who articulate the cause of freedom can never be taken at face value. Why? Because to do so would require the hard work and risk to one's own righteous self-image of having to address real arguments and real facts like those articulated by Judge Napolitano below.