One cannot propose following the Chatham House Rule on a public blog that hasn’t walls but for the defense of civil verbal behavior, but if I could, I should like to hear from those more than comfortable with affluence and wealth plus the beauty, freedom, leadership, and leisure known to the world’s post-medieval modern upper (way upper) class.
I offer questions.
What do the wealthy want?
What is reward or rewarding way up there in the stratosphere?
If I were to meet in Davos one of the Masters of the Business and Finance Universe, what would we talk about?
How would the conversation sound?
What would it be about?
Where would it be going?
Perhaps this post will disappear into the immediate Internet past to the sounds of the studiously silent.
I’ve thought here to mash up a post about conscience, which is to me a mysterious part of our universal human evolution: whether or not we like it, we’re more generally good — good hearted, good natured, helpful, kind by way of empathy and sympathy, lawful and respectful with a basis for both in simple transactional psychology.
Down the left side of this blog are epigrammatic statements that have most to do with the grooming of strongly good global cultural psychology. Authoritarianism, despotism, excessive egoism, and tyranny are on the outs while consideration, cooperation, and thoughtfulness are greatly — and universally — desired. Here are two quotations of quotations from the BackChannels sidebar —
Talmud 7:16 as Quoted by Rishon Rishon in 2004 Qohelet Raba, 7:16 אכזרי סוף שנעשה אכזרי במקום רחמן
Kol mi shena`asa rahaman bimqom akhzari Sof shena`asa akhzari bimqom rahaman
All who are made to be compassionate in the place of the cruel In the end are made to be cruel in the place of the compassionate.
More colloquially translated: “Those who are kind to the cruel, in the end will be cruel to the kind.”
“That which is distasteful to thee do not do to another. That is the whole of Torah. The rest is commentary. Now go and study.”
“If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am not for others, what am I? If not now, when?”
“Whosoever destroys a soul, it is considered as if he destroyed an entire world. And whosoever that saves a life, it is considered as if he saved an entire world.”
If you’re on this post, there’s a reason for it. Consider taking a moment to read what I’ve selected from Oriana Fallaci, Abraham Isaac Kook, Heinrich Heine, Simon Wiesenthal, Douglas Adams, Thucydides, Milan Kundera, Malala Yousafzai, and a briefly met online friend, Tanit Nima Tinat.
Published by W. W. Norton & Company, 2019.
Here is the lead from a review in Vox (July 8, 2019) by Sigal Samuel —
Patricia Churchland is a neurophilosopher. That’s a fancy way of saying she studies new brain science, old philosophical questions, and how they shed light on each other.
For years, she’s been bothered by one question in particular: How did humans come to feel empathy and other moral intuitions? What’s the origin of that nagging little voice that we call our conscience?
When we’re not so good — from naughty to sinful to heinous to unspeakable — we know why as greed, lust, and vanity account both for our indulgences and peccadilloes as well as many conflicts and crimes with the exception of earnest and necessary struggles against the despot and the totalitarian.
Why be good (for goodness sake)?
Conscience.
Why conscience?
I shall have to read Churchland’s book (which will be on my Kindle a minute after publishing this piece).
As small ideas and pieces come to me, I may add them to this post that drives to the core of differences between the worlds of medieval political absolutism and the far preferred modern experiences of human dignity and freedom — beyond those two may reside the Orwellian horrors of the bureaucratically and technologically capable totalitarian state headed up by thugs. For that, have a start-here look at China.
In the United States and the United Kingdom, the new right has broken with the old fashioned Burkean small-c conservatism that is suspicious of rapid change in all its forms. Although they hate the phrase, the new right is more Bolshevik than Burkean: these are men and women who want to overthrow, bypass, or undermine existing institutions, to destroy what exists.
If you’re feeling at sea with America’s now dramatically confused, polarized, and shifting political landscape, this book may offer a steady deck and a good look around at how we humans have organized ourselves and where forces may be taking us faster than we know.
All kinds of people are unhappy with Trump’s loss of the American election — valid substantial and outcome-changing complaint has yet to surface in the courts — but none more so than in the camp that has brushed away “Trump-Russia” and now embraced “Biden-China”.
Well, for Trump’s Mob at least, welcome to Orwell’s world.
For everyone else, there may be some questions worth asking for the long-term (because the short-term may be shaping up ugly).
Excerpt From the Awesome Conversation
So to fix everything that has gone wrong since, oh, the 15th Century, you would like to take away self-determination — self-concept; pursuits of autonomy and competence along one’s own selected career and leisure paths; multicultural, multiracial, multi-religious tolerance — and replace that freedom for the person (“pro-choice”) with bureaucratic organization and force. ?
Re. Renmembi (or Ruble): I think the dollar will be fine if or when what’s bothering America finds its way back to integrity.
So-called “secular progressive atheists” comprise but one segment of the nation, but one might suggest that many like the late Christopher Hitchens (“Do you need God to be good?”) may well be forward of our national culture, and no less so than Thomas Paine was forward of his surrounding political culture in his day.
Re. Roe v Wade. I try to stay out of the trap, it has so many thorny questions, but much in its day had to do with coat-hanger abortions, health of the mother, justice in the shadow of rape, and all that. Why do we believe that “back there” is always and somehow (mysteriously) better than forward of the present?
“Capitalism” and “Communism” (and “Socialism”) have become dogma and successful political policy is (or perhaps should have been [the world’s been looking different to me lately]) is a thing well argued and hammered out into cooperation and greater integration across any given unit of geopolitical space.
What is the difference between a Free Man and a Slave?
Or a Citizen and a Loyal Subject?
Do most of the world’s political leaders believe that the most awful of medieval horrors (slogan-driven mobs; vast public ignorance; a nobility clouded in the contents of pressed sachets; pestilence for all on the streets; that sort of Monty Pythonesque thing) should be out ahead in our global future, or might some prefer to disagree?
There should be a chat somewhere online about the look of a good global tomorrow.
How does one go about purchasing the United States of America?
First ruin it.
Give it a bad cold.
Shut it down.
Throw the lesser capitalists out of their own small businesses; throw their employees out of their jobs.
Next: take their your own profits in trade and purchase what the little people couldn’t hold.
It’s a free world, financially speaking, after all.
And funny thing — more and more (of everything – businesses in bankruptcy, related debt, foreclosures, even people) will may be coming up for sale as debt rises and capacity to return both interest and principle diminishes.
“One of the primary reasons to be fiscally responsible during periods of economic expansion is to have the capacity to fight downturns or emergencies,” said Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. “This is precisely the kind of moment, where borrowing is warranted and necessary, that we should have been preparing for over the past years.”
Even if the Big Picture looks good, the financial suffering attending the country’s COVID-19 response and related response to that on the street may nonetheless continue degrading productivity and the sustaining of wealth in short order. One may wonder with what might be coming whether the complacent “we shall see” really hacks it for the public.
“We are going to destroy each other and this country based on raw emotion, public opinion, media distortion, fake news, false narratives and unverified video and allegations.”
Disciplined observation with integrity accompanied by empathy, logic, and reason may be more difficult than casually imagined, but those are the best tools we have for defining issues and answering with appropriate and progressive policy.
The Stanford philosophizing referenced above may not lead to the most cogent or helpful of references for approaching legal or policy issues, but for those two regions, any may start with the idea that mere perception is not reality, and it is generally good to investigate how things really work when on the way to making decisions or plans pertaining to them.
Peel the onion; turn over the rock; have another look; put it to a test — language has many cliches and tropes related to investigation and the methods of arriving at conclusions — “truths” one might call them — in which one might have confidence on the basis of other than ambitions, agendas, pleasant delusions, and personal interests.
We wouldn’t be here sick — and sick about being sick — as well as dependent on our government for bailouts and tide-me-overs and driven apart, largely by drivel, were it not for the mediocrity of some of our most powerful politicians.
On Facebook, I just ran a series of Trump Authoritarian pieces from the Mainstream Media that also informs us about Trump’s popular — or not so popular — image. These were the URLs (in order of posting):
Like no other President in history, Trump has so inspired quintessential American passion in his own opposition that even when he strives to do the right thing and speak honestly (as I believe he has with COVID-19), he’s neither believed nor trusted. 😦
HE (Caps intentional) has brought this on himself, and we — all of us who are part of the American constituency and who have lived beneath the umbrella of our extraordinary humanist and secular Constitution all of our lives — deserve much, much better.
From the Awesome Conversation
BC’s Note:
Of course I scan and cherry pick these pieces for whoever may be around to glimpse history as it passes from the present.
IMHO, Americans — all of US — need a new class of earnest, high-integrity, honest local and state leaders and statesmen. This bouncing between peacocks – some criminal and shady; some living between The People and the upper stratosphere of power and wealth – where does that leave us?
Today we have a Far Out Left apparently incapable of digesting and independently analyzing CDC data, and as consequence we have the hijab of health fascism with few to zero lives saved in a pandemic that largely mirrors our own popular contempt for our common fate — death is immutable — and to some extent our own health (as we drink and eat too much and stay up too late). 🙂 COVID-19 takes advantage of our vulnerabilities and, perhaps, our passivity. (Do you want to fight back for real: pay attention to diet and go jogging, and, toward the end, accept ageing and increasing frailty as part of your humanity).
Regarding too many politicians, their narcissism and related nepotism and complete loss of personal and public ethics and principles: shame on them — and shame on us for letting them get away with what they do!
The arch note has come to mind: “Democracies elect the governments they deserve.”
Is all of this — from the “Helsinki Moment” to so riven a society it seems unable to remember its own mission in the world, its sense of itself, its better expression of the western civilizational ethos — what we — all of us — have come to deserve?
America’s “Far White Right” Republicans, who haven’t had much to do with reality either these days, have scraped up the mud mixture to attempt to splatter the Democrats thoroughly in the old Soviet zeitgeist and call their opposition “Un-American!”
Times of Israel blogger Fred Maroun asked on his Facebook page, “Is Netanyahu racist, as Sanders claims?”
After taking care of the Netanyahu question — not racist! — Maroun went on to defame Sanders. Here’s what he said:
Sanders, on the other hand, is an antisemite. He’s using the antisemitism of many on the left to gain support, and he has no problem associating with virulent antisemites like Linda Sarsour. He’s never apologized for any of it, on the contrary, he only gets worse. His accusation against Netanyahu is part of his game to attract those people. If he wants to criticize Netanyahu on the settlements, fine, but he knows that wouldn’t distinguish him from other Democrats, so he accuses the leader of the Jewish state of being a racist, code word for Jews being racist. His antisemitic base loves it. He uses exactly the same tactics to attract antisemites that Trump uses to attract right-wing racists.
Those who support Sanders are engaging in the the exact same moral acrobatics as those who support Trump. Shame on them.
My response to the accusation: Sanders — anti-Semite!
Sanders has the frameworks of the New Old Now Old Far Out and Lost Left — a term I used to use as I arrived here a conservative, and, sigh, the Left of my youth seemed to have drifted toward Noam Chomsky and Chris Hedges on the barricades. That could have been just the way I arrived and “channeled” into Facebook.
Judaism’s Orthodox–>Conservative–>Reform Spectrum has had a last note pinned to it in the figure of Felix Adler.
— In 1876, Adler at age 26 was invited to give a lecture expanding upon his themes first presented in the sermon at Temple Emanu-El. On May 15, 1876 he reiterated the need for a religion, without the trappings of ritual or creed, that united all of humankind in moral social action.[7] To do away with theology and to unite theists, atheists, agnostics and deists, all in the same religious cause, was a revolutionary idea at the time. A few weeks after the sermon, Adler started a series of weekly Sunday lectures. In February 1877, aided by Joseph Seligman, president of Temple Emanu-El, Adler incorporated the Society for Ethical Culture. —
One might imagine, easily, that those promoting and living a strongly behavioral view of Judaism and Jewish Law bound into Jewish Obedience to the Commandments and related codes (“613 Commandments”) were not too happy with Professor Adler.
Sanders may have that ethical-humanist strain of ultimately Jewish thought in him, but he must also know as a Jew that he is not part of Russo-Soviet complex on the left that spread the “Protocols” throughout Russia and conveyed the same through White Russian emigre into Germany. America’s “Far White Right” Republicans, who haven’t had much to do with reality either these days, have scraped up the mud mixture to attempt to splatter the Democrats thoroughly in the old Soviet zeitgeist and call their opposition “Un-American!”
Bernie’s a liberal Jew. (I’ve been part of Reform Judaism — and Ethical Society much, much earlier — but am tired now “of all that” and prefer a quiet supper in a good restaurant on the Sabbath). Regarding Sanders’ political and social views, I would bet his position similar to Adler’s and what I without study would refer to as “Jewish Humanism”.
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