John Paul: And the Wall Came Tumbling Down

The Corriere della Sera, one of Italy's two biggest dailies, reports documents uincovered by the German government in the Stasi files prove the Soviets were behind the assassination attempt on John Paul II in 1981. Apparently, they gave the job to Bulgarian Security, who recruited Turks to actually do the deed. The communications were routed through East German security to cover the traces.

Back when the wall fell, the Bishop of Ottawa spoke to a group I was attending. He had just returned from a conclave in Europe. He claimed that John Paul had been crucial in causing the Berlin Wall to fall. I doubted him then. It turns out he was exactly right. John Paul was an enormous threat to the Soviets, and they knew it.

Pay Equity

A new book, "Why Men Earn More" by Warren Farrell, looks at a broad array of wage statistics and concludes that, contrary to popular opinion, women earn just as much as men, and sometimes more.

For example:

- Women are 15 times as likely as men to become top executives in major corporations before the age of 40. The glass ceiling is for men only.

- Never-married, college-educated males who work full time make only 85 percent of what comparable women earn. In other words, the supposed “male pay advantage” was really always a “family pay advantage,” an advantage of married men over single men and women recognizing and resulting from their need to support a wife and kids—and their greater workplace stability as a result. Now, all women are paid at the married rate. But men are not.

- Female pay exceeds male pay in more than 80 different fields. If “Equal pay for equal work” is the issue, affirmative action should be introduced to help men. But of course, it has not been.

- Part-time female workers make $1.10 for every $1 earned by part-time males. Women have the advantage at the bottom of the work ladder as well as at the top.

- Even in the early 1980s, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics found that companies paid men and women equal money when their titles and responsibilities were the same.

- Even in 1969, data from the American Council on Education showed that female professors who had never been married and had never published earned 145 percent of their male counterparts. Women were given an advantage even before the current “affirmative action” regime.

- Even during the 1950s, the gender pay gap for all never-married workers was less than 2 percent, while never-married white women between 45 and 54 earned 106 percent of what their white male counterparts made. There never was a general gender pay gap. It was a married vs. single pay gap.

- Citing Internal Revenue statistics, Farrell notes that women who owntheir own businesses net only 49 percent of what male counterpartsmake. Obviously, bosses cannot be holding women back in such circumstances. This, therefore, is presumably the free market demonstrating the proper pay differential between men and women. That women make more than this demonstrates discrimination against men.

- Women are more likely than men to pick glamorous jobs that pay less. It makes sense. They can afford to consider other things than money, not being normally obliged to support a family, and not having their social worth judged on their earning capacity.

Women have choices. Men do not.

The Catholic Counterculture of the Sixties

It is striking how, although he almost single-handedly invented the 60s counterculture, which has now become the dominant culture, it has turned out to be something very different from what Jack Kerouac wanted or believed.


Some quotes and observations from his biographer:

"politics was not a major interest for any of them [the Beats], although they agreed on a vaguely anarchistic disdain for bureaucracy and the welfare state, a reactionary working-class perspective…"

"… [Kerouac] told a friend that rational psychotherapy was for him only another superstition, and he preferred the richer, deeper, sad peasant mysticism of Quebec Catholics."

He "disliked … the repetitious analysis of sex that seemed to preoccupy everyone."

"The city intellectuals of the world were divorced from the folk body blood of the land, were just rootless fools." – quoted.

He "revered the family…wanted to expand the nucleus, return to the traditional extended family…"

"As far as he was concerned, society was insane, an evil mistake."

Kerouac: "scientific psychology … [has] put a mechanism in the place of an organism."

Kerouac supported Taft in 1952. Eisenhower was too far to the left for him. In 1956, he supported Eisenhower for reelection against Stevenson.

"I'm a messenger from heaven."

Kerouac claimed the Beats were "an essentially religious movement … rooted in the Gothic style."

Later, he describes himself as a "lay Jesuit."

Asked to explain the phenomenon of being "beat," he cited Jesus's claim that, "to see the kingdom of heaven you must lose yourself."

Again, he said being "Beat" involved "absolute belief in a Divinity of Rapture." His desire in writing was to have "God … show me His face."

In another essay he defined "Beat" as believing "in beatitude, and that God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son to it."

He wrote poems for the Catholic church magazine Jubilee. When he took up painting, "all of his subjects were Roman Catholic, most often the newly anointed Pope John, whom he loved."

“All I write about is Jesus.”

His diaries are filled with prayers (some for humility) and sketches of the crucified Christ.

According to Kerouac, On the Road
“...was really a story about two Catholic buddies roaming the country in search of God. And we found him. I found him in the sky, in Market Street San Francisco (those 2 visions), and Dean (Neal) had God sweating out of his forehead all the way. THERE IS NO OTHER WAY OUT FOR THE HOLY MAN: HE MUST SWEAT FOR GOD. And once he has found Him, the Godhood of God is forever Established and really must not be spoken about.”
“Kerouac was wrongly accused of championing the fornication, adultery, car stealing, illegal drugs, and other sundry sins and vices he wrote about so matter-of-factly. It was an understandable mistake.”
- Culture Wars magazine - http://www.culturewars.com/CultureWars/1999/kerouac.html
Kerouac’s great virtue was forgiveness, compassion, mercy, charity.

The other beats are not all that different. Allen Ginsberg is probably the one who would have been happiest with the way the culture interpreted them. But William S. Burroughs was a right-wing gun lover.

Burroughs called liberalism "a sniveling, mealy-mouthed tyranny of bureaucrats, social workers, psychiatrists, and union officials." He considered the US a police state similar to that in the Soviet Union.

Burroughs, though homosexual, called homosexuality "a horrible sickness."


Left-wing critics of the day generally hated both Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg . The academic establishment hated them and tried to censor them. The one cultural sector that was welcoming from the beginning—and I think this is significant--was the Catholic Church.

Essentially, from the beginning, the counterculture was a Catholic movement. To Kerouac, this was absolutely explicit. But just look at the major figures who were from a culturally Catholic background. To being with, almost all of the original Beat poets:

Jack Kerouac
Gregory Corso
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Michael McClure
Phil Whalen
Neal Cassady

And so too these other figures generally identified with the counterculture of the sixties:

Marshall McLuhan
Timothy Leary
Jerry Garcia
John Lennon
Paul McCartney
Carlos Castenada
Frank Zappa

It is terribly ironic that the counterculture so quickly turned hostile to the Catholic Church. The devil quickly turns things to his ends.

Emotional Genius

Brandenn Bremmer, a 14-year old prodigy who taught himself to read at 18 months, shot himself yesterday.

Comment from his mother: "He had this excessive need to help people and teach people. ... He was so connected with the spiritual world, we felt he could hear people's needs and desires and their cries. We just felt like something touched him that day and he knew he had to leave.”

There was something like this in a movie on child prodigies I saw, directed by Jodie Foster; and psychologist Alice Miller says something like this too. People with high intelligence also seem to have strong sense of responsibility for others; to be “sensitive.” They take on themselves the problems of those around them, and the problems of the world.

There is more to high intelligence than we understand.

Also, this special emotional sensitivity is the real “EQ.” It is the opposite of what is currently called “EQ,” which has to do with manipulating the emotions of others for your benefit.

Primal Screen Therapy

A recent weekend section in the local paper talks about a new kind of psychotherapy: “movie therapy.”

The idea is that by talking about favourite movies, one can “unlock all the feelings you have repressed.”

God forbid. While I bet movie therapy can work in practice, psychotherapy has its theory completely wrong, completely backwards. This is no doubt why psychotherapy has such an appallingly bad success rate. Almost any significant “mental illness” you can mention—chronic depression, schizophrenia, personality disorders, manic depression—is, according to psychotherapy, “incurable.” Which is to say, psychotherapy cannot cure it—though most such “mental illnesses” used to be considered transitory before psychotherapy.

If one simply wallows in one’s negative emotions, one trains oneself to feel them more and more. They harden into definite vices: anger, greed, hatred, envy, bitterness, covetousness, lust. (Look at that poster boy for psychoanalysis, Woody Allen, and his record on lust.)

The goal should be to get rid of them. Art—such as a movie—can do this, by sublimation. Unless you are yourself rather shallow, it has to be a pretty good movie—but most movies will at least be deeper than most psychiatrists.

It scares me to read, though, one patient saying “It took a long time for me to open up… The romance between Ewan McGregor and Nicole Kidman’s characters made me realize that I had never really loved my husband.”

Heaven help us. Here it sounds to me as though psychotherapy has broken up what may have been a perfectly good marriage because real life cannot equal a fictional romance. And real husbands are not as dashing as Ewan McGregor.

Magazines: The Editor's Art

A reminder of how good Time magazine used to be: they described Jack Kerouac back in the early Sixties as "Latrine laureate of Hobohemia ... ambisextrous and hipsterical." They'd never write like that now. Doesn't fit with what the marketers say. Magazines can be great, can have a profound influence on a culture, but it usually lasts just as long as one gifted editor, and when he or she is gone, it is gone.

Although the magazine usually lives on on sheer reputation for years.

And oddly, the great magazines are the ones that break all the rules. Like the old Time Magazine, that used to always, expensively, show artwork on its cover. Every marketer knows you have to show a photo of someone's face to sell a magazine from a newsstand.

But genius and scientific marketing do not mix.

That quote above, similarly, would fry any fog index. Would not be allowed today, because Time magazine, to increase its potential readership, is now pitched to a fairly low reading level.

Some other magazines that have been great:

Reader's Digest. A great idea for a magazine. But it really did depend on the good taste of one editor, to select the best articles from elsewhere. And it used to really be for readers: it actually ran its table of contents on the cover. It was also a model of editing craft: everything was chopped at least a third. But it is now of little interest.

Playboy. It used its pictures to foster really high quality writing, and paid well for it. As a result, it probably did a lot forAmerican culture for some years, no matter what one thinks of the "Playboy philisophy." Its interview feature was also once a matter of record: something that often could not be missed.

The Economist. Maybe still is great, but not what it was just a few years ago. I knew it had copped out when it went to colour inside. I loved the gall of a magazine that was all black and white and ran pages full of dense text. Most magazines these days "know" you have to keep pieces short and cut up the page into smaller pieces to tease people into reading anything. The Economist obviously pitched to people who had read before. But since it went colour, its captions aren't nearly as funny as they once were--this, in the first place, something they got from Time in its glory days. And some of the more interesting and quirky columns are gone--like Johnson, which was, in a magazine on economics and current events, about language.

National Review. It was enormously influential in the US for a generation. But it depended entirely on the talent and the inherited fortune of William F. Buckley Jr.

Mad Magazine. William Gaines _was_ Mad Magazine. It went spectacularly against all received wisdom by runnig no ads, and getting all its revenue from newsstand sales. Everyone knows both of these things are impossible.

Harrowsmith. Much too high production values for its presumably small market as a Canadina special-interest magazine. And extravagantly great writing. My favourite head was "Still Waters Run Jeep."

The New Yorker. Some say Harold Ross of the New Yorker invented modern editing.

There are "great magazines" now on the web, in the same way. "Arts & Letters Daily" used to be great; but it has now been abandoned by its founder, and is pedestrian. "The Drudge Report" continues to be something special.

The Feminine Advantage

Some indication of the easy ride women get with feminism is the slate of speakers for the upcoming “Festival of Thinkers” in Abu Dhabi. There are fifteen male speakers, and three female—and feminists will seize on that stat and say it shows discrimination against women.

But look closer. Among those men, you have ten Nobel prizewinners. The other five all have Ph.D.s: Edward de Bono and Bjorn Lomborg, both almost household names; Craig Barrett, the CEO of Intel; Bernard Piccard, the first man to fly non-stop by balloon around the world; and last and apparently least, Thomas Rocco, VP of something called “Collegiate Enterprise Solutions.”

Now look at the three women: no Nobel Prizes. Only one has a Ph.D. One is CEO of Entovation International (who?); one is a professor in China; the last, a recent Ph.D. (2001), is an associate professor in Sweden and a marketing director for Silex Microsystems. Not really in the same league as Intel.

So while there are more men than women, it obviously takes higher qualifications for a man than for a woman to be included. The discrimination is against men and in favour of women.

Add the cumulative comparable discrimination every step of the way—in school, university, grad school, hiring and promotion—and the advantage for women is staggering.

Taking the Veil

An observation from attending a conference last weekend: a lot of women wearing the complete burqa/chador, the veil, at the conference spoke fluent English with regional American accents or British accents. A number had blue eyes.

Nobody wants to hear it, but a lot of Western, non-Muslim women, once they are over here, are embracing the chador. Just as the Arab women do.

What could be more absurd than the notion that in choosing to wear a particular style of dress, women are “oppressed”?

The chador is liberating. Given only that you are not constantly on the prowl for casual sex.

But that’s what it all comes down to, isn’t it? That’s all “women’s liberation” or current Western “liberalism” is about.

Adrienne Clarkson: your tax dollars at play.

On the Road Again

Reading Jack Kerouac and Kerouac's biography gives me the strong sense that the origin of the counterculture was the trauma of urbanization and greater mobility caused by the automobile.

The "back to the land" thing was a desire to recover the recently lost family farm.

The "commune" thing was an attempt to recover the extended family.

The "ecology" thing was from a sense of loss, of disconnection, from the land and the countryside. The odd conviction that the world was overpopulated was the culture shock of moving to the crowded cities from the vast open land.

The drugs thing was trying to recover lost spiritual roots; as alcohol is among the native North Americans. It was an attempt to recover that layer of interlocking meaningfulness, allusion, symbol, and metaphor, which one has when one lives with all the same people and shares all the same experiences over a lifetime. The sense that life as a whole is coherent. This level of experience is also necessary for sharing deeply, for sharing emotions.

When it is missing, besides drugs, art must wheel into play to recreate it. Hence the burst of creativity in the beat and hippie years.

The sex thing similarly was a hunger for lost intimacy, of the sort one has with an extended family and a tight-knit community.

The distaste for children comes from the sense of crowding in the cities, the disconnect with the procession of generations as a result of the rootlessness, and the relative expense of raising kids in a city as opposed to on a farm. Where they more or less earn their own keep.

The “radical” politics was simply disaffection, of general unhappiness with the situation. Hence its ideological incoherence.

The music, rock and pop, especially the hippie versions of it, was based on folk, country, and blues: rural, traditional styles. Again, urbanites trying to recover the rural past. Pop is rural folk.

The huge increase in depression is an obvious result of the rootlessness, the loss of meaning. Depression is alienation.

Feminism was a different reaction to the same stimuli. Women, isolated in their suburban kitchens, lost the community of the extended family, the church breakfast, and the village well. It was the isolation and rootlessness that drove them screaming out of the home.

My hope, though, is that the computer and the shift from manufacture to services will be able to mend the harm the automobile and industrialization has done. Our communications technology is catching up to our transportation technology, and soon it will be possible for most of us to move back out of the cities into the towns and countryside, thanks to "telecommuting."

In the meantime, the Internet is doing a lot in terms of creating virtual communities. I can stay in touch with old friends from every point in my life, on line, by email or in chat groups. I can find them on the web and reconnect if we get separated. I can link up with people who share my interests at any time, wherever they are. Alienation is getting a lot harder than it used to be.

Letter from Moriarty

Dear Abbot:

Overpopulation is not a myth. It is an obvious fact.

Moriarty


Dear Moriarty:

It is hard for me to see how "overpopulation" can be factual, rather than a value judgement. How does one determine an optimal population for the world, in order to determine that we are over or under it? I would have thought that the optimal population of the world would be that population at which quality of life is highest, most readily measured by material prosperity. By this measure, the world is under, not over, populated. Simply note that the more populous areas of the world are, generally speaking, the more prosperous ones. And that, in general terms, as the world's population has grown, the individual prosperity of the average human has also grown, for as long as we've been able to keep track.

Abbot



Dear Abbot:

What's a "myth" is the idea that our current (18th-20th cen) model of continuous economic "growth"-- with populations growing, & lifestyle (industrial and consumer consumption) upgrading can continue for
much longer at all.

Moriarty


Dear Moriarty:

There may theoretically be an upper limit in terms of resources. But if so, we are nowhere near it, based on any objective evidence. The cost of raw materials and food has been going down steadily for the past century and more. Improved technology improves the use of raw materials, discovers new materials, and so forth. There is no evidence that this is a zero sum game. Sure, some day we may run out of charcoal. This is not especially troublesome, however, unless we have stopped developing, and so have not in the meantime found some superior replacement for charcoal—coal, say, or petroleum.

On this perspective, the likeliest path to perdition is to stop developing, not to "overdevelop."

Houston Chronicle, 04/21/00: "World proven oil reserves today are estimated to be 15 times greater than the original 1948 estimates. World natural gas reserves in the last 30 years have increased almost five-fold. World coal reserves today are estimated to be over four times the amount calculated nearly a half-century ago… Consumer-inflation-adjusted prices for electricity, natural gas and gasoline in the United States have each fallen by approximately one-third since the 1980s [despite the recent rise in oil prices]"

Abbot


Dear Abbot:

South Korea is way overpopulated -- environmental degradation, pollution, waste piling up, no parking spaces, all tell us so.

Moriarty

Dear Moriarty:

You have been in South Korea for sixteen years and you haven't noticed how the environment has improved with development? Ten or twenty years ago, the mountains around Seoul were bare; people stripped them clean every winter for sustenance and for firewood. But now Korea can afford to maintain huge national and provincial parks in fairly pristine condition. You can trace the same thing world-wide: greater development leads to less environmental damage. In the seventeenth century London was a cesspool. Now you can fish in the Thames, and eat the fish you catch. LA no longer has smog alerts. The forests of Europe and America are now steadily growing. More habitat for more animals.

In 1972 two thirds of the waters in the US were unsafe for fishing and swimming. Today, two thirds are safe. "We have more forested land today in the US than at the turn of the century," says US Forest Service chief Mike Dombeck. (US News & World Report, 4/17/00)

A snippet from the Houston Chronicle, 04/21/00: "Urban air quality in America is one-third cleaner than in the 1970's."

I remember Gananoque when I was growing up as a fairly dirty industrial town, with factories along the river and the sound of the steel presses everywhere. Now most of that old industrial land is park.

Abbot


Dear Abbot:

I might wildly guess that that this biosphere could sustain 2 or 3 billion of us at a decent lifestyle without
getting "sick". 6 billion is already way too many. 10 bil is going to be a hellish nightmare.

Moriarty


Dear Moriarty:

The Earth cannot get “sick.” This is anthropomorphism. The issue is whether 3 or 6 billion can live on it with a decent lifestyle.

But the average lifestyle of each human today at six billion is better than it was when there were only 2 or 3 billion of us. Far fewer are hungry. On what basis, then, can you call 6 billion "too many"?

As the earth as a whole undergoes the industrial revolution, people are moving off the land and concentrating in cities. This means is that a greater number of people can be sustained at a better standard of living on less land.

On current projections, world population will peak at about nine or ten million, then begin to decline. Worldwide, we are not reproducing at replacement level. On this basis alone, overpopulation seems dubious as a driving concern. Some quotes: "By 2050, … the number of immigrants needed to maintain the working-age-to-retirement ration [in South Korea] is 110 times the size of the current national population." "The probability that you die from AIDS when you are 15 today is over 50 percent [in some nations of sub-Saharan Africa]." (AP, 06/27/00). "A report issued by the United Nations said that, on current trends, the population of Central and Eastern Europe will drop by a third by the middle of this century." (Economist, 05/06/00). "[Japan's] population is projected to decline by 17 percent during the next half century. By 2050 the population will dwindle to 105 million from 127 million now, according to UN estimates… [Japan will need] 600,000 immigrants a year just to maintain its present work force." (Korea Herald/NYT, ?). "Like it or not, Europe, Japan and South Korea are facing shrinking populations and a tight labour market…Such countries as Italy and Japan [are] expected to lose a quarter of their current populations by 2050" (UN Population Division Study, "Replacement Migration").

For more on this, you might like to scan http://www.pop.org/reports/facts.htm

Abbot


Dear Abbot:

You argue that we are UNDERpopulated on purely econ-growth terms, need for workers. Seems
pretty blind to me.

Moriarty


Dear Moriarty:

Paul Krugman, you may recall, predicted the current slump in Japan on the basis that Asia's newfound prosperity is founded more or less completely on its reserves of skilled labour. Japan ran out of population, and so it hit a growth ceiling. It is precisely its large population that is fuelling growth in China.

Bottom line: people are worth more than oil or tin. Surprise.

Abbot


Dear Abbot:

You think that it's natural or good that we become the only large animal species on this planet? The tigers & lions are done-for, the elephants & eagles & bears don't have much longer outside of zoos. "Wild" forest areas are disappearing rapidly, exactly under our overpopulated pressure.

Morairty


Dear Moriarty:

Development is more likely to preserve than to kill off other large species. As pointed out above, there are more forests in developed nations than there were a hundred years ago. There is more habitat for wild animals. Moreover, wealthy nations have more resources to divert to the preservation of species. In 1970, the US had 10 million acres of protected wilderness. Today it has 104 million acres. In 1970, the US had 30 million acres of national parks. Now it has 83 million acres. "Several animals that were threatened or near extinction in the lower 48 states at the time of the 1973 Endangered Species Act, including peregrine falcons, bald eagles, gray wolves, and California condors, have had their ranks grow in recent decades." (US News & World Report, 4/17/00). Just this week the gray wolf was taken off the list of protected species. There are just too danged many of them.

If extinction of species is a real problem, the solution is development. The surest way to kill more off is to prevent development.

Abbot


Dear Abbot:

We lose to extinction, what, 50 species a day? Much more rapid than at any time in the past (except sudden climate-change). The oceans are becoming exhausted of fish.

Moriarty


Dear Moriarty:

Bjorn Lundstrom has challenged such figures as only theoretical, but not actually happening. We may be working from a flawed model. We keep finding new species every day as well, including some previously believed to be extinct.

The oceans are indeed becoming exhausted of some popular types of fish. This is no surprise. We've been counting on the oceans to give us a free ride, all taking and no giving. And we’ve been eating at the top of the food chain, as if we still lived by hunting tigers and cougars on land. We plant nothing in the oceans, just harvest what is there.

This is hardly an argument against development, though. Rather, it shows just how much further we can develop: hunting and gathering, the continent of North America was able to support a few million people, tops. With settled agriculture, it now supports four hundred million or so, at an incomparably higher standard of living. So too for the seas. Except that the seas account for more area, and more biomass, than the land. Imagine the untapped potential.

Abbot


Dear Abbot:

The Catholic Church seems to think that not permitting their followers to use birth-control is more important than any of this -- or argues that they're separate, one has nothing to do with the other.

Moriarty


Dear Moriarty:

There is no problem of overpopulation. If there were, there are natural means of birth control more effective than any artificial means. Consider abstinence.

Allowing artificial birth control is not directly related to limiting population. It is about enabling sex. Let’s call a spade a spade.

Abbot


Dear Abbot:

A primitive obsession with increasing the number of one religion's believers (in competition with other religions), coupled with a patriarchal prudishness (against sex purely for pleasure, when babies are not wanted) seems to drive Vatican policy.

Moriarty


Dear Moriarty:

Sex sheerly for pleasure necessarily reduces the other person involved to a sex object. It is an offense against their human dignity. It is also reckless disregard for the interests of children, given that you use no foolproof form of birth control (e.g., tied tubes or a vasectomy).

This is sufficient reason for the Catholic Church’s stand on recreational sex. Imputing less honourable motives is idle speculation.

And I can’t see your alternate explanation as plausible. Would a patriarchy be prudish? Why? Are men commonly more prudish than women? Is that your experience?

Do you have phone numbers?

The modern West has a weird and quite unique obsession with sex, both pro and con. In China, they pointed out to me that sex is not one of the five traditional essentials of life (with thesubtext: foolish, decadent Westereners). In the Persian Gulf, they refer to the “wicked West,” meaning specifically our perceived sexual obsession. It is abnormal. I think can be largely traced to the good Dr. Freud, as well as to a crass misunderstanding of the traditions of Medieval romance. Freud, you may recall, in effect claimed that, if you did not masturbate, you would go blind.

Freud has been pretty systematically disproven. Unfortunately, popular culture has not caught up to this fact yet. And doesn’t want to.

Abbot


Dear Abbot:

I find Catholic opposition to birth-control (incl abortion) to be obnoxious in the face of our factual
situation. Families with 10 kids are unhealthy, for both those people and for their societies. Nations
like the Philippines with very high fertility per woman, due to Catholic teachings, are in horrible situations of economic decline, with no hope in sight.

Moriarty


Dear Moriarty:

There are a lot of factors that suggest large families are healthier, for the children and for the parents. Starting with a reduced risk of breast and cervical cancer for mom, longer life expectancy for dad and mom, better mental health for middle as opposed to oldest, youngest, and only children, and so on.

The Philippines is in economic trouble because of bad government, aka corruption. Its population density is lower than that of Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, or the Netherlands, none of which are in obvious economic decline. To distract attention with unfounded claims of overpopulation helps to keep bad governments in power, by giving them an excuse, and so retards development. It is convenient to blame the poor for their own predicament. This is one reason why the dogma of overpopulation has been so eagerly embraced by third world governments like China and India.

But a boom in population, historically, has generally been rapidly followed by a growth in standard of living, not a decline. We saw it in England in the Industrial Revolution, we saw it in Germany, we saw it in Japan, in Korea, in Taiwan, in Hong Kong. We are now seeing it in China and India—exactly the countries where the experts claimed overpopulation was the biggest problem. Meanwhile Africa, which has not seen a comparable population boom, languishes.

Dear Abbot:

I never noticed anything in the teachings of Jesus, as recorded in the Bible, which oppose family-planning
by any means -- can you point out? This seems to be a later-Christian invention, for reasons above.

Moriarty


Dear Moriarty:

In an agricultural society, in a society where children are permitted to work and earn, family planning probably does not become an issue. Every new child is a blessing, because children earn their keep. See the Book of Job.

Let me however point out that, in the Bible, man's prime directive is to "go forth and multiply" (Genesis 1:28). Let me also point out that the Hippocratic Oath bans any doctor from performing an abortion. Hinduism, Islam, Christianity, and Buddhism have all determined that life begins at conception. Therefore, the ban seems always to have been present, but not a big issue because people were not inclined to violate it.

Note too there is no problem with “family planning,” properly so-called. Catholics may indeed plan their families and space out births: see the Catechism of the Catholic Church, para 2368. That is not the issue. The issue is the use of specific means to do so.

But let us just put everything else aside, and suppose that you are absolutely right: suppose the Catholic Church is wrong.

So what? What does it matter to you, not beign a Catholic? Why does this evoke such violence of feeling? Why do you wnt to kill the pope? Is being wrong such a crime?

No, methinks you do protest too much. Being wrong is not so important. It is being right that really gets people’s dander up—when it’s an unwelcome truth being propounded. See the stories of the prophets.

Your friend,

Abbot

Dinner with Moriarty

Dear Moriarty:

Thanks for having us over, and for your gracious hosting.

Of course, the trip ended on a down tone. I would like to make clear, from my perspective exactly why, in hopes that this will improve our friendship in the future. The essential problem was the rather strong, and, it seemed to me, emotional attack on Catholicism on Saturday evening. What especially stays in mind is you shouting "Just kill the pope!" This was not the first time I have seen this; exactly the same thing happened when I visited you last time, and it soured that visit too.

I'd really like to thrash this out with you, by email, so the shouting cannot interfere.

Any Catholic who has spent any time in North America is pretty familiar with the charges that came up Saturday night; it is fairly insulting to suppose we have not considered them already. But let's review, with comments. Then you can pick up any of the points you like for further email discussion.

1. Catholic teaching on birth control is unreasonable since the world is overpopulated.

Answer: the world is not overpopulated. This is a popular myth.

2. The Catholic Church is rich.

Answer: this too is a popular myth; not by any generally-accepted method of accounting.

3. The Catholic Church should sell everything it owns and give the money to the poor.

This holds only if you already do not believe there is any value in a church. Why doesn’t the Red Cross do the same thing?

4. The Catholic Church discriminates against women.

In what way? I think it would be a lot easier to argue that modern feminism discriminates against women.

5. Religion causes wars.

This is about as meaningful as arguing that "music causes wars."

6. The issue of iconography also came up, indirectly, in that you praised Islam for its lack of icons.

This is an old Protestant complaint against Catholicism. While I respect traditions that do not believe in iconography, to reject icons is to reject art. Art is the language of the soul.


Abbot

The Hollow Men

Thesis: suffering builds soul. Accordingly, a person who has it too easy in life—in particular a spoiled child—is spiritually hollow.

This is a growing phenomenon of modern life, necessarily, as we all have it better year by year in material terms. And it is reinforced by modern childrearing, which believes in indulging children and not disciplining them.

So we have the hollow men. And they are a recognizable type.

The extreme form of hollowness is what is called “psychopathy.” But this is just a matter of degree.

Note this is the opposite of the conventional wisdom: kids become psychopaths from being spoiled, from knowing no restraints, not from having tough childhoods and being “abused.”

Some reflections on the logical results of being spoiled:

General inability to transcend your most basic instincts; because you have never had the incentive nor had the experience imposed on you.

Hence a hallmark would be lack of self-control.

A hollow man is therefore rather transparent, his future actions predictable: because they are basic and instinctual.

This makes him more like an animal and less like a human than average: or makes him or her seem "childish." I think when we encounter someone who has been spoiled, we tend to think of them as less in stature as a result.

Hollow men therefore also tend to be rather comic figures; because they are the prisoners of their urges. It is being hollow that creates the "humours" of traditional comedy and satire: the compulsively avaricious, the compulsive woman-chaser, and so forth. The “two-dimensional” stock characters of satire. (This is very different from being humourous or witty: the humours are the butts of jokes, not the joke tellers).

The hollow would naturally be prejudiced, narrow-minded. A fair judgment requires a mind open to new ways of looking at something.

A hollow man would also tend to lack principles: consistency of principle requires doing what is right regardless of present temptations. A hollow man would not be as able to look beyond the present temptation.

Hence hollow men tend to be two-faced. They tend to make commitments lightly, and often not follow through on them.

They tend to be quitters; not to stick with something once it gets difficult.

Another interesting aspect of being spoiled is an incapacity for detachment. A spoiled person tends to see things only from his or her own point of view, and so lack real sympathy for others.

The inability to take a new point of view makes them narrow-minded to the point of actual stupidity. This, to my mind, explains how children from bright and accomplished families can be complete duds: spoiling can counteract inherited intelligence.

This in turn explains why ruling classes almost everywhere have their children sent away to be raised by others: because otherwise they would be spoiled, if only by other adults in deference to their parents.

The hollow are inclined to live a sort of fantasy life, ignoring their real situation, if it does not suit them. They are unusually capable of self-delusion. Walter Mitty was a hollow man, as of course was J. Alfred Prufrock. To create a fictional life for yourself is easier than the challenges and possible failures of real accomplishment.

The hollow are naturally self-centred and demanding of the attention of others.

They make good salespeople; because they need others' attention, because they make promises lightly, and because they can easily make themselves believe things.

That is a good measure of whether someone is hollow: can you picture them as a salesperson?

Another good measure is sense of humour. Humour requires detachment and the ability to suddenly see things from a new perspective. The worse someone is spoiled, the harder this kind of mental flexibility is; because in itself it is disorienting, painful. Hence the worse their sense of humour will be.

Also their ability to do philosophy, to be purely logical; to "be philosophical" or to be attracted to philosophical issues. This also requires detachment, seeing beyond one's own concerns of the moment to the general. To philosophize means getting outside your skin. Too strong an ego makes it much harder.

Also their ability to be truly moral. This too requires a detachment from one's own desires. Worse, the hollow man will often not realize they are being immoral, harming others, or being two-faced. Because they cannot grasp the difference between what is right and what they want. To the spoiled, these seem almost self-evidently to be the same thing.

The spoiled would tend to be hypocrites; because they measure all things in relation to themselves and their desires rather than abstract principle.

Indeed, the strict Greek term for a hollow man is probably “hypocrite”—literally, one who wears a mask, like an actor.

The scribes and Pharisees of the New Testament were hollow men. As surely was Pontius Pilate, with his famous throwaway question “what is truth?” Kurtz was a classic hollow man. As was Willie Loman in “Death of a Salesman.”

The spoiled will tend to complain more. There is much truth to the fairy tale of the princess and the pea. Because they cannot easily get beyond their own perspective of the moment, because they consider anything that happens to them very important, and because they expect attention from others, they will complain loud and long.

It does seem, on balance, when you add it all up, a pretty bad thing to do to spoil a child. A lousy thing to do to society, and, in the end, a lousy thing to do to the child.

But the world is filling up with more and more hollow men.

I wonder if becoming a hollow man is the same thing that is called “loss of soul”? This, according to Jung, was the greatest fear among hunter-gatherers he met in a trip to Africa.

Part of the danger of loss of soul, of course, is that ambient spirits can then come in and take over. What is it Jesus says about your soul as an empty room freshly swept and cleaned? Then the demonic possession can appear—in simplest terms, possession by a vice like the standard humours: avarice, greed, sloth, gluttony, lust, anger. Or, more dramatically, what we now call “schizophrenia.”

This is the opposite personality type to the depressive. Everything is usually wonderful in his life, or must be seen to be, and most especially he is always wonderful. The challenge is to keep constructing explanations and alibis to make this so.

While a depressive feels everything keenly, a hollow man seems only sentimental: vocal about feelings, but feeling nothing very deeply. Easy to anger, but not being really angry so much as thinking this is the right time to be angry, or enjoying the emotion of anger, or thinking it would be advantageous now to get angry. Easily expressing sorrow, but like a summer shower: not sad so much as thinking this is the right time to seem sad, or enjoying self-pity, or thinking that it would be advantageous now to seem sad.

This segues neatly, I think, into the characteristic lack of emotional responsiveness in schizophrenia, once contact is definitely lost with those the hollow man encounters. Without an audience, the hollow man is almost without emotion. But given another twist, this is also the cold-bloodedness of a psychopath.

Full-blown schizophrenia is supposed to be brought on by a crisis: a period of difficulty in one’s life. It makes sense. The alibi-making machinery must flip into overdrive to compensate for a reality that is less than pleasant. This takes up a great deal of consciousness, reducing what is available for dealing with the outside world. And the alibi becomes so divorced from the surrounding “reality” that others at last see it as delusion.

I note with interest the claim, in a book I read on Death Row in Florida, that most guys on death row go psychotic after they are there. It makes sense to me: this is the psychopathic personality finally faced with a situation they cannot make look good, even to themselves.

21st Century Schizoid Men

I have no training in psychology, but I am very interested in the phenomenon of what is called “mental illness.” Most of all, I think psychology is generally barking up the wrong tree, in trying to deal with the soul (psyche) as if it were empirical, and so could be studied using scientific methods.

The proper psychology is, I think, necessarily religion. Religion commonly works in changing people’s character and in healing spiritual illness. Psychology does not, and admits as much.

Because it interferes with the religious cure, I think contemporary psychology probably does more harm than good.

“Depression,” in the religious context, is the “dark night of the soul.” It is the time of indecision, as one is caught between the nonsense of the world and the reliable truth of the spirit. Psychology works by trapping you in the dilemma, by insisting on the return to the world, when you know in your heart the world is mad.

“Schizophrenia” is the same experience, in a sense, but occurring to a different personality type. People of discipline and sincerity go through depression. These are the people Jesus describes, point by point, in the beatitudes: those who hunger for righteousness, who are poor in spirit, who mourn.

But schizophrenia is, in New Testament terms, surely demonic possession.

I ran into this interesting description of the symptoms of schizophrenia from the British Royal college of Physicians and Surgeons:

“Positive symptoms

We normally feel that we are in control of our thoughts and actions, but schizophrenia interferes with this feeling of being 'the captain of the ship'. It may feel as though thoughts are being put into the mind or taken out by some outside, uncontrollable force. The body may feel as if it has been taken over, like a puppet or a robot under outside control. At worst, the whole personality seems under the influence of an alien force or spirit. This is a terrifying experience, which the person tries to explain according to education and upbringing. In 'high-tech' societies, invisible influences capable of working over a distance may be put down to radio, television or laser beams, or a computer somehow installed in the brain. In traditional and religious communities, witchcraft, angry spirits, God or the Devil may be held responsible.

(From the leaflet on schizophrenia put online by the Royal College of Physicians and surgeons. http://www.rcpsych.ac.uk/public/help/schiz/sch_frame.htm)”

Well, okay, doesn’t Occam’s Razor argue that the perception is simply accurate? That we are being taken over by another spirit? Demonic possession.

Moreover, this explanation has the practical advantage of preventing the person from becoming “ill.” As I witnessed in Korea, the person with these symptoms simply becomes a shaman, and, instead of being hospitalized as “insane,” has a new career. They do quite well in other respects, in daily life, and are often prodigiously creative.

In other words, without psychology, schizophrenia is not really such a problem.

Are You Going to Hell?

It's probably best to know before you go. Try the test, based on Dante's Inferno:

http://www.4degreez.com/misc/dante-inferno-test.mv

Reflections on the Elections in Iraq

Can the election in Iraq actually work?

Generals are always well prepared to fight the last war. So are the rest of us. Iraq, we all knew, was becoming “another Vietnam,” just as we once feared Vietnam could become “another Munich.” I myself have long felt the plans of the so-called “neo-conservatives” to bring democracy to Iraq dangerously naïve. Didn’t we learn in Vietnam that you cannot impose democracy from without?

Perhaps. But somewhere before Munich gave way in popular imagination to Vietnam, outsiders nevertheless successfully imposed democracy on Germany, Austria, Japan, and many former British colonies.

Progressives—including me--also say democracy is a cultural thing, that to impose it on Arab and Muslim culture is a kind of imperialism. What Westerners thought desirable was rejected in Vietnam, after all. Wasn’t it? Many argue that democracy similarly violates Muslim culture. They point to the absence of a functioning democracy anywhere in the Arab world.

But only a few generations ago, it was as fashionable to argue democracy was incompatible with German traditions.

Thirty years after Saigon, we now see functioning democracies in Thailand, in Taiwan, in Korea, in Japan, in the Philippines. It is harder now to believe it cannot work with Asian culture. Democracy was not on offer in Vietnam: the choice was military dictatorship or military dictatorship. Foreign support withdrawn, the more competent military won.

Saying Islam and democracy can’t mix is equally baseless. Muhammad was elected leader of Medina; the early Caliphs, his successors, were also elected. It is aristocracy that is alien: the equality of man is an essential Muslim doctrine. One of Islam’s criticisms of Christianity is its formal priesthood, which implies special privilege for a few: for Islam, all are equals before their creator.

It is hard, then, to see how Christian civilization fosters democracy in a way Muslim civilization does not.

Besides Christianity, there is the fabled classical heritage: the Wes tsupposes itself the inheritor of the democratic traditions of Greece. Not so: most of the Hellenized world, the empire of Alexander, from Alexandria to the Indus, converted to Islam in the seventh and eighth century, and the West was cut off for centuries. When classical traditions were recovered in the West, it was largely through Arab mediators. The world of Islam is the more direct inheritor of these Greek traditions.

Nor is Greece really the original home of democracy. That distinction probably belongs to Mesopotamia—ancient Iraq. Its early cities were participatory democracies long before Athens.

It is strange that the Muslim world, and Iraq, have lost very early and strong democratic traditions over the centuries. But Greece too knew military dictatorship as recently as the 1970s.

Now, without the notice it deserves, a stiff wind is blowing in the Arab world. The trend to democracy is everywhere, since the Cold War ended; but recent events in Iraq have probably hastened it, just as Paul Wolfowitz and the other “neo-cons” predicted. Saudi Arabia has just held its first-ever local elections. Oman held its second free elections at almost the same time. Morocco, Kuwait, Jordan, and Bahrain have held elections recently; Jordan’s monarchy proselytizes for democracy in the region generally.

And, speaking from this vantage point in the Persian Gulf, the man in the street and the driver in the taxi seem to genuinely want it. Everybody likes Karzai; nobody likes Saddam or the Taliban.

It may not be the neo-cons who are out of touch with foreign culture. It may be the Vietnam generation.

Democracy might yet be stillborn: fundamentalist Shiite movements might indeed sweep the polls. Hitler too was democratically elected, and Khomeini’s fundamentalist revolution in Iran had wide popular support.

But this is a vicious circle: it is the absence of democracy that sustains such movements. When opposition is prohibited, the agenda of any opposition movement must include violence. When political organization is outlawed, religious organizations provide the obvious cover. Compare Poland in the Cold War: the Catholic Church became the centre of resistance to the Communist regime. No wonder the commissars of China fear the Falun Gong.

Then, in a society where opposition is considered treason, a direct assault on authority is far riskier than attacking foreigners allied to them. Hence a domestic opposition may go after the US or “the West.”

So, there is good reason to believe that America’s project of democratizing Iraq can work not only for Iraq, but will really reduce the threat of terrorism against the US itself. And may be the first domino to rise in a renewed Near Orient. Iraq, after all, has a lot of oil, and Baghdad was once the capital of Islam. It ought to be a wealthy nation.

The Bush administration may still be wrong; to my mind it is still a pretty gutsy call. But at the least, this is not unthinking prejudice. There is method in their neo-conservatism.

The Future

There’s been a lot of news of the future recently: things that sound as though they might be straws in the wind.

Just today in the paper was a report from a conference of scientists predicting that human beings should be able to expect a normal 1,000 year lifespan in about twenty five or fifty years. Probably just far enough off that I won’t be in on it, and that is perhaps just as well. I wonder what the emotional burdens might be of living that long.

It would certainly be a change. Can you imagine Michelangelo still being around, or Shakespeare? Even the English language hasn’t really been here so long as a thousand years—not to mention the Americas as we know them. The implications boggle the mind.

Also in the news a few places this last week was the idea of fully automated robot war. War with no human casualties.

At least on one side. All played like a video game from a safe distance.

I’m not sure this would hold in a life-and-death struggle between fairly evenly-matched enemies. At some point the robot screen would be used up and you’d be down to more primitive means.

What else? One of my own theories is that the General Practitioner is as dead as the dodo. It’s just that nobody has realized this yet. All any doctor but a surgeon does is diagnosis and prescription, and any decent computer program can do this better than a human can. All we need is computer terminals, pharmacists to fill prescriptions, surgeons, and the various lab specialties.

Save a huge amount of money too. And this is part of the dynamic that I think makes it likely. Doctors are vulnerable because they have made themselves so expensive. This increases the incentive to try to find an alternative.

And, with government-funded socialized medicine, it is governments paying the bills. That is a powerful and well-coordinated opponent if they decide to save this money.

World hunger? Truth is, we already have more food than we can eat. But future potential here, with genetic modification, seems infinite.

Genetic modification ought also to make it easy to produce all the cheap fuel we want: just engineer an organism that produces petroleum as a waste product, but feeds on any old given thing we do not want: corn husks, whatever.

Or trees. Worried about the loss of forests? Why not a genetically engineered tree that grows to maturity in six months?

The extermination of species? The Tasmanian museum just gave up an attempt to revive the extinct Tasmanian Tiger using old DNA and cloning, but still says it should be theoretically possible. It’s just that the particular DNA they were relying on has become to degraded for present technology. Give this technology a few years, and we should see lots of old friends back. Imagine zoos featuring dodos, mammoths, and passenger pigeons.

Many people still do not seem to realize that world overpopulation is not a problem. First, as noted, we have all the food we can eat. Second, world population is expected, on present trends, to level off at about 2050, then begin to decline.

Of course, this does not take into account the possibility of thousand-year lifespans suddenly entering the mix.

Nor does it take into account further plagues like AIDS. Note the ominous news of a new, drug-resistant strain.

The pendulum is now swinging fast in the US against “liberalism” and towards “neo-conservatism.” I expect this to spread fairly quickly to the rest of the developed world. I predict the Conservatives to win the next Canadian election, whenever it is held. Things that are now still risky to say will soon become received wisdom. Don’t put your money in environmentalism, gay rights, the women’s movement, or secularism.

Down But Not Out

Apologies to those who follow this blog regularly, and with bated breath--hi Mom!--for my recent inactivity. I have been struck with amoebic dysentery, a fringe benefit of living in one of the sunnier parts of the globe.

This has lowered my energy level a bit. Can't even peel my own grapes.

Matter and Spirit

Dear Abbot:

It seems to me that you equate 'mental' with 'spiritual.' I do not see how knowledge of the existence of self requires the existence of spirit (or soul).

Costello

Dear Costello:

What distinction are you making between "mental" and "spiritual"? As I understand it, when we are talking about man's non-physical part, the terms "mind," "spirit," and "soul" are interchangable, just as, on the other side of the equation, I could use "physical," "material," or "sensory." Although the meanings are a bit different. When we're down to such distinctions, I suppose I'd see the soul as our emotional being, the spirit as our essence as free willing beings, and the mind as our awareness or consciousness. But any one could be used as the more comprehensive term.

Whether the soul, spirit, or mind are immortal is, though, a separate question.



Dear Abbot:

If reality is entirely mental, why can't we change it to suit ourselves?

Isle of Man


Dear Isle of Man:

To say that our immediate reality is mental is not the same as saying we can control it. As Descartes immediately discovered, he is not the sole creator of his thoughts.

There's a nice little Zen experiment to demonstrate this. Imagine you have a dire illness. There is only one cure. But it only works if, when taking it, you do not think of a monkey.

So far, nobody has been able to take it successfully.

Father Knows Best

“Father Knows Best” was a popular TV show in my distant youth. Can you imagine a show with that title today?

Not that fathers got it all their won way. A popular comic strip from the same time was “Bringing Up Father.”

But today, it is absolutely obligatory that fathers be portrayed as hapless and doltish, and women as brilliant and resourceful.

This marred the otherwise wonderful film “The Incredibles,” which I went to see recently.

It was heavily based on the old Fantastic Four from Marvel comics, circa 1960. The Mole Man appears at the end of the episode, from underground, just as he did on the final page of one of those early Fantastic Four comics. Violet, the daughter, has the same powers as the FF’s Invisible Girl: invisibility plus the ability to create force fields. Elasti-girl has the powers of Mr. Fantastic, while Mr. Incredible is the Thing. The baby, Jack Jack, is the Human Torch.

The FF was also a family outfit: Mr. Fantastic was married to Invisible Girl, just as Mr. Incredible is married to Elasti-girl. The Human Torch was her brother; he is their son in the movie. And they went through the same sort of trials and tribulations, at one moment popular, at the next scorned by the general public.

But the one big shift is that Mr. Fantastic was the brains behind the outfit. That won’t do for a male lead role these days: he had to be replaced as male lead by the Thing, a big lummox; and his wife has to be the brains. He must screw up, and be rescued by the women of the family. His daughter speaks of the need for him to learn a lesson.

Just the same thing happened to the recent film adaptation of the classic children’s book “The Polar Express.” As a book it is the story of one boy, who struggles with the question of belief in Santa. For the film version, it is breaded out with more child characters, most notably an assertive boy who is told, almost in so many words, that he should shut up and follow (“learn” is the word used) and an assertive girl who is told, conversely, she should speak up and “lead.”

That’s the progress we’ve made in “sexual equality” since the early Sixties. Then, the matter was case by case; now, women always outrank men, on the basis of their sex.

And this is what we are systematically teaching to our young. I hope they have the good sense to rebel.

Things are a little better on “Cartoon Network.” Thankfully, it lacks a high didactic purpose. “Johnny Bravo” is a shamelessly racist and sexist parody of the white male stereotype. “Ed, Edd, and Eddy” push the stereotype of male scruffiness and uncouth; they are regularly excluded from polite female society and ignored by everybody. But at least things are seen from their perspective.

And other shows on “Cartoon Network” tend to give the underdog’s point of view. They at least illustrate male frustration. This, of course, is why moms don’t want you to watch this stuff. It’s subversive. In “Dexter’s Lab,” Dexter, though absurdly brilliant, is ignored by his parents and adults generally in favour of his vacuous sister. In “Codename: Kids Next Door,” a boy, Nigel, leads a mixed gang in rebellion against adult oppression and conformity. Girls are welcome but not dominant. “Samurai Jack” seems fully comfortable with masculinity; but also seems to be a foreign import.