PeaceVision

Wall Street's Reaction...

2011-08-08T17:08:00.003-04:00

During the past two days, Wall Street has expressed deep disappointment with the US Economy. Many pundits are saying that the problem is that the debt-limit deal didn't go far enough in cutting future deficits, and hence there is a growing concern over the ability to pay back our sovereign debt (as evidenced by S&P's downgrading to AA+). Yet I find that argument difficult to swallow because investors are fleeing equities and, aside from gold, they are choosing to put money into US Treasury bonds.

It would seem instead, that the real problem besetting Wall Street is the failure of the US Economy to build a broad based recovery in which everyone participates, not just the wealthy few. Perhaps they have finally concluded that if the customers don't have jobs, they can't buy products. The real unemployment rate is substantially higher than the 9.2% advertised. The number of underemployed is much higher than that.

The problem I see is that the economy has split into two parts -- a "real" economy in truly useful goods and services that is still deeply mired in recession, and a "speculative" or "shadow" economy of financial derivatives and consolidated debt instruments that had, until recently, enjoyed a wonderful recovery. As these two economies have diverged, there is less and less incentive for the disenfranchised in the "real" economy to keep propping up the wealthy in their "shadow" economy.

Out of survival instinct, T.C. Mits (George Gamow's term for "the common man in the street") may disengage from the formal economy and engage more in a less formal, but more substantive local economy. If this disengagement were complete, it would leave banker tycoons holding bags of worthless money (or in modern equivalent, computers full of worthless digital bits in their account balances), but it isn't likely to be that way -- satisfying though that picture might seem. Instead, we may see some long overdue deflation in the financial economy. It is time for the financial bubble to burst and this "tail" to stop wagging the dog.

George Orwell's thoughts on publishing Animal Farm...

2011-08-01T23:01:00.002-04:00

When I was a high school student, growing up during the Viet Nam era, I read George Orwell's Animal Farm. The curriculum presented it as a critique of communism in general, and the Soviet Union in specific. The events between the Russian revolution and World War II were not so familiar to us, having only touched briefly upon them in history class. It was not mentioned, at the time, that George Orwell was, himself, a socialist and was writing his critique from the liberal left point of view. He notes in his preface, which was not published with the volume I read, but is available here,

But now to come back to this book of mine. The reaction towards it of most English intellectuals will be quite simple: 'It oughtn't to have been published'. Naturally, those reviewers who understand the art of denigration will not attack it on political grounds but on literary ones. They will say that it is a dull, silly book and a disgraceful waste of paper. This may well be true, but it is obviously not the whole of the story. One does not say that a book 'ought not to have been published' merely because it is a bad book. After all, acres of rubbish are printed daily and no one bothers. The English intelligentsia, or most of them, will object to this book because it traduces their Leader and (as they see it) does harm to the cause of progress. If it did the opposite they would have nothing to say against it, even if its literary faults were ten times as glaring as they are.

He goes on to say:

there is now a widespread tendency to argue that one can only defend democracy by totalitarian methods. If one loves democracy, the argument runs, one must crush its enemies by no matter what means. And who are its enemies? It always appears that they are not only those who attack it openly and consciously, but those who 'objectively' endanger it by spreading mistaken doctrines. In other words, defending democracy involves destroying all independence of thought. This argument was used, for instance, to justify the Russian purges.

It is quite interesting to me that such ideological-fratricide is common to both the liberal left and the conservative right. I wonder whether all this Blessed Unrest we have had, between the Arab Spring, the Euro-zone and American debt crises, and everything else, will once again be followed by ideological purges and consolidation by a fascist elite. I certainly pray it is not.

Return of the Drachma

2011-06-21T00:01:00.005-04:00

The Greek debt crisis has cornered all the headlines once more. As the bankers wring their hands over the dwindling ability to wring their interest out of the Greek citizens, the rest of the world waits, somehow knowing that this fate awaits all countries who have borrowed more than they can pay. The economists clamor that austerity is the only way, but the citizens protest that there must be another way. Indeed there is. The country can withdraw from the Euro zone, and this will be the first stroke knocking down the house of cards that was built by the bankers. I, for one, will not weep for them, though my own net worth may suffer. We can no longer afford to have a monetary system that is based on debt. There is no way to sustain it. Greece, Ireland and Portugal have discovered this the hard way. They will eventually have to rebuild a self-sufficient, local economy. How long before we, in the United States, come to grips with this issue?

Foreign Trade Zones

2011-01-29T13:58:00.003-05:00

The Tea Party and Libertarians are making noise about the number of Foreign Trade Zones that have been established. While the hype is that this is allowing cells of Chinese communists to establish a foothold in the country and prepare for a take-over, I find the reality even more alarming.

These FTZs are a deal between multinational corporations and our governments. Local, state and federal government are all colluding on this. Governments grant highly favorable tax treatment in exchange for the corporations locating plants and operations in the US. If you examine the list on the .gov site linked above, you'll see companies from all over the world – Krupp, DeGussa, Mercedes-Benz (Germany), Hyundai (S. Korea), Mitsubishi (Japan), and lots more, so its not just China. Many of the franchises are held by US corporations. Consider for example, the Philadelphia Shipyard FTZ in my backyard:

FTZ No. 35 Philadelphia
Grantee: Philadelphia Regional Port Authority
3460 N. Delaware Avenue, Second Floor
Philadelphia, PA 19134

35B Merck

35C Sun Company

35D ConocoPhillips

35E Aker Philadelphia Shipyard

With the exception of Aker (Norway), these are US corporations.

In order to promote global trade we are essentially granting “fiefdoms” to multinational corporations, wherein they enjoy tax immunity or abatement.

The claim that there are no jobs for US citizens within the FTZs is just nonsense. Lots of US citizens work at these companies at the Philadelphia Shipyard (I know several) and they pay taxes to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and the IRS. The problem of course, is that Aker, Conoco, Sun and Merck, and perhaps some foreign national executives who work there, are NOT paying their full share of taxes.

I think that what we are witnessing is a new world order of a different kind, in which there is more power sharing between so-called sovereign governments and multinational corporations. The corporations have a lock on the wealth, and the sovereign governments have a lock on the people. The sovereign governments are becoming puppets of the corporations. It used to be that all politics was local, nowadays, all politics is theater.

Is BP a "person" or an "angel"?

2010-05-25T12:48:00.003-04:00

Much to the consternation of some, our Supreme Court Jesters have decided that corporations are persons and deserve the right to spend their millions on "free" (i.e. political) speech. Apparently the Bible thinks of certain corporations even more highly, because clearly in Revelations, BP is likened to an angel…

Revelations 16:3 "The second angel poured out his bowl on the sea...and every living thing in the sea died."

Community Gardening at Old Haverford...

2010-05-04T00:43:00.003-04:00

So as of May 1st, the Friends Community Garden is officially open for the season! This project grew out of a plan for beautifying the burial ground of this old Quaker Meetinghouse along Eagle Road in Havertown PA. The landscape architect of the project suggested some years ago, that we consider placing the unused rear portion of the land in service as a community garden, or just let it become meadow. The Meeting approved the former plan, and now we have 20 gardens of 500 square feet each, tilled and planted.

Local food is so important in sustaining a community. First, of course, there's the food it provides. This food -- grown without petrochemical fertilizers and pesticides -- is healthy to eat, but it also didn't require as much fuel to get it to the consumer's table. Secondly, there's the community building effect of gardening with your neighbors -- sharing tools, tips, and advice, as well as the occasional zucchini or tomato. Thirdly, there's the lowering of our dependence on foreign oil. The ability to grow food locally helps a community to be more resilient in the face of economic stress or natural disasters elsewhere in the world. Since modern supermarket food travels thousands of miles to feed you, it often the case that storms and other natural disasters can disrupt our food supply, even though they occur in far away places. Finally, there is the economic benefit. For gardeners who grow more than they need, it can provide a small income, or they may donate their excess to local food banks easing the burden on those less fortunate.

Community gardens encourage "permaculture" rather than "monoculture." In the midwest, the only type of corn that is grown is the one or two strains that are most productive and most disease resistant. However, if a new pest arrives that can get past those genetically engineered defenses, then thousands of acres of food supply can be wiped out. In permaculture, each small gardener decides which variety to plant. Many explore heirloom varieties that are particularly adapted to the local conditions. Moreover, most gardeners plant a variety of different crops in their plot, so they can have variety in their diet. An on-site compost pile provides for recycling the nutrients in the soil. All in all, this is a great start to a more resilient community!

Happy Fossil Fools Day!

2010-04-01T21:38:00.007-04:00

A number of people I meet ask me if I believe in global warming. Others ask if I believe it is caused by human activity. I believe both. For much of our existence, humans have considered the air to be an inexhaustible resource. We learn that there is a symbiotic relationship between the plant and animal kingdoms that keeps the levels of carbon dioxide and oxygen in balance. Plants convert energy from the sun, along with carbon dioxide and water, into simple sugars and oxygen through the process of photosynthesis. On the other hand, both animals and plants use the sugars produced by photosynthesis, and combine them with oxygen to obtain the energy they need. The chemical equation for photosynthesis looks like this:

The arrow goes from left to right for photosynthesis, and in the other direction for respiration. As long as there was as much photosynthesis as respiration, everything stayed pretty much the same.

But when the industrial revolution came along a few hundred years ago, we started doing something besides just breathing. We started burning carbon in the form of coal we dug out of the ground. Between 1900 and today, we have gone from burning about 500 million metric tonnes (1.1 trillion lbs) of fossil carbon (oil, coal & gas) annually, to more than 8000 million metric tonnes (17.6 trillion lbs) annually -- a 16 fold increase.

All of this industrial carbon burning has the effect of increasing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, without a balancing increase in the number of plants doing photosynthesis. And increasing the CO2 level has the effect of trapping more of the sun's energy here as heat. During the day, sunlight passes through the atmosphere and is absorbed by the earth, but at night, the warm earth radiates this heat back into space as infrared energy. CO2 molecules absorb the infrared that was leaving for space, and emit it back at the earth, making the earth warmer.

Not only are we dumping more CO2 into the atmosphere, we -- by virtue of our increasing population, and our need for more food, shelter, and fuel -- have been cutting down forests at an alarming and increasing rate. According to Mongabay, an organization devoted to raising awareness of wildlife and wildlands, we are currently cutting down forests at the rate of 80,000 acres a day! This wood is being used for many purposes, one of which is fuel, but the problem is that the forests were extremely efficient at photosynthesis, while the land use after deforestation is far less effective at offsetting our industrial carbon bonfire.

So, think of the atmosphere as if it were a big balloon. We've increased our burning of fossil fuels 16 times over the last hundred years, dramatically increasing the addition of CO2 to the balloon. Meanwhile we've been cutting down the forests, and not replanting them, dramatically decreasing the rate of converting the CO2 back into oxygen and sugar. It's no wonder that CO2 levels have risen from a pre-industrial level of 285 ppm to the current level of 387 ppm (parts per million).

The point is we have to start thinking about the air we breath as a finite and precious resource. We can't dump CO2 or pollution into it forever and expect nothing to change. We've been fossil fools to burn so much of the fossil fuel, it seems. Now is the time to change.

Suppose Ben Franklin were our delegate to Copenhagen?

2010-03-31T10:21:00.002-04:00

This post was sent to the Philadelphia Inquirer as a letter to the editor during the Copenhagen Climate Conference (7-18 Dec 2009). Needless to say, they chose not to publish it, so here it is for those who care:

Philadelphia’s own Benjamin Franklin is rumored to have said: “Beer is proof that God loves us” and though his observation is the likely result of enjoying the fruits of fermentation, it is true in another sense as well. As our leaders meet in Copenhagen to discuss the climate crisis, one imagines what Franklin might say to them. He might point out that beer provides an accessible model for understanding the pickle we’re in. In making beer, one begins with a vat of water, malt, hops, and yeast. The malt provides sugar which feed the yeast, which they consume and turn into CO2 and alcohol, giving beer its carbonation and its “kick.” While the sugar supply is plentiful, the yeast population grows exponentially, until they have either consumed all the sugar or have increased the alcohol content to a level that is toxic to themselves. The yeast colony then collapses and most of them die.

We happily siphon the beer off the top, bottle it, and enjoy it without care or concern for the billions of yeast who gave their lives for our pleasure. To understand the analogy, picture us as the “yeast,” and oil as the “sugar.” We burn the oil and produce greenhouse gasses, which have the same effect as the “alcohol” building up in our vat – the planet, mother-earth, our home. So Franklin's question would be this: "Can we humans act more intelligently than so many yeast in a vat of beer? Can we agree on reasonable limits on greenhouse gas emissions? If so, then perhaps beer really is proof that God loves us!"

Shoulda' Woulda' Coulda'

2008-09-18T13:01:00.003-04:00

There's just one regulation I wish we had 3-4 years ago, and that is the following: The only kind of mortgage instruments available for owner-occupied, primary residences are fixed-rate, level payment loans. No ARMs, no balloons, no fine print. Think how much of the present turmoil would have been avoided!

Of course, the economy depends on "growth" and to fuel that growth, the pirates in power look for any equity nest eggs they can steal. They saw a great possibilities in the housing market. For most people, most of their net worth is tied up in the house they are living in. So the market invented the sub-prime ARM -- where one refinances at a "teaser rate" with low payments for a year or two, followed by a ratcheting up to the usual usury (typically described only in the fine print.) As long as the housing market continued to increase in value, the defaulting home owner could be sacked and the seized property then sold at a handsome profit. But it didn't work out that way. Perhaps there is some justice in the universe, however, because the financiers are now holding the (nearly empty) bag.

This is world that has been turned on its head, and to see this Republican administration using taxpayer resources to bail out these venerable thrift (or is it 'theft') institutions, is highly amusing. As the Rolling Stones said, "just as every cop is a criminal, and all the sinners saints..." so it would appear that every Republican is a Democrat, at least in terms of deficit spending. Too bad their spending isn't on things that do the average fellow any good. A trillion on the war in Iraq, a trillion for friends on Wall Street, but not much for schools and health care and the homeless folks who've lost their houses. I guess the political minions of the captains of finance have once again chosen mammon in spite of all their high minded talk.

Frankly, I don't care that much because a dollar isn't worth a damn anyway, so why get excited just because we're talking about trillions of them?

Good Tidings of Great Joy...

2007-12-07T16:34:00.001-05:00

And as we run ourselves ragged in this 2007 Christmas Season, trying to buy all those expensive gifts for everyone on our list, with our credit cards maxed out and the interest rate on our sub-prime mortgage about to reset and dump us into bankruptcy with Chapter 7 now out of reach for all but a few... remember that the message the angels sang was: "Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men."

How is this orgy of consumerism helping us to achieve the angels' proclamation? Have you asked yourself who made those gifts under the tree? Was it children in China or sweatshop workers in Malaysia? How much oil was used just to get them to your door by Christmas eve? Are we celebrating the birth of the savior, or sacrificing our souls to Madison Avenue and the god of consumerism?

How does this contribute to the attitude of outsiders toward our American ways? Do you care? Should you?

Remember a simpler time, when Christmas morning brought a stocking with sweets, and orange and sometimes a new scarf or sweater that was actually made by the person giving it... Are extravagant gifts a suitable substitute for something that was handmade and heartfelt? Simplicity can save the world, by conserving our resources and using them wisely in a sustainable way. Isn't that what a savior would want?

Love, Peace and Joy to you this Christmas!

FDRs words ring true...

2007-10-19T09:40:00.000-04:00

The only thing we have to fear, is fear itself... So said FDR in his 1933 inaugural address, but it is still true today. For the opposite of peace is not war, as Tolstoy implied, but fear. It is fear that leads us into violence. Violence is seldom the response of one who truly has nothing to fear. More commonly, it results from an attempt to banish fears, be they real or imagined.

For people of faith, it is an easy thing to put aside violence. For the early Friends, and for many others, once you have had a direct experience of unity in the Light, you need never fear for your spiritual security again.

The vision quest of this work is to find a way to articulate the message of Peace so compelling that it convinces those who are divided by their fears to come together and talk to one another, rather than being driven further apart.

We think of fear and hopelessness as touching the powerless. But it also underlies the behavior of those in power. It was fear of the United States that drove the Kremlin to financially exhaust their state in the nuclear arms race of the later 20th century. It was fear of the loss of oil revenues that drove the current regime into a foolish war with Iraq. What drives someone to amass fortunes so large that they can never ever spend even a small fraction of it in their lifetime? Fear. What drives a person to ignore the needs of others who are different than them? Fear. And what drives a tribe, clan, or nation to take up arms against innocents? Fear.

Some of those in power understand this primal relationship between fear and violence. They manipulate us through it. Are you afraid?

Excessive Excess...

2007-08-15T13:23:00.000-04:00

There are no extra notes in a Bach Fugue...
There are no extra words in a Shakespeare Sonnet...
There is no extra wood in a Shaker Table.

If these examples of economy and simplicity are hailed as great achievements of Western art and culture, then why then are we, in the West, so enamored of excess?

More isn't always better.

Cutting out excess takes time, but improves the impact of the written word, as Pascal noted in one of his letters: "I have only made this letter longer because I have not had the time to make it shorter" Likewise, cutting out excess from our daily lives takes some thought, but can lead to improvement rather than impoverishment.

The Almighty Dollar

2007-06-19T17:38:00.000-04:00

One of the ways in which the powerful maintain their authority is to control the medium of economic exchange -- in this country, the "dollar." The United States Constitution, in Article I, Section 8, states:

"The Congress shall have Power [...] To coin Money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin, and fix the Standard of Weights and Measures;

To provide for the Punishment of counterfeiting the Securities and current Coin of the United States;"

Now of course, all of this makes perfect sense when one considers the founding fathers (and mothers) had just left Europe where the monarchies routinely debased and inflated their currencies to cover war debts and dissipative excesses, so these powers are not given to the President, but instead to the Congress. Nevertheless, they eventually debased it anyway, and let Presidents manipulate it too.

Money was invented to eliminate the need for direct "tit-for-tat" exchanges in a barter economy. "I'll trade you seven pigs, two chickens, and this pocketknife for your 2 year old prize bull." Historically, precious metals like gold and silver were used, because they were relatively easy to identify, and fairly limited in supply. In 1792 the US established coinage standards, then in 1873 a gold standard at fixed exchange rates that were modified from time to time, before the gold standard was abolished altogether by Richard Nixon in 1971. Since then, we have had a paper fiat currency with no inherent value at all, other than that determined by what you will trade for it. In fact, since modern day transactions are largely completed using "paperless" methods (bank debit cards, credit cards), the currency is largely just "1"s and "0"s in our banks' computers.

For how many such "1"s and "0"s do you trade your day of labor?

And with the powerful in control of the banking system, the fear of being "wiped out" (having your "1"s erased and being left only with the "0"s) is a powerful factor in influencing group behavior. Perhaps this is why Jesus chased the money changers from the temple. As a society, we have become entirely too preoccupied with something that has no inherent value!. Learn to look beyond the pictures of George, Abraham, Andrew and Benjamin, to see the people who are really controlling you.

What is the Peace that is Possible

2007-05-24T12:01:00.000-04:00

Thoughts on Violence and Quaker Testimony

by Alden Josey

Violent behavior of any kind has been so thoroughly rejected in Quaker tradition, and the futility of violence as a means of solving problems so thoroughly stressed, that a pervasive negative feeling surrounds this subject and makes many who seek to follow the Quaker way want to eliminate violence totally from their lives. Who would question the desirability of eliminating violent and destructive behavior and its twin roots of rage and hatred? However, it is necessary to make a critical distinction between feeling and action; controlling and eliminating violent action has benefit in the personal and collective realms, but suppressing and denying emotions, whether positive or negative, leads to neurosis in the former realm and to insidious forms of conflict in the latter.

The Quaker testimony on peace and non-violence derives directly from the central assertion that there is a Divine principle at the core of every human personality. Violent action, of whatever kind, against another is a blasphemy, an act against the God principle in life. During the persecutions of the Restoration period in England, 1660-1672, Friends in England were subjected to extreme violence by the government, ostensibly because they were held to be a seditious sect that threatened the hold of the King on state power. Beyond that, their religious ideas and practices were felt to be a clear threat to existing institutions of religion and social order. Under the weight of the most severe distraints and punishments, Friends tried with amazing courage and general success to keep to their vision of the sacred core of individual life and spiritual community and to live out its implications, privately and publicly.

Re-thinking the problem of violence, either inter-personal or inter-communal, in the light of modern depth psychology reveals, first of all, that powerful negative emotion and its violent expression are archetypal in nature. That is, they reflect a basic human experience of the world as well as a basic human tendency to respond to this experience.

Every individual experiences angry, aggressive emotion, and everyone has responded at times with violent feelings and perhaps with actions. No one is exempt from these archetypal structuring factors that are fundamental features of every human psyche. It would seem, then, that all are vulnerable to tides of violent feeling that may lead to violent action. Efforts to suppress, deny or split-off this psychic reality in the service of a moral imperative do not negate or dissipate it. Rather, they force it into the unconscious from which psychic location it becomes a Pandora’s box of troubles.

We are well aware of the varieties of overt violence. Covert violence, though it avoids certain physical expressions, is less than completely honest in the way that it hides emotional states. It can be as destructive in the infliction of pain and suffering through its forms of silence, withdrawal and virtual killing as a physical act. Equally dangerous to relationships of all kinds is the tendency for unconscious contents to be projected onto external figures and situations where one discovers one’s own shadowy demons in the behaviors of other people.

Denial of one’s violence in the form of “Who, me?” and an effort to assert one’s goodness fail the Quaker requirement to honor the Light in another. On the contrary, the real task is to transform the rage and violent feeling that are part of psychic life into constructive and creative forms, and to do this it is necessary to embrace it, at least to accept these as archetypal realities in human psychic life. To do this effectively, it is necessary to see violent emotions in a more fundamental way not prejudiced by negative, rejecting attitudes.

As psychic phenomena, rage and violence are manifestations of psychic energy constellated by certain experiences that the ego experiences negatively, for example, being publicly humiliated by an adversary. Psychic energy, or libido, is a neutral phenomenon until value is assigned by the ego in the form of a choice of action. It is useful to consider that violent feeling has a more primary aspect as psychic energy constellated by a particular experience. In this sense, it is a natural and inescapable fact of our human nature.

The violent outburst of affect or action with its destructive consequences, either overt or covert, is merely the expression of the psychic fact that a personality is unable at its present stage of development to assimilate or integrate the energy that is released. It is less true to say “I had a very violent reaction to..” than it is to say “A very violent reaction had me..”

Seen in another image, psychic energy liberated in violent affect and action has popped up outside the boundaries of the conscious personality, which cannot integrate it but rather is assimilated by it. A reasonable conclusion is that violent behavior in general is to be transformed most effectively by enlargement of personality, by a psychological development that frees one from the limitations and constraints of an inferior state. The most telling service to a Quaker principle of non-violence is conscious self-development.

In the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus is made to speak to this notion in a profoundly appealing metaphor:

Jesus said:
Blessed is the lion which
the man eats and the lion
will become man; and cursed is the man
whom the lion eats and
the lion will become man. [emphasis added]
Thomas, Logion 7

Perfect Peace in human relationships is an ideal state not achievable except in certain measure, and that measure is a reflection of the consciousness that is brought to the relationship space by all the parties. In seeking to live in a spirit of Peace, we do not reject our own paradoxical psychic nature with its constantly shifting refractions of dark and light. Rather, while owning these contradictions as our own, we choose to awaken to the permanent dialogue between them and to choose Peace, to “eat the lion” and not be eaten by it. We choose the Peace that is possible in us at every moment, letting the lion become man as a creative act of individual personality.

Revised 7 May 2007

submitted by: Alden Josey

The [Im]morality of the Warrior / Enemy Model

2007-05-19T12:32:00.000-04:00

by Keith Helmuth

As a[n] example of contributing to an “open focus” process, I want to amplify a theme on which I spoke briefly at the last meeting, and on which I am particularly drawn to work. In order to be fully serious about the task we have been given, it seems to me we have to recognize and address divergent and competing moralities. For example, we have to understand and respond to the morality that is now being reconstituted around the image of the “enemy” and the ideal of the “warrior.”

From a Quaker point of view this is a regression in psychosocial and societal development. The entire history of the Religious Society of Friends has been oriented toward the evolutionary transcendence of this tribal and dominator ethos. The sense of human solidarity, the sense of right relationship, and the sense of cooperatively shared commonwealth that Friends have traditionally incubated, and transplanted into the development of the modern world, is the heritage that we are now endeavouring to keep alive.

It seems more and more evident that this heritage is being deliberately and systematically sidelined by powerful interests that are planning for a future of enclave security and nomadic military domination and control of resources. It seems very unlikely this strategy will work in the long run, but, at the moment, this regression is in the ascendancy. Human solidarity and right relationship with regard to justice and equity is being eclipsed at the policy level by a dynamic of economic triage and social and environmental write off. Wealth and military power are more and more regarded as the determinants of the human future. Friends can only regard this as a betrayal of the Christian and humanitarian tradition. Spirit led analysis of this situation, and enhancing the countervailing influence of Quakerism, stand out as a potentially significant theme for our committee’s work.

The vantage point I have had on the publishing industry (both scholarly and popular) for the last decade has made me keenly aware of the concerted effort being made to portray war as normative human behaviour. The arguments that are being advanced for the necessity of military action and the militarization of culture are undercutting and eroding the culture of peace for which Friends and others have been working. In order to understand why this is happening, and be clear about the context of our response, we need to research this literature and understand this world view.

For example, on my desk are three new and relevant books:

The first is The Utility of Force: The Art of War in the Modern World by General Rupert Smith. Smith is a retired British Army officer. From the praise it has received, it appears this book, and the thinking it advances, must be understood by anyone working in war and peace studies.

The second book is War in Human Civilization by Azar Gat. Gat is a professor at Tel Aviv University. This book professes to “solve the riddle of war” by showing how it grows from general human desires that are everywhere more or less the same – hence the ubiquity of war, and the normative behaviour argument. The book is being extravagantly praised as the pinnacle of scholarship on the subject.

The third book is Savage Century: Back to Barbarism by Therese Delpech. The author is the Director of Strategic Affairs of the French Atomic Energy Commission. Her analysis appears to be profoundly observant and astutely critically with regard to the parallels between 1905 and the present time. She fears we are tending toward another catastrophic political and social breakdown from which recovery – this time, in any meaningful sense - may not be possible. We have here yet another serious, professional voice (in a steady procession of such voices) with deep holistic foreboding about the human future. Her last chapter is titled “The Human Soul Torn to Pieces.” Although she is dealing with the same world-historical factors of human behaviour as the other authors noted above, she offers a very different voice. (I am often struck by the difference between men and women with regard to this kind of analytic and policy judgment work. This may be an interesting sub-theme to consider.)

At the same time, there are a number of new studies that do not accept violent conflict and war as normative, and which argue for both a different interpretation of the human record and for the evolutionary potential of human learning and cooperative societal development. There is abundance of relevant, emerging work on which we can draw – if we choose to do so - for a fully rounded study of this theme. (I am not proposing that this theme become the dominant focus of our work, but only that it be taken up within the range of themes that may emerge.)

Coming back to the matter of divergent and conflicting moralities, I have been pondering a situation for which I can find no resolution, but with which I think Friends must deal, if only to gain a clear understanding. Our committee’s work may be a venue in which this dilemma can be explored and articulated.

Anthropological study introduces us to the reality of different value systems in different cultures. This fact was made real to me in an especially powerful way when, early in the American invasion of Iraq, a reporter put a microphone in front of an Iraqi father whose son had just been killed by American bombing. The father, who spoke clear English, shouted angrily at the American reporter: “You don’t understand! We are a people of revenge!” In that voice coming to me across the miles, I heard a deeply fervent moral reality. For that father to fail the code of revenge would be as much a moral failure for him as it would for a Buddhist to abandon compassion or for a Quaker to turn violent. How do we understand this reality in the context of the Quaker vision for peace? How do we see this moral reality within the ethos of human solidarity?

As Friends, we live in the conviction, as the songs says, that “any eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.” But the reality of the revenge code is not only profound, it is, seemingly, on the ascendancy. The deeply rooted and pervasive expression of this code argues powerfully for a “natural” or biological context. It certainly predates the rise of compassion, forgiveness, reconciliation, and cooperative problem solving as an emerging, ever widening moral code of societal development. There is a sense, it seems to me, in which this emerging alternative moral code is an effort to transcend the more deeply spontaneous moral code of revenge. The moral code of compassion and human solidarity relies on a strong element of learning and the sense that “human nature” is highly malleable. It can be seen as a revelatory step in relation to the unfolding energy and technology environments of human development. It can be seen as evolutionary divine guidance for human well being, and, likely, human survival.

But that Iraqi father, and his anguished cry from within a deep sense of innate moral reciprocity stops me in my tracks, and makes me ask; what is going on here? How can we be talking about the “evolutionary potential of Quakerism” in the face of this reality. It seems to me, among everything else we might do, we must somehow take this reality into account.

At the moment, the fulfillment of this emergent morality seems like a long shot. The question may be asked: Are Quakers, and all the other folks who have been working for this emergence, on a fool’s errand with regard to the human future. I think there is temptation in this direction, even among Friends. Fatalism is in the air. It hard not to breath it in. I am especially interested in the potential of our committee to work with this dilemma in a way that helps clarify and articulate a Quaker voice on the human future.

What is at stake is more than just the peace testimony. As already articulated by committee members, the root issue is integrity and the sense of being a vessel for emergent truth in a complex cultural world. Our world view about this truth is being put to the test. The key line in Fox’s peace testimony speech is, “the spirit of Christ is not changeable.” While this conviction provides solid footing in changing circumstances, the collective sense of this experience has itself been, and continues to be, a context of profound social change. Whether the societal changes that flow from the spirit of Christ can be maintained and further prosper is a real question. My sense is we are trying to answer this question in ways that help Friends keep faith and hope alive, and which links the Quaker voice effectively with the world wide movement for justice, peace and the integrity of Creation.

With that said, I will end on an up-to-the-minute bibliographic note. Paul Hawken has just published a truly marvelous book titled, Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming.

submitted by Keith Helmuth

Understanding and Wisdom

2007-05-11T09:19:00.000-04:00

Too many of us mistake
knowledge for understanding, and
learning for wisdom.

How much of our educational enterprise is geared toward impressing facts upon youthful minds? Little ones are natural learners, and their play is all about exploring the world around them and learning from it. And yet most of our acheivement tests, measure knowledge of facts. As children grow, we need to encourage them to develop understanding and wisdom, not just a mental cache of facts. Facts are useful, but not without understanding and wisdom.

Class Act

2007-05-08T22:58:00.000-04:00

Recently, I had the pleasure of listening to a talk by George Lakey, a visiting professor at Swarthmore College and director of the Training for Change organization.

His talk brought up some interesting points about the class structure we have in our supposedly "egalitarian" society. The education of each class is specialized. Much of the education in the US is based on a factory model, designed to turn out cogs that fit into a well-oiled "free-enterprise" machine. I had not realized how much of my early education was designed to train me to be a compliant working class citizen. The net result of this education is someone that is employable, and the word employ means "to shape to one's use."

The middle class, on the other hand, is educated to deal with change and to make decisions with limited information. They are educated to be managers, as well as teachers, nurses, engineers, and various other "occupations" that can effectively define and shape the work of the working class.

In addition to the working class and the middle class, there is another class entirely, which George described as the owner class. The education of owner-class children is conducted largely by private schools and is tailored toward giving them a broad brush knowledge of the world, and in giving them powerful connections with other members of their class. To paraphrase George, they don't have to actually know anything (since they don't actually have to do anything themselves), but they have to appear to know everything.

The class structure is organized so that the labor is done by the working class, who are educated and managed by the middle class, who organize the enterprises for the owner class. If one really wants to understand why we go to war, one must understand what is typically meant by the words national interest when uttered by a politician. It means the owner-class' interest. The war in Iraq is in the "national interest," or so we've been told. For the owner class that has been exploiting the oil resources of the middle east, the presence of oil-rich, rogue states in the Middle East represented a clear and present danger to corporate profits.

There is a hidden agenda for the uberrich, and it has to do with how we all embrace globalization. Do we become a cooperative global society, with basic human rights for all and the rule of law to protect everyone's rights and interests? Or do we become a global version of fuedal society in which we compete in some global jousting match, to gain advantage for our owner-class?

Group Dynamics and the Ising Model...

2007-05-03T22:38:00.001-04:00

In 1924, Ernst Ising developed a model for how the magnetic field of atoms are influenced by their nearest-neighbor atoms. What he discovered was that as the temperature is decreased below a critical value, there is a tendancy for regions of the material to align with all of their magnetic fields aligned "up" or all aligned "down."

Above that temperature, thermal vibrations act to flip the field of atoms randomly, and no long range order persists.

An interactive simulation of this model is available, and it demonstrates how a mixed state can prevail at some temperatures, with some areas of "up" and some of "down", but if the temperature is below the critical temperature, eventually one of these regions will win over, and become dominant.

To what extent does this model also describe the behavior of people in groups?
In 1996, Eugen Tarnow suggested that the conformity or independence of a large social group could be modeled in much the same way as the magnetic domains in the Ising model. He argued that there is a cost associated with disagreeing with others, and that you feel that cost more strongly if those you are disagreeing with happen to be close to you. You are more comfortable with disagreement at a distance. He also argued that there is an analogue to the temperature, in which a higher temperature would be associated with the group's willingness to embrace new ideas, think creatively, take risks, and so forth.

One thing that can influence how the Ising model will converge below the critical temperature, is the presence of an external magnetic field. If the force is sufficiently large, the model will always converge to agreement with the external field. In Tarnow's application to social groups, this is the role of the authority figure(s) that exert influence or control on the group. Whereas you feel the cost of disagreement most strongly with only your closest neighbors, everyone in the group feels the influence of the authority field equally.

Moreover, those who wish to exert the authority over the crowd are skilled at manipulating the crowd's "temperature" though they probably don't think of it this way. In a small group, music is often used to discharge some of the random energy of the group and put people in a mood that is more sympathetic toward the mood of others, and possibly the mood of those who wish to control the group. Another factor that can increase the willingness of the group to conform is fear. If the group is afraid, they are more likely to conform to group expectations.

The interesting thing about using this model to describe groups is that it can predict sudden shifts in behavior which seem otherwise inexplicable if one assumes each member of the crowd is thinking and behaving as an individual. These shifts are similar to a change in phase from liquid (where atoms flow freely around and past one another) to solid (where atoms move back and forth but seldom move past one another.) Tarnow described the liquid phase as a relatively individual, while the solid analogue was relatively conforming.

What does this have to do with Peace? It would seem that it has a great deal to do with peace or the lack of it. We have only to look to how the current administration capitalized on the general mood of fear and anxiety after September 11, 2001, in order to coalesce support for a war in Iraq that had virtually nothing to do with the World Trade Center attack. Those of us who stood publicly with War is Not the Answer signs can attest to the palpable enmity that we experienced from passers-by and neighbors for going against the general opinion, which in turn was heavily influenced by the "authority field" through their propaganda about weapons of mass destruction.

Many of us felt we were having little effect at the time, however, the presence of a small but significant number of determined pacifists has gradually helped to shift the political landscape, as the "authority field" has grown weaker through loss of credibility as scandals broke, and as a clearer picture of the actual threat or lack thereof, emerged.

The key, of course, is to recognize when an outside "authority field" is attempting to manipulate us, and to resist the urge to align ourselves with the group-state without prayerful meditation and laboring with the Spirit. After all, as Friends, we believe in a higher authority that is available to lead us, and we must follow that Inward Light. Some might call us Liberal Quakers, but liberalism keeps the crowd temperature high, and along with a liberal education, it makes it more difficult to lead us astray. Perhaps this is why the right-wing noise machine tried so hard to demonize liberalism.

Selfish Genes...

2007-05-01T23:40:00.000-04:00

How much of our conscious decision making is influenced by our Selfish Genes?, a notion popularized by Richard Dawkins in the 1970s. Dawkins contends that organisms act in ways that promote the probability that either their own, or closely related genes, will be passed on to future generations. Genes that improve the organism's chances of survival and reproduction are, in some sense, successful and eventually become widely represented in the gene pool. Genes that decrease the organism's chances should eventually disappear. For example, genes controlling skin pigmentation rapidly dominate as dark or light pigmentation, since these confer survival advantage in the tropics and in northern latitudes, respectively. Meanwhile, a gene that reduces an organism's probability of maturing to breeding age by even a few percent should virtually disappear from a population within a relatively small number of generations. Genetic disorders like sickle cell anemia survive because they confer a slight advantage when a person has one copy of the gene even though a double dose of the gene leads to expression of this fatal, recessive trait.

If we take these ideas at face value, it would seem that we humans might be engaged in all manner of aggressive behaviors in order to increase the prominence of our own genetic material in future generations. Among wild horses, when a young stallion succeeds in driving off or killing a rival stallion, he will also sometimes try to cause any pregnant mares to miscarry the previous stallion's offspring in order to increase his own chances of siring offspring on these mares sooner. Ugly behavior, but not uncommon. Among asiatic men, the preponderance of descendents of Genghis Khan, about 8%, far exceeds what can be explained by normal genetic diffusion, and underscores the "success" that similar ugly behaviors lead to in our own gene pool.

However, Dawkins goes on to point out that there are also many examples of altruistic behavior -- not only in our own species, but in many others, especially colony organisms such as bees, ants, and termites. In these, all the inhabitants of a colony share a large number of genes. In a bee hive during a cold winter, the workers cluster about the queen and buzz to keep her warm, though the outermost insects freeze to death as they exhaust themselves in this effort. Nevertheless, the surviving queen will pass on nearly all their genes to the next generation if she survives until spring.

Once again, we see examples of competition for advantage, and cooperation for advantage. Do we only cooperate and compete for advantage?

So the central question for us as seekers of the Truth, is how do we reconcile our selfish genes, which were key to our emergence as a species and, in the grand scheme of things, part of the Creator's design, with revealed behavioral guidance such as the Peace Testimony of Friends, or for that matter, the Ten Commandments? Even if we can do so for ourselves, how can we convince others of this when such powerful forces are at work? More soon, on group dynamics, collective behavior, and the physics of phase transitions!

Genetic algorithms

2007-04-28T00:12:00.000-04:00

In computer science a few years back, there was a lot of interest in Genetic Algorithms which employed a simple model of genetic evolution to search for optimal, or at least better solutions to a problem. To be useful, the problem at hand must be cast in such a way that the variables can be represented by a finite set of states. Often, these take the form of whether or not some aspect of the problem is to be included or excluded (binary variables) or is to be set in one of several possible states (integer variables.) These variables are then used to define a sequence, ultimately represented as ones and zeros, that forms the genetic sequence for the problem. Each region of the gene sequence codes for a different aspect of the problem.

The other feature of this approach is that, given a gene sequence, you need to be able to quickly model how well this instance of the sequence does in the current "environment." The environment is usually constant, but could change over the course of the optimization.

Next, you "seed" the model with a number of instances of the gene sequence, constructed using a random number generator (or your last run of the model, or whatever other way you like.) In each generation, you evaluate the success of each individual sequence with respect to the environment of your model. You then rank them from most successful to least, and remove the least successful half (or so) from your model. You take the remaining half, and pair them up randomly (or by score or any other scheme you like) and create two new instances in which the sequences inherit at random and on average, half of their variables from one "parent" and half from the other "parent." The two children are then often subjected to some small percentage of "mutations" in which one or a small percentage of the variables are altered at random. These "children" are then released into the population along with the successful half from the previous generation, and allowed to compete with their predecessors in the next iteration of the model.

This is Darwin's survival-of-the-fittest model, used to extract an optimal solution in a computer simulation.

But nature isn't all just dog-eat-dog competition. There are many examples where self-organizing systems are actually cooperating to enhance their mutual chance of survival or quality of existence.

Examples of this are found in our own cells, where the mitochondria which used to be independent bacteria millions of years ago, now live their entire existence within our cell walls, providing energy in exchange for the usual "food, shelter, and waste removal services." Speaking of dogs, the mitochondria giving up their freedom to live inside animal cells, is not too different than the way in which wolves, on at least three separate genetic strands (asiatic wolf, european wolf, and african wolf) adapted to cooperate with humans, and become our domestic dog breeds. Easier to provide a little assistance to the human hunters and herders, and maybe a little security alert now and then, than to have to hunt for your own dinner all the time.

So where and how does this cooperative behavior arise? Why aren't we more cooperative with one another?

Commentary on Arjuna and Krishna...

2007-04-27T15:00:00.000-04:00

Yesterday's post quoted a translation of the Bhagavad Gita, Mahabharata, in which a great battle occurs, and Arjuna, in the company of Krishna, comes to the realization that the armies arrayed against him are his brothers. I first read this passage in the 60's during the Viet Nam war, and while the passage goes on to show Krishna absolving Arjuna of guilt, I took a quite different message from it at the time.

Our youth had been shaped by years of listening to our parents and grandparents recount their lives through World War I, World War II, and the Korean Conflict with enemies referred to by pejorative names like "kraut," "gooks," "japs" and so forth. These had the effect of dehumanizing the enemy, to enable soldiers to overcome the revulsion of killing. No doubt, the soldiers on the other sides of these conflicts did the same thing.

To me and at that time, Krishna's message was that it was wrong to regard the enemy as subhuman. Only once you had fully recognized that your enemy is really your brother, were you to be held blameless for "law-minded" action. Not dehumanizing the enemy represents a great wisdom that modern societies would do well to embrace, but we can go further. We can move beyond even Arjuna's profound understanding.

A central belief of Friends(Quakers) is that there is "that of God" in each and every one of us -- friends and enemies alike. They are not only our brothers and sisters, but also possess an inner Light that transcends everyday experience. To do violence, even to a criminal, even in the name of law, is to deny forever that link with the Divine.

From the Bhagavad Gita...

2007-04-26T16:49:00.000-04:00

Both sides recruited allies and prepared for war. Diplomatic efforts persisted; Krishna offered a most reasonable compromise, and presented it most persuasively, but Duryodhana refused to give the Pandavas even enough land to cover the head of a pin. It is strange, but even now, even after two thousand years, readers of the story get the sense that at any time, right up to the end, if Duryodhana had come to his senses, then we would have had a totally different set of stories; there would have been no Mahabharata.

He did not come to his senses, of course, and the great war began. It was held on the broad plain of Kurukshetra - the field of the Kurus. There were 18 armies on the one side, the allies of Duryodhana and Dhritarashtra. The Pandavas and their allies mustered 12 armies. An army from Krishna’s tribe of the Vrsnis fought for Duryodhana. Krishna himself was a non-combatant; he had agreed to drive Arjuna’s chariot.

The day of the battle dawned clear, and the armies drew up on opposite sides of the field. Every warrior had his conch shell trumpet, and all were sounding. Imagine the shofar, twice or ten times as loud, and hundreds of them sounding at once. That is what it must have been like.

Arjuna told Krishna, "Take us out between the armies."

Krishna positioned the chariot halfway between the armies, and stopped. It was quieter there; both armies were distant; Arjuna looked out.

"I see my brothers there, my cousins, my uncles, the beloved sons of my beloved friends."

He swung around.

"And there also, there are my cousins, my uncles, the beloved sons of my beloved friends. They are all my brothers, Krishna. It cannot be lawful to kill them. I cannot kill them. I will have no part of this action."

Krishna answered. "There can be no blame for law-minded action, if you act with the proper dispassionate attitude. You must do the right thing, and be heedless of consequence."

Arjuna said, "Krishna, all those people are going to die. I will not be responsible for their deaths."

"Quite right," said Krishna.

"What do you mean?"

Krishna explained. "We act as instruments of dharma. Everybody on this field today is working out karmic dramas that extend back through lifetimes upon lifetimes. You and I, my best true friend, have been preparing for this battle for hundreds of lifetimes. I remember every one of them. You don’t."

Arjuna studied his friend.

"Krishna, who are you?"

And there was a flash of light, bright as a thousand suns, and Arjuna saw Krishna’s cosmic form as Narayana, one of the great gods. There, all at once, were all of the planets and all of the stars and all of the gods and all of the demons and spirits, gandarvhas and apsaras, all of the sages and saints, all of the priests and warriors, all that is and all that ever was and all that will be. Arjuna saw, and felt, endless perfect love swelling to fill the everything that Krishna had become. And he saw all the gory deeds that were ever done and the carnage that must come with time; he saw Krishna tall as mountains, black as night, his eyes blazing as he waded through rivers of blood, the mangled corpses of Duryodhana and his brothers dangling from his bloody jaws.

"Krishna, stop!" Arjuna fell to the chariot floor, his head in his hands. "Be just my friend again."

"But you see how it is, Arjuna," said Krishna, as he helped his friend up. "You cannot kill them, because they are dead already; their own actions have doomed them. You cannot be responsible for their deaths, because each one is responsible for his own death. In each lifetime, each one does what he has to do, and if he does it selflessly, in love of me, without regard for gain or loss, he may come finally to rest in my perfection and be free of the cycles of action and death.

"You are a warrior. You must fight. And you will bear the pain of action because you will be steadfast in your love of me."

"Let us continue," said Arjuna, and he sounded his great conch Devadatta.

Brahma and Shiva

2007-04-25T11:32:00.000-04:00

In the Hindu religion, the roles of creation and destruction are assigned to two different devas of the Trimurti. Brahma is responsible for creation, while Shiva handles destruction. Hinduism regards both of these processes as the province of the divine, while in western theology, creation is still a divine responsibility, but destruction is more often associated with evil or the devil. The Hindu point of view recognizes the need to tear things down, in order that new things may take their place, while the western model views the act of creation as a perfect expression of divine will, and therefore any attempt to destroy it would be against the will of God, therefore evil.

Hope and Fear

2007-04-23T15:10:00.000-04:00

Violence is born of Hatred, and Hatred is the child of Fear and Injustice.
Fear is born of Ignorance, and Ignorance never knew its' parents.

But Hope is the Virtue that springs from Understanding and Love.
Understanding comes from Being Present in the Moment, and
Love is a Gift of the Spirit...