Enough already!

When I was a very grown-up age of twelve, my mother told me she was pregnant with her tenth child.

I was furious and told her so in no uncertain terms:  ”You have enough children!”

I didn’t understand it then, but  I was really saying that I didn’t want to be a surrogate mother to a baby about whose arrival I had not even been consulted.  Of course, in my adolescent wisdom, I had no idea just how much I myself was gaining from being an older sister who, however great my ignorance may have been on any subject, was always less than those of my younger, lesser experienced siblings.  So I grew up with a self-confidence that was perhaps not always due solely to my superior abilities.

My mother did have her tenth child, of course, and though I at first refused to so much as change a diaper without sulking, I eventually discovered that I have a great deal in common with my youngest sister.  And among other things, we are agreed today that if one is going to be a member of a large family, being at the top or the bottom of the array is almost always less of a challenge than fighting for a separate identity as a squashed in-between.

So I am now most grateful that my mother did have her tenth child and that she is now my grown-up sister.

Thanks, Mom.  She really is a gift.  Just like you said.

Besides that, she’s arriving from America today for a ten-day visit.  So I’m taking a break from blogging.

 

Ignoring the question

When I was about ten years old, my brother Jack came home from first grade one afternoon, and told my mother that he had some homework.  It was, he said, to learn the first five questions of the catechism.

I’m sure by then my mother knew the first five questions by heart - Q:  ”Who made you?”   A:  ”God made me.”  Q:  ”Who is God?”  A:  God is the infinite, all-knowing, all-powerful, all-loving…” etc.  But she nonetheless sat down with Jack, opened his catechism and asked him:  ”Who made you?”  ”Who made you?” repeated Jack.  ”That’s right,” my mother replied, “who made you?  What is the answer?”

“Oh, we don’t have to learn the answers,” Jack said.  ”We just have to learn the questions.”

At the mature age of ten years, I thought this was so very funny.

But now I think how right this little brother of mine was.  As Roman Catholics, we belonged to the One and Only True Church, which in addition had just a century earlier infallibly declared itself infallible.  We had no need of questions;  we already had the answers.

And yet the questions are profound:  where did we come from?  why are we here?  where are we going?  Oh, those questions are worth learning.  They are worth a lifetime of pondering.

What a terrible loss to learn to skip over them before we had barely reached the age of reason.

Jack was right:  we have to learn the questions.

Reflections on blogging

Some time ago I took time off blogging in order to finish my latest book.  I did that, but somehow the rhythm of daily blogging was disrupted and I’ve never gotten back into the flow in the same way.

Why? I ask myself.  I’ve seen it happen to other personal blogs too.  They will be posting regularly sometimes for years, and then they dribble off.  I thought at first it was because I was trying to fit too many things into a single day.  That may have been true.  But something else changed too.

Instead of asking myself on a daily basis “what will I blog about today?”  I subtly changed the question to “Is there anything I feel would make a really good post today?”  9 times out of 10, my thoughts did not pass the muster.  If I keep this up, I think I might manage about 1 post a year in good years.

So I’m going to experiment with changing the question.  I really do want to blog less and read more, so I’m aiming to write 3 posts a week.  But on those days, I’m not going to ask myself if I have anything worthwhile to say.  I’m going back to my original question:  what am I going to blog about today?

This isn’t because I think the world needs my blogging.  But it helps me.  And many times the comments are a big bonus for my thinking out loud.  So blogging is worth while for me.  And I’m going to stop worrying about whether it’s making a contribution to the Greater Good.

I think a little itty bitty bit of good, even if it’s only for myself, is enough good to matter.

When less is more

When I was a young faculty member, I remember a faculty member who kept agitating for our department to teach a course in geriatrics.  How boring, I thought.  Who wants a course about old age when all the exciting things in life are finished.

Oh my my my.  How wrong I was.

Getting old is one of the most fascinating, unexpected, and often enjoyable experiences of my life.

Yes, neither my husband or I are suffering from some of the diseases that typically appear among the retired that can cause so much pain and distress.  And although we’re not rich, we are not poor and we don’t have to choose between eating and heating, which is my short-hand definition of poverty.

And many of the challenges of one’s younger years are already faced as well.  I don’t worry much anymore if people like me, if I’ve attractive enough, if my chosen career has any intrinsic value.

But getting old is also rewarding in itself.  Just having a life to live somehow seems more wonderful, more amazing.  And terribly surprising.  I find all sorts of things I never appreciated before are now quite beautiful.

I have less energy than I used to though, and I have developed a strategy that I find is essential if I’m not going to drive myself absolutely mad.  I get a great deal more satisfaction if I set goals for myself that are realistic in terms of what I can reasonably accomplish today – not what I could do even five years ago.

Less really is more.  I go to bed at night feeling much happier if I have accomplished my more modest achievements for the day than if I go over an impossibly long list of things I said I was going to do and didn’t.

All of which is a rather long explanation about why I’m not blogging every day anymore.

I do hope it’s included in the times when less is more.

The original garden view

I was taken aback when I was asked recently by a friend why anybody who doesn’t believe in God and in heaven and hell would bother trying to be good.  If there is no threat of punishment or promise of reward, why should we bother trying to be loving and generous?  Why bother being faithful and honest?  Why value truth above lies?

We’ve known each other for more than half our lives, and I thought my own answer to this question was clear:

Because human beings are happier if we love each other, if we are honest and truthful and trustworthy.

St. Augustine of Hippo concluded in the 4th century that the reason we humans suffer is because we are conceived in sin.  Adam and Eve were expelled from the Garden of Eden because they ate that forbidden apple, and God was so angry that He has punished every man, woman, and child ever since.  That, despite the fact that we are redeemed by the death of God’s own son.  We might be redeemed, but even innocent children are still being punished.

I don’t think that’s the meaning of the biblical story of the Garden of Eden, and I don’t think that’s the way the Hebrews, who did not believe in heaven and hell, understood its meaning.  I know that Augustine was trying to solve the problem of suffering, but he didn’t.  Turning God into an unforgiving, irrational tyrant doesn’t make sense.  Especially when at the same time one wants to argue that this is an all-powerful God of Love.

I think the Garden of Eden is a poetic answer to a question we all ask sooner or later – why is there so much suffering?  And I think the answer suggested by this ancient Hebraic parable is that we create much of our own suffering.  There are things we might want to do – figuratively eating the forbidden apple.  But if we do, we are ultimately going to be unhappy.  Profoundly unhappy.  Far more often than we want to admit, we create our own unhappiness.  We expel ourselves from paradise.  It is not God.  It is we ourselves who create our own hell.

I think Freud, who was Jewish, understood this.  As he was puzzling over patterns of unhappiness in people’s lives, he reached the conclusion that we so often are the authors of our own unhappiness.

It is Cain who murdered Abel, and the story is not that it made him happy.  So too, it is we who are bombing each other, it is we who are destroying so much of our environment, it is we who are untrustworthy, we who do not keep our promises.

It is we, not an eternally unforgiving God, who are the authors of much of our own discontent.

 

 

 

Misinterpreting the obvious

One of the things I find fascinating about living in Britain is the names of places.  It’s hardly unique that the names are often a short-hand for their location.  But what I find so endlessly surprising is that the short-hand so often goes back not just hundreds but thousands of years.

“Roman Hill” obviously got its name over a thousand years ago.  ”Cathedral Close” is close to the cathedral,”Stocks Lane” suggests the ancient location of the stocks used to humiliate and punish recalcitrants.   The meanings of  ”Boot Street,” “Cheese Place,” or “Westgate” might be obvious, but “Ludgate” is a little more elusive if one doesn’t know that Lud was an ancient Welsh god.

I assumed that our organic farm shop located on Bury Lane was among the obvious, and I asked our fish monger yesterday where the cemetery was – or at least had been.  He said that his knowledge went back no further than its long history as a fruit farm.

So I went to Wikipedia and discovered that “Bury” is an old English word for castle or stronghold, and is a precursor of the word borough.  Instead of looking for a cemetery, I should be looking for the castle.

So I think I must admit that my obvious interpretation of “Bury” was — ahem, are you ready for this? — dead wrong.

Wonderful blog!

It’s nice to get encouragement to keep blogging, but in the last several months, I have been getting an awful lot of what seem to be generic comments telling me what a great blog this is.

I’m beginning to get suspicious.  Is this a way of getting a general approval to make comments following my posts and so to get spam past the spam-screen?

The psychologist R. D. Laing described people who do not believe in themselves and so conclude that anybody who offers them a positive assessment must be either very needy themselves or very poor judges of character.

On the other hand, maybe I’m just getting cynical in my old age.  As we used to say during the Vietnam War protest years, “Just because I’m paranoid doesn’t mean people aren’t out to get me.”

And now what will we do?

Unlike the politicians in Washington who were accusing the attitudes and policies of each other for being responsible, Boston’s response to the marathon bombing has been restrained.

It will be interesting to see what happens now that the bombers have been identified.  Will the fact that they were ethnic Chechens who’d converted to Islam be the only thing that matters?  Will it matter that they came to the United States as 9 and 17-year-olds?  Will U.S. attitudes toward using violence to get what we want occur to us Americans?  In the 31 days following the Newton shootings killing 20 children and 8 adults, an additional 919 people have died as the result of guns.  An estimated 176 children have been killed by American drone strikes in Pakistan.  Is there any relationship between our attitudes and those who we call terrorists?

I hope the people of Boston are more like the people of Connecticut or Norway.

Massachusetts doesn’t have the death penalty.  I’m assuming that the surviving suspect will be tried under state law. Don’t know if he can be tried under federal law, and if so, if he could face the death penalty.

I hope not.  Not because I feel sorry for terrorists.  But because too many Americans think our strength is in having the biggest bombs and the most guns, rather than in implementing our principles of freedom and democracy without prejudice.

The other side of the bombs

Celebrating the death of Margaret Thatcher with joyous renditions of Ding Dong the Witch is Dead felt cruel to me.

But then there was the Boston Marathon bombing.

I felt horror and pain and outrage.  But there was a part of me that should help me understand the Ding Dong singers.  I found myself hoping that this bombing – awful as it is – might give Americans some insight into what it must feel like to be living in an Afghanistan village hit by an American drone strike.

Apart from that thought, which I confess gave me little comfort, I could see little that was positive in most of this week.

Then I read an article by William Rivers Pitt.  He was reminded of the advice given to frightened children:  ”Look for the helpers.  You will always find people who are helping.”

And so it was in Boston. Not just the police and medical professionals ran into the smoke.  Runners and people who’d come to cheer them on ran into the potential danger to help.  They used their own belts and scarves as tourniquets.  They literally saved lives.

In that sense, the bombers failed.  This was Boston, where they ran to the sound and the smoke to help each other.

No, I’m not a Pollyanna about all this.  I am too well aware that there was dancing in the streets in America when Osama bin Laden was killed.  I know the opposing parties in Washington have already begun to blame each other for the Boston outrage.

But at least not every impulse in the American psyche is to shoot first and worry about innocent victims after we have wrecked what we think of as our justified self-defense.  There are helpers.  There is heroic selflessness.  There is another side of the bombs.

 

Ding dong dummy

I have often been critical about people who put inappropriate comments and content on the internet.  Obviously, that includes child pornography, but also bullying on social networks, lying, and yes, theft.

As you can see by two of the comments following my post yesterday, I initially  included a photograph which had been copyrighted.  I’ve now removed it, and since my stats show that it was viewed by a maximum of six people, it is not now swirling around cyberspace in gay abandon.

But it is the property of a professional photographer, and it is embarrassing to have accidentally appropriated his work.

I hope that I can qualify as a good witch rather than a bad one.  Or as a good thief rather than a bad one.

Ding Dong the witch…

It is something of a shock, if not a surprise, to be living here in England listening to some of the unedited comments about Margaret Thatcher.  Hatred lives long and deep in the hearts of those who feel that she destroyed their communities, their jobs, even entire industries.  ”Ding Dong, the Witch is Dead” is reaching number one in the song charts, and people are drinking champagne to celebrate her death.

I personally think Margaret Thatcher saved Britain from becoming a much poorer country, but I can understand and respect those who disagree with her policies.  I can positively agree with those who feel that her methods sometimes seemed to lack compassion.

But she was a legitimate leader of the country, re-elected prime minister three times.  The lack of restraint in relation to those who disagreed with her seem to me to show a lack of respect for the very political freedoms of Great Britain and of which she is so justly proud.

Besides that, Margaret Thatcher has been out of office for 23 years.  She leaves children and grandchildren and many voters who benefited hugely from her policies.  Many of the comments are cruel, mean, coarse, arrogant, and ignorant.

Not, of course, that we ever engage in behavior distantly resembling anything like that in the United States.

We’re a gun culture after all.  Guns are much more effective than words.

Hail to the SUN!

I’ve never been someone who has felt I have to get out of the house.  In fact, ever since I learned to read, I could sit for hours with a book, un-tempted by the sunshine and fresh air outside.

But after a pitiful excuse for summer last year and then one of the longest, coldest, windiest, wettest, and dreariest winters I have ever known, I am now greeting the sun with awe.  I understand – and I do not exaggerate – how primitive people thought of the sun as a god.  I admit that I am now looking at the weather forecast with almost religious fervor.

And although I’m not suggesting that we return to offering our vestal virgins in sacrifice, I have foregone my postings on this blog this last week because the sun-god has returned.   I can’t ever remember feeling quite this exhilarated because I can walk out the door into sunshine and engage in what in other times I might have called “work.”

How long this will go on for, I don’t know.

But right now, if I have a choice between being on the internet or under the sun, the sun is winning.

Is slowing down a good idea?

Sometimes I find the economic naiveté combined with the self-righteous high-mindedness of the left-wing  irritating.  (You may have noticed.)

But yesterday I read a left-wing proposal suggesting that we re-instate the 55-miles-per-hour speed limit that struck me as eminently sensible.

• Cars on average are about 25% more fuel-efficient at speeds below 55 mph.  So it would save drivers money at the pump.
• There aren’t any upfront costs involved in implementing this policy.  Cars don’t need special adaptation, panels don’t have to be installed on our roofs, we don’t even have to lower our thermostats.  It wouldn’t involve any new taxes.
• A new law doesn’t even have to go through Congress.  The Environmental Standards Agency could mandate it without further legislation.
• By reducing America’s  oil consumption about 4%, it would reduce our greenhouse gas emissions and help reduce pollution of the air we breathe.
• A 55 mph speed limit might even save lives.

Unfortunately, upon further reading, I have discovered that  the arguments are not quite as convincing as I first thought.  For one thing, it’s not at all clear that cars are 25% more fuel-efficient at speeds between 45 and 55 mph.  So it might not save as much oil as proponents think.

And the number of lives that a reduced speed limit saves is also not quite as straight forward as the initial claims reported.

It might still be a good idea to reduce the speed limit.  But it might not be quite as obviously a good idea as I thought at first.

Darn.

 

A politically incorrect solution to global warming?

I have just read an article by Dr. Bjorn Lomborg, the well-known – some might even say infamous – author of The Skeptical Environmentalist.   He is one of the few people I have read who has presented some startling facts and figures about climate change that just might change my mind.

First, he says that almost certainly global warming is real, and almost certainly mostly man-made.  At that point, however, he parts company with the politically correct view.

First of all, he says, let us stop claiming that at this point, global warming is about to end human life as we know it.  Over the next century, more people will die from excessive heat, but an even greater number of people will not die from exposure to cold.   Global warming will reduce the yields on some crops but the higher levels of CO2 which acts as a fertilizer, will significantly increase yields on other crops.  Economists estimate that global warming will cost more than it saves beginning about 2070.   Assuming nothing else changes, global warming is predicted to cost about 1.5% of global GDP  in the next two centuries.  A problem to be solved, then, but not utter disaster.

So how should  we solve this problem?  Lomborg argues that the Kyoto agreement has had almost no impact whatsoever.  Countries like Britain which are producing less greenhouse gas have simply exported its production to countries like China.  So has Denmark.  So has much of the European Union.  America, as you may recall, declined to join the Kyoto agreement.

I’ve been reading for years that renewable energies simply were never going to be able to take the place of fossil fuels.  For one thing, we haven’t figured out how to get renewable energies to do a lot of the heavy-duty things fossil fuels do.  Secondly, even assuming we can and want to dedicate hundreds of square miles to solar panels and wind and wave farms, it is hugely expensive. Here is the central fact that the Green Lobby must address:

The cost of CO2 for the next 200 years is projected to average about £3.50 a ton – that’s about $5.  Reducing CO2 emissions through the use of renewables today costs £26 a ton in China, in Britain and much of the developed world it costs £81 a ton.

Okay, maybe this huge cost would be worth it if renewables could do the job.  But on current form, the most optimistic forecasts are that renewables can reduce the use of fossil fuels by about 8% total in  the next hundred years.

That’s just not going to solve the problem, is it?

Lomborg argues that rather than putting money into expanding our present-day renewables, we should instead invest much more in research and development to find ways of producing the energy we need that is both clean and affordable.

He gives some rather tantalizing analogies.  We did not, he said, get better computers by subsidizing the vacuum tubes on which early computers were based.  We didn’t get them by taxing typewriters either, or provide grants so that every home and school  had at least one computer.  We got better computers because IBM and Apple invested in human ingenuity – that is, in research and development that produced both better and cheaper computers.

Lomborg believes that global warming is indeed a potentially very serious problem.  If global temperatures rise by an average 4 degrees Celsius (about 8 degrees Fahrenheit), scientists simply don’t know how bad the flooding, the droughts, and extreme weather events will be.

But Lomborg also points out that research is showing that we have a little more time to deal with it than we thought just a few years ago.  Okay, he says, let’s take advantage of this.  Let’s learn from the mistakes we’ve made for the last 20 years.  Let’s plug in to that great reserve which has been our greatest force for the last two hundred thousand years – human creativity.

Will it work?

Well, one can’t be sure.  But the evidence is suggesting that what we’ve tried so far hasn’t succeeded and isn’t going to.

Personally, I’m inclined to bet on human creativity.  If we’re willing to put the money and effort into it, I think we have the brains to do it.  If we do, we could save the planet as well as ourselves.

 

Remove shoes before entering

The Old Lutheran Gift Shop is selling socks embroidered with Luther’s famous words:

Here I Stand.

The words are written twice – once above the ankle and once on the foot.  So you don’t really have to take your shoes off to let people know you’re not moving.

Personally, I’m thinking of buying a pair for a wonderfully steadfast friend.  Though I admit that some people might prefer to use the word stubborn.

If it won’t, we shall spring it make

when faces called flowers float out of the ground

and breathing is wishing and wishing is having –

but keeping is downward and doubting and never

-it’s april (yes,april;mydarling)it’s spring!

 

when more than was lost has been found has been found

and having is giving and giving is living-

but keeping is darkness and winter and cringing

-it’s spring (all our night becomes day)o,it’s spring!

ee cummings

 

May today begin another festival of new life for you and me and all those leaving winter behind.

Happy Easter!  

The Other I

Thought for the Day

 

 

The wife of President Calvin Coolidge once asked her husband after he’d come home from attending church services what the sermon had been about.

“Sin,” he replied.

“What about sin?” his wife asked.

“He’s against it,” replied the president.

Serving the poor might be a bad idea

The new Pope Francis said that he wanted to focus the church on service to the poor.  At first this sounds wonderful.  Which is why I’ve been trying to figure out why it is making me so uncomfortable.

First of all, I worry about defining the poor.  What qualifies someone as being poor enough to deserve service?  We are all poor in the sense that we all need each other.  We all need love and caring and forgiveness.  We all need to work with others – even when we work alone.  We need forgiveness, we need others to enjoy us, we need others to appreciate what we try to do for them.  We need them to remember us, we need them to share their insights and skills, we need support, even if it is to do no more than deliver our daily mail.  Or email and social network messages.  We all need that birthday card, that telephone call, that text message, that smile from a neighbor.

I also worry about this implication that I am a holier person, a better Christian, if I serve the poor.   Why?  Am I holier if I serve the poor than if I am a creative physicist?  if I discover how to use electricity?  if I share a great musical talent?  or paint great pictures ?  if I develop a business that provides thousands of jobs?  If I am a dedicated teacher on a good salary?  Am I holier if I serve the poor than if I am myself poor?  Is being poor intrinsically better than being middle class?  or even a rich philanthropist?  Is it better for me to be poor or to serve the poor than to use my particular talents which may, actually, make a lot of money?

I worry too about what serving the poor as a primary focus pushes out of first place.  I’m afraid that a goal like “serving the poor” still  leaves too much room for discrimination – in terms of gender, ethnicity, color, religion, age.  Of course I’m not against helping the poor.  And I’m glad if a focus on serving the poor means that the Roman Church will be less obsessed with doctrinal issues like gay marriage, consenting homosexual relationships, birth control, papal infallibility, and the plethora of beliefs which the church has insisted are necessary for salvation, beliefs that seem to the Vatican are more critical to true Christianity than loving our fellow creatures.

But I’ve been around a long time, and I’m afraid it might not mean any of these things.

I would feel less uneasy if the pope had made love his primary focus.  That would not have excluded giving a loaf of bread to someone in need, it would not have excluded teaching, or caring for the sick.  But it would have been a great deal less patronizing.  Which ones of us want to be “served” because we are poor?   Look at the expression on the face of the young man whose foot is being kissed by the pope.  Perhaps I am projecting, but what I see on that face is the expression of someone who is not at all sure he’s not being used.  There’s no way I would want someone kissing my foot on the grounds that I’m among the needy poor.  It’s demeaning.

Love, as a primary focus, instead of serving the poor, also would have made it much more obvious that discrimination in relation someone who is of a different religious, sexual, or ethnic persuasion is against the basic Christian commitment above all to love.  It would not have distinguished between the poor and those who aren’t poor.  It would not have suggested to the Christian who is “serving the poor” that he or she is in some way superior to those being served.

No matter what our talents, what our economic condition, what our social status, we all need to serve and to be served, we all need to be needed.  And so I don’t like this materialist division between the poor and those who supposedly aren’t.

We are all in this together.  We need each other.

We all need to love and to be loved.

 

 

 

 

The you that is me

I just want to clarify that my post yesterday, “Sermon to myself” really was meant to be a sermon to myself, and not to the reader.  It was a soliloquy about what makes me happy, energized, feeling as if I am living my life as it was given to me to be lived.

I’m someone who simply loves to work.  The last day I left the university, I sat in my car and sobbed.  I loved the challenge of the students, I loved the self-discipline and continued critical thinking that being a university professor called for.  I didn’t see retirement as a holiday but rather as a chance to learn different things, to face new tasks.  I’ve written two books since retiring, learned how to build walls, tile around pools, grow lemon trees, fix electrical appliances, and appreciate just how profoundly different cultures really are.

So my sermon to myself was very personal – it was not advice to other retirees.  It was merely a reminder to myself that in truth I can’t sit still and be happy.  In part, that’s a limitation.  It makes me very goal-oriented but not so good at letting go and simply appreciating the glory of the moment.

I thrive best with a schedule.  Not a schedule with rigid inflexibility, not a schedule which does not take into account the changing needs of age in myself or my husband and friends.  But I don’t do well with days filled with complete spontaneity, asking myself every quarter of an hour or so “what shall I do next?”

It’s the way I am.  But certainly not the way everybody should be.  Thank goodness they aren’t.   They’d drive me crazy.

 

 

 

Sermon to self

You get more done and have more energy even at the end of the day if you live by a schedule.  A realistic one that is not inflexible in the light of unexpected events, but one that you take seriously.  This was easier when employment imposed certain non-negotiable requirements.  The older you get, the more you have to be self-disciplined.  You are not the kind of person who enjoys retirement as a kind of extended vacation.

Looking at a list of the things you want to get done on a day and then playing five games of Free Cell while you decide which one to tackle first saps your energy, interferes with your ability to think critically, and doesn’t help you decide anyway.

A schedule is not the same thing as a list of things to do.  You get more done if you set time limits for yourself.

 

Worrying out loud

Cyprus is on the edge of total bankruptcy.  The European Union has offered them a bail out but Cyprus has to come up with a contribution of their own in order to get the bailout, which the EU and the IMF have suggested come from a 10% tax on the savings deposited in the Cypriot banks.  The Cypriot parliament, in the face of mass demonstrations on the street, have just refused to authorize such a tax.  Right now the situation is in stale-mate.  The banks have been closed for the holiday, and now seem to be in lock down.  Once the cash in the cash machines runs out, people will be running out of money.

I see the Cyprus situation as quite grave – not just for Cyprus, not just for Europe, but for the world economy, with all the implications for war and strife that entails.  I cannot see a solution, but what is more worrying, no economists of almost any persuasion is offering one either.  They all do agree that the collapse of the euro could be close to catastrophic, and I’ve read a lot of analyses about what went wrong, but how to fix it feels like asking how to get somebody out who is fast sinking into quick sand.

 

The European Union began as a free trade union to bind Europe’s nations together so that something like WWII would never happen again.  But the currency union which came later was cobbled together by politicians against the advice of economists who said that it could not work unless participating nations were more fiscally united.  As it is, each country still runs its own budgets.  The Mediterranean countries like Italy, Spain, Greece, even France, continue to run up deficits that they used to deal with by devaluing their currencies, but which is not possible when they are tied to the euro.  Meanwhile, Germany has greatly increased its productivity, and benefited greatly from a euro that is undervalued relative to the strength of their economy.  Even with the re-integration of eastern Germany, they are now by far the strongest economy in Europe.  

 

The Germans do not want to see the euro destroyed — they have benefited from it too much, and will also be badly burned if it goes down. But they are not willing to bail out other countries who they see as having failed to grasp the nettle.  Meanwhile, countries that suffered under Germany during WWII are arguing that this is WWIII fought on the economic front, and Cyprus said in words of one syllable today that they would choose bankruptcy and bring Germany down with them rather than let Germany dictate a 10% tax on all their savings.

 

On the other hand, Cyprus is awash with billions of euros of corrupt money of Russians storing their ill-gotten gains in Cypriot banks.  They would be hit by the tax, which is why Putin called it unfair but might also be why Brussels as well as the IMF would be happy with it.  Unfortunately the Cypriot banks themselves are not being asked to pay the price;  their savers are.

 

There is a lot of blame – both in Brussels, and among individual national governments who have lied both about the size of the deficits they have run up and to the people who elected them. The people least responsible for the debacle, the working people, are the ones being asked to pay the highest price.

 

The problem, though, is that I don’t see a way to protect the average worker.  Period.

 

In some ways it’s just like Syria – hundreds of thousands of people have been killed, and millions of people are now refugees.  But I have little hope that Muslim Brotherhood, or the Sunnis who are among the rebels, will be any better than Assad who is an Alawaite, a third Muslim group exiled to the mountains for years by the ruling Sunnis until Assad’s father got control.  The Sunnis and the Shias have been at each other’s throats since Mohammed died, and whether it’s Iraq, Iran, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, etc., they view each other as heretics whom they have a God-given mission to wipe from the face of the earth.  It makes Northern Ireland look like a child’s sandbox.

Frankly, I’m glad I’m not running the world.

But I wish I thought the people who are were better at it than I would be.

 

Bombshell! Bigger isn’t always Better

In the face of little concrete evidence, it wasn’t  totally unreasonable to assume that the bigger the brain, the more intelligent the head that held it.

Gradually, though, doubts about that simple equation have begun to creep in.  The brains of Neanderthal man were larger than the brains of Homo sapiens.  Surely they couldn’t have been smarter than we are, could they?  And then we’ve been discovering that dumb animals can do all sorts of things that we can’t.  Birds can navigate half-way around the world without getting lost and without the help of even an old-fashioned compass.  Dogs can hear things we can’t, and bees can see colors we don’t.  Dolphins can communicate with each other.  So even can trees.  Then we discovered that some parrots can correctly use as many words as the average two-year old.

And now, using MRI scans, scientists have found that female brains are more efficient than male brains.  The brain of the average woman is 8% smaller than the average male brain.  But research isn’t suggesting that men are 8% smarter.  Research from both the Universities of California and Madrid have found that on the whole men have better spatial intelligence than women.  (So when they won’t stop and ask for directions, maybe they aren’t as lost as we women think they are.)  Women, however, outperform men in inductive reasoning, are better at keeping track of a changing situation and at some numerical tasks.

Ah, but not to worry:  Trevor Robbins, professor of cognitive neuroscience at Cambridge University in England says that the finding was fascinating, but controversial.

 

Amen!

I AM WHAT I AM

I am what I am
I am my own special creation.
So come take a look,
Give me the hook or the ovation.
It’s my world that I want to take a little pride in,
My world, and it’s not a place I have to hide in.
Life’s not worth a damn,
‘Til you can say, “Hey world, I am what I am.”

I am what I am,
I don’t want praise, I don’t want pity.
I bang my own drum,
Some think it’s noise, I think it’s pretty.
And so what, if I love each feather and each spangle,
Why not try to see things from a diff’rent angle?
Your life is a sham ’til you can shout out loud
I am what I am!

I am what I am
And what I am needs no excuses.
I deal my own deck
Sometimes the ace, sometimes the deuces.
There’s one life, and there’s no return and no deposit;
One life, so it’s time to open up your closet.
Life’s not worth a damn ’til you can say,
“Hey world, I am what I am!”

A wonderful person sent me this declaration for my birthday.  I’m tempted to ruin the whole thing by tiresomely trying to explain.  But my guess is that explaining isn’t how one comes to understand this.  Not this.

The written words make me dance even more than the music.  But Shirley Bassey deserves to be heard!

 

Non-thoughts on the papal election

I can’t pretend I haven’t noticed.  Or that I don’t think it’s a big deal.  Or that I haven’t read a lot about it, or have a lot of thoughts about it.

But enough people who are better acquainted with the new Pope Francis than I am, and who indeed may be believing, practicing Catholics, have had a great deal to say.

So I am not going to write about the thoughts I’ve had about the papal election and where I think Pope Francis might direct the Vatican and the RC Church.  Time will tell.

Besides, what happens in any religious community is at least as much a result of what the people think and do as what their leader thinks and does.

So tomorrow back to my prosaic hodge podge of postings.

 

Are mothers the same the world over?

Today in Britain is “Mothering Sunday.”  It’s mother’s day now in that it’s a day children pick whatever is growing to give as a gift to their mothers, and grown-ups buy cards for them.  But  as the 4th Sunday in Lent, it’s traditionally the day when church-goers return to the “mother church” of their original families.  It sometimes involves travelling some distance, and although it is less common now that only 10% of the British population attend church regularly, it is still a recognized custom.

In this sense, “Mothering Sunday” is another example of the adaptation by Christianity of what were originally pagan practices honouring that Mother Nature who gives life to us all, and on whom we depend during every living moment.  The festival to the Egyptian goddess Nut, married to the sun-god Re, is one of the earliest mother’s day celebrations on record.

If you are interested, there is an excellent introduction to these mothering gods on a blog post entitled Mothering Sunday.

If you scroll down on that same post, the author has a wicked list of the things his own mother taught him.  If I hadn’t also learned from my own mother not to steal, I would copy it verbatim here and claim it as my own.  Not only did my second-generation Polish American mother teach me the same things as the Laird’s mother taught him growing up in Scotland.  She seems to have used the same words!  Below are a few of the teachings of the Laird’s mother:

My mother taught me -

• religion:  ”You better pray that this will come out of the carpet.”
• logic:  ”Because I said so, that’s why.”
• contortionism:  ”Will you look at that dirt on the back of your neck!”
• weather:  ”This room of yours looks as if a tornado went through it.”
• hypocrisy:  ”If I told you once, I’ve told you a million times.  Don’t exaggerate!”

Be interesting to know if other readers recognize their own mothers as often as I do.  Do let me and/or the Laird know if you do.

 

 

Van Cliburn’s sing-along

Van Cliburn’s funeral was held in Fort Worth, Texas five days ago.  Reading his obituary, I have just become aware of his story.  I’ve listened with deep appreciation to his renditions of Russian music for years, but I had no idea of the trajectory of his life.  My ignorance astonishes me.   I didn’t even realize Van Cliburn was his first and last name.  I thought he was Dutch, and never would have guessed he was a Texan.

I guess most people know that in 1958, after he had failed the medical exam to enter the military, Cliburn entered the first International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow.  It created quite a stir because here was an American, a citizen of Russia’s arch-rival, brilliantly playing Russian music.  And he wasn’t even a foreigner from somewhere on the East Coast of America – he was from Texas!  Some of the Russian judges were so upset by his genius that they fiddled their scores so he wouldn’t come in first.  But the head judge gave 25 points to Cliburn on every criteria, and zero to all the other contestants so that Cliburn came in with the top score.  The result was so contentious that before it was announced, the judges went to Nikita Khrushchev.  ”Is he the best?” he asked. Yes, they said. “Then give him first prize.”

Van Cliburn came home to find himself on the cover of Time magazine, described as “the Texan who conquered Russia.”  More than that, at the height of the Cold War, the win helped thaw the icy rivalry between the United States and Soviet Union.  When Mikhail Gorbachev made his first visit to Washington in 1987, the Reagans invited Van Cliburn to perform.  It ended up as an unscheduled sing-along for the whole room as Cliburn struck up “Moscow Nights.”

Nothing could have been better.

 

 

Translation of an English weather forecast

As a child I remember being  told that the Inuit had 117 words for snow, and almost as many different words for various colors of  white.  Just how many words the Inuit really have for different kinds of snow is a matter of some scientific controversy.  But obviously, it would be important for survival for an Inuit to be highly sensitive to differences in snow.

Weather forecasters in Britain do not have 117 words for rain, but I have learned the usefulness of a few distinctions with which as an American I was not familiar.

But before embarking on a trans-oceanic vocabulary lesson, let me point out that  British weather forecasters are among the best in the world.  That is because Britain is probably one of the most challenging  places in the world to forecast the weather – accurately anyway.  The land mass of Great Britain is slightly smaller than the land mass of the state of Oregon.  But it is buffeted by distinct weather systems from all four directions each competing to be number one.

The UK often gets weather crossing the Atlantic Ocean after it has visited the US and Canada.  Depending on whether it is a hurricane that has travelled up the East Coast before turning east, or whether it has first travelled across the continent, it may arrive in Britain more subdued or more ferocious.  Weather also arrives from continental Europe.  If it is sweeping down from Siberia, it may be viciously cold.  If it is sweeping up from southern Europe, it is often warmer.  Then there is the Golf Stream.  It doesn’t always arrive on the same trajectory, so it may bring more or less rain and temperatures may vary. The UK is a battleground of warm air from the tropics and cold air from the Arctic.  Add a variable wind and the result is usually extremely volatile weather.

Which is why there are at least three qualitatively different kinds of rain.   I was initially mystified by a prediction that “Showers would be followed by rain”, especially when it was paired with a prediction in a different part of the country that “Rain would be followed by showers.”  Or even by “drizzle”.  It all sounded like rain to me.

Technically, rain is the generic term of condensed water falling from the clouds, but in usual forecasting parlance, predictions of rain usually suggest it will go on for some time.   A shower, on the other hand, is apt to be a one-off, not settling in for a long stay.  It might be called a rain-storm if it is heavy enough.   Then there is drizzle which consists of  fine, mist-like droplets,  also sometimes called mizzle, making the weather “mizzly.”

An incomplete list of other rain-related terms includes cloudburst, hail, condensation, dew, fog, mist, precipitation, and sleet.  Hmmm:  maybe British forecasters could compete with the Inuit’s snow list after all.

In case one is wondering whether to wear a rain coat in Britain, the default answer is Yes.  Burberry rain coats are a famous British invention for a reason.

The high ground

Britain doesn’t have Main Streets.  People in Britain know what a main street is – the street with the main shops in a town or city.  But they invariably call it “High Street.”  I don’t remember ever seeing a street actually named “Main Street.”

Although it’s where the banks and businesses are generally located, High Streets are not named after the High and Mighty.  The names were generated almost two thousand years ago by the road system built by the Romans.  They chose the highest possible location for the road in order to avoid periodic flooding.  So the main road running through towns here are literally the highest streets.

It’s quite interesting to try to guess on entering a town for the first time which is the High Street.  I don’t get it wrong very often.

It’s not because I’m so smart.

It was the Romans who were the smart ones.

The gift

I have just heard that Pat Logan died recently.  Pat, along with perhaps three or four other people during my years as a Maryknoll sister,  changed my world view as well as my view of myself.  We worked together in the Publicity Department at the Motherhouse, and Pat is the one who wrote the scripts for the Maryknoll Sisters’ weekly television show, “Let’s Talk About God,” on NBC in New York, in which I held conversations with children- well, puppets – who freely expressed their questions and opinions about whatever topic seemed relevant at the time.

Pat herself was as questioning as the puppets she created.  She was dedicated, energetic, and unorthodox.  She was born in Scotland, and came to the States when her Scottish father immigrated as part of his work during World War II.  Now that I’m living in Britain, I’m not sure Pat was quite as unorthodox as I thought then.  Part of her was Scottish.  But however much of her presentation was cultural, Pat had a liberating independence of spirit that was beyond culture.

It may be that the Maryknoll superiors knew something that I didn’t when they refused her permission to make final vows.  But I’ve often thought it was that independence that was the basic problem.  The RC Church was reeling with the shake-up begun by Vatican II, as well as the changes taking place in American society reflected in the Civil Rights Movement and the Peace Corps.  Our superiors were as shaken as most of the older generation by the seemingly insubordinate attitudes of the young who thought we were going to create a great new world.  Hundreds of women were either told or chose to leave Maryknoll during this upheaval.

Pat did not want to leave Maryknoll – she thought she had a vocation.  I think she did.  But she belonged to a Maryknoll that has emerged from the tormented crisis of the 1960′s and 70′s.  The Maryknoll Sisters, unlike the Vatican, did not try to obliterate the teachings of Vatican II, but has done a great deal to understand and live by them.

Pat and I were not permitted to be in contact after she left Maryknoll, and when I left myself several years later, I had no idea for many years where she was.  We finally contacted each other just before my husband and I returned to Europe.  By that time, I’d had a university career, married, lost a child.  But learning that I was not bitter or angry about my time in Maryknoll seemed to give Pat the greatest joy.

We talked again several times over the years, but living on two different continents in those days made communication expensive.

Pat is another one of those people to whom I never thought to say thank you.  She quite possibly wouldn’t have even known what I was talking about, and still being Scottish in some deep recess of her American self, she might have found it embarrassing if I’d tried.  She would have said she was just being herself.

And she was.  There was a no-nonsense down-to-earth quality about her, undisturbed by her significant gifts.  She cared about people.  She wanted to make a contribution.  But she didn’t think one should make a big show of it.  You just did your best, which in Pat’s case was often quite outstanding.

That’s why she gave me so much.

Whether you want it or not

With all the bits of Latin being bantered about with the pope’s resignation, I learned something quite delightful about the etymology of the phrase “willy nilly.”

It is a translation – albeit I will admit a rather free one – of the Latin phrase “volens nolens,” which translates literally as “willing or unwilling.”

But “willy nilly”  is a much more elegant way of saying the same thing, don’t you think?

 

 

Who is this speaking, please?

I felt a certain admiration for Pope Benedict as I listened to his final address to the public in St. Peter’s Square.  He seemed remarkably honest about the problems in the Vatican which he felt he no longer had the energy to deal with.  I’ve watched a lot of high-achievers unable to recognize that they have passed their peak, that it is time to step down, and I thought there was a courageous honesty in that shy smile.

At the same time, something else bothered me.  Benedict kept talking about his following the voice of God, and urging his listeners to do the same.

But the age-old question remained un-addressed.  The RC Church teaches that we must follow our conscience, no matter how isolated it may make us, no matter what authorities may say, no matter what the cost.  So it is no defense that some action may have been legal, if at the same time it was immoral.  It was not a defense to say that one was ordered to shove 14 million people into gas chambers during World War II.  Or ordered by one’s husband to beat one’s one child to death.  It is not a defense simply to follow custom, even if it is a religious custom.

The question, though, is how one knows if what one is listening to is the voice of God.  Cromwell was convinced he was listening to the voice of God.  The man who shot President Reagan believed he had heard the voice of God telling him to do it.  Men and women put to death by the Inquisition of the Church died because they believed they had heard the voice of God.  Today thousands of terrorists believe they are being called by God to be martyrs.  Our own military personnel often believe that they are doing the work of God.

I can understand saying that I hope I am responding to the voice of God.  But that’s not what the pope said.  He said he was responding to the voice of God.  That sounds like a kind of arrogance to me that makes me very nervous.

It’s that attitude that makes it possible for Church officials to exercise power by decreeing that disagreeing with them is to disagree with God.  It’s the grounds on which even today priests and nuns have been silenced or excommunicated for disagreeing with the Vatican about married priests, or the ordination of women, or the literal truth of the virgin birth of Jesus, or the right of divorced people who have remarried to receive the sacraments.

A better teacher than a mother

Until I left for the convent at the age of 18, I was a sort of surrogate mother of at least half of my eight younger brothers and sisters.  As a result, I thought for years that I had all the qualifications and experience needed to be a superb mother.

As I have developed something of an enthusiasm for gardening this last year, I have treated my fledgling vegetables and fruit in much the same way as I treated my younger brothers and sisters.  And I’m not so sure I would have been such a good mother, after all.

The unrecognized child-rearing philosophy of my youth probably was a result of my own “I can do it myself” psychology that I remember even as a two-year-old insisting that I could button my own clothes even if the first attempt was a bit out of sync.  So I assumed that what children wanted was to be taught how to do something, and then get on with it themselves.  I wasn’t much for hugs or nurturing.

To my astonishment, I’ve just realized that I’ve been treating the vegetables in the garden the same way.  ”There,” I said to each sprouting seed, “I’ve planted you in fertile, well-watered earth.  You can grow now.”  So I was a little late in recognizing that the collard and cauliflower needed a little help in fighting off the white fly and slugs.  And it didn’t occur to me to actually read a gardening book to see when or how to harvest kale or purple-sprouting broccoli.  I assumed I would be able to tell when they were ready, and how to pick them.

But a good vegetable crop needs a little more fussing over.

Just as some children do.
I’m glad, though, that  carrots and swiss chard have been my instructors – even if it is a little late.

And next year I plan to be a more maternal gardener.

Or maybe I should just write a book telling somebody else how to do it?  I bet I’d be good at that.  And I could just buy my vegetables from the farm market.

 

Applied tranquility vs transparency

It wasn’t boring, and it wasn’t tranquil, and as usual most of the news was about something else that’s gone wrong.   But this morning news did result in a couple of block-busters resulting from media dissemination, and suggests that staying in contact with the news is perhaps worth the angst.

The first block-buster has created disarray in the British Liberal Democratic party.  Last week a television documentary revealed that in the last ten years or so, complaints by women of unacceptable sexual harassment by a leading member of the party had been brushed under the carpet. The party leader, Nick Clegg, said he didn’t know anything, a story gradually being adjusted as emails and female victims come forth indicating that not knowing anything is not quite synonymous with the truth.  His leadership position right now is under severe strain.

The second block-buster is that the archbishop of the Roman Catholic Church in Scotland, Cardinal O’Brien, has resigned with immediate effect, and is not, after all, going to join the College of Cardinals in Rome to elect the new pope.  O’Brien has been accused of “inappropriate sexual behaviors” by three priests and one former priest in his diocese, and their formal complaint to the Vatican has just been made public.

Who knows?  maybe we can stop the US policy of drone strikes too, if it gets enough publicity.  From what I’m reading, the number of deaths of innocent women and children is creating a ground swell of support for the Taliban in Afghanistan.

Addendum:  What I find particularly interesting about all the emerging sex scandals in the RC Church is that if the Vatican were not so backward and frightened of sex, most of the scandals in relation to women and to homosexuality would be greatly reduced.  It’s the hypocrisy of so much of this behavior that is so despicable.   A less neurotic attitude toward sex might even have reduced the actual number of paedophilia attacks, since seminarians with a propensity for children might have been recognized earlier and many of the potential offenders might never have been ordained.  At least they would have been brought to book, treated and removed from temptation much earlier and more often.

Tranquility vs transparency

Today’s almost-instantaneous global communications systems are wonderful.  But they have their downsides, only one of which is this question of news.

Wherever one is on a political, economic, or religious spectrum, it is impossible to review an average day of news and commentary without feeling the impulse toward something between rage and despair.  I’m not the only one to be faced with the decision to tune out altogether or to find some way to come to terms with an overwhelming feeling of helplessness.

I’ve given myself endless sermons that I am not, cannot be, responsible for everything that happens in the world.  I even have enough self-knowledge to realize that, despite my obvious goodness and wisdom, I am unlikely to do a better job than most  of our leaders.  Why then, I have asked myself, bother?  Why flagellate myself when there is nothing I can do beyond my own very small patch?

But I think there is a reason we should keep worrying about what’s happening in the larger world beyond our personal circle.  It’s because transparency is one of the most powerful tools we as a human species have.  Closed, secret systems provide far more opportunities to cheat, lie, manipulate,and destroy.  Even the fear of exposure can help keep these universal impulses under control.  We know this is true for each of us as individuals.  Seeing what’s going on is just as true for systems.  We need them to be transparent.

So although my life might be more tranquil if I simply close the door on the world, I won’t be making my small contribution to a more transparent and honest one.

It’s not that any of us can see ourselves making much of a contribution to changing the world.  Even those proclaimed to be among the Great and the Good seem to make such small changes for a life-time of heroic effort.  But bit by bit, for better or for worse, we each do make a difference.

Like it or not, we’re all in this together.

 

Seeing it my way

Most of us most of the time think we see things the way we do because that’s what’s there.  I see an apple, for instance, because it’s an apple sitting there on my table.  And most of us most of the time are confirmed in this view because people around us also see an apple just like we do.

But in truth, the way each of us perceives the world varies far more than we think.  Although by and large we all tend to have the same five senses, some of us don’t, and in any case, those senses don’t work in the same way for everybody.  Some people can’t tell the difference between the colors green and blue, some people can hear sounds, or taste things that others can’t.  When we move into the brain and how we interpret our experiences, those differences among us are hugely magnified.

One of those differences that most fascinates me is the Autism Spectrum.  The Cambridge University psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen has been studying this spectrum in thousands of people, and has concluded that the population is distributed along a normal curve.  This spectrum is not an indicator of either mental health or of intelligence, but it has a great deal to do with how we perceive and relate to our world.  Some autistic people at one extreme find it almost impossible to communicate or interpret interpersonal communications from others, while others at the other social perceptiveness extreme are exceptional in their abilities to tune into the needs, feelings, and responses of others.  Men tend toward the autistic side of the curve, while women tend toward the social perceptiveness side.

People scoring on the autistic side of the normal curve may be diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome.  This is not a diagnosis not of psychopathology.  In fact, it often helps avoid it, because it helps the individual understand why he is different from so many people around him.

I’ve long suspected a strong degree of Asperger’s Syndrome in my family.  Some of us may be bright, but at the same time say and do some of the most insensitive things to and about each other without the slightest intention of causing pain.  I’ve felt quite insightful sometimes when I have understood this after some particularly cutting remark from a close relative.

What I’ve worried about is that I too may be firmly on the left of the Autism Spectrum.  I share a lot of the characteristics that often show up on that side of the normal curve – I’m fairly good at mathematics, I am highly organized, even sometimes rigidly so, I cannot bear to make small talk with people I barely know.  Am I also someone who completely misses interpersonal signals that are obvious to the average person?

Last week I answered  the Autism Spectrum Quotient questionnaire used for research studying differences among people at different points on the normal distribution.  Typical questions ask if you’d rather do things alone or with others, if you like to do things the same way all the time or prefer changes in routine, like social chitchat, numbers, reading fiction, would rather go to a museum or a theatre, usually understand the point of a joke, enjoy meeting new people.

The average woman scores about 15, the average man about 17, 23-32 is above average, someone with Asperger’s averages about 35.

I scored 22.  Still in what would be considered mid-range, but I guess I’m not an earth-mother.  If you’re interested, you can get your own Autism Spectrum Quotient.  It is NOT sufficient as a diagnostic tool, but it’s an interesting tool — if you’re interested in that kind of thing.

The loss of innocence

I doubt there are many people living in the real world who have maintained an unqualified  child-like trust in man’s goodness.  Whether it be in banking, business, academia, hospitals, politics, or religious institutions, we bang up against not only the loving, but also against the self-serving — often in the same people.

It is not surprising, then, to read speculation that it is the in-fighting, the hypocrisy and back-biting within the Vatican that finally exhausted Pope Benedict and led to his conclusion that he no longer had the strength to carry on.

There have even been calls for Benedict to return to Germany rather than maintain his residency in the Vatican, where some fear that he will meddle by “advising” the new pope.

But there are two reasons why that is not going to happen, however much Vatican enemies may wish him to disappear.  One is that Benedict’s physical safety will be much easier to safeguard within the Vatican, and attempts to assassinate Benedict’s predecessor suggest that this is a real concern.

The second reason is that Benedict will be beyond the reach of any legal attempts to hold him accountable for the paedophilia that has been rampant in the Church and quietly covered up for decades.  Even his worst enemies in the Vatican will not want to see this issue subjected to the full rigour of a string of court trials around the world.

A British obituary

One of the first things I noticed living in England is that British obituaries are just a little different from what I expect to read in America.  An obituary will typically include all the expected details about the deceased’s contributions to his or her profession and surviving relatives.  But over here an obituary will far more often also include some unexpected racy detail or short-coming that all his acquaintances probably knew or suspected, but would often be glossed over in other cultures.

My introductory British obit, for instance, discussed the individual’s academic contribution, but added “he could have done so much more if he had not been an alcoholic for so many years…”

This might sound somewhat tasteless to American sensibilities, but when my sister died in her mid-forties, several of her sibs got together and wrote a private “British obituary” for her.  A sanitized politically correct version is the one that was published in the papers.  But just telling the truth among ourselves was cathartic and helped us deal with a loss that we found devastating.

I was reminded yesterday about this particular British trait reading an obituary of an English civil servant.  Serving in Margaret Thatcher’s government in the 1980′s, he decided that something had to be done about the quality of reports being written by the staff.  It’s important, he argued.  Even something as simple as an apostrophe can completely change the meaning of what one intended to say.  For instance, he pointed out, during World War II, one report omitted the apostrophe following the word “Germans.”  The result read “Germans push bottle up rear of French offensive.”

I know this story because it was included in his obituary.

My husband said he always did have a wonderful sense of humour.  (And of course, the British have a sense of humour;  Americans – the lucky ones, anyway – have a sense of humor.)

The freedom of uncertainty

I was a young adolescent when I first learned that Luther had taught that doubt was an inevitable part of belief.  I wondered at the time if my father’s ancestors had been Lutheran rather than Roman Catholics, because it was my lawyer-father who first taught me to doubt.

But what my father did not teach me, and what has taken me a lifetime to learn is that there aren’t any Right Answers available to us humans either.  Whether I was discussing theology or cooking a chicken, I thought there was One Right Way.  I was usually open to exploring the possibility that my way wasn’t that Right Way, but I was always looking for it, I always thought it was there.

A graduate course on Immanuel Kant gave me my first glimmer into the realization that Right Answers might not be absolute.  And being married to someone from a different cultural and religious background (not to mention an opposite sex), was almost a daily reminder that my Right Answers were not quite as obvious as I thought.

In recent years I have found not looking for Right Answers is amazing fun.  Whether I’m putting supper together or planning a garden or even a book, it’s so freeing, so exciting to feel that the possibilities are endless.  There isn’t just one Right Way.  There isn’t even just one Best Way.

Heisenberg’s principle of indeterminacy showed conclusively that we cannot and never will be able to predict exactly what is going to happen on the level of quantum physics.  Yet many people clung to the idea that the world of our everyday lives is predictable.  Most recently, economists thought that they could develop statistic patterns that would predict the stock markets.  Despite their blatant failure and the crisis of 2008 whose fall-out remains with us, many people, economists and non-economists alike, still believe they know, they have the absolutely non-negotiable Right Answer, to how we should revive our economy.

Now I have just finished reading two books which are further undermining our hopes for certainty and for right answers.  Any surviving hopes among deterministic, mechanistic scientists for absolute predictability are dangerous and illusory.  The first book is by Nicholas Taleb, the New York trader who says that the crisis was an example of what he calls “a black swan event.”  A black swan event is extremely rare, and so extraordinarily difficult – in fact, ultimately impossible – to predict using the statistic tools of probability.  Taleb argues that not expecting the unexpected is the worst possible way to prepare for it.

The second book is The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, the  New York Times guru who correctly predicted both the 2008 and 2012 Presidential election outcomes in 49 out of 50 states.  Despite this success, Silver says that prediction is getting less certain, partly because we know so much.  So much of the data is sheer noise, distraction from hearing the true signal.

In a way, in order to survive, we must live with the assumption that some things are going to happen.  We even need to plan them , and we need to believe that to some extent we can control those outcomes.  And to some extent we do.

But actually, we cannot predict even the next second with absolute certainty.  We can’t know for certain what we should do about anything.  We can plan for the future, we can put money into pensions, we can try to take care of our health, we can do our best to put effort into relationships that are significant, we can get an education, we can follow our dreams.  But we might be poor, we might die young, our relationships may not last, our dreams may shatter.

That’s a bit scary.

But it’s also the way it is.

And having spent many years in the cage of Right Answers, I also find it liberating.  What will be, will be.

 

Orbiting vocabulary

Yesterday a ten-ton meteor exploded above the Urals in Russia, injuring at least a thousand people, shattering windows, and even buildings.

Tonight scientists say that an asteroid missed crashing into Earth several hours ago by a mere 17,000 miles, eerily close by standards of spatial distances.

But what’s the difference between an asteroid that misses Earth and a meteor that comes crashing down?  And as long as we’re on the subject, is there a difference between an asteroid and a comet? or between a meteor and meteorite?  or a meteoroid?

The differences are not always clear-cut because their identities often change, so that an asteroid might not remain an asteroid,  or a meteor might become a meteorite.  I know these questions do not qualify among the great epistemological questions of the age, but here are the current definitions.  It helps organize one small corner of chaos anyway.

An asteroid in basically a planetoid made of rock and basic metals that orbits the Sun in the same way that Earth and the other planets revolve around the Sun.

A comet is different from an asteroid in that it is composed of dirt and ice.  When they are close to the Sun,  it is possible to see a comet’s tail of dust and gas.  Apart from that, a comet is pretty much like an asteroid, and it is sometimes hard to tell which is which.

A meteoroid is a small chunk from an asteroid or comet.  They also have their orbits around the Sun but are too small to be asteroids or comets.

A meteor is a shooting star.  It’s a meteoroid that enters the atmosphere of another object – like Earth – and streaks through the sky as it burns up in the atmosphere of a planet like Earth.

A meteorite is a meteoroid that survives its passage through Earth’s atmosphere and impacts an object like Earth.  They are the ones that create the most damage to life on Earth.  Historically, meteor strikes may have been responsible for some of the 54 major extinctions we know have taken place in the last 550 million years.  The dinosaurs may have been felled by the catastrophic destruction caused by a meteor strike.

Well you never know.  This is information that might be useful one day.

But come to think of it, I hope not any time soon anyway.

 

Chin up, it’s going to get worse

A British journalist yesterday was reporting on the economy.

The bad news, he said, is that this year is going to be worse than last year.

But the good news is that this year is going to be better than next year.

And he probably thinks he’s an optimist, as well.

 

That Tree of Knowledge

Another blogger writing a series of thoughts on biblical stories asked last week about those two famous trees in the garden of Eden – the tree of life and the tree of knowledge of good and evil.  Why weren’t they just called the Tree of Life and the Tree of Death?

That tree of knowledge caused me a certain amount of consternation in my earlier days.  It was suggested to me more than once that using my intelligence was a sign of hubris and unwillingness to serve others with humility.  And indeed, it did seem to me that the Genesis story did teach that the pursuit of knowledge is what began the cascade of good and evil which ultimately leads to death.

Obviously I don’t agree with that interpretation.  But I don’t think either that is what the original story in Genesis was meant to convey at all.  First of all, I think the word “knowledge” does not refer to information or intelligence, but to behavior.  I think it is used here with the same meaning often used in the bible to refer to carnal knowledge – to “know” one’s wife is to have sexual intercourse with her.  In this case, I think the “knowledge” of good and evil refers to engaging in behaviors that are destructive.  Like Cain murdering Abel.

I’m not convinced either that the Genesis story meant to suggest that before Adam and Eve human death did not exist.  The Hebrews do not seem to have preached this.

My own view is that what Genesis was saying is that there is a kind of alienation from life  which the human kind of knowledge seems uniquely capable of creating.  In our religious, philosophical, and scientific pursuits, we often set ourselves apart and above every other being in the universe.  We separate ourselves, we see ourselves as totally different.  In this isolation, our individual death really is the end of everything.  We do not see ourselves as part of a larger world, as participating in a process that is far greater than our few measured years.

We also often cut ourselves off from learning from other life forms which have not tasted of “the tree of knowledge of good and evil.”  All living beings do not flee death in terror.  Although I am in good health, as I am getting older, I can even feel a potential letting go in myself.  I have had the privilege of being with animals and with some humans as they have reached the end of their lives.  In both, I have sometimes seen a deep, almost transcendent, sense that it is time to go.  There has not been a terrified struggle, but a peaceful letting go, a sense that this part of the story is finished.

I’m not talking about the frenzied rush which engulfs living things faced with premature death.  I saw it in the spider which managed to get into my shower at eleven o’clock last night.  I saw it on the face of a woman today who thought she had stepped into the path of an on-coming car.  It is something that most of us have experienced in the face of grave danger.

I’m talking about the general knowledge that we are going to die some day in the unspecified future.  I’m not convinced that the fear that engulfs many people as a result of simply knowing that at some point this life is going to end is intrinsically “natural.”  It is a fear that comes with the tree of Knowledge.  But it’s not a tree of true Knowledge.  It’s a tree of denial, of false superiority, of losing contact with what we really are, and where we truly belong.

That tree of knowledge of good and evil is the Genesis explanation of death because it is a tree of alienation.  Metaphorically, it is we who walked out of the Garden of Eden, and are now spinning around in ungrounded fear.

But I think we can go home again.  I think we can learn again to love what we are and our place in the universe – however mysterious that is.

The resignation of the pope

Benedict XVI announced today that he is resigning at the end of this month.  He said that he was too old to continue to do the job required of the pontiff.

If that is the real reason, I admire his capacity for self-knowledge.  It has seemed to me over the years that one of the great challenges of old age which too many of us fail is to recognize that we can’t do what we used to do.  We might have accomplished a great deal, we might have been great leaders in our fields of endeavour, our contributions may have been significant.

But no matter how large or small our achievements may have been, we do not stay at the top of our game.  Our physical and mental energies decrease.  We are not what we were.

And quite possibly, the higher up the tree one has climbed, the harder it is to recognize this.

So if Benedict has in truth been able to recognize that he simply no longer belongs in the position of leader of the worldwide Roman Catholic Church, I think his decision is one that many of us need to emulate in our own small ways.

But of course in this age of lost innocence, one cannot help but wonder.  The popes have declared themselves infallible, but it has thus far been beyond even a pope to declare himself incorruptible, competent and wise.

Is there some scandal threatening to emerge, some new cover-up of hierarchical corruption, paedophilia, or hypocrisy that is what the pope really does not have the strength or courage to face?

I don’t know.  Obviously I don’t know.  I do hope this decision is one of humility and wisdom.  If it is, it may perhaps be one of the biggest benefits to the church of this pontiff’s reign.

The conundrum of freedom

In a recent post from the Writer’s Treehut, the author explores the question of free will.  He looks at how our ideas of free will have changed over time.  We no longer seriously accept “the devil made me do it,” as an explanation for behavior, for instance, and see “God told me to do it” as either unacceptable or insane.  Recent brain research, on the other hand, is suggesting that close to 90% of the activity of the brain does not reach consciousness.  Even more surprising is the discovery that most of the decisions which we think of as “conscious and deliberate” are accomplished in the brain before we are aware of it.

Much of modern thought on free will stands simultaneously on two opposing sides of the teeter totter.  With democracy, we defend the concepts of freedom and individual responsibility.  At the same time, we are faced with increasing evidence that we are not as in control of our own choices as we often think.

Almost everyone will agree that free will is not without its limits.  I cannot voluntarily kill myself by holding my breath.  I cannot jump out a fifth-floor window and fly safely to the ground.  I cannot survive without minimum amounts of food and drink.

But what about that huge grey area over which some people sometimes seem to be able to make choices and others cannot?  How long can I choose to stay awake?  What about the endless diets that are broken within days?  what about addictions to alcohol, caffeine, drugs?  What about breaking into a cold sweat in response to perceived danger?  Can we suppress that adrenalin rush supporting a flash of anger or sexual arousal?  Can I hide an embarrassing blush on my cheek?  or suppress an involuntary startle?

What about those responses which are learned from our culture?  What clothes I can remove in public without embarrassment is largely learned.  My sense of injustice is greatly influenced by religious and cultural values which I have been taught.  Food that I can eat without positively gagging is often determined by custom.  My beliefs about when I might legitimately kill another person, my response to rape, my evaluation even of the expression on a person’s face are learned.

And yet they all seem to become involuntary, beyond my conscious control and free will.

Since we are all different both in terms of our genetic inheritance, and our physical and social environmental histories, it seems to me it is simply impossible for us to judge just how responsible someone else is for their own behavior.  I don’t even know for sure just how free my own choices are in any particular circumstance.

Having said all that, I am not willing to make the jump made by so many liberal thinkers that we are all responsible for what happens to others.

It is not that I don’t think I could often live your life quite well enough.

But there is no way I want someone else to take responsibility for my choices.

Yes, I am grateful for advice.  Yes, I am hugely indebted to those in my lifetime who have given to me great gifts that I in no way deserved.  Yes, without the good fortune that has been granted me, I could be a far more vicious  self-serving, insensitive human being than in my worst moments I have perhaps sometimes been.

But you are not responsible for me.  And in the same sense, I am not responsible for you.

That does leave us a problem, though.  Societies cannot survive, human beings cannot live, without rather large swathes of behavior control.  Society must control the expression of some behaviors or cease to exist.

So do we hold those violators – mass murderers, for instance? – responsible?  Do we try to inhibit that kind of behavior through use of punishment?  Do we simply lock people up for their own and our safety, even if they are not “guilty” in the sense that they are not responsible for what they have, or might, do?

Personally, I think we each experience ourselves as making choices.  I think that experience is part of our survival mechanism.  But perhaps our free will is an illusion, in the same way our experience of  Earth as flat is an illusion.

Just how free we actually are is a fascinating question to which we haven’t a clear answer.  Maybe we don’t even have a clue.

Why am I right all the time?

A Nobel prize winner whose name I don’t remember was asked in an interview what it felt like to be so much smarter than everybody else.

After a slight pause, he replied “That’s not usually how the problem presents itself.”

If only I had an equally valid excuse for when everybody else is wrong.  It would be so useful.

Worry as an on-going process

In American, in the last thirty years or so, the purchasing power of the middle class has not increased;  it has not actually even kept up with inflation.  At the same time, the gap between the wealthiest in our society – the famous 1% – and everybody else has widened considerably.

I read an article today by the economist Paul Krugman that makes me fear that we have not begun to see the worst.  He points out that today jobs are returning to developed countries like the United States from the under-developed countries where they had migrated.  This is because wages in Asian countries have increased substantially, greatly reducing the cost savings, especially when you add in the difficulties of transportation, government regulations, and likelihood of lower energy costs in the homeland.

But there’s another big reason.  It is that  jobs done by workers are increasingly going to be done by robots.

That might not sound like a bad idea – it will reduce production costs even more, and might eliminate a lot of boring jobs.

But it’s going to eliminate a lot of jobs period.  By the hundreds of thousands.  Even a college education isn’t going to be that helpful.

Krugman points out that the implications of this development for the entire capitalist system are profound.  The people who will make money are the people who already have assets to develop in factories and their robots.  The “work hard and save for a better life” opportunities will continue to decrease for the vast majority.

Krugman doesn’t elaborate on the implications of these changes beyond pointing out that they could fundamentally change the way capitalism works, making the few even richer, and the many even poorer.

But as Henry Ford realized, if nobody can afford to buy the cars he was making, he wasn’t going to make a lot of money producing them.

Isn’t that what will happen if we continue to disenfranchise the middle class in our society?

Or will we have to develop a whole new economic system going beyond feudalism, beyond slavery, beyond Marxism, beyond capitalism?

I guess worry is an ongoing process.

But then, so is problem-solving.

I doubt I will be around to see the future, but it sure is going to be interesting.  Assuming, of course, that Homo sapiens survives at all.

Getting one’s just desserts

Last week an unidentified driver of a Mercedes car removed the barriers put up around an empty parking lot adjacent to a busy Edinburgh train station and parked his car.  There was plenty of room after all, and he (or she?) obviously couldn’t see any reason to be inconvenienced by a totally empty lot.

Except that it had been blocked off so workers could resurface it.

Faced with the self-satisfied car just sitting there, the workers carefully cut a square of tarmac and left the car marooned there.  The police are trying to contact the owner who will almost certainly be faced with a hefty fine.

I always thought I was a pretty nice person.

But I will admit  that sometimes quiet revenge is so utterly satisfying.

 

Why I’m not a mystic

It suddenly occurred to me today why I’m not a mystic, and why I don’t even want to be one.  I don’t want to close my eyes to everything this world has to offer and retreat to some deep meditative practice, concentrating on finding the transcendent Truth deep within myself.

I am a thinking, sensing, living human being, and I find this world totally fascinating, exhilarating, energizing.  Yes, I also find it infuriating, exhausting, puzzling.

But I was born into this world with the body that I have, the needs and capacities that I have, and I have no desire whatsoever not to be what I am, and to use my abilities to the full.

No, I don’t want to drown in acquiring things, and I certainly do not want to be any kind of celebrity.  Too many things, too much celebrity only get in the way.

But I love this world and I want to drink it in in every possible way.  I love trying to solve problems.  I love discussions about the meaning of life, I love people who come up with new inventions, I love beautiful music.  I love those small acts of kindness or understanding one sees in ordinary exchanges in places as prosaic as the grocery store.

No I’m not a mystic.

And I don’t even ever want to be one.

My big sister syndrome

I was never really a child.  By the age of 20 months I already had a younger brother, and by the time I was twelve years old, I had eight younger brothers and sisters.

So I grew up always knowing more than almost everybody else.  I learned how to do things first and then taught them.  I was given responsibilities for looking after them, and my authority was almost equal to that of my parents.  As a result, I grew up with a sense of confidence and independence that is so deeply-rooted that it almost feels genetic.  But it isn’t genetic.  It’s learned from having thousands of right answers, from years of being in charge, from knowing better or at least thinking that I knew better for the first two decades of my life.

As my younger sibs became adults, they began to tease me about always knowing best and gave me the honorary title of Lucy.

I hope I have modified my tendency toward telling everybody else what to do all the time.  But I am still an older sister.  I don’t expect to be given advice I don’t ask for and don’t take kindly to its being given.  I do ask for people’s opinions, but I don’t expect them to make decisions for me.

I’ve recognized these things about myself for many years.  But I have only just realized that all the women with whom I have been friends for any enduring length of time are themselves also oldest sisters.  I can’t believe this pattern is a complete coincidence.  I sense in other oldest sisters the same self-rootedness I learned growing up.  I find it liberating and supportive at the same time.  This independence in others frees me of a kind of responsibility for them that, unasked, I often spontaneously assume in relation to others.

 

 

Are we going to make it?

On my bad days, I don’t see how Homo sapiens is going to survive the twin assaults of environmental pollution and militarism.  Each is destructive enough on its own, but my fear is that they are each escalating factors for the other.  As food, water, and oil become more scarce, we ratchet up our determination to get enough of what we want, whatever the cost.  If the cost is bombs from drones or on the backs of suicide bombers, whether its nuclear or germ warfare, if  survival is the issue, I fear the restraints on our assaults on others who have what we need or think we need will decrease exponentially.  Globalization exacerbates the problem as well.  We can no longer hide away or walk away from peoples who disagree with us, or who have what we want.

But I do have good days as well, when I still have some hope that a combination of altruism and ingenuity will pull us through this.  Every once in a while I see reason to hope that enough of us around the world will recognize our common humanity.  With that comes a recognition that we all have human rights that go beyond our religious and ethnic differences.

And there are times too when our capacity for ingenuity and creativity almost make me dance.  Maybe after all we can do it. Maybe we can figure out how to preserve our planet and each other at the same time.

What if, for instance, we could figure out how to run all our cars on water?  Well, the Japanese have done it.  They have produced a car that will run on water – any kind of water.  It will run on rain water, ocean water, drinking water, even tea.  It will run at 80 kilometers an hour (about 50 mph) for an hour on a litre (about a quart) of water.  A couple of quarts of water can be carried as back up, to run another hundred miles or so.  The car works by generating hydrogen from the water, which in turn runs the car.

It’s difficult to estimate just how much a car like this might reduce greenhouse gas emissions and global warming because although the number of cars  being driven worldwide is increasing every year, so too is the efficiency of the cars.  My best guess is that cars produce about 20% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, but don’t quote me.

The Japanese hope to start mass production.  No price has been set yet.

Wouldn’t you love to have one?

The lore of the lur

The lur is a musical instrument probably first created in the Bronze Age and used in Scandinavia 3-4,ooo years ago.  A lur dating back several thousand years ago was found several hundred years ago in a Danish peat bog.  It is still in working order today, with a haunting sound, that can call across the mountains.

The lur is still immensely popular in Denmark, and has given its name to  -

 A wonderfully smooth, haunting pack of — BUTTER!