Time to confront poisonous US culture

Newsom: "...take a little damn responsibility, all of us". Photo from KCRA 3 video

Two thoughts to start the month of June with: Each age has its over-arching outlook on what is important in life; secondly, to succeed in life so as to be fully human means personally reassessing our goals, digging deep into what guides us in the setting of our ambitions. 

Last week, in a cry from the heart after the shooting deaths of nine workers at a transport yard in California, Governor Gavin Newsom asked: "What the hell is going on in the United States of America? What the hell is wrong with us?"  

Newsom called out the mentality of Americans in apparently accepting the inevitability of gun violence - "It just feels like this happens over and over and over again — rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat." He went on:  "And here we are, in the United States of America, where we're experiencing something that just is not experienced anywhere else in the world."

He highlighted the "numbness" and the "fury and frustration" that builds up within the population as a whole over the deaths by shooting, whether mass shootings or the inner-city toll. "And what are we doing to come to grips with this?... It's time to ... wake up to this reality and take a little damn responsibility, all of us".

Two other signs that all is not well in American society, in fact, that the culture has turned toxic, are the high number of girls presenting as deeply unhappy and wishing to become male, and the rising count of young people with mental health problems.

On the first matter, are good summary of the state of affairs is given in the following two paragraphs from an American source:

The vast majority of youth now presenting with gender dysphoria are adolescents who suddenly express revulsion with their sex from birth, and 70% of them were born female. Many of them have co-morbidities such as anxiety, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, autism spectrum traits, and depression, Malone explains, which need to be considered.

This newer presentation — which has been termed late-, adolescent-, or rapid-onset gender dysphoria — has now been seen in every gender clinic in the Western world, and there has been a huge surge in the number of cases. One recent US survey found a 4000% increase (over 40-fold) since 2006, and there have been similar large increases in Finland, Norway, the Netherlands Canada, and Australia.

The Malone in "Malone explains" refers to William Malone, MD, an assistant professor of endocrinology practicing in Twin Falls, Idaho.

The "social contagion" of a materialistic, money- and me-focused culture is having a broader impact also. This year's The State of Mental Health in America report from the Mental Health America organisation has as its three top findings: 

Youth mental health is worsening. 9.7% of youth in the U.S. have severe major depression, compared to 9.2% in last year’s dataset. This rate was highest among youth who identify as more than one race, at 12.4%.

Even before COVID-19, the prevalence of mental illness among adults was increasing. In 2017-2018, 19% of adults experienced a mental illness, an increase of 1.5 million people over last year’s dataset.

Suicidal ideation among adults is increasing. The percentage of adults in the U.S. who are experiencing serious thoughts of suicide increased 0.15% from 2016-2017 to 2017-2018 – an additional 460,000 people from last year’s dataset.

What a toxic society these statistics reveal! However, evidence of such a diseased existence appears wherever a family-oriented society loses its willingness to accept the discipline that the exercise of loving mutual support demands. I'm writing from Vietnam, where I see warped Western values beginning to undermine the traditional solidarity of families and of community.

Here is one observer's description of the root cause of where a nation can go wrong in its culture, especially one like the United States that is rapidly revealing its underlying secular lifestyle, and that prides itself in its individualism:

There is so much division in society today, simply because the individual is facing a crisis of meaning and purpose.  Because of secularism, man does not believe in a creator or the existence of the Ultimate, whom we call God.  He has no idea of his own origin, purpose in life or the outcome at the end of this life.  The world teaches us that the universe, and that includes us all, comes from the random interactions of atoms. It is by accident that we were born into this world.  Life has no meaning, no intrinsic value, except to make the most of what this world offers, at the end of which we return to the universe as atoms. This lack of purpose means that we are called to live for ourselves.  There is no reference point, no objective truth or morals to follow.  It is all about me finding fulfillment in this life.  People are important to me insofar as they can enrich my life.  This is what individualism is all about.

That godless, therefore unanchored and atomised, style of living has certainly taken root in American society, in much of the West, and in richer countries elsewhere. The forms of technology that have arisen in the past 50 years have shaped Western culture, as have the loud proponents of today's stunting form of science that, along with corporate greed, debases ethical standards and fertilizes the desire for ease and entertainment as the true ends of life.

It's clear that each nation has a pattern of thinking that is part of its unique culture. However, the carriers of each culture have to take responsibility for what they accept within the inheritance they pass on to later generations. 

Therefore, parents, in the first instance, need to be determined in taking stock of their own lifestyle and to decide on ways to protect their young ones from the poisonous mindset that envelops society as a whole. They have to realise that their family must stand up to the powerful influences of academia, social media and mainstream media. In addition, social structures such as the school have succumbed to the general contagion and so, to preserve what good remains and to rebuild what has been debased, counter-cultural families must work together. To this end, useful resources can be shared, and new communities developed. Resources for such a project include texts as given here and here.

Governor Newsom is right to be worried about the American way of life and in calling for everyone to take responsibility for transforming American culture. That same plea applies to all of us in whatever culture is our own. This is the time to be counter-cultural wherever we are and family by family, in a way that develops the common good. The young especially need to see that we are not redeemed by science but by that wonderful dimension of reality revealed by God, namely a love that is powerful and everlasting. This is the source of meaning and peace of mind. May God give you success in the work of your hands in this transformational project! 

UPDATE: To get an insight into the nature of the contagion we are exposed to, go here.  

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Time to relax

Hi. Go to full screen to appreciate the visuals that accompany the narrative.

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Beauty and uncertainty - the art of science

‘Data becomes sensation’ in Halo.  Photo: Claudia Marcelloni CERN

Wonderment, beauty, uncertainty. These are the qualities that scientists repeatedly cite as being at the heart of their work. We see how these elements are to the fore in an article on an effort to translate the findings of astrophysicists into forms that the general public can appreciate, revealing the "frameworks" scientists use to understand their data. 

Halo is an art installation produced by Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt, artists who like to dramatise extreme cosmic events with visual aids. In their latest effort they have converted raw data culled from subatomic particle collisions at Cern in Switzerland, where they have been working as artists, into a melange of light, sound and curious tactile effects. “We have put data into a form where you can feel it,” says Jarman. “Data becomes sensation.”

Inside Halo, 384 vertical wires are arranged in a circle surrounding visitors, each throbbing out the patterns of data in sync with the lights. If you touch a resonating wire, you can convince yourself you’re feeling the universe coming into being. 

Jarman says Cern scientists have welled up on stepping into Halo, apparently perceiving in it a simulation of the elegance they find in equations and theories. “For me,” says Professor Antonella De Santo, the Sussex University physicist involved in the project, “this is the first time I have sensed the scientific beauty I experience in my career in artistic form.”

[Halo is about] getting humans to experience what goes on beyond the limits of human experience, the vast forces of nature operating on Earth and beyond, or shifting the imponderables of quantum physics into visual and auditory form.

Neither Jarman or Gerhardt have scientific backgrounds. Rather, they are making a kind of outsider science art. That outsider perspective gives them a refreshing sense of what science amounts to. “We think of science as all about facts,” says Jarman. “But what are facts? And what is data? A lot of what scientists know is more like fiction. What we’re doing is revealing their frameworks in a way that everyone can understand. Without a framework, we couldn’t know anything. But that framework isn’t fixed. It’s unfinished business.”

Professor De Santo agrees. “The best scientists are humble. They don’t presume to know everything. They live in uncertainty.” Indeed, for her that humble stance is what guides her work, which is at the cutting edge of the new physics that goes beyond what is known as the Standard Model. That model, she explains, told us there were 17 building blocks of nature: six quarks, six leptons, four force-carrier particles, and the Higgs boson. “But it was incomplete. It didn’t include gravity. It said neutrinos don’t have mass, which they do. And it didn’t include dark matter. I don’t believe in a theory of everything. I’m not arrogant enough to suppose we will ever know everything.”

This blog has several posts on the beauty of the world around us, as well as the degree of ignorance that remains as to how the world works. I invite you to check out the archive using the menu on the right.

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Where technology does NOT empower humanity

Photo source: Netflix's Black Mirror

The battle to achieve recognition of human dignity goes on into the 21st Century. It is a battle because some in the elites of the political and corporate worlds, and especially of academia, would have the social masses capitulate to demands that they keep their heads down and their mouths shut while those controlling our social structures ease the path for new technological forms to take over.

In a discussion posted on YouTube in early May between political philosopher Michael Sandel of Harvard Law School and historian Yuval Noah Hariri of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the topic arose of the likelihood of success of the "project" to improve society through greater appreciation of certain values relating to human dignity as compared to the transformation of social structures through technological development where free will yields to mechanism, as Michel Houellebecq envisages it. 

Sandel:

Some years ago I was teaching a course on ethics and biotechnology … and we were discussing various aspects of the project of re-engineering human nature…. One day we invited James Watson… who had won the Nobel Prize for describing the structure of DNA, and he was talking about cognitive enhancement through genetic alteration, and he was very much in favor of it…

I asked him: “Do you consider having a low IQ to be a disease in need of a cure?” He said, “Yes, of course, because people with low IQs live very difficult lives. They have trouble making a living and so on.”

A student raised her hand and asked: “Well, given that's the case, why don't we try to reform the economy and societies so that people with low IQs don't live such hard lives?”

Watson's reply was: “We're never going to be able to change society. That's way too hard. That's why we need to use genetic engineering to solve this problem.”

Sandel continues: 

And I found that a revealing but chilling answer, not only because of its eugenic sensibility, but also because it seemed to concede so readily the project of moral and political improvement, as if to say that human agency is impotent in the face of that project. Therefore, better to repair ourselves to fit the world, the social roles, that are beyond human repair or reform. That's the worry that I think represents the fundamental concession to the moral and political disempowerment of humanity.

Harari takes up the issue:

…There are many successful attempts to better human society, not through the invention of some new tools, some new technology, but by changing the values, the stories, the structure of society itself. 

One of the biggest achievements of humankind has been the drastic reduction of violence over the last few generations and even though it owes something to a technical invention – the nuclear bomb – to a large extent it was done by changing human values in society. … [Political parties] also had enormous success, and when it comes to racial inequality, to gender inequality, they really managed to improve things and not by inventing a new technology. 

So this fixation that the answer to any problem we have is just to invent a new technology…. That's extremely dangerous, first of all, because it gives up so many other things that we can do and, secondly, because it ignores the main problem that, okay, you invent the technology but then the decision what to do with it is not in the hands of the tool, it's in the hands of the same society. So if you have done nothing to change the society and its values, you just invented a new tool. Then if the society has evil values, it's now just more powerful to do its evil things. You have done nothing; you just made things worse.

Harari points out that artificial intelligence machines may try to force humans to comply with their wishes, to which Sandel comments:

I suppose that we could conclude by agreeing that even the smartest smart machines can't tell us how they should be used. That is ultimately for us as democratic citizens, which suggests a project not of manipulation but of education and of persuasion. 

Harari:

Yeah … but I would just say that maybe part of what is fueling the political crisis we are seeing around us is this deep sense that time is running out, that if humans don't exercise their agency in the near future they will lose that agency.

I mean all previous technological inventions in human history … empowered humanity, but the current wave of technological inventions for the first time … endangers human agency [as] we see a shift in power from humans to algorithms.

Therefore, it is imperative that people everywhere strive to maintain a expansive sense of the dignity of the human person, building on the success in banning slavery, in the declaration human rights, but looking ahead to the banning of  the death penalty, the banning of euthanasia and abortion based on the ulimate value of human life, and the restructuring of economic principles to end the scandalous economic inequality worldwide.

One final thought: It's surprising that Harari continues to use the deep term "evil" in talking of values that a society may have. With his evolutionary humanism, where ethics is simply a set of rules people think will make life easy, you would expect him to use "negative" or some such neutered term. 

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Good luck or bad luck or God's will?

An elderly, hard-working Chinese farmer and his son had a single horse. They used the horse to plough their field, to sow the seeds, to gather the harvest, and transport it to market. The horse was essential for the farmer to earn his livelihood.

One morning, the horse broke the fence and ran away into the hills. When the neighbours found out that the only horse the farmer had, had run away, they came to comfort him. They said: “Your only horse has run away just before the planting season. How will you till the land? How will you sow the seeds? This is unfortunate. What bad luck!”

The farmer replied: “Good luck, bad luck - who knows?”  

A few days later the farmer’s horse returned along with two wild horses. When the neighbours found out the news, they said: "Now you have three horses! You can till the land much faster. Maybe you can buy more land and get a bigger harvest and make more money. Or you can sell the other two horses. Either way, you will be a rich man! What good luck!"

But the farmer replied: "Good luck, bad luck - who knows?"

Next morning, the farmer’s son started training the wild horses so that they could help till the land. While attempting to mount one of the wild horses, he fell and broke his leg.  The neighbours came once again and said to the farmer: "This is really unfortunate. It's just before the sowing season. Your son won't be able to help you. What bad luck!” 

The farmer repeated: “Good luck, bad luck - who knows?”

A few days later, the emperor's men visited the  village because a war had started and they forced the eldest son from each family to join the army. When they came to the farmer’s house they saw the son with the broken leg. He would not be of much use in the army and so they didn’t take him. The neighbours, some of them with teary eyes, came once again to the farmer and commented: “Your son  is the only one not taken to go to the war. Breaking his leg was a stroke of good luck.“ 

The farmer calmly replied: “Good luck, bad luck - who knows?” 

That's it; that's the story.

It's a favourite piece for motivational speakers, as here. Zen teachers use it too. But those inspired by the Bible to seek the will of God know the attitude of the old farmer is what must be in our heart and mind to find the peace that Jesus offers.  

Take heart from this selection:

Jeremiah 29:11 - "For I know the plans I have for you," declares the Lord, "plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future."

Esther 4:14 - "Perhaps you were born for such a time as this."

Romans 8:28 - And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose.

Psalm 33:11 - The plans of the Lord stand firm forever, the purposes of His heart through all generations.

2 Peter 3:9 - The Lord is not slow in keeping His promise, as some understand slowness. Instead, He is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance.

Psalm 32:8 - I will instruct you and teach you in the way you should go; I will counsel you with My eye upon you.

Proverbs 3:5-6 - Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways submit to Him, and He will make your paths straight.

Jeremiah 1:5 - Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you; I appointed you a prophet to the nations.

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Yuval Noah Harari and the materialistic mindset

Harari, who needs to break out of the prison of his postivistic worldview

Historian Yuval Noah Harari, a professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, says something in a video conversation with Harvard’s Michael Sandel that is surprisingly feeble, given it comesfrom someone who has written three non-fiction bestsellers. In these he offers the world a list of declarations about how humans have got to be at the homo deus stage of history, and how a dramatically different future awaits us. What he says is this:

I think that many of the big events of history we still don't have a good explanation for them. Why did Christianity rise to become the dominant religion in the Roman Empire and then spread from there? I've never read a convincing argument why it was Christianity and not any of the other many religions that were on offer in the supermarket of ideas of the Roman Empire.

It's praiseworthy that a high-flying academic should be so humble, but this could be a case where there is an explanation that is not limited to the materialistic view that Harari embraces in his major writing, as we shall see later in this post. Someone who is open to the real world might say that, yes, the spread of Christianity is inexplicable, unless we at least posit the possibility that the power of the Holy Spirit turned a small group of frightened Galileans into a band of emboldened apostles who urgently went into the world telling everyone how much God loves them.

This is not nitpicking, as Harari, for all the success of his published works, is among the group of academic writers who are so beholden to the materialism common among academics that “they fail to do justice to the complex, multi-layered human organisms” of which they treat. 

Harari views humans as “an animal of no consequence” and a state of contingency is the nature of our existence – “It is doubtful whether Homo sapiens will still be around a thousand years from now.” Therefore, for Harari, “it is pointless to waste time searching for purpose or meaning”, as Nick Spencer writes in his critique of the Harari mindset exposed in his books.

Just how significantly the chains of Harari’s materialistic outlook restrict the depth of his work is revealed in such statements as “As far as we can tell, from a purely scientific viewpoint, human life has no meaning” (Sapiens); “to the best of our scientific understanding”, he states in Homo Deus, it is clear that Christians through the centuries and modern liberals are “all equally delusional” in identifying any kind of meaning in life. 

Spencer responds:

How exactly a scientific “viewpoint” or “understanding” – whatever Harari means by that – could detect “meaning” and “purpose”, and what it would look like, is far from clear.  

In a deeper dive into nihilism, Harari states that “universal and immutable principles of justice” like equality, liberty and human solidarity, are merely the product of our imaginations, and that they are not real but exist only because they are useful: “We believe in a particular order not because it is objectively true, but because believing in it enables us to cooperate and forge a better society.” And again: “There are no such things as rights in biology.”

Spencer objects: 

For Harari, only biology is “real”. Living things are real. Human organisms are real. But the stuff that comes out of their heads – like rights, liberty and dignity – is not.

…In essence, if you adopt a thoroughgoing materialistic and positivistic approach to reality, insisting that only the material and measurable is real, then – amazingly – you will discover that reality is ultimately material and measurable.

All this naturally breeds a determined reductionist attitude to humans themselves. If only material stuff is real – and, importantly, if only physical sciences are able to detect what is real – it follows, as he says in Homo Deus, that “according to the life sciences, happiness and suffering are nothing but different balances of bodily sensations.” Notice the opening qualification: “according to the life sciences.” Similarly, a few pages later, “If science is right and our happiness is determined by our bio-chemical system, then the only way to ensure lasting contentment is by rigging this system.” Or, once again, according to neuroscience, the “deeper parts of your mind know nothing about football or about jobs. They know only sensations.” Harari waves the word “scientific” around like a trigger-happy guerrilla, brandishing the barrel at any moral or metaphysical truth claims that peak out from the undergrowth. Happiness? Goodness? Freedom? Beauty? Holiness? Science cannot find them. 

After a while of this, the reader is naturally tempted to ask why science is the only legitimate tool for understanding reality or human life? After all, if you’ve only got a hammer in your toolbox, everything will be a nail. Harari’s answer lies in the material/imaginative divide on which he bases everything. The imaginative — the category into which he conveniently put most of what makes human life meaningful — doesn’t exist. It isn’t real. It is merely parasitic on what is real: our bodies, or our biology, or neurochemistry, or bodily sensations, or whatever. That being so, only those things that can detect, measure and alter biology, neurochemistry, and so on need to be considered. Human life is biology. Biology comprises knowable facts. Debates can be resolved and futures decided by recognition of said facts and manipulation of said biology.

…Thus, when writing about abortion in Homo Deus, Harari reasons that although devout Christians oppose abortion and many liberals support it, “the main bone of contention is factual rather than ethical.” Christians and liberals “believe that human life is sacred” and that murder is a crime. They simply disagree “about certain biological facts: such as whether human life begins at the moment of conception, at the moment of birth or at some intermediate point?” No matter. Biologists are here to help, for they are “more qualified than priests to answer factual questions such as ‘Do human fetuses have a nervous system one week after conception? Can they feel pain?’”

This is so muddle-headed that it’s hard to know where to begin. “Devout Christians” and “liberals” (at least the thoughtful ones; we can leave the head-bangers of both sides out of any serious debate) agree about the “biological facts.” They both accept, broadly speaking, when foetuses develop a brain, a central nervous system, a beating heart, and so on. They both agree, broadly speaking, when a foetus may start to experience sensations or feel pain. They disagree on the existential and ethical significance of all of the above. The “biological facts” are not in dispute. It is what they mean in terms of ultimately contested concepts — such as “life,” “rights” or “dignity” — that is hotly disputed. But if you have systematically dismantled any sense of objective “meaning,” this avenue is necessarily closed to you. 

The fact that Harari apparently honestly believes that “biological facts” will resolve such disagreement over abortion points to nothing more than the inadequacy of the positivist approach he adopts when discussing our species. More cynically, it is an example of what happens when you banish concepts like “meaning” from a debate — because science can’t find it in your neurochemistry.

Apart from all else, Harari’s work declares his ignorance about Christian beliefs, whether he is discussing the soul, Genesis, or our eternal destiny. Similarly, he confuses happiness with pleasure; and he is simply fails to appreciate how limiting his dichotomy is between the “real” and the product of the “imagination” such as mathematics, ethics and aesthetics. For instance, given findings in the social sciences we know that, with regard “goodness” and “beauty”, human universals do exist. Further, as Spencer notes: “Aardvarks, livers, and chromosomes will cease to exist. [The number] 17, π, and i will not. Which has a greater claim to being real?”

Fundamentally, this post has shown that Harari is writing as a member of that strand of science – and it is just one strand – that serves as a straitjacket on the depth and extent of members’ vision. The weaknesses in Harari’s argument as to the remaking of the human into a complete “experience machine” firstly highlight, as Spencer concludes, “how that which is real cannot simply be reduced to what biologists (or even Harari’s frequent, catch-all ‘scientists’), can measure", and secondly, it “underestimates the extent to which humans are quite attached to the more holistic, humanistic, emergent understanding of themselves”.

One might add that people know that they possess a deeper reality than that of being a purely - purely - biological organism, and so any attempt to manipulate one person as "an indeterminate blob", to use Robert Nozick's words, is an attack on everyone. Human dignity is something that has to be recognized and defended, as history has made clear.

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Parents cop blame for the misguided young

As an observer of where concern arises about the future, I often see the finger pointed at the society that has produced the college-age or twenty-something generation. Misguided young adults have been sent on their way into life in such a state that they are bound to suffer a painful fall, but in the process of that psychic collapse all the signs are that they will make society as a whole suffer.

In a post on this site created a few days ago I wrote how "the snowflake generation" had not been brought up to comprehend that everyone has to face suffering in life, and that maturity is apparent through a person's acceptance of sacrifice, as well as the necessity of tolerance, as against arrogance and the belief that happiness equates with pleasure. 

An American journalist and author, Rod Dreher, is one of those concerned at the poorly prepared younger generation, particularly because of their lack of insight into the human condition, especially our innate weakness. He recorded with agreement in his Daily Dreher blog on Substack these thoughts of a correspondent:

I think that they [young people] don't believe in human fallibility because they haven't experienced it. They think that if only "the right people" were put in charge of everything, those "right people" could fix all the world's problems quickly and easily. Young people in all places and times have considered themselves infallible, at least for a time, but I think this phenomenon is uniquely present in certain sectors of modern American society.

If you're an American student at an elite private university or flagship state university (e.g. in one of the wokest places on Earth), you probably had a pretty sheltered upbringing. (I would know because I am part of this group!) You think that prosperity, safety, and justice are easy, and that if only we ran the whole world like the suburb you grew up in, everything would be all right. 

What will it take to get young people to recognize human fallibility? I think we need to get them to really experience what life is like outside of their sheltered environments. Get them to volunteer in daycares, nursing homes, homeless shelters, or prisons. Get them to join the military, the Peace Corps, or missionary organizations. They need to experience birth, death, sin, responsibility, deprivation, and futility. They need to learn that life is complicated and that you can't wave a magic wand that will fix everything. Ultimately, we need to get our most affluent, influential, and therefore sheltered young people reacquainted with reality.

Dreher concludes that post with this:

Parents who have shielded their children from every failure are creating monsters. I spoke recently to a teacher who had to endure a miserable ordeal at his school with the parent of a student who had made a D on a paper in his class. The student’s father phoned the teacher enraged over the grade. The dad said it would affect his daughter getting into college. According to this teacher, Dad genuinely believed that his daughter deserved an A for effort, and raised hell when the teacher refused to budge. [...] That poor girl. The day is coming when she’s not going to know what hit her.

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