Infanticide!

There, that got your attention! And such is the real purpose of shock words these days – to condense a slur, rally a slogan, and sometimes promote a hidden message. I remember when students would shout “hey hey LBJ, how many kids did you kill today .”

Some issues are tangled, mysterious, insoluble. Abortion and women’s rights _ or potentially crippled-child rights _ is one of the toughest. Definitions are almost impossible. The world refuses to be solved .

For the record, I am in favor of all children, everywhere, being born normal, healthy, and into circumstances where they are well cared for until their late teens. For the record, in our real world, even if babies are born normal and healthy, society often lets them die or suffer from neglect, starvation, war, disease, or other violence. And genetic luck guarantees that many embryos do not produce normally healthy babies. It used to be far worse – nature was never kind .

But “baby killer” is an effective slur. Nobody wants to be so labeled. The problem is that those who use it are – like those anti-war demonstrators – really pursuing a deeper agenda One in which it is the duty of women to produce and raise children and leave the rest of the stuff to men.

I dislike such people and their agenda. Perhaps one day I too will have to find something simplistic to shout back. Isn’t that really the true problem with our civilization? Not stupidity, not evil, just fatigue at complex, seemingly insoluble, issues .

Judeo Christian

Evangelical Christians blather on about how the United States – “western civilization” in general – was founded on “Judeo-Christian” values. The Bible as the ultimate source of morality. They wish to establish a kind of “Judeo-Christian” state, kind of like Iran but (of course!) different .

Real history shows that “Western Civilization” arose from three major and almost unique cultural foundations. One was the classic Greeks who invented a worldview of logic and observation, and who regarded their deities about as we do comic book figures. The Romans generated a true rule of law in which order was maintained by professional bureaucrats, rather than priests or warlords. The Romans paid lip service to gods the way we do superstitions – Romans always believed they were the reality. And finally – not least – the Teutonic worship of individual power and rights – a healthy counterpoise to logic and rule .

The “dark ages” and “middle ages” were cruel and Christian. Only by reversion to Greek/Roman/Teutonic did the West break into the Renaissance and all that followed .

The United States’ Founders were steeped in classism, and based the Constitution on Greco-Roman-individual rights values. The Bible was a convenient shared cultural experience with some useful moral ideas, kind of like television in the ’70s .

But – until the last few elections – most of us never wanted interpretations of holy scripture to circumscribe our daily lives. Its rise is another example of the failure of social education in this country .

Jonestown

There are many examples of “the madness of crowds.” Somehow most of us can temporarily lose our own rationality in a mass action. More permanently we can narrow and harden our logic and belief into a small cult, or a larger “movement.” Some are mindless and temporary such as mobs; others have deep underpinnings supported by leaders and philosophers, like the Nazis .

The prime modern example to my mind was Jonestown, where a large group of “normal” people gave up their ordinary life. Believing in a charismatic leader, they cut ties, liquidated assets, followed him into a jungle community. When times got tough they followed him into mass suicide.

Although Americans are prone to fads, for the most part citizens here have been saved from massive indoctrination by an inborn cynicism. No matter the cause, we often ask “who profits?” “follow the money”, and “what’s in it for you?” This streak of skepticism may not protect us from momentary enthusiasms, but it does tend to make our allegiances quite fragile. For most of us, true belief can flip overnight, with or without external cause .

Not always, of course. Hence Jonestown. The cautionary note there was that apparently more than a few of the “suicides” were “murders”. Crazy powerful leaders are a lot more dangerous than any neighbor following an influencer primrose path.

Conservative Follies

Liberals imagine a better world that is based on shiny visions of what might be. Conservatives fear that the best world has already passed them by .

Both positions, of course, can be silly, especially in extremes. Liberals tend to optimistic views of people that have little reality in experience. Conservatives dream fondly of a past that never was.

As someone who reads a lot of history and science, the one thing I fully believe is that nothing stays the same for long. Our bodies are seething masses of churning chemical reactions. We age. Life evolves. And yet – it does not do so too quickly, our DNA was billed to be mostly conservative.

Conservatives say they fear change and simply want to return to when things were better. They usually confuse what was actually happening in those olden days with their own visions of what they believe should have been happening .

It’s an old, old story. From first shards of clay texts, there were those predicting disaster (because the stupid younger generation ignored the most important rituals and beliefs.) Age of gold devalued to silver through bronze and iron to maybe sand.

Unfortunately, for all of us, things do keep changing. Even more unfortunately, we have a lot less control over events – especially from beyond our limited circle – then we would like to believe .

Simple-Minded

In nostalgic eras past, unfortunate individuals with low mental capacity were known as “village idiots” or “simple-minded’” folks. Now we inhabit supposedly kinder times, but those “simple-minded” are still with us. However I refer tp people mentally constrained by their own choice.

Some are intellectually lazy, and find it easier to accept or reject anything they hear without troubling to investigate further. Nevertheless, they hold their opinion – whatever it may be – arrogantly. Others reach the same condition simply because there is too much to know and life requires us to focus on what is relevant .

The harm in so many people willingly becoming simple-minded is that in the myth of our society, citizens are supposed to be well informed. About everything. Admitting that one is fully ignorant or confused or even unsure about anything is not rewarded. To admit ignorance (even to yourself) when you are ignorant is quite healthy. But many of the unthinking may label you as stupid .

We have a voting population certain of their shallow beliefs, too involved in other things to care much except when egged on by volatile wannabe leaders .

In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is not king. In the land of the simple-minded the wise person remains as unobtrusive as possible .

Magic

When I was a boy, “magic” had been confined to church. After world war II, everyone assumed “Yankee ingenuity” could fix anything, often with little more than “string and bailing wire”. Farm boys were all mechanical geniuses, City kids knew how to outfox anybody. All was – or would soon be – knowable and under control .

As examples, we fixed our own flat tires, changed oil. When a TV or radio didn’t function, I’d take vacuum tubes out to test and buy at Radio Shack. Even later, I knew how transistor “gates” worked and could program in binary (zeros and ones) or assembly. TV or newspaper news was limited, trustworthy, opinion confined to editorial pages .

Now? It’s all magic. Even mechanics can’t fix new cars, God himself couldn’t repair a broken circuit board. I have no idea how quantum computers work, nor how AI is programmed. And all sources of “news” are slanted and suspect .

In fact, once again, we inhabit a world of magic as profound and (possibly) as dark as anything in the Middle Ages. We know how to (mostly) talk and provide services for money, shop, consume, and be entertained. A few “experts” know a lot – or claim they know a lot – about increasingly tiny bits of esoterica .

That makes the residual child in me quite uneasy. Without understanding I still believe real control is impossible .

Flash Tsunami

Earthquakes and tsunamis often strike without warning, many times in places where they occur only every hundred years or so. These days, there are often warnings. But they seem to be more and more a metaphor for the various “flash” events created by an instantly interconnected world

You can, for example, be sitting quietly on a bench in a deserted park and be suddenly surrounded by a crowd. Maybe just having fun, maybe robbing everyone in sight, maybe engaged in gang warfare. The point is, it’s a lot of people suddenly appearing at a small place without warning. Only their social media knows why .

Similarly, there can be flash shortages of almost any good or service as advice or warnings go viral and everyone grabs as much of whatever as possible, paying much more than usual. Frantic hoarding clearing shelves instantly .

And of course there is the mental flash information known as “memes”. Suddenly everyone “knows” something they never knew before. Maybe true, maybe false, usually irrelevant but when thousands or millions of people are affected, even mental illusions have an impact .

It seems that such social flashes are more and more frequent. Almost like the “good old days” of the unexpected earthquake or tsunami .

Cowboys and Indians

Little boys have always enjoyed, I suppose, playing war games of one side against another, often based on historic conflicts. In my youth it was Allies versus Nazis. In other places and times it could have been North versus South, Gauls versus Romans, or that constant favorite, cowboys versus Indians .

The games were usually harmless enough, anyone willing to take any side for an afternoon. Not at all like the real horrors of war. Kids didn’t much care about historic realism, and happily evoked stereotypes .

In real life, “cowboys versus Indians” had nothing to do with cowboys. It was the full military of an industrializing giant civilization pushing out a “primitive” culture. At best, it wanted to turn “Indians” into “white people.” At worst, it judged that impossible and tried to exterminate them or place them in isolated zoos .

In spite of modern romanticism, there was a lot purely awful and nasty about “native American” culture, as any honest reading of historic sources will quickly discover. And that lifestyle was fully incompatible with the onrushing pioneers.

There were no easy answers. And no solutions .

I fear the current Mideast is now turning into such a conflict. Only extermination or zoo preserves will be acceptable. A sad moment in a world not nearly so “enlightened” as we had hoped.

Egomorphism

Anthropomorphism shapes everything into a kind of human, with feelings, desires, and powers similar to us. Not only “hard” nouns like trees, the sun, or buffalo, but also “concept” nouns like luck or evil. Many take it so far as to include imaginary ideas like family, government, or conspiracy.

I would coin an equivalent “egomorphism” for those who narrowly believe everything (including all other people) are exactly like them. They evaluate every part of the universe as if they were in control. Their desires, hopes, and fears become those of everyone and everything .

Unfortunately, it seems that such mentalities also see themselves as essentially rotten. They only survive by suppressing their inner worst tendencies. They assume that everyone else maliciously applies full power as they would do if they had no inhibitions .

That includes what is known as “projection” but it goes far beyond. It includes a basic hostility and paranoia as if fighting inner demons. It assigns agency to illusions such as conspiracies and secret societies all trying to destroy them .

A sad mental state for them .

A dangerous mental state to everyone else .

Ozymandias

We read Shelly’s Ozymandias as a distillation of the illusions of power. A cruel despot forcing subjects to erect a massive statue to his glory, all crumbled and forgotten over the millenia. But there are other interpretations.

For one thing, that king of kings probably could care less what we see in the desert today. Assuming it was a vanity project, it was more to impress his present than anyone after he died. And for all we know it could have been a public works project to keep folks employed.

More to the point, Ozymandias was not a god, but a human. That means he had to eat, defecate, sleep. He was bored and worried at times. If he grew old there were toothaches and various pains, wounds, and diseases. He may have been good or evil to his subjects, but he was subject to all the ills that flesh is heir to, like everyone else, then and now .

Besides, he was more constrained to his locality than anyone today. He could not know science, visit other continents, talk to people a world away. His direct sphere of influence was limited to a tiny immediate environment. His powers were in some way less godlike than those of anyone with access to a cell phone or automobile .

Power, yes. Cruelty, perhaps. But not to be pitied because his colossus and kingdoms did not survive the ages. Never to be envied because most of us are more godlike than he could ever dream .