You know how the world works, don’t you? ‘Fess up, now. You have some models of all that is tangible and intangible. You know, for example, that if you trip, gravity will assist you on your way to the ground. You might not be able to envision gravity, but you have some model of how it works. And with society, it’s the same. You feel pretty confident you have a handle on this humanity thing. People fit into the various categories of your model, and they act and interact according to the probabilities you have somehow quantified without consciously doing any math. But most importantly, you actually act on your models. Could it be that you perceive your models not as mere representations, but as “the real world”?  
 
You also know that science-types and math-types have done a bunch of modeling to explain the world. You recall history lessons in which Ptolemy’s geocentric model of the universe was replaced by the heliocentric one of Copernicus, and you can comment, “As long as models appear to work, regardless of their alignment with reality, they are useful until they are replaced. If they work, you can act on them. If they work, they are their own reality.”
 
You’ve seen the models of humanity in sociology, psychology, and philosophy books and in online survey results: So many people act in a particular way; so many will choose this over that; so many will be involved in accidents, crimes, food poisonings, violent confrontations, and TV program binges. How can we question the numbers? Isn’t math one of those irrefutable things? Numbers never lie, and numbers are essential to models.
 
Keep this statement by Tony Rothman and George Sudarshan in mind: “Mathematics is the language of models.” (280) * The context of what they say lies in our penchant to believe that “if it’s math, it must be from someone who’s smart,” “if it’s math, it’s probably right because mathematicians are objective.” And why shouldn’t we believe in math. Doesn’t the equation 1 + 1 always seem to end invariably?
 
Models of Earth’s processes, including human interactions, can be instructive. We don’t have to accept them as such, but remember they are mathematically demonstrable if they are “good” models. After all, we often act on the basis of models, so we must find them instructive. We actually alter our behaviors when a credible person or group reveals how some component of the world works by modeling it; we change our language and our views to accommodate new models, such as evolution, quantum electrodynamics, and Marxism. But, really, in psychology, too? Yes, what is DSM-IV? That bible of psychological maladies is the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition. Did you catch that word statistical in the title?
 
Think this is irrelevant to your life? Aren’t we being encouraged to act because of what the climate models tell us? Don’t we buy or sell stocks on the basis of some model of financial security? Don’t we avoid some neighborhoods and gravitate toward others because of safety models? We even change as the models change. How do you think the eugenics model, derived in large measure from a socialized interpretation of Darwinian biological evolution, itself evolved to a point of founding a Nobel Prize Laureate sperm bank and, before that, to mass murder under the Nazis?
 
Almost every aspect—if not every aspect—of our lives is model-driven. Even plastic straws, once just part of our mechanism to get liquid into our mouths, have become part of a pollution model. Save the whales! Save the dolphins! Save the oceans! And speaking of the oceans, what happened to the model in which New York City was inundated this year?
 
Models aren’t themselves the realities of our world, just our way of understanding our world, a way that might change upon some new discovery. And some models are just not in any way easily visualizable, like gravity. The typical “visual” models of how gravity causes planets to orbit the sun involve two dimensional sheets warped by a central mass, like some bowling ball that warps the middle of a trampoline. Yet, space is three-dimensional, and spacetime is four-dimensional. How’s that model working out for your understanding each time you trip or watch the sun set?
 
In their Doubt and Certainty, Rothman and Sudarshan also note the role of approximations because models are approximations. We say Earth is a sphere, and that’s how we envision it. Our model of Earth, which is a globe, is, however, just an approximation. Earth is slightly oblate, even slightly pear-shaped. But, hey, the image of a sphere works, and for most of our purposes, serves us very well. If we need to work in greater detail, we adjust the approximation, accounting, for example, for the difference between its greater equatorial diameter and lesser polar diameter, or its high-standing continental or low-standing oceanic rocks. **
 
It might be our willingness to accept approximations as satisfactory models that gets us into trouble when we face the approximations and models of people with opposing views. We tend to accept our own models of the world or society or humanity as objectively valid and reject other perspectives as invalid approximations. It might not even matter to us that we have no “absolute” way of demonstrating the efficacy of our own views (or prejudices). For all of us, there’s a model out there that we accept not just as a representation, but as reality itself.
 
And the passion! Oh! the passion we have for that special model, or for all of our models! Revolutions have been driven by models: 1776, 1789, 1917, and others too numerous to mention here. And as we keep accumulating models, we observe a recycling of older models or a merging of the newer with the older. The Flat Earth Model still has its adherents. There are still those who believe that eugenics will “purify” a race.   
 
There are demonstrable flaws in all models though they aren’t always immediately recognizable. Ptolemy is long gone, but if no one told you Earth goes around the sun, and you had only your experience as your guide, isn’t it very possible that you, like those ancients in Alexandria, would assume the sun, not Earth, moves? What difference do the models of the Solar System make in your daily life anyway? Some erroneous models are harmless—at least for the everyday person.
 
What of all those other models to which you fervently adhere? You know, those models you accept because they seem to you to be based on irrefutable math and approximations sufficient enough to explain things as they are? Do you accept the irrefutability of climate change models even though the models themselves have undergone changes? Do you accept the models of utopian worlds promised by politicians, or philosophers, or clerics even though such promises have always come up short of fulfillment?
 
On what models do you currently base your daily life? *** And what is the level of approximation you accept in those models?
 
*Rothman, Tony and George Sudarshan. Doubt and Certainty. Reading, MA. Helix (Perseus) Books, 1998.
 
**Apparently, there are many who won’t accept the spherical model, so I guess we can say that accepting any model is a personal matter. Flat-earthers, for example, can’t comprehend or refuse to accept a round world. One might say, “Well, aren’t they the same as the ‘climate skeptics’ because we know that the climate models are irrefutable as a result of their math?” I’ll let you to entertain the question that asks whether or not the model of Earth is different in kind from a model of climate. In answering, make a note that the IPCC seems adjust its models relatively frequently, always accounting for some unanticipated variable that pops up in new research data.
 
*** Do you act with passion on any of them? Think of the Occupy Wall Street movement or the current Let’s Go Occupy Senator Diane Feinstein’s Office movement to push the New Green Deal. Do you have that kind of passion over any of your models? Are you willing to revolt over any of your models? Have you a new model you would impose on the world?  

Sometimes we fix by cannibalizing. Sometimes we repair by damaging. Sometimes we don’t understand the ramifications of our actions.  
 
You know the expression about robbing Peter to pay Paul? In part, it’s an expression about our common dilemma of cross purposes.
 
Take beach preservation as an example. The movement of water in the surf zone generates a current called the longshore current that results in the transport of beach sands along a beach. Beaches, consequently, constantly undergo depletion and replenishment, but in some instances, the transport exceeds the replenishment. One way to preserve a beach is to build groynes, elongate rock barriers that jut out into the water perpendicularly to the beach’s edge. Another way to preserve a beach is to build little rock islands about where the waves begin to break. The groynes, which are rigid “hydrologic structures” capture some of the sands that move along the beach. The upcurrent side of the groynes can accumulate a crescent-shaped body of sands. The little rock “islands” absorb wave energy that moves sands and allow the buildup of a sandy connection called a tombolo on the beach-side. Both kinds of accumulations build up a local beach at the expense of a beach down-current. Robbed of its continuous supply of moving sediment, the down-current beach loses sands without replenishment. In other words, we can save one beach at the expense of another.
 
And now there’s an analog with respect to electric cars and highways. According to Jay L. Zagorsky, writing in Phys.org, using electric cars can make America’s highways worse. * Right now, the funding for highway maintenance comes from fuel taxes. With decreased use of fossil fuels, there will be fewer tax dollars to dole out to highway maintenance.
 
Of course, where’s there is a problem, some politician will suggest a solution. Maine has proposed a flat $250 fee for every electric vehicle. Smart, right? But not so good for the average vehicle owner in Maine, where the average fuel tax is just $82. So, those who choose electric vehicles to save money on fuel costs will pay more in taxes. Definitely a matter of robbing Pete. Go figure.
 
We are often faced with dilemmas that require tradeoffs. Sometimes the tradeoffs are no-brainers, such as paying for a military to protect the homeland at the expense of paying for some domestic program. No homeland because of war equates to no need for domestic programs. The reality of a world with threats requires a military to defend against those threats—one benefit cancels the other.
 
But the dilemmas can be more personal than beaches, highways, and armies. What of the dilemmas regarding matters like abortion? Is there a downside? I’ll give an example not tossed around by those on both sides of the debate: The justice system’s acceptance of DNA evidence.

Remember the OJ trial? It was termed by the Press the “trial of the century”—a highly debatable designation in light of the Nuremburg, Sacco and Vanzetti, and Lindbergh kidnapping trials of that century. Anyway, one of the core arguments of the prosecution in the OJ trial centered on DNA evidence that the jury apparently either didn’t understand or chose to ignore. But since that trial DNA evidence has become a key mechanism to prove guilt or innocence.  How’s this related to abortion?
 
Well, the common argument on the side of prochoice proponents is that it is a “woman’s choice to do what she wants with her body.” That seems reasonable to the proponents, but it sets up a logical problem. How do we identify an individual as an exclusive individual? Why, DNA, of course. The woman’s DNA is hers and no one else’s, right? But then given a comparison of DNAs of mother and offspring, what can we say about the offspring’s DNA? Is it the same, or is it different? If it is different—it is—then the offspring is an individual in its (his, her) own right. The offspring has its own body if it has its own DNA.
 
Now jump forward in time and allow the offspring to become an adult accused of a crime. How can DNA evidence be valid if the individual isn’t an individual. According to the proponents of prochoice positions, the offspring has no guaranteed right to life because it is the “woman’s body.” So, if the offspring commits a crime years later, should we imprison the mother? Remember, the argument is that the offspring is the “woman’s body.”
 
So, let’s review. I can save my local beach at the expense of another’s beach. I can avoid fossil fuel use in my car at the expense of a tax increase and crumbling highways that inconvenience everyone, and I can abort an offspring at the expense of scientific evidence that is now apparently invalid, and in the process, thwart a potential conviction of a perpetrator.  
 
*Zagorsky, Jay L. How electric cars could make America’s crumbling words even worse. The Conversation. Phys.org. February 25, 2019.  Online at https://phys.org/news/2019-02-electric-cars-america-crumbling-roads.html  Accessed on February 26, 2019.

Today was a very windy day in northeastern states. As I drove past the Monongahela River, I saw a river boat diagonal to the flow, its lead coal barge rammed against the riverbank. Wind has that kind of power, as we all know. It caught the empty coal barges on their way for filling, and regardless of the power of the riverboat’s engines, the strong wind overcame the pilot’s ability to steer in the center of the river. Instead of being blown into a nearby bridge, the pilot wisely chose to ram the barges into the bank, keeping them in place by a constant drive of his propellers. When the winds die down, he’ll be able to back off the bank and resume his journey.
 
It wasn’t the power of the wind, the hazard of giant barges being rammed into a bridge, or the pilot’s clever resolution of his problem that struck me, however. It was that I briefly saw what was happening on the river, but continued on with my day. Driving by, I made a mental note that I would mention the strength of the wind, the river tug and the barges, and the solution of the pilot in my next conversation.  I did not attempt to rescue the riverboat people and their barges. Not that I had the ability to do so. No, doing something about the situation was, in reality, beyond my ability.
 
But as I drove off, I thought of ants. Yes, ants. I thought of how we step on ants either purposely or accidentally and go on with our day. I also thought of the other ants that missed being squashed by a human shoe. They, like me, go on with their daily lives regardless of the events around them. “Hey, where’s Charlie?” isn’t something an ant will say to bewildered other ants that question the absence of their comrade. They have an anthill to tend.
 
So, we have empathy. But in a world of seven billion humans, we seem to have a limit on empathizing. We hear about an earthquake and the suffering it causes, and we, like ants make only a brief pause in our lives. Sure, we are empathetic, but what can we do? There are seven billion of us. Can we empathize with all other humans, millions of who suffer tragedies daily? We would never do anything else. Empathizing would consume us.
 
There is an empathy limit. We already know that we can become desensitized to the plight of others by various means, including, unfortunately, being exposed to virtual tragedies in film, in books, and in video games. Too much exposure deadens us. Too many tragic incidents wear us down. We all seem to have some kind of empathy limit; otherwise, we would succumb to the sorrows of the world both near and far. A distant earthquake will register briefly on our brains’ right supramarginal gyrus and then something draws away our attention.
 
I’m not looking to change the way we are. We’ve evolved to this level of empathy over 200 to 300 millennia. I’m just making an observation about my own response to seeing a river tug boat in the midst of a problem and on my reading about or seeing from a distance the numerous “incidents” that plague our species daily. We aren’t insensitive if we do not respond sympathetically to every disaster or problem. With the number of problems humans face, empathizing with everyone would mean we could do nothing else.
Now here’s the test for your Empathy Limit. Mark (this is a self-test) when your right supramarginal gyrus goes numb.
 

1. June, 2015: Six children and their teacher and guide were among the dead when an earthquake shook Mt. Kinabalu in Malaysia. The kids were on a field trip.  
2. December, 2018: At least 429 people died and another 1,459 were injured when Anak Krakatau erupted, causing a landslide that, in turn, caused a tsunami. In September another earthquake near Sulawesi killed more than 2,100.
3. May, 2017. Eight people died and another 200 were injured when a speeding Amtrak train derailed. In January, 2019, six people died in a train accident on the Great Belt Bridge in Denmark.
4. February 14, 2019. A car bomb killed at least 33 Indian soldiers in Kashmir. A month earlier at least 20 people died when a car bomb exploded in Bogata.
5. January, 2019. The Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy reported that 410 people died from the Ebola virus in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
6. June, 2018: Three siblings were killed when an out-of-control car hit a family as they walked on a sidewalk in Southern California.

 
Do I continue? Had enough? Reached your empathy limit? You realize, of course, that I could make a seemingly endless list like this.
 
Think of yourself as one walking by a squashed ant? Think of yourself as another ant that escaped squishing, some lucky ant that continues its business for the hill?
 
How empathetic are you? I know, I didn’t provide a quantitative system for judging, so, no number is necessary. But in reading day after day of tragedy after tragedy, everyone becomes a bit numb to it all, saving empathy for loved ones and acquaintances, showing it in visits to the funeral home to express condolences, and, on occasion, expressing empathy for strangers caught by happenstance in some life-ending moment. You could apply the Hogan Empathy Scale or the Empathy Quotient scale developed at the University of Cambridge’s Autism Research Centre, but that’s unnecessary here. You have a sense of how empathetic you are. If you’re honest, you’ll recognize your own Empathy Limit. Strange, isn’t it? We can cry over some fictional tragedy in a movie but might not cry for those six children who died in that earthquake on Mt. Kinabalu.

Everyone who has ever judged another has done so on the basis of an explicit or implied moral philosophy that rests on assumptions about virtue and knowledge. That includes you. So, you—and I—might consider asking a series of questions: “Just what is the basis of my moral philosophy and, thus, my judgments? Do I believe that my moral philosophy is arbitrary or based on irrefutable axioms? Have I simply adopted some older system of morality, making, in the process, slight situational changes as suited my needs in this or that circumstance? Is my explicit or implied moral philosophy just another mechanism devised to support my Ego and the Group Ego with which I identify? Could I argue logically for my moral philosophy?”
 
It is possible that every Occidental moral philosophy rests not on irrefutable knowledge, but on re-trampled and time-worn paths that lead back to Socrates and Plato. Doesn’t our moral philosophy derive from our sense of what is or is not virtuous action? That last bit refers to the argument for Meno’s definition of virtue. Meno is Plato’s guy in the eponymous book, who, in a discussion with Socrates, argues for a system of justice based on helping friends and harming enemies. * Might I argue that in twenty-first century United States a moral system based on emotion, rather than logic, accepts Meno’s definition of virtue and justice?
 
We will always have controversies that elicit judgments based on personal moral philosophies. As we judge those we consider to be on the wrong side of those controversies, we do so on the basis of our surety. It’s in our nature to argue opposing positions, mostly political ones, but also social and religious positions. Regardless of the tendency to think that political judgments differ from social and religious ones, moral philosophy still pervades our political minds. Since the demise of many western monarchies and the emplacement of congresses and parliaments, many westerners have tended to characterize controversies from the perspective of politics. We still hear the charge today that everything is “political,” that all is “politics.” And fitting into that context is Meno’s definition of virtue, summarized by Rachel Barney as “virtue consists in the political skills which enable him [i.e., any person] to harm his enemies and help his friends, without incurring harm to himself.” ** One reason for our Menoan thinking lies in having not just universal access to media, but also in having media with universal access. Media with agenda can broadcast “knowledge” on which we base our judgments.
 
Take the current controversy over placing a physical barrier between two countries, such as the second fence Hungary okayed at its border with Serbia to keep out immigrants. *** Oh! You thought I was going to say U.S. and Mexico. Okay, let’s look at the controversy over the wall at the southern border of the USA. In 2013 many Republican senators voted against spending money on a wall, and House Republicans didn’t even address the issue under Speaker John Boehner. All 52 Democrats in the Senate supported building a wall at that time. Five years later, when Republicans supported building a wall, no Democrats signed onto the effort, and Speaker Pelosi said the House wouldn’t spend a dime on the project, with some Democrats calling the wall “immoral.” Go figure. It was moral in 2013 but became immoral in 2018. Are we in an Age of Meno? Is the virtuous position one that favors a wall or not? What is the moral philosophy here? Is everything political? Is the U.S. Congress a personification of Meno’s definition of the virtuous person? Does it make judgments on the basis of harming political enemies and helping political friends? Note, in giving your answer, the role of media in shaping the moral philosophy behind opposing sides of the argument. Note also the surety of knowledge assumed by contemporary “moral philosophers.”
 
And here’s where we always run into a problem. We have motives for doing whatever we do, but personal motives are never objective. They are the consequence of personal knowledge and desire. Whether or not the U.S. Congress (or any other country’s parliamentary body) ever approves a border wall is irrelevant in this discussion because the point applies to every judgment each of us makes and every obligation each satisfies.  
 
Is a border between two countries an objective entity set by international law, agreed on universally, and outside personal or subjective interpretation? Is any property boundary ultimately invalid since it depends upon a mere legal construct based on a set of principles or laws accepted at the time of its origination? Can you apply your answer to the previous two questions to your own circumstances? Do you have any form of personal wall?
 
I know that presenting a series of questions doesn’t satisfy most readers. We want answers, nay, crave answers. But in matters we consider to be political, all of us judge on the basis of moral axioms, on what we believe to be self-evident truths. Yet, when we look at controversies as they are handled by people separated by political power, we see that moral philosophizing is, at best, a situational phenomenon. We’re not even talking differences in generations with regard to building a wall. With regard to the building of a wall between the United States and Mexico, we’re talking about the same people changing their votes in just five years. What changed? What moral philosophy dictated that change? Was it a matter of acquiring new knowledge that displaced the old knowledge? If it was, then can we take a lesson about the surety we have in the knowledge we now have, that what we knew has been overridden by what we now know? What of our current surety?
 
Maybe there’s a lesson in this for all of us. Admit it: You judge. You hold opinions based on what you think is sound knowledge that frames your moral stance. So, look back at your own judgments that you once believe rested on sound knowledge and virtue. All of us, need to examine our “moral” judgments on the basis of what we thought we once knew with certainty.  
 
 
*Plato. Meno. In the dialogue between Meno and Socrates, Meno’s sixth response is: “Let us take first the virtue of a man—he should know how to administer the state, and in the administration of it to benefit his friends and harm his enemies; and he must also be careful not to suffer harm himself.” Online at. http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/meno.html  Accessed February 19, 2019. This version of virtue is part of the Homeric tradition if you think of how Odysseus returns to his homeland and ruthlessly dispatches the suitors who have occupied his house. The hero has no qualms about judging and condemning his enemies.
 
** Barney, Rachel, "Callicles and Thrasymachus," The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2017 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2017/entries/callicles-thrasymachus/ . I recommend glancing through a paper related to the subject: Prichard, H. 1912. “Does Moral Philosophy Rest on a Mistake?” Mind (n.s.), 21 (81): 21-37. Online at http://www.ditext.com/prichard/mistake.html  Accessed February 19, 2019.
 
***Twenty-eight countries have border walls; others have plans to build one; some have proposed to build them but have not yet acquired funding. The longest, if we ignore the Great Wall of China built long ago, is the 3,280-km-long wall under construction between India and Bangladesh. Ukraine is building a 2,000-km wall between it and Russia. Turkmenistan has separated itself from Uzbekistan by 1,700 kilometers of wall, and India matches that length in its border with Burma. Even China is constructing a 1,416-km wall at its border with N. Korea. You can find a list at https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/countries-with-border-walls.html  Accessed February 21, 2019.  

I confess my ignorance. I had long admired the music of Camille Saint-Saëns, particularly the finale to his Organ Symphony, his Carnival of the Animals: “The Aquarium,” and his Danse Macabre. I knew the language of his music, but I was uniformed about his verbal compositions. That is, uninformed until I saw the YouTube version of the Organ Symphony’s “Finale,” published by moltoallegro19 on July 18, 2010. * That’s where I saw Charles-Camille’s statement about his effort in writing the piece. The quotation appears near the beginning of the video, just as the organ builds in both pitch and crescendo: “I gave everything to it I was able to give. What I have here accomplished, I will never achieve again.”
 
What more could we ask of anyone, but to give everything one has to give to an effort. Like the effort at life, for example. Remember, this is not your practice life. As you compose the symphony of your life, be able to say at its "finale," “I gave everything to it I was able to give.”
 
*Online at. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hopaQjQFUYw  Accessed February 18, 2019.

Going to host or attend a party in someone’s home? Concerned that the conversation will flag or, worse, trend toward bitter political debate? Consider this:
 
If an archaeologist were to find the ruins of your home long after your demise, would he or she be able to discern much about your beliefs and values? What if, in the crumbling artifacts of your coffee table or mantel, there were remnants of your treasured knickknacks? Would those objects suffice as a history lesson, possibly revealing the character of your life and society? Assume, for this hypothetical, that nothing written remains—no diary or journal, no refrigerator posting, and no letter to or from Aunt Matilda.
 
Now, look around. You are the archaeologist. Interpret what you see as objectively as you can. You will probably say, “That’s easy.” But do so by first blanking out all you currently know about the specifics of your culture. You have only the broken remains of objects in this scenario of discovery about an individual and, by extrapolation, about a people or culture.
 
Have I just invented a new parlor game for your next party? You’re welcome. 

You had to have heard it somewhere other than here. There’s no substitute for hard work. Many a bright, but lazy, person has failed, wallowed in failure, or suffered the plight of the self-pitying. And while the lazy seek scapegoats for failures, the hard worker plows the field of success.
 
So, how many times do we need to hear that one makes himself or herself successful? Well, here’s another. Ali Konyali, born in Germany to Turkish migrants, chose to research the pathways to success that other second-generation Turkish migrants took. Repeatedly, he encountered the same pathway, best summarized in this: “I come from an underprivileged environment, but I got to where I am by working really hard.” * The successful emphasized their own achievements.
 
There’s nothing new in hearing the successful lay the primary reason for their success at the altar of their own efforts. And there’s nothing new in encountering scapegoating as the reason the less successful lay at the altar of their failures or mediocrity.
 
Here’s some advice for the unmotivated. Every day, repeat the following line from Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poem “The Windhover”:
           
            “No wonder of it: Sheer plod makes plough down sillion shine.”
 
The plow overturns dry soil to reveal inner moisture that glistens in sunlight.
 
            Say it again: “Sheer plod makes plough down sillion shine.”
            And again.
            And again.
 
You won’t hear that advice from those who advocate dependence on government programs or those who look for scapegoats to blame for failures. Go ahead. Say it again.
           
            “Sheer plod makes plough down sillion shine.” **
 
*Koolen, Karin. An emphasis on individual achievements. Erasmus Alumni Magazine. Earsmus University Rotterdam. https://www.eur.nl/en/education/alumni/erasmus-alumni-magazine/emphasis-individual-achievements  Accessed February 17, 2019
 
**If you are unfamiliar with the poem, you will find it here: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44402/the-windhover  Accessed February 17, 2019
Hopkins’s poem, dedicated to Christ, has both religious and non-religious meaning. My use of the poem, one of the most analyzed and debated poems in all of English literature, lies in my fascination with its last three lines. “Sillion” is the soil overturned by a plow.

What could be more appropriate for a Valentine tale than the rabbit, uh, er, bunny? No not some story about a revitalized Hugh Hefner bar scene with employees serving drinks while wearing silk ears and a skimpy outfit, but rather the story of Oryctolagus cuniculus, the European rabbit and prolific procreator. Ah! Love bunny! 
 
Apparently, the species has a tendency to overrun entire countries, such as Australia and France. After their introduction to Australia by the “First Fleet” which carried prisoners and the rabbits to breed for prison food, a few European rabbits released into the wild eventually turned themselves into a horde of crop-devouring little monsters in need of extermination. Enter myxoma, the virus called on to do the culling. Myxoma virus of the genus Leporipoxvirus bypasses the immune system of certain rabbit species and causes myxomatosis and death within about two weeks. Ah! Poor little bunnies.
 
But wait! Super Bunny to the rescue. At least, an immune bunny to the rescue. Farmers beware! In an example of parallel evolution, some rabbits in unconnected locations have evolved immunities to protect themselves from myxoma. * The bunnies are once again on the rise. The mechanism of protective adaptation is a story for those interested in evolutionary processes, but the parallel evolution might interest a wider audience.
 
Karl Marx is like the guys who introduced rabbits to the landscapes of Australia to satisfy their hunting desires. An earlier release by Alexander Buchanan in 1857 was followed by a later release of rabbits into the wild by Thomas Austin. Austin said at the time that a few rabbits would do little harm. Let’s hazard a guess here about Marx: He probably wasn’t motivated by a desire to destroy crops and the lives of millions of humans. He could not have foreseen the degradation of lives wrought by the dictators who corrupted his ideal plan. 
 
First, take a look at some of Marx’s requirements, the “rabbits” he introduced into countries as invasive species:

1. Abolition of property in land…
2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.

   5.  Centralization of credit in the hands of the State, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly.
   6,  Centralization of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State.
   7.  Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the State, the bringing into cultivation of wastelands, and the    improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan.
   8.  Equal liability of all to labour. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.
   Etc.  **

​See anything similar being advocated today?
 
Second, the facts of food production in the Soviet Union are glaring examples of the failure of centralization under the auspices of the state. Soviet agricultural collectives and communes offered few or no incentives for individuals to elevate their “common” state of life, the somewhat drab living in state-designed bland and cramped housing, and under the requirement to labor with little going to their own support. (However, farmers on collective farms were permitted to have one or two cows and to sell milk on the side) There was no private ownership of land. The result? Food shortages. Farmers in the Soviet Union produced far less than their American counterparts, and the Soviet Union had to import grains. In 1932 and 1933 the decrease in food production caused by collectivization caused widespread famine under Stalin’s reign, possibly causing more than 14 million deaths in those two years alone, and millions more between 1929 and the late 1930s. 
 
So, there it is, the introduction of a political/philosophical invasive rabbit into countries with devastating effects. There’s an analogy here somewhere. Oh! Yes. The rabbits of Communism and Socialism overran numerous countries, destroying the farms and disrupting and even destroying lives. Some efforts were made to eliminate those rabbits, but wouldn’t you know it, they seem to have adapted to the political scene of the twenty-first century. They’ve made a comeback and are now apparently the cute little bunnies in the imaginations of many young people uninformed about the lives lost and disrupted under Communism. The rabbits are starting to multiply again, apparently having developed an immunity against the economic-political-and-even-military efforts of generations of twentieth-century peoples who attempted to rid themselves of the hardships and evils that today’s version of Marxists would reintroduce. Can anyone say "Venezuela"?
 
We’re going to need a more virulent myxoma. 
 
*Pennisi, Elizabeth. Seventy yars ago, humans unleashed a killer virus on rabbits. Here’s how they beat it. Science. February 14, 2019. Online at https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/02/seventy-years-ago-humans-unleashed-killer-virus-rabbits-heres-how-they-beat-it   Accessed on February 15, 2019. 

**Karl Marx: Selected Writings. Second Ed., Ed. by David McLellan. Oxford. Oxford University Press, The Communist Manifesto, Chapter II "Proletarians and Communists," full list on pages 261, 262. 

I’m not sure whether any anthropological analysis of another culture isn’t fraught with some error. We know, for example, that just by going as an outsider into a group, we somehow affect that group’s behavior. So, I’m a little leery about accepting findings by anthropologists. However…
 
K. E. Read made some comments about the Gahuku-Gama and their stand on morality and judgment that might serve as a point of departure for those outside New Guinea to reexamine their current stand on judging others. First a background in Read’s words:
 
          "The [Gahuku-Gama have] no body of explicit principles, no formal code of ethics, in the sense of a more or less coherently stated and inter-connected system of moral concepts: [they have] nothing to offer which is comparable to the integrated concepts of the person, of a natural moral law and a universal moral order. Abstract ideas of the good, of the basis of right or wrong, do not interest the Gahuku-Gama. Their moral rules are, for the most part, unsystematized—judgments which refer to specific situations rather than to any explicit ideology of right and wrong as such." (229) *
 
        "One of the most noticeable characteristics of the Gahuku-Gama is their unconcern with and their unwillingness to judge actions or situations in which they are not personally involved. Moral offences and breaches of rule which do not affect them either as individuals or as members of a particular group stand, as it were, outside the range within which the moral judgment operates."  (228)
 
If Read is correct in reporting on the nature of Gahuku-Gama culture, then in them we have a model of non-judgment within a context of a morality that is not generalized or codified. Make your own comparison: Look through the condemnatory comments on social media and on pundit shows to see how judgment pervades almost every issue, even those that do not affect people or groups personally. Outside New Guinea there are codified moral systems: Judeo-Christian morality, Common Law, Legal Precedent, Islam and a number of offshoot codes of right and wrong that serve as the bases for judgment and condemnation. But Read seems to have found a place where judgment and condemnation is not quite the same as it is elsewhere. As he writes,

​          “Nor are the Gahuku-Gama alone among New Guinea peoples in showing this unwillingness to judge. Dr. J. B. Watson of Washington University has told me that he has also come across it among the Agarabe of the eastern Highlands. Dr. K. O. L. Burridge of the University of Malaya has mentioned a similar attitude among the Tangu of Madand District, and I have heard it referred to by Miss Chowning from the University of Pennsylvania, among the Nakanai of New Britain.” (229)
 
Take a look around. Do you and your contemporaries operate within a codified moral system that makes you juror and judge?
 
*Read, K. E. “Morality and the Concept of the Person among the Gahuku-Gama,” in Myth and Cosmos: Readings in Mythology and Symbolism, Ed. By John Middleton. Garden City, New York. The Natural History Press, 1967.

Tired of the merry-go-round or the fast-paced treadmill of life? Are you under a false impression when you argue that your complex life would be better if you could simplify? Would sitting motionless before the Wheel of Dharma in Lhasa be preferable to the incessant motion of your life? To paraphrase Thoreau, is your life “frittered away by detail”? (61) *
 
Somehow the cells of poriferans communicate. They work in unison for the good of the organism without a network of nerves and central processor, that is, without a brain, without even so much as a knot of nerves. Simple as the animals seem to be, individual sponges can live for many years, and some can grow larger than a human. As a group, sponges have faced threats to their existence for hundreds of millions of years, but have survived five major and some minor extinction events that have annihilated more complex animals, the ones that do have brains. And they have adapted to a number of aqueous environments—all that without a brain. Maybe there’s something to be said for just sitting there as sponges do. Their lives are not, we might argue, “frittered away by detail.” Maybe we can learn not from the Himalayan monk, but rather from the humble sponge. “If you seek simplicity, my child, be the sponge.”
 
There are sides to the issue raised by Henry David Thoreau’s life at Walden Pond and famous lines “Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!” and “Simplify, simplify.” (61, 62) One side argues for simplifying by reducing activities in a busy lifestyle and by refusing to focus on the acquisition of goods; the other side argues against simplicity and for complexity as the way of fulfilling the human potential. Both sides have their advocates, and the advocates have varying definitions of simplicity and complexity. Both sides have their stock of clichés and humorous takes on Thoreau’s advice. The writers of the TV series Cheers had the character Diane quote that famous Thoreau line “Simplify, simplify” and Coach, the uneducated bartender, ask why Thoreau had to say the word simplify more than once.
 
The definition of a simple life isn’t set in stone, of course. Nor is the definition of a complex one. Both the occupied and the unoccupied among us can survive or succumb. Few of us would wish for the ultimate simple life of a sponge though I’m guessing that you believe you know someone who mimics sponge-like simplicity.
 
We cannot fully emulate the kind of simplicity we ascribe to sponges because we are endowed with minds, and minds are restless even in the midst of deep concentration and sleep. And even in physical paralysis, we can busy ourselves in travel by book, the frigate of the mind, to paraphrase another nineteenth-century author, Emily Dickinson. ** But with regard to simplicity and complexity, most would probably assume  there is a difference between, say, a person meditating in the Himalayas before the Wheel of Dharma and a person working in an overheated office with enveloping chatter and machine noise.
 
What, we should ask ourselves, are we to do to simplify? We have to survive in a complex society, and that entails acquiring shelter and food; those, in turn, require our wending our way through rents or mortgages, taxes and upkeep, grocers and diets, to which we can add traffic, social pressures, and moral dilemmas. Do we simplify by living the life of a hermit or take our families to some little house on the prairie (hoping, of course, that diseases, storms, bad guys, and droughts somehow bypass us)? Do we just cut out a few activities, such as those involving phones, computers, and TV comedy series in favor of “quality time” spent in self-awareness? We are nothing like simple sponges even when we try to emulate them.
 
Do sponges have a lesson to teach? No, they don’t. Does Thoreau? Maybe, but marginally. Remember that Thoreau didn’t spend his entire life in the woods. He made pencils and interacted with his society. And he wrote, "I have always endeavored to acquire strict business habits; they are indispensable to every man.” If you read Walden, you’ll find numerous descriptions of his having to attend to the details of living in the “wild.” Cabins don’t build and maintain themselves; food doesn’t arrive in Nutrisystem(™) mailings.
 
Isn’t it fun to be more than one thing? To be, unlike sponges, motile? In a recent posting, I referred to Tennyson’s poem “Ulysses.” In that poem Tennyson writes about the restless drive of the Homeric hero and contrasts it with a nonmotile existence of a stay-at-home king. If you recall, after ten years of war and ten more years of wandering the Mediterranean, Ulysses returns to wife, son, home, and hearth. But the poet puts him there for only a brief stay like Thoreau’s two years at Walden. Tennyson has the Homeric hero say:
 
            How dull it is to pause, to make an end, 
            To rust unburnish'd, not to shine in use!
            As tho’ to breathe were life!
 
Tennyson’s words remind me of three lines from another poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins, who wrote in “The Windhover”:
 
            No wonder of it: sheer plod makes plough down sillion
            Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
            Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion.
 
In hard work, the farmer overturns the soil with his plow, revealing in the sunlight the shining moist layer hidden below the surface. And embers, seeming to be the end of the fire, like Ulysses embarking on yet another adventure even at the end of this life, rekindle as they tumble, becoming gold-vermillion.  
 
Each of us will always ask whether or not we are “too involved” in life and whether or not we prefer a more sponge-like existence. The reality is that we balance both kinds of life. Regardless of his advice to simplify, Thoreau didn’t spend a life “unburnish’d” and devoid of details. In Amherst, Massachusetts, Emily Dickinson appeared to live a simple life, but she traveled on “Coursers” of poetry and frigates of books. All of us are complex in our ostensible simplicity and subtly simple in our very apparent complexity. In the midst of a complex life, some will ironically and for various reasons “make an effort” to live simply; others, will look for occasional simplicity in complexity or accept human complexity as the simplest form of life an organism with a brain can expect. And just like the embers, all of us can, even when the end seems near, “gash gold-vermillion.”
 
Tennyson has Ulysses say:
 
            Death closes all: but something ere the end,
            Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
            Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods…
            ‘T is not too late to seek a newer world.
 
 
 
 
*Thoreau, Henry David. Walden, in Walden and Civil Disobedience: Authoritative Texts Background, Reviews, and Essays in Criticism. Ed. By Owen Thomas. New York. W.W. Norton & Company. 1966.
 
**There is no Frigate like a Book
To take us Lands away,
Nor any Coursers like a Page
Of prancing Poetry--
This Traverse may the poorest take
Without oppress of Toll--
How frugal is the Chariot
That bears a Human soul.