In his famous anti-war poem, Wilfred Owen, who died in WWI, ended with “Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori,” basically, “It is sweet and proper to die for one’s country.” But, of course, death is death. Dead soldiers are lost loved ones. Where is the “sweetness” in that?


So, the question constantly rises when anyone goes to war: Is it really sweet and proper to die? One could easily argue that all wars are manifestations of human vanity and folly, but there is another side, that decorum side. As I write this, Ukrainian soldiers are fighting Russian invaders because they are defending their country. They are engaged pro patria, that is, for the fatherland. Simultaneously, Russian soldiers are fighting, supposedly, for their fatherland. I assume that they have been told there’s a necessity for leveling apartment buildings, hospitals, schools, and whole cities like Mariupol pro patria. And one can’t blame the foot soldier for the international politics, especially when the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kirill, says the invasion of Ukraine is justified because of gay pride parades.


One has to wonder about the balance sheet of good and evil in the Patriarch’s mind. I guess many can see from his statements that he opposes homosexuality, but even if he can justify that stance on the basis of morality, how does murdering Ukrainians fit into the dogma of good and proper? Are Russian soldiers, as well as Ukrainian soldiers and citizens, dying pro patria over gay pride parades? Is the threat to morality a greater evil than the threat to life?


Am I…Let me change that to a declaration: I am living in a bizarre world. Bombing hospitals and schools is definitely preferable to a gay pride parade in the world of the Patriarch in Moscow, especially for a guy who just dedicated a new, big shiny cathedral to Russia’s military. I suppose that the papal condoning of the Crusades is comparable, as is the Islamic ayatollahs’ justification for killing infidels in terrorist attacks. Where does all this sweetness and propriety pro patria end? Will it ever end?


Again, I seem to understand defensive war. I seem to understand and empathize with defenders under attack. But try as I have, I cannot understand unprovoked attacks and justifications for killing based on some moral principle that says a gay pride parade is more satanic than indiscriminate bombing of cities. And I certainly don’t understand a rather educated class of people, such as the Russian citizens, buying into the justification provided by Patriarch Kirill. And my reasoning there lies in a YouTube video I saw of on-the-street interviews of Russians, with one of them saying that with respect to what he thinks about the war in Ukraine, there is “a penalty.” In other words, if you oppose, don’t disclose.


Russian politicians, media, and even the Russian Orthodox Church can justify the deaths of young Russians sacrificing themselves on foreign soil pro patria. Why couldn’t the Patriarch simply tell the faithful the truth as he sees it and as many Russians believe? The Slavs of Ukraine are part of Russia, as they were, for example, during the Second World War. Why not just declare that the Ukraine’s breakaway status is no different from South Carolina's secession from the fledgling United States on November 3, 1860? Ukraine did break away from the Soviet Union in 1991, but it had been over the centuries both affiliated with and attached to Russia. Maybe I can see how a Russian Patriarch could speak of the secession as an “evil,” but gay pride parades? Bizarre. Give me another justification, Patriarch, please, not some equivocation, some prevarication, or some moral equivalence between bombing civilians and gay pride parades.


From reports that are possibly erroneous during the heat of war, I have read that thousands of Russian soldiers have died. I have not heard that thousands of Ukrainian soldiers have died, but war being what it is, one can assume losses on both sides, except that Russian children are not being killed as Ukrainian children are. I wonder whether those loved ones back home in Russia will commemorate the deaths of their soldier children, friends, and even mothers and fathers as “dulce.”


And I cannot stop wondering whether any leader who begins an offensive war, has no sense of history. Check your list of conquerers. Where is Attila today? Where is Caesar? Where is Alexander the Great? And where are their empires? Where, also, are all those who believed dulce et decorum est pro patria mori?


Such is the bizarre world in which we live. It was bizarre before; it is bizarre now; it will be bizarre when we are gone.

That there is now evidence for the earliest bone-tool use from a cave not too far from Casablanca makes me wonder how long fashion has been fashionable. Those bone tools from more than 100 millennia ago appear to have been dedicated to making clothing from animal skins.


So, if you have a leather belt, shoes, or jacket, you fall into a fashion tradition that goes back possibly 120,000 years ago, give or take 10,000 years. Before that? Well, let’s just say that there was a naturist tradition, one that is still prevalent in isolated societies ranging from the Namibia to Brazil, from desert to rainforest. Throughout the rest of the world fashion prevails.


More to the point here: We’ve been using tools for a long time, sometimes without much innovation for millennia, as in the artifacts uncovered in the Contrabandiers Cave in Morocco. Of course, nowadays there’s a patent for a new tool issued daily, or at least it seems to be that way if my walk down the “As Seen on TV” aisle at Walmart isn’t misleading me. Tools: They defined us as different from other life-forms. Sure, a crow can use a tool as can one of our sister primates, but not to the level of complexity of purpose and innovation we humans show. Heck, in the absence of a screwdriver, I’ve used a coin to turn a screw—Look at me! Inventor.


What was it like when that human ancestor first used a tool to make clothing? The people who inhabited the Contrabandiers Cave lived during the Eemian Interglacial, a warm period that ranged from 130,000 to about 115,000 years ago. Generally, climates were warmer during the Middle Paleolithic—as archaeologists name it. So, it’s interesting that a warmer climate coincided with the rise of fashion. Because most people don more clothing in cold weather and less in warm weather, I wonder whether the rise in “fashion” all those millennia ago had something to do less with the need for warmth than with a burgeoning juxtaposition of morality and vanity. Was it a matter of covering up for modesty’s sake or for vanity’s? Did humans ask that question from Genesis? You know, that question Yahweh asks Adam and Eve after they have eaten from the Tree: “Who told you that you were naked?” Or did humans look in a placid pond, see a reflection, and ask, “Am I getting fat?” What was the reason for all the sewing in a Moroccan cave? Of course, it could have been a simple matter of seeking protection from UV, insects, and scrapes.


That people donned clothes for modesty, vanity, and practicality begs questions about self esteem, self awareness, and religion. There is a reciprocal relationship between fashion and vanity. One begets the other on a two-way street of self esteem. “Does this loincloth make my hips look big?” “Does this fur match my brown eyes?” *


The abundance of clothing in the modern world boggles the mind. Most people have some choice in what they choose to wear on a given day. True, there are some whose level of poverty prevents them from the luxury of vanity and the external trappings of self esteem. But look in your closet, your dresser drawers, and the laundry basket: You are a manifestation of that vanity that arose with those sewing needles 130 millennia ago. You are a manifestation of that self awareness. And if your fashion implies an unstated modesty, you are a manifestation of the ethical system that led to nuns’ habits and burqas derived from religious practices. And if your fashion “enhances” in your mind the appearance of your body either by covering a flaw or revealing a beauty, you are a manifestation of vanity.


I cannot, however, dismiss the practicality of clothing. It does protect, so it has a utilitarian value. Kaftans in sunny locales shield one from both UV and Infrared. Jeans and canvas are light body armor around rough and sharp objects. Those animal skins that the Moroccans used so many millennia ago have morphed into protective suits for scuba divers and astronauts.


It is a simplification on my part to link those Moroccan needles to my own times, but it is not a farfetched hypothesis. The pattern of our lives today is related to the pattern of lives long past. Much of what we do is merely a difference in degree and not kind when we see ourselves in the context of “deep history.” We use tools as our ancient ancestors used tools, but ours are better: Sewing machines with numerical control now replace the single needle and time-consuming stitching that burdened those Moroccans of the Middle Paleolithic working with what might be some of the earliest bone needles.


Unless you live in a naturist society as some tribes live in warm climates, you are probably wearing clothes as you read this, even if you are inside a warm room. What governed the choice you made to dress? Was it convenience and utility, modesty, or vanity? All of the above? Merely habit and conditioning?


Those might seem to be silly questions, but they imply something—whatever; you decide—about the nature of your life and, by extension, the nature of human life.


*Blue eyes don’t go back to the Eemian Interglacial. See University of Copenhagen. "Blue-eyed humans have a single, common ancestor." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 31 January 2008. <www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/01/080130170343.htm>.

If you haven’t said, “I loosened it for you,” you have heard it when one person fails to open a jar, a lock, a bolt, or a rusty lid and another person succeeds in opening the object. I could call this the “pickle jar response,” but it has a wider reach than just opening lids.


When the second person succeeds in opening the jar, the first person claims part of the success with “I loosened it for you,” usually jokingly. But no one can ever prove that the application of a weak torque is the reason that the later application of a stronger torque works. Honesty would come in a statement like “I am not strong enough to twist off the lid, but you obviously are.”


The wider implications lie in what a government can or should do for businesses. Should government step in to fully open the pickle jar as the Obama Administration did with the bankrupt-destined Solyndra solar panel plant? If you recall, the government gave the company a $535 million guaranteed loan that, upon the bankruptcy, the taxpayers lost. Hmmn. $535 million. Any lesson in pickle-jar opening there? Oh! Wait! Under the Biden Administration the U.S. Development Finance Corporation will provide up to $500 million in debt financing to First Solar’’s “vertically-integrated thin film solar manufacturing facility in India.” Yeah. You read that correctly. “IN INDIA.” Seems we can open pickle jars all over the world. Is that what the government of a democratic-republic like USA is supposed to do? Open pickle jars everywhere? Is that how the country should apply torque?


One might argue that in the complex world of modern commerce, few individuals have the strength to open a pickle jar by themselves. Such financial frailty is common. So, the role of the government in business has expanded. Agencies that could provide technical advice now provide financial assistance through loans and grants. And the money seems to derive from a bottomless ATM. As long as there is a living taxpayer, some politician or government bureaucrat will find a way to spend tax dollars in an effort “to help.”


Laissez-faire is defunct, it seems. Jefferson’s aphorism that that government which governs least, governs best, is forgotten.


Although difficult in many instances to prove, a laissez-faire government might actually increase commercial activity by its minimalist approach. But commerce is a two-way street. Yes, unrestricted business might prosper, but only at the expense of consumers. Unrestricted lassis-faire allows the unscrupulous to fleece the public. So, politicians and bureaucrats enact restrictions.


The balance between overregulation and basic protection is a difficult one to maintain, particularly because there are so many kinds of commercial interactions that blanket rules affect. And bureaucrats assigned to loosen a jar in, say, the oil industry, often end up sealing another related jar more tightly. Those same bureaucrats, with no vested interest in the free exchange within a capitalist system, typically adopt the perspective, “Well, these are the rules. There’s nothing we can do except apply them” when they deal with businesses.


In many instances, commerce succeeds both in spite of and because of government oversight. However, the struggle to open a lid of success is difficult under the clockwise torque of regulating agencies that don’t truck in variations. Jefferson’s idea that the government that governs least is the one that governs best isn’t possible in a complex modern society. There are just too many people doing too many different things for the government to “govern least.” As a result, we’re on the slippery slope to total regulation akin to that of totalitarian governments. In the future, most western cultures, barring some change in direction, will impose “pickle-jar openers,” on commerce of all kinds; bureaucrats who will be required by regulation to “loosen” as the law allows.


I make these comments in the context of some personal experiences with government agencies. As a consulting researcher for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania’s Department of Environmental Protection, I witnessed the conflict between bureaucracy and the coal industry from the perspective of the government. As a consulting researcher for a corporation, I saw the same conflict from the other side. As you might imagine, the regulators saw the industry as teetering on the edge of violations, whereas the corporate personnel saw the regulations as teetering on the edge of governmental overreach.


One of the reasons for the conflict between those who are willing to struggle to open their own pickle jars without government help lies in the dissociation of regulators from business for profit. Regulators are salaried employees with guaranteed incomes. Fluctuations in businesses don’t affect them. Agencies once established exist ad infinitum unless the government itself falls. None of the Roman Empire’s bureaucracies remain.


And the problem of government overreach is exacerbated when different agencies become intertwined in a “problem.” Underground mining, for example, causes subsidence at times and in some instances loss of ground water sources or stream alterations. Fishery agents become involved with mining agents, and when gases escape from underground mines, air quality agents join the regulatory fray that also includes water quality agents.


So, at times—as in the Solyndra fiasco—the government unloosens a jar with nothing of substance inside, and at other times, the government tightens the lid on a jar of tasty pickles. The lesson is a simple one: If you want to open a business in spite of government restrictions, you’ll need to strengthen your figurative forearms to apply all the counterclockwise torque necessary to overcome the clockwise torque that government applies.

Ron and Elise talk:


Ron: “I see that many people are appalled by the indiscriminate bombing of Ukrainian cities and the intentional targeting of civilians. I wonder whether these same people disturbed by the bombing were similarly disturbed by the 2016 bombing Aleppo that resulted in the deaths of 90 children and hundreds of adults. It is true that more than 200 nongovernmental organizations appealed to the UN for a cessation, citing the targeting of at least one hospital. But the bombing was not, in the minds of many in the West, a front-page headline. It seemed to me that the American media, for example, was more concerned about hatred of Trump than about hatred of Russian leaders who permitted the bombing. Of course, I could be could be totally wrong. Maybe you, Elise, were one of those concerned about Aleppo as you seem to be concerned today about Ukraine.”


Elise: “I tried to tell people at the time about the bombing, but there was so little coverage in the media by comparison with the coverage of the bombing of Ukraine, that people remained largely unaware and very parochial.”


Ron: “So, I have a question about morality, and it’s one that has been bothering me. It concerns my previous thinking about bombing cities.”


Elise: “What?”


Ron: “It’s a complex problem, but I’ll try to lay it out. Because my father fought in World War II, specifically on Okinawa, I’ve been fascinated, I suppose is the word, by the military action of the Allies against the Axis Powers. Bombing Japanese and German cities seemed all right. I justified them for a long time because I knew the Germans, for example, bombed without a moral imperative London and other European cities. It was okay in my mind to drop “dumb” bombs—no one had ‘smart bombs’ at the time—as I was saying, it was a matter of dropping ‘dumb’ bombs, including incendiaries on civilians, in retaliation for the German bombing.
    “And then there has been in my mind those two justifiable atomic bombs that hit not just a few civilian places or even many civilian places, but all civilian places within Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Total destruction, maybe 100,000 dead and another 100,000 injured in leveled cities. Or I think of the bombing of Dresden, a nighttime saturation bombing that killed thousands and destroyed a once-beautiful city. Yes, I know, I know. The bombing of Kyiv or Kiev today is also destroying a once-beautiful city. And maybe tomorrow the Pearl of the Black Sea, Odessa, will also come under indiscriminate bombing—the war is only a few weeks old, so we’ll see…
    “Anyway, back to what I was saying. The Allies bombed as the Russians bombed in Aleppo in 2016 and as they are bombing in Ukraine as we speak. So, I have to ask myself if I see a difference. Is it one of those differences without a distinction? What enables me to think of indiscriminate bombing in one instance as moral and indiscriminate bombing in another as immoral? How is it that I can more or less justify the deaths of thousands here and not there, that is, in one place and time and not in another place and time? I have to ask myself if I my personal morality isn't more than a response to situations.”


Elise: “You might be thinking in the context of offensive and defensive war.”


Ron: “There’s that, of course. I guess the Allies were trying to stop the bombing of their cities by bombing German cities. The Nazis had, obviously, started the whole thing, unprovoked by neighboring countries. And they were killing not just thousands or tens of thousands, but hundreds of thousands and by the end of the war millions of people. But the innocent people, powerless to stop their own leader Hitler, those people who lived in Dresden and Hamburg and Berlin were annihilated by the Allied bombs. The Japanese, also. Sure, there were Japanese atrocities. I’m thinking of the Rape of Nanking and the deaths of many thousands of Chinese after the largely symbolic early Doolittle raid on Tokyo that offended the whole Japanese population. For a long time, I’ve been satisfied that the Japanese deserved the nuclear strikes. They had started the war at Pearl Harbor and in China and throughout Southeast Asia, so they should have been punished in a morally justifiable retribution. Besides, I thought the bombing was also justified because the Japanese would not surrender and an invasion of their islands would result in an untold number of Allied casualties.”


Elise: “So, indiscriminate bombing is justifiable in your mind. At least in some circumstances. Those who start a war deserve destruction. Those who defend, don’t.”


Ron: “Pretty much. The Ukrainians, for example, were no threat to Russia. And I think the world community, save those who want to align with a totalitarian regime—like Venezuela, Iran, China, and North Korea—those governments driven by an anti-American, anti-West success. Those who would side with Russia because of propaganda, the uninformed people of Russia currently under a blanket censorship, yes, those people see no problem with the bombing, believing that the Ukrainians are somehow Neo-Nazis. And what could be more motivating to people in a country once devastated by Nazis than to think there is a renewed threat by Nazis? A country that lost millions, that had the city of Stalingrad suffer a siege by Nazis, such a country’s citizens, now a couple of generations removed from all by historical tales, would believe that bombing Ukraine is justified, that destroying more than a dozen hospitals and a building clearly marked with the word children, that all that is justified. I don’t know if you see my point. I guess I’m asking whether or not I have been similarly indoctrinated with regard to bombing cities, that I was convinced that destroying Dresden and Hiroshima was justifiable, but that bombing Mariupol is not.”


Elise: “Moral dilemma for sure! Only you can resolve it for yourself. I remember reading that after the bombing of Dresden even people in the United States and Britain were appalled by the death toll, a death toll, by the way, that the Germans exaggerated for propaganda reasons. Nevertheless, it was still in the thousands, with many victims incinerated.”


Ron: “And there’s still something in me that says, ‘The Ukrainians should bomb a Russian city.’ Of course, I know that that would be an escalation, but how angry would you be if you were a victim of an unjustifiable conflict? Surely, Elise, you wouldn’t just ‘turn the other cheek.’ Surely, you would think, ‘There’s no way to end this except by inflicting pain on the attackers.’ I know that when I saw images of the Russian convoy stretched out along the highway, I thought of the American attack on a similar convoy of Iraqis trying to flee Kuwait. But then, I think of the Russian soldiers, all someone’s son or daughter, simply following orders in the erroneous belief that Ukrainians were Neo-Nazis. Aren’t they also ‘innocents’ in this war? Aren’t the leaders the ones responsible? Yet, I feel no empathy when I hear that Russian soldiers died at the hands of the defending Ukrainians. This war business destroys all moral clarity. It reminds me of the Pope’s having an army, or of the Crusades. Moral leaders, supposedly, calling innocents into immoral circumstances.”


Elise: “So, I agree that if my hometown were bombed, I would feel anger and I might even want to exact revenge. But, I have to ask whether or not killing those loosely associated with the bombers, killing the civilians in that attacking nation was crossing some moral line. How is killing children justified?”


Ron: “I’m between that proverbial rock and hard place, and neither is a moral position. I am driven to support Ukrainians killing Russian soldiers. I abhor that indiscriminate bombing. I am even intellectually involved: What does Russia gain by destroying a country it wants to make part of Russia? What does it do with burned out cities and millions of refugees? Just let them starve? So, what is gained by destroying that which you want to conquer? Nothing’s left. You gain nothing but disdain and a new problem, a population that will do all it can to cause you, the Russians, pain. And what folly is it for Putin to threaten nuclear war when it would mean annihilation of his own country? Does he believe that he can bomb the West with impunity? Would I as a Westerner feel perfectly justified in nuking Russia if Putin were to launch a strike against the West?”


Elise: “As I see it, our moral dilemmas are unsolvable because we face the same problems we faced throughout our history. It appears to me that we can’t get by a ‘situation ethics’ when we are involved in war or are under the threat of war.”

Probably no one in twentieth-century history was more feckless than Neville Chamberlain.


Is there a twenty-first century Neville, someone as feckless as Chamberlain was when he dealt with Hitler?


With a sheet of paper in his hand, but no threat of military retaliation in his heart, Neville paved the way for Hitler to invade neighboring countries. Again, I ask, is there a twenty-first century analog, a present-day doppelgänger? Is there a modern capitulator?


Neville Chamberlain thought he could avoid war through reasonable negotiations. He was, as history notes, wrong. Bullies, would-be conquerers, and warmongers do not acquiesce to talk or empty threats.


Just about the only time that reason or pleading prevented an invasion was in the fifth century, when Pope Leo I went to the camp of Attila. Attila acquiesced to the plea of the Pope, and withdrew from Italy. But that plea was made in the context of Attila’s recent losses at Châlons and an ongoing famine that affected his supply lines. As the story goes, also, Attila saw a vision of a priest holding a sword in the sky behind the pleading Pope, an omen in the shape of St. Peter about to wreak havoc on the Huns.


Here’s what I know about bullies and would-be conquerers. They don’t often respond like Attila. They do respond to tangible actions. Think of Muammar Gaddafi, who, after seeing America’s actions against the threat of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, turned over his fledgling nuclear materials because he believed he, too, would be subject to military action as he was in 1986.


There is no leadership training that turns a feckless person into a leader of substance. A great leader can come from any walk of life. Reagan, who ordered the bombing of Libya in retaliation for acts of terror, was an actor. Ukraine’s indomitable leader Volodymyr Zelenskyy was a comedian.


Strange how some in America’s “ruling class” pretend to be leaders and who receive the accolades of the “elite” only to prove themselves to be feckless when they are confronted with bullies. I fear America is being led by Nevilles.

“Saw a commercial for travel today.”


“Yeah?”


“Showed bungy jumping. High bridge, river below. Screaming tourists on their way down; the bungy cords tied to their ankles.”


“I did that once.”


“Really? Weren’t you worried that the cords would break?”


“Nah! They check that out.”


“Oh! You mean the way the rocket engineers checked out the Challenger Shuttle—right before it exploded. Yeah. That works. And you have an expert elastics engineer to check out the bungy cord’s reliability. Kid probably spent years working with such materials in the lab. But then, so did all those rocket engineers who worked with rockets and O-rings.”


“What’s your point? That we shouldn’t go bungy jumping? Or that we shouldn’t ride in space shuttles?”


“It’s more general. This is a planet of risks, but people ignore that they are vulnerable. So, yesterday, during this March’s spring break, some West Point cadets went to Florida, decided they would do a bit of cocaine, didn’t know it was laced with Fentanyl. Go figure. Guys who volunteered to enter the military, where risk is even greater than in ‘ordinary’ life, and they overdose on a drug. Guess every generation has its share of fools. My point isn’t to avoid bungy jumping on vacation; it’s not to avid military service; it’s to avoid bungy jumping or its equivalent just for the acquisition of a little dopamine. In a world of risks, just surviving is a job. I’m not advocating locking oneself in one’s room for life, but I am advocating caution. We can’t eliminate risk because life on this planet is risky.”


“Sure, but maybe a little fun…”


“With forethought. I saw a video of a 70-year-old guy go up to a bison in Yellowstone. Beast gored him and threw him into a tree. He survived, but only luckily. Think a guy 70 would have garnered some wisdom about wild animals with horns, but no, had to learn the hard way—and at 70!”


“I see videos like that all the time. I’m not one of those guys.


“Yet, you went full bungy. Of course, there are levels of risk, and I understand that. But we’ve become so accustomed to ‘virtual worlds’ and to fiction in which Wiley Coyotes can fall, but not suffer death, that our brains have become conditioned to, or immune to, the sense of risk. It’s as though we have bypassed the functions of the amygdalae. Face it, evolution retained that part of the brain for reason, probably because we evolved those other brain parts that tell us it’s okay to bungy jump just because we can.”


“I think I see your point.”

Einstein is famous more for a blackboard than for a lab table, but what he did on the former was demonstrated on the latter. Well, by “latter,” I mean complex lab tables like cyclotrons, accelerators, atomic clocks, lasers, and telescopes, that is, everything physicists use to study the nature and composition of the Cosmos. His Gedankenexperiment (“thought experiment”) has been tested by many, and so far, what he “thought about” agrees with what physicists see in Nature. But the many proofs for Relativity that rely on experiment—and therefore, on experience—seem to put the cart before the horse. Did Einstein “think” about relativity in the absence of “experiencing it”? That is, was there something in his encoded experiences that enabled him to derive his insights? Or, did he think in the absence of experience?


Einstein was not the first to examine the world by thought. Aristotle ran a primitive version of thought experiment in making his assumption about why things move. Galileo transferred the thinking into action by actually running experiments, and Newton added the exact math by which we still send cars down roads and rockets into space. In Newton we find a merger of thought and action, a tie between the why and how of motion that furthered Galileo’s scientific methodology and that overturned Aristotle’s thinking. Observation led to conclusion that led to prediction.


Although he was aware of experiments, Einstein did science by thinking, specifically by analogies, placing himself mentally on a train, or in an elevator, or in a fall. He turned analogy into predictive math. And his predictions work to this day. They enable us to have GPS because we know that clocks run differently when they are exposed to greater or lower gravity or faster or slower speeds. They enable us to understand the strange arcs of ostensibly bent galaxies that are rather the product of light’s bending into Einstein rings as it passes a closer “gravity well” of an intervening galaxy.


Although we might say that Einstein’s insights were derived purely from thinking, we might also acknowledge that in drawing analogies, he was relying on experience. He knew about elevators, ladders, bicycles, trains, falling apples, Galileo’s relativity, Newton’s forces, and he had experienced acceleration personally. In other words, his insights derived from experience, from his experiments similar to those we all run in the physical world, experiments that keep us from repeating a fall down the stairs. Gedankenexperiment isn’t a thought in a vacuum. It is thinking in the context of what we know because we have experience.


I make that statement in the context of a recently published article and a nine-year-old’s observation. Looking at emojis, Leonora told her parents that the text-bedecking symbols are very much like the hieroglyphs Egyptians carved in stone. That might seem to be a simple observation, but it has a profound context. It begs questions about both what we know and how we know. And then it begs the question about how we communicate.


Does Leonora have some innate understanding of the relationship between language as a symbolic representation of reality? Was her insight like Aristotle’s “motion,” already contained in her brain the way some “motive force” is “contained in the moving object”? Or did she deduce some universal principle of language after nine years of careful observation in the laboratory of her life? That is, was her knowledge a priori or experiential? Was she born with an innate understanding of language as represented in symbols that cross the physical gap between two people before she heard the first soothing sounds of care from her mother or before she cooed her first coo?


You send me a smiley face in a text. I understand. Well, I think I understand. I reciprocate. You understand. At least, you think you understand. We are connected very much as the Egyptians were able to connect with their hieroglyphs. In fact, I see you just sent me a cartouche of emojis, a happy face, a face so happy it sheds tears, a “thumbs up,” and another symbol, maybe fireworks, all logograms, pictograms, and ideograms. We have just communicated to a more complex degree as you add emojis to further refine your thoughts just as an Egyptian cartouche encapsulates several images to make a single thought, like the name Ramesses. One smiley face: “I’m happy.” Two smiley faces: “I’m super happy.” In those cartouches, the modifiers keep building until in one, we get “Protector of Egypt, who has subdued foreign lands, Ra whom the gods have borne, the founder of the Two Lands,” or his nickname “Ka nakht mery Ra,” (The strong bull, beloved of Ra), symbolized by a bird, a bull, and couple of other hieroglyphs.


And your thoughts encapsulated in the emojis you texted? What were they about? Why were you happy? Something in the “real world” that you observed? Maybe something that happened to a mutual friend? Certainly, what lies at the center of our symbolic connection is experiential, some happy circumstance that you or I observed and that we communicated by an emoji, or, as Leonora might say, a “modern hieroglyph carved not in diorite but in cyber-stone, in digits, in pixels? And we drew an analogy: Whatever symbol you sent = Happiness (or Fun, or Joy).


So, Leonora opens us up to a complexity of thoughts about knowing, thinking, and sharing. And her insight came because she had seen hieroglyphs somewhere, had learned about them, or, should I say, had experience with them. They were part of a pattern stored in her neurons.


In February, 2022, Leonardo Fernandino, Jia-Qing Tong, Lisa Conant, and Jeffrey, R. Binder published in PNAS online “Decoding the information structure underlying the neural representation of concepts,” a work on how the brain classifies. * That we can recognize a blond Golden Retriever and a red Irish Setter as “dogs” or a Chevy or a Ford as “cars” lies in our stored conceptual knowledge as patterns of dogs and cars. In short, as the authors write, our neurons through experience “encode sensory-motor and affective information about each concept, contrary to the long-held idea that concept representations are independent of sensory-motor experience.” Leonora had seen pictograms in texts and hieroglyphs on Egyptian monuments. She tied them together in a mutual pattern, and, walla! She had an insight: When we send an emoji, we are not different from Egyptians who put hieroglyphs on stone monuments. The “stuff” of language, the essence of communication hasn’t changed. We went from runes and hieroglyphs to letters that relate to images (an A, for example, related to a drawing of an ox’s—alep’s—horned head rotated), and now we’re back to pictograms. Really, think of texts you have received. Some of your friends have sent not words, but simple emojis, the new hieroglyphs.


And think of what that means for communication. If you pick up a nineteenth-century prose writer’s work, you will find long, complex paragraphs. Move to, say, Hemingway, and the prose becomes crisper, the paragraphs shorter. And now complex prose has virtually disappeared in texts with emojis. Simplify things any more, and we’ll be back to runes.


Einstein knew about elevators. He knew about bicycles, cars, and trains. He even knew about flying when he wrote his famous papers two years after the Wright Brothers’ famous first flight. Walla! He put experiences together, not just fitting a new entity into an established category like “dog,” but to refine an old category by adding an insight: Weight disappears in a free fall. And that provides an insight. It provides a refinement of both concepts and engenders a new category: Spacetime. Leonora knew about hieroglyphs and emojis, and her brain recognized a class of entities that encompassed both. She might not have provided an insight as profound as Spacetime, but there’s little doubt that she had, nevertheless, an insight.




*https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2108091119   Accessed March 4, 2022. For a summary issued by the Medical College of Wisconsin, see “The stuff of thought is the stuff of experience, says a new study,” published online at https://medicalxpress.com/news/2022-03-thought.html  (Accessed March 5, 2022).

The world community seems to be surprised by the Russian invasion of the Ukraine. Should it be? Isn’t the invasion just “more of the same” for a species with a history of exacerbating natural troubles with artificial ones? Didn’t Homer warn us of such human troubles when he had Zeus declare in the Iliad, “Man has only himself to blame if his miseries are worse than they ought to be.”
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When I first considered writing about the human condition some 25 years ago, neither I nor anyone else had to strain to see the map of waxing troubles. It was all around us on a scale of 1:1 in the threats of epidemics and potential pandemics, such as the cholera outbreaks in Bangladesh (1991, about 9,000 deaths) and in Latin America (1991-93, 8,000 deaths), western Africa’s meningitis outbreak (1996, 10,000 deaths), and the potentially medieval-like, but short-lived, reappearance of the Bubonic and Pneumonic plagues in India (1994, 56 deaths). Trouble appeared also as natural disasters, such as the 1991 Bangladesh cyclone (138,000+ deaths), the Latur earthquake in India (10,000 deaths), the Izmit earthquake in Turkey (17,000 deaths), and Hurricane Mitch that devastated Central America in 1998 (11,000 deaths). Trouble surfaced also on economic and social fronts, as well. A recession began in July, 1990, and “syncretic” anarchists” stirred the cauldron of mischief.

And wars! Who could forget the wars of the 1990s? That decade’s conflicts turned upside down the lives of many who wished only to continue living in relative peace. The strife of the 1990s that led to the deaths of innocents and conflict opponents included:

    The Colombian Marxist Guerrilla War perpetrated by FARC, the Salvadoran Civil War perpetrated by the FLMN with an estimated 75,000 deaths, the Nicaraguan Civil War, the Honduran Guerrilla War, the Surinamese Civil War characterized by massacres, the Venezuelan Uprising, the Slovenian War of Independence, the Bosnian Civil War, the Croatian War of Independence (12,000 dead or missing), the Moldovan Civil War, the Algerian Civil War, the First and Second Civil Wars of Liberia that killed 250,000, the Malian Civil War, the Nigerian Civil War, the Sierra Leone Civil War, the Somalian Civil War, the Togolese Civil War, the Djibouti Civil War, the Senegalese Border War, the Ethiopian-Somalian Border War, the Ugandan Civil and Ugandan Guerrilla War, the 1994 Rwandan Civil War/genocide with an estimated 800,000 deaths, the South African Rebellion, the Armenian-Azerbaijani War, the Lebanese Civil War, the Georgian Civil War, the Tajikistan Civil War, the Turkey-PKK War, the Sri Lankan Civil War that killed 80,000, the insurgency in Kashmir, the Burmese Guerrilla War, the East Timor War, the Philippine Guerrilla War, the Laotian Guerrilla War, the Kampuchean-Thai Border War and the Kampuchean Civil War, the Chinese Tiananmen Square confrontation, the Papua New Guinea Civil War, the Haitian Civil War, the Chiapas Rebellion, the Guatemalan Civil War that ended in 1996 (read Nobel laureate Rigoberta Menchú Tum’s account of earlier days of this war), the Ecuadorian-Peruvian Border Conflict, the Albanian Rebellion, the Uprising in Kosovo, the Chechen Revolt, the Second Chechen Revolt, the witch hunts in Ghana, the Ethiopian-Eritrean Border War, the Congolese Civil War, the Zairian Civil War that, like Rwanda, involved Tutsi and Hutu, the Comoran Rebellion, the Pakistani (Sindh) Civil War, the Invasion of Kuwait, Kurdish uprisings, the Gulf War with, according to Carnegie Mellon’s Beth Daponte, well over 100,000 deaths, and other conflicts that I probably missed. Just adding what I listed sums to 1,317,000 deaths, and I did not tally all from the other wars. Ten years and more than 50 wars! (Look through any decade of the past 1,000 years, and you will find similar numbers of conflicts and, as in WWI and WWII, many more deaths)

After one of my college classes in the 1990s, a 25-year-old veteran of the Gulf War told me, that he “couldn’t stand” the flippant attitude of his slightly younger classmates and that they should be sent off to see the rest of the world before they continued their education. Like so many others before him, he had personally experienced the killing and the troubles foisted upon the survivors. I remember similar statements by Vietnam War vets who took my classes in the 1970s. What they all noted I noted for the country: During the course of any decade, many maintain a flippant attitude even as troubles abound. Neither the attempted destruction of the World Trade Center’s North Tower by truck bomb in 1993 nor the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah building seemed to shake people into adapting to the dangers at hand as precursors of the 9-11 attacks.

The encompassing troubles of the 1990s and the warnings they triggered reminded me of a poem written over a century earlier. I found myself sub-vocalizing lines from A. E. Housman’s “Terence, this is stupid stuff” that I have referred to in other blogs:

    Therefore, since the world has still
    Much good, but much less good than ill,
    And while the sun and moon endure
    Luck's a chance, but trouble's sure,
    I'd face it as a wise man would,
    And train for ill and not for good. *

That seems to be advice from a pessimist, but it carries some wisdom. The landscape of lives temporarily unaffected by trouble appears to be a smooth plain. But just as one type of landscape borders another on Earth as plains abut piedmonts and piedmonts abut mountains, for example, so the human landscape of peace and security borders on or transitions into a rugged and dangerous terrain.

Each of us will encounter some trouble forced upon us by Man or Nature. It’s our lot as humans to experience trouble, sorry to say. There’s no peaceful and secure human landscape that runs into forever; all natural and human landscapes border on change. Just before the outset of WWII, the people in Europe a little over two decades after destruction and death caused by WWI and the worldwide Depression, were beginning to walk on a smoother surface, only to suffer another war, one far more devastating than the previous Great War. Today, other countries are at war. Tomorrow, still others will fight. Diseases will ravage as COVID-19 has ravaged, and natural disasters will occur. Because we cannot seem to learn the lesson that this life isn’t practice, we humans will continue to exacerbate our troubles by adding what is avoidable to that which is unavoidable.

What we can’t control, such as earthquakes and storms that cross into our personal territories, forces us to adapt, and many of us have so adapted and will so adapt. Hard lessons have to be learned by those who train for good and not for ill.



*A. E. Housman. The collection is called A Shropshire Lad.