Nothing like having a President asking a dead woman to join him on stage (Ah! The power of the position!). “Jackie, are you here? Where’s Jackie?” (Aside: she died in a car accident that prompted condolences from the White House—someone should have reminded POTUS) Well, almost nothing like that gaffe. Biden also asked a man in a wheel chair to stand for recognition: "Chuck, Stand Up, Let Them See Ya!” And remember this one? "In Delaware, the largest growth of population is Indian Americans, moving from India. You cannot go to a 7-11 or a Dunkin' Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent. I'm not joking.”


Go ahead, slap your forehead. I just did. Could President Gaffe and Vice President Word Salad-n-Chef be “in real life” as foolish as they sound in public?


While standing on the South Korean side of the demilitarized zone, Vice President Harris said, “The United States shares a very important relationship, which is an alliance with the Republic of North Korea.” Among her profundities is her statement that a banana is a banana—sorry, not that, but rather, “community banks are in the community.” One can get dizzy listening to her circularity. "I think that, to be very honest with you, I do believe that we should have rightly believed, but we certainly believe that certain issues are just settled. Certain issues are just settled.” The lyrics of “You Spin Me Round (like a Record)” by Dead and Alive summarize the Vice President’s words on almost every subject she has addressed in public:
    
    You spin me right round, baby
    Right round like a record, baby
    Right round round round
    You spin me right round, baby
    Right round like a record, baby
    Right round round round


Oh! Did I mention that the Vice President’s words “spin me right round”? 


I suppose those who say, “Well, these are just little slip ups,” can’t be convinced that on the world stage the staging of words matters.

It took us centuries, nay millennia, to encapsulate our problems in myth and then in psychology and eventually in neuroscience, but here we are, the latter two mechanisms for self-understanding rooted ofttimes in those mythical origins like the story of Pandora’s opening the pithos (storage jar, not pyxis, “casket” translated as “box”), for example. Today, one of those ancient Greek myths seems to be as good an explanation as any for the widespread contention fostered by mainstream and social media.


The goddess Nemesis (the Distributor) symbolizes indignation and/or retribution. Her role as a distributor was to oversee a balance between happiness and misery, keeping both check when either tended to dominate human affairs. Like other mythical characters, Nemesis has undergone change, but also like others she represents one or two underlying themes or sets of themes. In the instance of Nemesis, one persistent theme is proportion or equilibrium: One can’t be too happy for long or too sad for long. Nemesis as a distributor of both keeps both in check. Biblical Job is an example. He was up, way up, rich and happy before he was down, way down, destitute and unhappy. And then he was up again.


Nemesis also represents indignation. And as such, she seems especially germane to our times because all around us we see indignation based on an unequal distribution of happiness. Nowhere is this more apparent than in politics and political commentary. Everyone is indignant. Everyone is unhappy with the happiness of others. Nemesis is busy keeping happiness and misery in balance, or she is busy distributing indignation. Maybe it was an easier task when the world had fewer people in ancient times; today’s billions under the influence of propaganda or advocacy from one side or the other are difficult to control.


In American politics (probably in every country’s politics) indignation prevails, and neither side of any political divide seems to understand the indignation on the other side. You can find numerous examples deeply rooted in certain issues: Climate, abortion, crime, sanctuary, health care, taxes, intrusive government, justice, gender, education, and war. The happiness on one side engenders indignation on the other: Biological males using female facilities pleasing some and threatening others; gender propaganda in the classroom pleasing some and threatening others; socialism pleasing some and threatening others. Every issue listed above is a focus for similar indignation. The happiness born of the successes on one side engenders unhappiness on the other. The unhappiness manifests itself in a common complaint: Hypocrisy—that is, the ostensible hypocrisy of the “other side.”


Finding Nemesis in her role as an equalizer is an ongoing task. She always seems to be missing for one group or another. But finding her in her role as a distributor of indignation is easy. She’s right there in front of us, all around us, and definitely on mainstream and social media.

A couple of decades ago—or more, I can’t remember—the university where I worked decided to revamp the general curriculum—a rather periodic process in universities as they attempt to correct the ineffective general curricula adopted in their previous revamping. I remember two major curriculum revisions and a couple of minor ones during my four decades in academia. Driven by perceptions that students were not reaching the erudition promised by the universities and by shifting national, state, and local standards, those motivated to change general curricula usually succumbed to the prevailing avant-garde movements, most of them based on tried-but-not-true temporary experiments run in schools from kindergarten through first-year college. Of course, history shows that curriculum revisions are the stuff of burgeoning managerial staffs, each new position requiring in a world that produces no physical gizmo some proof of worth, some reason for the managers to hold their jobs.


Curricula revisions aren’t just a recent phenomenon. Someone way back, maybe even at Bologna, where the modern university system arguably started, probably said after about a half millennium of same-old-same-old, “Should we incorporate this new information…allora…this Galilean stuff into what we teach?” And later, “Should we incorporate this…allora…Newtonian stuff into what we teach?” All the while the idea of a commonly held body of knowledge persisted: Basic readin’, writin’, and ‘rithmatic, the skills needed by everyone to survive among “civilized” people. Yet, how to acquire those skills became increasingly a matter of trial-and-error, with error being the key focus of faculty a couple of decades after introducing a revision to the curriculum.


Thus, Americans experimented with such novelties as open classrooms, outcome-based education, and even student-designed curricula. In the 1970s, under the push by a few in my university, the administration settled for a while on allowing students to choose whatever courses outside their majors they wanted to take, a policy that led to emptied Composition 101, Introduction to Philosophy, and Biology and Physics 100-level classes and filled Batik and Tie Dying classes as the process from the student’s perspective became one of acquiring not knowledge, but rather credits. After a period of worsening student performance, the administrators—again eager to show they were on top of modernizing—decided it was time to revamp again. The last major revamping in my career centered on “teaching across the curriculum,” a philosophy that tried to reassemble the cracked egg’s spilled specializations.

So, at my university, the general curriculum was supposed to center on certain fundamental skills and themes, skills like writing, reading, and math-ing being applied to five chosen themes. Energy was not among the themes. I argued that there was no more cogent theme than energy. But the illustrious committee rejected energy as a theme that should run through all major curricula.

Quick, name something you can do without energy. Right, you can’t even think without the expenditure of energy. All that stuff you eat goes into energy production--for which the brain thanks the mouth and the body's distribution system. Without energy you are no more active than a rubber chicken--and even that analogy limps since the molecules in the chicken constantly vibrate.

And yet all of the committee members who rejected the theme of energy had either lived through or been born during the Carter years. Energy if you remember the most famous equation ever written is the other side of the Cosmic Coin. But lost in the intellectual movements of the day, my colleagues put curricular focus elsewhere, leaving students of a generation or two to discover on their own the significance of energy in their lives and in the life of their civilization.


As one who did research for the now defunct Pennsylvania Energy Office, I think I gained some sense of energy’s role in maintaining the Commonwealth. From studies on coal, greenhouse gases, and green technologies, I realized that prudent energy policy on a state and federal level is as important to the life of the people as a whole as energy policy is for individuals and families. The effect of high energy costs, for example, reveals itself in fewer leisure trips and more expensive products. That just seems to be commonsense. But it isn’t, at least it isn’t for the people running a number state governments and running the federal government. And I wonder whether someone like the Transportation Secretary and the Governor of California were part of a student body who never learned much about energy because they were learning about how utopian the world would be if only we could rid ourselves of fossil fuels so we could save the planet. And the lessons on energy that might have been learned if it were a principal topic in college might have even been absorbed by the President as he went through school at the same time I was in college.


Now, I’ll admit that typically only those involved in majors like physics, chemistry, biology, and geology (particularly petroleum technology) had some focus on energy in the past. Possibly economics majors also perceived its importance, but I have my doubts on the familiarization with the subject among those taking courses in the humanities and the social sciences. So, here we are, decades after Jimmy Carter initiated a Department of Energy, and just a couple years after energy independence, finding ourselves as a nation once again importing energy—into a country whose energy resources are immense.


But I’m not arguing that those enormous reserves of coal, oil, and natural gas are the only sources on which Americans should rely. Instead, I’m arguing that necessity is the mother of invention and that it is a mother who discovers as they behave what her children need. In other words, when little Johnny is listless, he might have a vitamin B-12 deficiency, so Mom needs to give him some. She sees the symptom, and reacts with a cure. Not so with the listlessness in the Biden economy and under the Biden energy policies. 


We have a whole country that has a symptom caused by a deficiency, but Mother Joe, Mother Pete, and all the other Administration Mothers can’t recognize their children are ailing or see the cause of their lethargy—the Administration’s own folly hampering domestic energy production and relying on foreign sources while trying to make an abrupt change to “green” energy in underdeveloped technologies and insufficient infrastructure. Like university administrations and faculty, the current Biden Administration wants to rewrite the curriculum, the energy plan, based on the ideals of the day. But as every generation discovers, the ideal often conflicts with the real, and changes made because of contemporary ideas, don’t necessarily result in improvements—as educators have discovered through many curricula revisions.


It’s the same old, same old. Maybe one of Christ’s parables sums it up. In Luke 16: 19-27, Jesus tells of the rich man and Lazarus, the pauper at his gate. When the two die, the poor guy goes to the “bosom of Abraham,” whereas the rich guy goes to Hell. So, the rich guy asked Abraham to send someone to warn his five living brothers to change their ways. “And Abraham said to him, ‘They have Moses and the Prophets; let them hearken to them.’ But the rich guy says, ‘No, Father Abraham, but if someone from the dead goes to them, they will repent.’ But he says to him, ‘If they do not hearken to Moses and the Prophets, they will not believe even if someone rises form the dead.’”


One wonders. If those who suffered through the energy crisis of the Carter years, could rise to speak their wisdom to the Biden Administration, would anyone hearken? Probably not. After all, Biden himself lived through the high inflation and energy woes of the Carter years. He certainly can’t hear the voices of the prophets of that day, and obviously he can’t remember—he does have like that rich man in the parable a beach house worth two million or more in Delaware, and he seems unlikely to have seen the “Lazuruses” on the ground outside his gate. He has, like those universities, decided to try what hasn’t worked before or what is based on ideals without proven sustainable successes because he, like those university administrators, believes “it will work this time.” Except that the last revamping of the energy sector that actually led to energy independence and net exporting of energy instead of importing is the very policy he overturned. It’s as though the university finally devised a curriculum that achieved the goal of erudition among its students and then went to the unsuccessful curricula designs of the past. 


All the words have been spoken. The “Moseses” and other “Prophets” plus the actual history of the American energy sector has stood as a lesson for decades. It’s a fundamental lesson, one that transcends the vicissitudes of a managerial class seeking to prove they know better than their forebears and that they are wise. But just as readin’, writin’, and ‘rithmatic have been staples of education for centuries, so prudent energy policy, not fashionable energy policy, is the only way to achieve economic stability now and into the future. Energy, can’t live without it. Hearken!

Twenty-first century people face a big list of moral dilemmas.


1) Should Iranian women burn their headscarves and protest in the streets because Tehran’s morality police killed Mahsa Amini, the young woman caught in public without the full hijab attire? Should they protest publicly even when doing so means risking their own lives? 2) Should the Patriarch of Moscow condemn the wanton destruction and death caused by his friend and benefactor Vladimir Putin? Should he say Mass in that beautiful new cathedral dedicated to the military that Putin built for him? 3) Should Americans generously and freely provide all immigrants with housing, health care, phones, education, and protection? Should they do that personally, or should they just have the government do that for them and avoid the inconvenience of doing so face-to-face? And should the people of Martha’s Vineyard cast out 53 migrants from an island that somehow handles over 100,000 tourists each summer on the grounds that the island has insufficient facilities? And what about New York City? Should the city house immigrants bussed from border states in the newly formed Bidenville tent city, where the large tents can sleep 1,000 on cots barrack style? 4) Should the UN cast Russian ambassadors out onto the streets of the East Side and off the Security Council? Or should the ambassadors of all the countries ignore Putin’s threat of nuclear war and sit by idly while discussing the so-called existential threat of climate change? 5) Is climate change a moral issue as some argue? Have you switched completely from fossil fuels to Solar, Hydro, nuclear, or gerbil power yet? 6) Should felons run free rather than pay bail? Should any legislator, prosecutor, judge, or parole board suffer any consequences of decisions that allowed violent offenders to reoffend upon release under the no bail policies? 7) Should Catholic priests and evangelical ministers condemn the support so many in their congregations give to abortion and by doing so risk seeing less money in their collections? 8) Is human life an inalienable right? Or, is human life an arbitrarily defined entity dependent for its value and right on the opinion du jour and in situ? 9) Should biological men be allowed to use women’s restrooms or locker rooms because they declare themselves to be women? is this a moral issue or just one involving an open or closed toilet seat? 10) Is censorship by the few a sufficient guide to rectitude for the many? 11) Should you buy a product—regardless of your desire or need for it—from a “woke” company that operates on values you do not perceive to be moral or ethical? 12) Should you respectfully bury recently deceased Aunt Zelda or put her body in the composting pile as you are allowed to do in California, Washington, Colorado, Vermont, and Oregon? If a human body now has thousands of synthetic--many carcinogenic-- compounds from plastics and other sources, is composting really a way of saving the environment and humanity? Or will Aunt Zelda's body poison the kale served at an upscale bistro next year? 13) ... 


No doubt you can list other dilemmas we twenty-first century people face.

Ah! The threats. The desperation. The folly.
So, once again, on this day before fall, Vladimir Putin is threatening the use of nuclear weapons. How frightening! Especially for Russians, who will almost assuredly receive radioactive fallout from their own weapons. Then again, who’s to count the cancer victims and those dying rapidly from radioactive isotopes stripping electrons from the atoms in their bodies. Ionizing radiation? It’s as invisible as the wind.

What’s that? What are you saying?

Basically, that Vlad needs a lesson in meteorology, specifically in low and high pressure systems and the breezes they generate within a prevailing wind system. Ignorance is bliss until it isn’t.

In January the winds of Ukraine generally sheer, with northern Ukraine experiencing a west wind and southern Ukraine, an east wind, and eastern Ukraine getting a more northerly wind. In spring, northern, eastern, and southern Ukraine get eastern winds, whereas in southwestern Ukraine, winds generally flow from the south and southeast. By July, the prevailing winds change again as west and northwest winds prevail. Fall sees a trend back toward the winter wind regime. Within this general trend various high and low pressure systems, swirling clockwise and counterclockwise respectively because of the Coriolis effect in the Northern Hemisphere, alter local and regional wind directions.

Today’s (September 20) wind map reveals two wind gyres, both counterclockwise, indicating a double low pressure over Ukraine. Thus, winds over the country flow both from Belarus and into southern Russia.
What if Putin dropped a couple of nukes today—or any day? The result would be the spread of radioactive isotopes into the Crimea in the southeast, Belarus to the north, and into regions southeast of Moscow. Meteorology be damned! Putin says he isn’t bluffing about nuclear weapons as he conscripts more Russians into military service to replace the thousands lost in his “special engagement” to date. And that means that those soldiers—those Russian soldiers—sent to fight in Ukraine will also come under radioactive fallout. So will the soils of Ukrainian wheat fields. And cities like Savastopol, Karch, and Feodosia—those three accounting for about 700,000 Crimeans. Of course, Russian cities like Volgograd, with more than a million people, will also receive the unwanted radiation.

And if the winds shift as they inevitably do, will Moscow get a dose of its own radioactive isotopes? Certainly, it and neighboring Belarus will receive some radioactive fallout. Yet, a belligerent Putin continues his threats, and a compliant Belarus shows support.
Will he use nukes? I have no idea. Desperate men do desperate things. We can generalize as we do with regard to prevailing wind systems, but general wind systems do not preclude aberrations in wind directions. One can live within a region of Prevailing Westerlies and still get eastern, southern, and northern winds.

It’s truly unfortunate that most of the 7.8 billion people on the planet have no power to impose sanity where insanity reigns. Hitler, Mussolini, and Tojo began a world war in which more than 50 million people died. How many of us will Putin kill to satisfy his aggrandizement? How many will be Russians? And after he is dead, how many of his and other Russians’ offspring will suffer from cancer that his actions initiated.

The winds of today are not necessarily the winds of tomorrow. What blows today might blow back tomorrow. Vlad needs a lesson in meteorology.

Salem, Massachusetts, has an infamous past. Numerous accusations of witchcraft resulted in deaths of 25 innocent people accused of consorting with the devil. Arthur Miller dramatized the events of 1692-93 in The Crucible, a play that is required reading in many high schools, making that brief segment of American history available to those who paid attention in class or read through the Spark Notes. One might think that since 1711, when the Salem community voted to restore the good names of the accused and especially since 1957, when Massachusetts formally apologized for the hangings, that the Salem story is just history. But, in fact, Salem is an ongoing story. In  2017 Zambian police arrested four “witch hunters” and charged them with murder. Eight years earlier  people in Papua New Guinea burned to death a girl, a father, and his son, all accused of practicing witchcraft. A little research uncovers more such twenty-first century stories, including those of Nigerian “witches.” Yes, Salem lives on. And in the United States, where Salem lies, such destructive lies about others persist.


Although there are still places where the cry “Witch, Witch!” drives people to ostracize and murder their neighbors, the accusation has multiple variations, all of them causing hardship and harm. In the United States, the word witch has been replaced in recent times by racist and a number of words that end in -phobe (xenophobe, for example). Whether or not the accused is racist or phobic is irrelevant. What matters, as it mattered in 1692, is the accusation. Once out, it becomes a reality. And that new reality drives paranoia and subsequent injustice.


When the President of the United States labels an entire group of citizens terrorists, extremists, threats, racists, and Nazis, he sets in motion a process that is no different from what occurred in Salem. Truth and specificity never guide those who stereotype. Rational engagement dies with accusations of witchcraft in any of its supposed spectral manifestations. Today, just wearing a MAGA hat has led to abusive reactions by a paranoid public, reactions that have ranged from verbal to physical attacks on the accused. Is the American President alone in his paranoia? According to National Geographic online, “President Yahya Jammeh of The Gambia believes he is being targeted by witches. According to Amnesty International, as many as 1,000 Gambians accused of witchcraft have been arrested and tortured on orders from the president.” *


“Can’t happen here,” you say, even though videos are readily available showing the American version of TV personalities crying “witch”—i.e. “racist.” Is the American president different from The Gambia’s president? “How dare you ask?” you inquire. This is America; we don’t arrest and torture here. We don’t burn people at the stake.


But do we ruin their names? Do we send the IRS in for an audit or to punish as seems to have happened under Lois Lerner and other government agents? Do we send in the FBI over political disagreements? Remember that chief among the reparations made to the victims of the Salem Witch Trials was the restoration of names, that is, the restoration of reputations. In an age of widespread social media, how does one restore a ruined reputation? Once out, the accusation becomes the reputation, and the subsequent condemnation it elicits entrenches itself like a World War I soldier at the Front.


Those who bear false witness are chief among hypocrites, and the only way to stop the injustice they perpetrate seems to lie in counter accusations, a process that helped to end those Salem witch trials so long ago. In Massachusetts, Governor Phipps stopped the arrests for witchcraft and terminated the trials after his own wife was questioned by the witch hunters.


Will the false accusations ever stop? Probably not. Statista online ** documents that 21% of Americans believe in spells and witchcraft. I do not know how many Americans believe that those who favor small and unobtrusive government are “a threat to democracy” as the President has stated, but it is not unreasonable to assume they number in the millions. Salem of 1692 has re-emerged in this century, and all Americans now belong to a community of paranoid neighbors primed to cast accusations.




*National Geographic Resource Library. Witch Trials in the 21st Century: Accusations of witchcraft persist. Online at https://www.nationalgeographic.org/article/witch-trials-21st-century/. Accessed September 21, 2022.


**https://www.statista.com/statistics/1272243/belief-in-spells-or-witchcraft-in-the-united-states/  Accessed September 21, 2022.

Sorry for the following somewhat pessimistic essay. Advice: Force a smile on your face before you read :) 


The numbers, if correct, are staggering. Young Russians and Ukrainians of all ages have died in the thousands because Putin decided to invade Ukraine. And back home in Russia, the population, if one can judge by interviews of people in the street, has little choice but to accept the government’s word—as promulgated by the Press—that Ukraine posed a threat to Russia because of Nazis. I might have missed something, but I don’t remember Ukrainian war games or military buildups along the Russian border though I do remember the Russian takeover of Crimea and the on-and-off skirmishes in the region that have occurred over the past eight years. And I certainly remember enough geography to note that eastern Ukraine has valuable mineral resources.


So, people are dying because…That’s just it. What’s the “because”; what’s the cause?
​
Does Putin covet those resources once controlled by the Soviet Union that now lie in the hands of allegedly corrupt companies like Burisma and allegedly corrupt prosecutors accused of shielding them? Are those Russian soldiers’ lives spent to “reclaim” a territory that has ties to Russia but that has been “independent” since the fall of the Soviet Union? Have the people of independent Ukraine, not Soviet Ukraine and not the Russian enclave in the Crimea, shown any overt desire to rejoin a newly reconstituted Soviet Union? Makes one think that Ukrainians weren’t having fun behind the now torn Iron Curtain. Makes one think that whatever the level of corruption displayed by recent Ukrainian administrations, that Ukrainians as a whole were relatively happy calling themselves “Ukrainians,” and not happy to be called “Russians.”


Our species’ history is peppered with mad men and bad men who have caused not just a death, but many deaths, hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands, and in the instances of the two world wars, millions of deaths. And for what? Where are those mad-bad men both ancient and modern? Dead of course. And the world in general did not mourn their passing, as it will probably not mourn Putin’s passing.


In the meanwhile, all those Russian families who lost loved ones in an unnecessary conflict will mourn the losses they have personally suffered while their docile and unaware fellow citizens with no apparent skin in the game will continue to parrot the words of TV anchors and pundits and continue to hate the “enemies of the state,” including not only the Ukrainians, but also the NATO countries supplying Ukraine with weapons for their defense.


Are the Ukrainians without blemish? I don’t know. Like those Russian civilians, I have been fed some propaganda, I’m sure, but I have attempted to ferret out some truth by visiting different newspapers and websites for related stories. If the Ukrainians do bear some blame—for example, for including the Crimea as part of their independent nation—do they deserve the wholesale destruction, the rapes, tortures, and deaths imposed by Russian soldiers? Do those tales of war crimes committed by Russian soldiers that are demonstrable through bound and executed civilians lying in the street and through intercepted telephone calls between Russian soldiers and their wives, parents, and grandparents make the Russians different from the savage Nazis they claim to detest enough to risk limb and life?


And in the West, are we free from mad-bad men? Particularly in the United States, where we see children killing other children, attacks on police, threats against political opponents, and drug cartels pushing fentanyl that seems to have killed more than 100,000 Americans, have we, like the Germans of the 1930s, allowed indifference to reign unless we are personally affected? Do we see but care little about today’s vitriolic adults that foreshadow the next generation’s Caligula, Timur, Hitler, or Putin?


The reality of our times is no different from the reality of all those other times when angry and hateful men sent many to their deaths. We might wish it were not so, but every generation’s mad-bad men repeat the evil. Somewhere today, tomorrow’s evil is festering. The percentage of people who exemplify mad-bad men might not differ now from that same proportion in the past, but the absolute numbers tell a different tale. Today’s 7.8 billion people far outnumber the populations of one- or two-millennia ago.


If you look at estimates for world population over the past two millennia, you will see a rise in numbers except for the two centuries between 1200 and 1400. What could have caused a decline in humans? Was it the Black Death of the 1340s exacerbated by Timur’s cruel devastation in the region east of modern Ukraine that included the Crimea? Here’s what J. J. Saunders writes about Tamerlane:


    “Timur’s kingdom vanished with his life, and his imperialism was imbued with no purpose other than the agglomeration of sheer power built on the corpses of millions. Till the advent of Hitler, Timur stood forth in history as the supreme example of soulless and unproductive militarism” (174). *


Is Putin Timur reborn? Whatever its truth, the running estimate of Timur’s conquests is 17 million dead. They died in a region that includes modern Iran, Iraq, Turkey, Georgia, Azerbaijan, southern Russia (the Crimea), Syria, and India. Seventeen million people made up at that time about 5% of world population. So, how can I compare Timur and Putin whose recent invasion appears to have cost lives numbering only in the tens of thousands?


Remember the threats Putin made at the outset of the invasion? You know, the nuclear threats repeated by his minions in the media who called for the destruction of eastern United States and all of Great Britain? Five percent of the world population would pale by comparison in a nuclear exchange. And that exchange would, to the surprise of those Russian pundits, include Russians under the policy of mutually assured destruction. The soulless call for the nuking of the West by mindless media types indicates that mad-bad men still exist—and they will continue to exist.


If you listened and smiled as I advised at the outset, you probably find yourself frowning now. I apologize for that. The foregoing makes a lengthy restatement of succinct advice written by A. E. Housman in “Terence This Is Stupid Stuff”:


        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. **


With this generation’s and next generation’s mad-bad men always a threat, it might be wise to remember Housman’s lines and my own advice: What you anticipate is rarely a problem. Had NATO and other Ukraine-friendly countries anticipated the actual invasion of February, 2022, their preparations might have saved thousands of lives—both Russian and Ukrainian. Had the Ukrainians not returned the Soviet nukes to the Russians after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the threat of their use might have warded off the invasion and Russian threats to use nuclear weapons.


Train for ill and not for good because the ill, if it has not already surfaced, will surface. You do, in fact have skin in the game because it is literally your skin that’s threatened by soulless men seeking power.


*The History of the Mongol Conquests. 1971. Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd.


**1896

Chicken Little to Goosey Loosey and Henny Penny: Hurry, the sky is falling. It’s raining immigrants, planeloads of them.


So, Chicken Little and his friends went to see the King.


The King: What are you doing here?


Chicken Little, Goosey Loosey, and Henny Penny in unison: The world is ending. The sky is raining immigrants. Fifty of them landed on our heads today. There’s a prediction that more will fall. Save us.


The King: Nonsense. There are no illegal immigrants.

Bill and Sam talk.


Bill: You know that multiverse stuff?


Sam: No, what’s that?

Bill: Physicists tell us that the math points to there being multiple dimensions and other universes, all of them co-existing. Could be 10 to the 600th power of them or more.


Sam: So what? Are we ever going to know them directly?


Bill: Maybe.


Sam: Meaning?


Bill: I think we can see alternate universes existing right now and right here.


Sam: Where? How?


Bill: In American politics. The Vice President just said on national TV that the borders are secure. And today, a busload of illegal immigrants emptied on the sidewalk outside her residence.


Sam: I see what you mean. Alternate universes indeed! I guess they do exist.

In a Roman Catholic Church in Antwerp, a number of people sat on yoga mats; supposedly, in the same church, no one can offer a traditional Latin Mass. Now, on the surface, both inviting Hindu practitioners into the church and banning an old form of the Mass seem to be great for the brotherhood of Man (or, to be politically correct, the humanhood of Humanity). Doesn’t the priest’s and bishop’s permission to remove some pews to afford the yoga mindfulness participants some room for meditating on the floor seem so…ecumenical? And isn’t the dismissal of the traditional Latin Mass an acknowledgement of an ineluctable modernist movement, that is, a movement to welcome all into the folds of a religion that was stuck in a medievalism? Wasn’t that the object of changing Latin wording to vernacular phraseology? Look around. You would be hard pressed to find a school that teaches Latin, which was, during the first half of the twentieth century offered in almost every high school in America. (Who wants to learn all those conjugations and declensions of a dead language?)


Anyway, the inclusion of a mindfulness session in a Flemish cathedral bespeaks a decades-long trend to homogenize cultures, to stress similarities rather than differences. The problem, of course, is that homogenizing conflicts with peculiarity. The specific nature of one religion or culture isn’t the specific nature of another though all humans share to some degree certain ethical values. A defense of homogenizing lies in the argument that those values held in common are pathways to peaceful coexistence and--dare I say, also politically correctly--equity. The argument against such homogenizing is that in incorporating all in the hope of unifying people, those who introduce practices and ideas from other belief systems affect their own, water it down, so to speak. Why even bother to call belief a particular name like Catholicism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam? Why not just say "Religionism"? Isn't today's ideal a completely homogenized humanity, a species with no recognizable individuals--except for self-proclaimed leaders? Isn't today's ideal an analog of the Mississippi and its tributaries as confluences of human thought discharge into one large river of sameness (everyone, for example, dressed in a Mao suit and thinking one thought)?


The traditionalist who favors heterogeneity struggles when mergers of any kind occur, first for psychological reasons and second for theological ones. As we all know, changing a tradition of any kind, like changing a habit, throws the wrench of insecurity into the gears of daily life. We become comfortable with what we do, and we don’t like the discomfort that comes with adapting to something different. Theologically, anyone who subscribes to a belief system usually sees a link between it and a philosophy of life. In being “mindful” as a Hindu might define the process, a “Christian” might find a secularization of “meditative prayer.” And if Hindu mindfulness differs from Christian prayer, does practicing it lead a christian to a worship of Shiva or some other Hindu god in defiance of the First Commandment? It’s easy to see how the Antwerp church service aimed at reaching out ecumenically, might be taken as an affront to traditional Christian values and to the traditionalists themselves. Some traditionalists might even see the yoga on the floor before the altar as a desecration and not as a gesture of unification of humankind.


But this is neither a defense of such ecumenism nor traditionalism in a specific religion. I believe that Flemish incident encapsulates a different problem that an interconnected world faces. Should we canalize all human behavior and thinking in some grand effort to unify the members of our species? Or, rather should we emphasize our differences to be able to preserve our individual integrity? On a grand political scale, the problem can be expressed as the choice between socialism and capitalism or between an Orwellian world under control of a few and a more chaotic individualized and free one under no or limited control. Yet, there are probably contradictions in most human social (and religious) endeavors, and that principle of contradiction applies to philosophical and social homogeneity and heterogeneity, also. The unity in any traditionalist differentiated system could in itself be taken as Orwellian.


In education, the problem can be expressed as the choice between a traditional education and one that ascribes no special value to any body of knowledge, e.g., a choice between learning the “classics and heralded books” and learning about the folk tales of a remote Brazilian tribe based on the argument that, say, a fable from the rainforest bears the same intellectual value as Darwin’s Origin of Species, Newton’s Principia, and Shakespeare’s Hamlet even though the reach of its influence might be no greater than a radius of a few kilometers of selva.


In the turmoil of the American 1970s, I witnessed a battle in the war between tradition and anti-traditionalism. One faction at my university argued that there was no inherent value in any knowledge system and that no traditional body of literature or aesthetics was “more important” than any other body of literature and no culture derived from Greek, Roman, and the Judeo-Christian heritage had any value that distinguished it from the heritage of even the remotest tribe—even though the historical influence of one was greater than the other. And no skill set was fundamental according to those opposed to traditional education. That someone knew how to pen a paper with unity, coherence, and emphasis, was irrelevant because free-wheeling expression was—in those times of LSD and under the influence of experimental poets like e. e. cummings and dramatists like Eugene Ionesco—just as valuable as any structured prose or poetry. Representative art, some might argue, ends up like the happy little trees of Bob Ross or worse, like number paintings of a retiree. Take "abstract art" for example. Was the art of Jackson Pollock an attempt to undermine traditional art and break up a tired old tradition of painting recognizable characters and forms—though he was later interpreted as having painted stationary fractals (unlike your moving screen saver). The movement away from tradition seemed to be the Beat Generation on steroids—thank you, Jack Kerouac. And such an anti-traditional educational movement led to a couple of decades during which classical education and cultural bodies of knowledge fell from grace until they largely disappeared from curricula. Even traditional skills suffered a declining importance: Memorization—rote learning—was condemned as rather useless because one could simply look something up in a library (and later online). Access to dictionaries and encyclopedias on smart devices put another nail in memorization’s coffin and helped convince people that they need not fill their heads with knowledge. The ideals of a Renaissance Man and of a polymath both died in the last half of the twentieth century. The tradition of acquiring knowledge for knowledge's sake also fell by the wayside. The final nail in the coffin will be hammered in by AI. 


The preceding probably seems to be off the rails of a subject that began with the story of a Flemish cathedral’s hosting a Hindu yoga session, but consider that principle of canalizing represented by the yoga event. Do we funnel or channel all human experience into a river of categories of equal value for the sake of unity while risking the loss of individuality? Are some human endeavors and historical facts more significant than others? Do the ancient Greeks deserve attention because they shaped intellectual endeavors and explanations of Everything for a couple of millennia? Or should we simply cast them aside as tired old thinking or rank them as no more important than the Shawnee Prophet Tenskwatawa's explanation of the Cosmos under the control of Mishe Moneto, the Great Spirit? Is the Great Spirit the same Being as Yahweh under a different and speakable name? Yet, we know that the Shawnee never cast their influence over world history as the Greeks did. (Of course, one could counter this by saying that someone promulgating makeup with millions of social media followers casts influence on more people than, say, a bishop in charge of a single diocese or a philosopher in a classroom lecturing students on Neoplatonism; the counter argument would then be that just because someone or some culture cast a widespread influence doesn't mean the person or group should be emulated, studied, and promulgated) The Shawnee had a limited geographical reach. To echo the words of Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber in Jesus Christ, Superstar, "If you'd come today/ You could have reached a whole nation/ Israel in 4 BC/ Had no mass communication." If only the Shawnee had that two-millennia of spread under a unifying empire the way Christianity had under the Western, Eastern, and Holy Roman empires, everyone today would rank worship of the Great Spirit with the other world religions. If only Tenskwatawa had had a social media account...If you'd come today
You could have reached a whole nation
That yoga event in the Flemish church symbolizes the struggle we have with unity and disunity, with similarity and difference, and with tradition and avant-grade freeform culture. We have a dilemma. Do we channel as much as we can into a river of similarities or branch the flow of human endeavors into distributaries running through a delta and emptying into the wide sea of diversity? 

At the foot of the Christian altar, the crucifix, and an image of the Creator people meditated not on kneelers but on yoga mats in a Hindu tradition. One wonders whether or not their meditation focused at all on Shiva, the “Destroyer.”