In 2022, you resolve to


1)    


That’s it. Pick one, the one you know you can keep.

Language changes in form and meaning all the time. English, for example, began as the Anglo-Saxon (or Old English) language of Beowulf, transformed over centuries into the Middle English of The Canterbury Tales, wended its way through Hamlet, and emerged as the mechanism by which you communicate. Those large changes in form make the syntax of Anglo-Saxon different from yours, as evidenced by its placement of past participles at the end of a sentence as in German, the language to which it owes its origin. Along its journey through history, English also acquired numerous Latin cognates, all entering the language through the influence of first the Romans, who had invaded England, and then under the influence of the Church, for which Latin was a universal and official language.

​The etymology of the first word in this essay, language, exemplifies how words change: Going backward in history, it derives from 1) Middle English langage, 2) Old French language, 3) Vulgar Latin linguaticum, 4) Latin lingua, 5) Old Latin dingua, and on back to Proto-Indo-European roots. In meaning, the word changed from “tongue” to “system of communication through words.” The second word in this essay, changes, has a similar history, working its way through time as Old French changier, Late Latin cambiare, and on back to Proto-Indo-European kemb-. Cambire meant “barter, exchange.”


How do words acquire different meanings? Modern science and technology are two avenues to altered meaning. Politics is a third avenue. Take the word progressive, for example. Leftists, starting with late 1920's and early 1930’s Communists, have adopted the term as a hallmark of their politics. But in the 1920s, progressive had a different meaning, and progressives were “traditional liberals,” not rabid or moderately rabid socialists or Communists. In the 1929 a motley group of Left-leaning ideologists gathered under the guidance of clergyman A. J. Muste to foster unionism. The Conference for Progressive Labor Action became a turning point in the meaning of progressive. Literary critic and essayist Edmund Wilson, who was drawn to the study of Marx and Lenin, commented on the conference by writing, “curious to think about what being progressive meant fo the different ones!” If Wilson had lived to witness the 2019 Democratic Socialists of America National Convention, he might have used harsher words. That convention broke into a series of complaints over pronouns, loud voices, and clapping. *     


Wilson, enamored with what he believed to be the great potential of the Soviet Union, discovered to his dismay what a Communist dictatorship and a socialist politics can engender: A quashing of truly progressive thinking. Wilson asked, “Why should we suppose that man’s brutal and selfish impulses will all evaporate with a socialist dictatorship?”


The socialist and communist word thieves have somehow come to the conclusion that their form of progressivism will result in a society superior to that of today’s free enterprise capitalism. But when we look around our world, we see places steeped in Marxism and socialism to be locations deprived of free speech and individual freedoms. We see that today’s progressivism frees no one, makes government more powerful, and suppresses free action and thought.


The avenue of changing language seems to have taken us not forward in a sense that the word progress once meant, but backward to a time when emperors and kings controlled lives at a whim. One of the earlier meanings of the word was “a state journey by royalty,” a meaning antithetical to the term as it was used by the Conference for Progressive Labor Action in support of “common workers.”


If either A. J. Muste or Edmund Wilson were alive during this time of mandates, closures, loss of union jobs as in the shutdown of the Keystone Pipeline, censorship, and even, as in Austria in 2021 some enforced confinements of the unvaccinated, I wonder what both might think of the current meaning of progressive.




*You can see for yourself by going to DSA convention on YouTube.

In tough times slime molds emit a pheromone that attracts others of their kind to form a group fruiting body. Members of one class of slime molds, the Myxomycetes, organize themselves in this way when conditions in their environment become dry. That slime molds communicate via a pheromone is an indication of how important communication is among colonial organisms, humans included, especially in tough times. The communication among slime molds brings them together physically for the common good.


Are we different from slime molds during the hard times of a pandemic? Apparently, we have attracted one another into groups that produce similar ideological fruit, but that fruit seems as real as plastic prop fruit used on stage or as “permanent” decorations on coffee tables. Sure, we have gathered together, but not the way slime molds gather in tough times to produce real spores. Instead, we have gathered online, Zooming our way to collectively producing virtual fruit.


Maybe slime molds can teach us a lesson about surviving hard times by communicating "in person."

Now I think I know
What others knew
So long ago
As war and sickness ran their course
By turning living into corse,
From Corsican to warrior Norse.


No place is free from a disease
That moves about the world with ease.
It happened then;
It happens now,
From Saracen
To Christian men.
The plague is common as is war;
And both are doormen at Death's door.


It is the nature of our times,
When safety yields to bio crimes
As willing fools believe they know
How to contain as cultures grow
In petri dishes on some desk
Some microbes that are grotesque,
A virus and the deadly germs
That make us fall asleep with worms.


Is it pride or is it evil?
Our good will or that of devil?
What makes us think we can control
What others do from Rome to Seoul?


If it is pride, then be aware
That most of us will often err
Even when we take great care
To manage every new affair.                          
If it is evil, there’s nothing new,
And we all learn what others knew
The devil works today as then
To undo Christian and Turkmen.


Our past is lesson for today
And is a reason for dismay
Because we know that few will learn
That war and sickness can return
As pride or evil take their turn
Till each and all are in an urn.

In a Cheers episode from season 8, Frasier asks Rebecca, “Do you think I can’t be dangerous?” He then picks up scissors and runs around the bar, proclaiming, “I am running with scissors….” *


During recent NFL games I saw a quarterback trip on the turf as he dropped back to pass and a running back also trip as he headed for open field and a possible touchdown. It’s not that uncommon for people, even highly skilled athletes, to lose proprioception for a moment. That  the trips occurred in NFL games put on momentary display the difficulty humans can have in keeping track of all their moving parts, causing both embarrassment and harm. Loss of proprioception can result in stubbed toes, jammed fingers, pulled muscles, broken bones, and even death.


Being bipedal has its drawbacks, but I wouldn’t trade my many trips and falls for the life of a clam. Yet, my own mobility seems a paltry accomplishment in world filled with multi-legged creatures who can move faster, often in places and on surfaces where I might find movement dangerous or even impossible.


When I think of an insect with six legs, an arachnid with eight, a decapod with as many as 38 appendages, and a centipede with as many as 354 legs, I wonder how their little brains maintain any semblance of kinesthesia. Sure, they aren’t bothered by interrupting thoughts during movement, such as a busy mother’s, “I need carry the laundry upstairs; stop jumping on the beds, kids”; a secretary’s, “I better get this report over to Mr. Smith’s desk”; or a quarterback’s “The  tight end will be running a post pattern, the strong side wide receiver will be running a stop and go, and the tailback will hook as an outlet receiver.” We bipedal humans certainly have to account for more than just walking or running because we carry both thoughts and objects as we go.


Our multi-legged companion Earthlings, though not interrupted by complex thoughts, do have much to track as they move. Spiders racing across their webs to wrap a prey seem particularly fascinating. The Flying Wallendas, though entertaining, concerned themselves with placement on a single thread by comparison. Spiders move across multiple threads with apparently no mistakes—though this might be one of those statements like “no two snowflakes are alike,” a contention impossible to prove.


And now, there’s a new champion of movement on multiple legs: A recently discovered millipede with 1,306 legs. Called Eumillipes persephone, the critter lives underground in Australia.** Living like Persephone in the underworld can’t be easy. Interconnected pores in the ground might be hard to come by, especially at 60 meters down, the location where Eumillipes persephone was found. In contrast, we humans are used to more expansive environments at Earth’s surface, where we are free to trip and fall just trying to move on two legs.


The discovery of a millipede with 1,306 legs makes me think of our pride in bipedalism. Would a critter with 1,306 legs trip the way we do? How would one know that such a trip took place if the critter did trip? It isn’t similar to our saying, “I almost fell.” Falling seems out of the question for Eumillipes persephone, and not just because it already lives where Earth’s surface is up.


For bipedal humans, life here on the surface is one of avoiding falls WHILE doing everything else. We spend some of our neural energy maintaining our proprioception in order to accomplish all those “higher functions.” Millipedes and all other creatures with more than two legs get to spend more of their neural energy on simply moving, even when they are in hot pursuit of food or in hot escape from predators. In contrast, we might chase down an aisle after food in a grocery store while thinking of going to a party later in the day. We don’t just walk the way a millipede walks; we obsess over past and future, and the obsessing becomes a distraction. “Honey, I’m in the store; I got the milk, eggs, and bread. Can you text me those other things?”


If I asked you to walk and just think about your walking, would you succeed in that task? You are used to allowing neurons handle uneven surfaces while you concern yourself with “higher matters.” You can walk and talk, walk and think, and walk and chew gum. But we live in a time of increasing numbers of distractions that make a simple task like walking fraught with the dangers that gravity and hard and sharp edges impose. Proprioception isn’t easy for us bipedals. We have much to consider, which might be one reason that we’re told as kids, “Don’t run with scissors.”


Should we draw some lesson here? If so, would it be that motility comes with vulnerability in bipedal animals with more on their minds than mere movement? Would it be that only in being motionless can we focus without danger on self? Is our pride in our bipedalism unwarranted?


Notes:


*Season 8, “Severe Crane Damage.” Found on YouTube under “Frasier Running with Scissors”


***https://phys.org/news/2021-12-millipede-legs.html. Accessed December 17, 2021.

Allow me to mix topics: 1) Rules and situational ethics, 2) Civil disobedience, 3) Personal freedom, 4) Equity, and 5) Maybe some other stuff. If I were grading this as a college paper, I would comment that it tries to do too much without doing enough.


It’s the nature of government to impose rules. It’s the nature of rulers and their surrogates to refine rules by instituting more rules. In societies inundated by rules, no one is free except by defiance. Rule-breaking is, in part, an expression of personal freedom driven by selfishness and altruism. Contradictory, yes, but there. I said it. We break rules for ourselves; we break them for others.


Want a quick example of rules refined by more rules? The U. S. Constitution has 27 Amendments. You might ask, “Why didn’t the Founding Fathers think of those 27 rules when they wrote the Constitution?” And, to use an expression associated with the golden calf of Exodus 32:8, Holy Cow! Those Ten Commandments have been broken into “venal” and “mortal” sins, degrees of rule violations, so to speak. And Holy Cow Again, didn’t I just read that Pope Francis recently applied situation ethics to the Sixth Commandment when, referring to French cleric Michael Aupetit’s alleged dalliance, the Holy Father said, “It was a failing against the Sixth Commandment, but not a total one, one of the small caresses….” Yeah! Interpretations and re-interpretations of rules are the reasons for more refinement of rules. So, a selfish cleric defied a minor aspect of a major rule. He didn’t completely commit adultery. Reminds me of Bill Clinton’s, “I did not have sex with that woman.” We can use the Pope’s words to justify that oral sex and cigar sex aren’t sex and therefore violate no moral law.


Want an example of defiance that engendered a rule change? After struggling for years to get control of bootlegging and speak-easy black-market liquor sales, the government amended the Amendments, repealing the 18th Amendment in the end-of-prohibition 21st Amendment. Trying to force Americans to give up alcohol made drinking alcohol a matter of personal freedom. If you read the very first amendment, nay, when you look at the first ten amendments, you see the heart of the problem: Every one of those Amendments focuses in some way on freedom, making them, as we all know, The Bill of Rights.


American culture, born in an age of slavery, has been steeped ironically in the idea of freedom. From that famous Tea Party in Boston Harbor in the 18th century through the Civil War to the current defiance of mask and vaccine mandates in 2020 and 2021, Americans have balked at restrictions on their freedoms. But like steeping tea gradually and unnoticeably intensifying in a cup, rules become more intense with time, and freedom has become more diluted.


From where does the idea of freedom originate? It seems to have been on the minds of the Founding Fathers who banded together to break free from the English. Jefferson tied freedom to “unalienable rights” in the Declaration of Independence. Among those rights: Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. (Or, for those who are growing up in an educational system that has abandoned writing script: the “pursuit of Happinefs”) Jefferson’s recognition of “happiness” has, over the course of 225 years, led to thinking among some that rules are in their very nature anti-happiness. Thus, over the course of the last 150 years anarchists have found a cause for turmoil in their anti-government demonstrations directed toward “those who ostensibly suppress personal freedoms.” Promising a better, happier world, Seattle’s anarchists replaced government rule with mob rule. But even anarchists discover the need for rule-making, as the recent debacle with its own armed militia in the city’s CHAZ demonstrated. And the product of CHAZ? Destruction of property, four woundings, and two homicides. Even loose rules are rules subject to defiance, and the promised happiness of the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone crumbled in just 24 days.


The struggle between overlording government and freedom-seekers entered a new phase that Jefferson and his contemporaries did not foresee: The rise of Marxist and socialist ideologies that have been as repressive as any monarchy they knew. Nor could Jefferson and company have foreseen that the supposed motivation behind both Marxism and socialism, which promise enhanced happiness, lie ironically in interpreting equality as equity and in suppressing personal freedoms under rules, regulations, restrictions, and laws to guarantee that equity. For the Marxist and socialist, government’s imposed rules engender happiness and “freedom.”


Every new rule, regulation, restriction, or law comes with the pang born of hindsight: “Why didn’t we just do this, make a Bill of Rights, for example, in the first place? I had the feeling that this was going to happen, that is, that something unaccounted for or unexpected would show up.” Of course, there’s really no way to prove that one might have foreseen the need for refining or adding to such rules short of actually having made perfect (complete) rules at the outset.


As every generation discovers, it was born into a complex rule under which changing times apply pressures to revise. As every generation discovers, past laws just don’t account for realities of current circumstances. Commerce went from bartering to wholesale and retail in-person sales, to today’s online market cyber stores. Certainly, the Founding Fathers could not have foreseen a nation of fifty states and 330 million citizens that stretched across a continent and into the middle of the Pacific, all interconnected by electronic media. Certainly, they could not have anticipated a nation with territories as close as Puerto Rico and as far as Guam and Samoa and the globalization of the American economy. Certainly, they could not have anticipated any of the modern technologies, all of which are subject to some degree to laws that are built on previous laws, the Constitution, and those Amendments.


Two fictional stories before we proceed in this matter of rules vs freedom in an Age of Promised Equity:


First, “Harrison Bergeron” by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. In the tale, an incredibly physically superior teenager with equal natural superiority of mind, must be handicapped by law. The revised Constitution imposes equity. In the tale, it’s the year 2081, and the U.S. has added amendments, 211 through 213 (CCxi-CCxiii) that prohibit any personal superiority. No spoiler here; just read the story.




Second, Lord of the Flies by William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, a novel with the premise that humans are “savages” whose savagery is restrained only by the dictates of civilization. If you recall the story, you’ll remember that during a time of war boys arrive on an island sans adults, try to organize, break into cliques, and revert to savagery that includes murder. They are “rescued” by neatly dressed sailors, semblances of civilization’s orderliness, whose business it is to break, injure, and kill. Seems humans are at heart heartless—at least in the eyes of Golding. The heartlessness manifests itself in the absence of cultural controls and in the presence of them. Think of “civilized and uniformed German soldiers” who oversaw the concentration camps.    


A recounting of any war seems to support the notion that civilization is itself only a temporary restriction imposed on savagery. The restriction hasn’t worked very well, has it? I suppose that like the neatly dressed sailors in the novel, the neatly dressed and civilized Nazis simply masked their savagery. The bombing of London serves as evidence. And the civilized world’s solution to stop the Nazi bombing campaign was equally as savage: The bombing of German cities, including the fire-bomb destruction of Dresden, and the corollary bombing by Americans of Japanese cities, including the total nuclear destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, stand as evidence that all civilized people can be “inhumane.” Savagery can wear suits and uniforms. Savagery can emanate from offices.


In an attempt to quash the innate savagery and selfishness that arises with unbridled freedom, our species has organized itself under rules imposed by governments large and small. On the surface, the organization is “for the greater good,” at least in the eyes of those in control, but rules multiply like rabbits in Australia and Kudzu vines in the American South. Rule-makers themselves can become unrestricted, and they often impose ever more refined restrictions under the influence of one faction or another. Laws pile on laws; restrictions pile on restrictions as government agencies acquire more control. The tea darkens. The sundry federal agencies beget state and local versions; the United States Environmental Protection Agency finds reflections of itself in state departments of environmental protection, county-level agencies, and even city departments.


The imposition of many rules and regulations that bury personal choice, usually engenders some form of rebellion as personal freedoms work their way back to the surface of humanity. Humans just can’t keep their hands off the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. We’re all Adams and Eves unless we restrain ourselves or someone else restrains us. If there’s fruit to be had, someone will find a way to pick it. That innate defiance has manifested itself in contesting the many restrictions governments have imposed in response to the pandemic, restrictions imposed ostensibly for “the greater good.”


I found a story in the New Zealand Herald via the New York Post that I believe exemplifies why restrictions of any kind often succumb to the desire of individuals to do whatever they want on the basis of whatever they need at the moment. * Savagery will out. Clerics will do non-clerical things. Individuals will defy. At the very outset of the pandemic, the island nation of New Zealand imposed strict travel and other restrictions on its citizens. From the perspective of those in control, the government took actions “for the greater good.” Now, more than a year later, we can read a report about a New Zealander who received ten vaccination shots in a single day on behalf of people who did not want to be vaccinated. He took the shots for money; the people he represented got their fraudulent proof of vaccination. Small matter right? Isolated incidence of gaming the system?


No, not a small matter. It is, rather, an indication that restrictions, rules, and laws once imposed become dark waters rising to inundate an island of freedom. They shrink the living space. New Zealand is smaller because of those restrictions. Those on the land see a rising ocean of controls that limits their physical and mental spaces. And that inundation is one of the reasons that socialism with its many restrictions doesn’t work as its advocates intend. People, as we have seen from two giant migrations of Cubans in the last century, will build boats and leave to find freedom. Poor New Zealanders. They might have boats, but in sailing away, they might in a COVID world gone rule-happy, find no welcoming port unless they are vaccinated, masked, and willing to comply with freedom-crushing restrictions on movement, business, and even entertainment.


The thought that socialism and government-run-wild do not work because they impose restrictions in the name of “the greater good” and equity, however, is not mine alone. One of the best refutations of socialists’ arguments lies in words by Karl Popper, a reformed Marxist turned reformed socialist, who eventually recognized affront to individualism imposed by restrictions. The late philosopher of science writes in his autobiography:


    “I remained a socialist for several years, even after my rejection of Marxism; and if there could be such a thing as socialism combined with individual liberty, I would be a socialist still. For nothing could be better than living a modest, simple, and free life in an egalitarian society. It took some time before I recognized this as no more than a beautiful dream; that freedom is more important than equality; that the attempt to realize equality endangers freedom; and that, if freedom is lost, there will not even be equality among the unfree.” **


Back to our over-vaccinated New Zealander: Vaccinologist Helen Petrousis-Harris called his behavior and the behavior of those who paid him “unbelievably selfish.”  He needed money; the people who paid him took advantage of his need to fulfill their desire to remain unvaccinated. The scam was a defiance of policies and rules imposed for “the greater good” of New Zealanders.


In efforts to force humans into egalitarianism, socialists, Marxists, and Fascists promise much from the rules they impose. But the cost to individuals eventually makes them like the boys in Lord of the Flies, more savage and selfish as restrictions, rules, and laws shrink their world. The examples of gaming the system and defiance of the laws abound, with rum runners during Prohibition to drug cartels during the War on Drugs to people trying to escape such governments throughout the world and throughout the twentieth century and even the current century.


But socialists, Fascists, and Marxists will never learn that their burgeoning restrictions, regardless of their purpose to serve the “greater good,” will eventually run headlong into personal needs and desires. As Popper also writes, “Those who promise us paradise on earth never produced anything but a hell.” They also produce a world in which the common good itself can be threatened. Think armies, police, and first responders. The U.S. military would rather weaken itself by releasing soldiers who defied the order to be vaccinated than to maintain its current strength in experienced soldiers. Cities would rather reduce their police forces by the number of unvaccinated and reduce their fire departments by those unvaccinated rather than maintain the level of protection found in pre-COVID years.


Find yourself on a shrinking island of personal freedoms today? Do you also find that innate savagery starting to emerge, if not in you, then in others?


Or, instead, do you find yourself to be compliant with whatever rules the government imposes on your life? Remember my question about the origin of freedom? Think ancient Greece for a moment. Isn’t that the place you associate with the rise of democracy? True, it was limited just as American freedom was limited before the Emancipation Proclamation. Greeks also owned slaves. Personal freedom was not an absolute and universal principle in ancient Greece, but in December, 2021Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis made what he called a “tortured” decision to impose a mid-January, 2022, law requiring everyone over 60 to get a shot or face a monthly fine of 100 euros ($112). Yet, at the time of this writing in late 2020, fewer that two-thirds of the general population is vaccinated.


Freedom in Greece? The average monthly pension for elderly Greeks is 720 euros ($823). Ask yourself whether you would be willing to relinquish an eighth of your income because you don’t wish to be vaccinated, maybe, for example, because you have already had and recovered from the disease, maybe because you believe you have a good chance of surviving the disease but that even if your chance is slim, you prefer to make a decision freely. Strange that in a world where some governments accept euthanasia, capital punishment, and abortion, there is a push “to save everybody.”


Contrast the two kinds of defiance here. One guy in New Zealand gets ten shots in a day to make money and help others defy the vaccine mandate; some 520,000 elderly Greeks are forced by law to get a shot or face fines. Ah! Egalitarianism. Ah! Socialism, Fascism, and Marxism. What could possibly go wrong when all of us are treated equally in the name of equity? What could possibly go wrong when rules are imposed for “the common good”?


You want my answers? Defiance born of both selfishness and altruism: there will be elderly Greeks who will defy the law individually and in groups by finding some way to avoid the vaccine just as ten New Zealanders found a way. That underlying savagery of Golding’s novel surfaces and manifests itself in individual freedom whenever civilization becomes a self-perpetuating system of proliferating rules, regulations, restrictions, and laws. That sense of personal freedom also emerges when those subjected to such rules see that the rulers and their surrogates exempt themselves from the rules, as the US President, the Speaker of the House, a number of their supporting celebrities, the now notorious British Christmas party-goers at 10 Downing Street during the lockdown, the maskless and social proximity of the California governor dining with friends during a period of social restrictions, and, to use that expression that refers to the golden calf in Exodus, Holy Cow! a number of other “officials” who defied their own rules.


Note:


*New York Post. 11 Dec. 2021 (New Zealand Herald. news.com.au). Online at https://nypost.com/2021/12/11/man-takes-10-covid-vaccine-shots-in-single-day/. Accessed December 12, 2021.


**Popper, Karl R. 1985.  Unended Quest: An Intellectual Autobiography. Chicago. Open Court. Originally published as “The Autobiography off Karl Popper” in the Philosophy of Karl Popper by Schilpp, Paul Arthur. Ed. The Library of Living Philosophers.

It’s early December, 2021. A chill that will continue off and on for about five months is descending over the Northeast. In Philadelphia, citizens have already descended into the Ninth Circle of Dante’s Inferno, the frozen center of Hell. Five hundred twenty-three—scratch that. Five hundred twenty-four—the number changed during the writing of this sentence—people died by homicide fo far this year in the City of Brotherly Love: Let it sink in. 524.


Those who occasionally sample news stories have probably heard about the push for socialism, for equity, and for defunding police. The rally cries of idealists who know neither history nor psychology derive from beliefs in a vacuum. They derive from disembodied thoughts. They are ideas without essence like flowers without a fragrance. 


Is there, in the words of T. S. Eliot, a “dissociation of sensibility”? In that term, Eliot addressed a poetic trend he found in poets who didn’t “feel” their “rationally constructed” thoughts. Their language might be meaningful, but in a disembodied way. Eliot uses the smell of a rose as an analogy; it cannot be separated from the rose. In “dissociated” poetry, feeling is a separated “fragrance.” The rose lacks a distinctive feature that elicits an emotional response.


Jump to 2021 and Philadelphia’s 524 homicides, a number that exceeds the murders committed during any of the previous 14 years. And now for the dissociation of sensibility: Philadelphia’s District Attorney Larry Krasner recently said the city is not undergoing a crime crisis. To support his “rational” assessment, he points to a relatively flat line of other crimes, such as rape, wounding, and robbery—as though maintaining a level of or undergoing a slight drop in those crimes is an indication of something positive. I guess in these days of “equity” all crimes weigh the same on the scale of humanity.


That Krasner seems to be unaffected by the plight of victims of any kind of crime shouldn’t be unexpected. The catch words of the day, such as “equity,” “systemic racism,” and “socialism,” have influenced many, including some politicians and many media pundits. The ostensible decrease in personal responsibility in favor of an increase in societal responsibility has been an overriding influence in American society long in development and heightened by current media, politicians, and educators.


What could be more indicative of this push toward societal responsibility over personal responsibility than recent statements from the White House Press Secretary and others in the Biden Administration that crimes like “smash and grab” raids at retail businesses are the product of the pandemic? What could be more telling than the dismissal of such raids as minor? Have these people lost all sensibility for the victims? Have they so dissociated their sensibilities from the realities victims suffer that they cannot associate the fragrance of a rose with the rose, to use Eliot’s analogy, or the stench of crime with the criminal?


We might all profit from reading statements made by Karl Popper, a reformed Marxist turned reformed Socialist, turned advocate for personal freedom, who said, “Those who promise us paradise on earth never produced anything but hell.” Those who push for “unqualified equity,” unlimited bail reform, elimination of penalties for crimes like theft, and unjustifiable release of unrepentant violent offenders are living in a dream world. And they will probably continue to live in and impose on others that same “ideal” world unless they acquire a true empathy for victims.


Philadelphia has experienced 524 homicides as of December 9, 2021. Krasner thinks there is no crime crisis. The 524 victims’ families and the victims and families of other crimes like rape and robbery, however, are living Hell on Earth. For them there is a crisis in lawlessness.

Academia is in some ways a sheltered world. In-groups abound. But why not? Aren’t academicians just people subject to the same kinds of desires, social pressures, and insecurities that pervade our species? Aren’t professors just as limited through inculcation by the like-minded as much as any fundamentalist group is limited in perspective?


Say what?


Yes, I’m accusing academicians, including former academicians like me of oversimplification, of axiomatic thinking, of making unfalsifiable statements, and, woe is me, of intolerance. In fact, I’m accusing everyone on the planet and everyone who ever lived on the planet of being somewhat or sometimes intolerant. Face it; it’s difficult to accept all ideas with equal magnanimity. Surely, you have at times thought without impolitely saying aloud, “You’re an idiot!” You might be thinking that right now. That’s okay because sometimes I am. “To tolerate” in many instances is just another way of saying “to put up with until it goes away.”


My own four decades in academia can’t be much of a guide when I rely on them to convince you that the intellectual “world” is peopled by many intolerant individuals. I could tell tales, but anecdotes fail as inductive thinking usually fails because no one can account for all possibilities. No one has an infinite number of stories to relate, and stories that contradict a narrative are beyond count, also. Nevertheless, I will note here that I witnessed many ad hominem and non sequitur discussions in the hallowed halls and conference rooms of academia in personal attacks and biases that became manifest both overtly and subtly. I suppose with honest reflection, I could recount, also, times when I failed to see the errors in my own axiomatic thinking that made me intolerant of others’ ideas, times when I expressed not logical refutation but petty sarcasm. For my own past “offenses” I apologize.   


The “sheltered world” I mentioned above now has a name: “Epistemic Bubble.” Coined by Princeton researchers, it applies to online social networks of polarized groups. I can oversimplify it: Birds of a feather flock together. The researchers studied Twitter data to show how people unconsciously separate themselves into networks of the like-minded. The dipolar world is becoming more intensely dipolar as opposing political parties repel like similar ends of bar magnets.


Are you surprised that people separate themselves into the like-minded? I confess to having one of those “duhhhhh” moments when I perused some of the research by the Princeton profs. Can you name a day since Cain and Abel without polarization? “Yeah,” you say, “the day after Cain killed Abel the world was temporarily a monopolar society. One bar magnet has nothing to repel.” Can you point to an era of pervasive and enduring peace and cooperation? Some era of unmitigated tolerance? I can’t. I assume—maybe wrongly—on the basis of personal experience and learning that tolerance has always been local and temporary and always occurred where societies are most homogeneous; and when tolerance prevails, it exists with caveats, even in homogeneous groups.


Sorry; call my historical perspective a character fault if you want. Call it the product of anecdotal induction that casts a shadow of pessimism over my otherwise cheery and optimistic perspective. Epistemic Bubbles? Who is surprised? Polarized people? Who-da thunk differently save the idealists? My gosh, even the “saintly” Franciscan Order broke into suborders that broke further into suborders in both Catholic and Protestant traditions. What’s going on? Could the friars and nuns of medieval and modern times have learned from Rodney King’s 1992 post-riot question, “Can’t we all just get along?”


Apparently not, Rodney. Apparently not, Brother Francisco. Apparently not, Princetonians.


Anyway, take a look at collated research on the subject of polarization recently reviewed in an AAAS news release (6 Dec 2021) that reveals findings by members of the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs and Arizona State University. *


Consider this title that appears in the collection of articles: “Conservative Swings in Public Opinion Ramp Up Republican Lawmaker Extremism.” The heading overlies a short summary of research by Naomi Ehrich Leonard, Keena Libsitz, Edwin S. Wilsey, and Anastasia Bizyaeva. ** I’ll note that I do not doubt part of the group’s finding that “swings in public opinion” are “typically slightly larger and more prolonged [among conservatives] than liberal swings.” They seem to have acquired evidence for that conclusion. However, “Republican lawmaker extremism” is an unqualified term. What is “extreme”? Are reactions to Democrat policies extreme? Is, for example, the general philosophy—not always the practiced policy—of Republicans to limit government’s powers an “extremist position”? Take the current movement among liberals to swing toward socialism. Is that in any way extreme? Is Republican “extremism” the underlying assumption for the Princetonians’ conclusion. Did they start with a polarizing label before trying to prove a rule they accepted rather than trying to disprove an assumption or perspective? What kind of “science” is that?


You’re probably guessing now that I have found something to complain about in these Princeton studies. Consider my own intolerance and assumptions in the following question: “Do you find it odd that at Princeton, that bastion of tolerance, academicians are concerned about polarization?” Note my own illogic, as I succumb to sarcasm at the outset. Does this mean my apology above is null and void?


Why should I continue to join two magnets by their north ends? Shouldn’t I simply acknowledge that in the social world as in the physical world all magnetism is dipolar and that there are repulsive forces?


I’ll acknowledge that polarization exists between networked opposing groups. Polarization in American (and maybe in every) society is evident everywhere because almost every aspect of our lives has become politicized under the aegis of social media and agenda-driven media—even the weather. But opposing views aren’t in every instance necessarily extremist, be they Democratic or Republican views. The researchers see a “tipping point” or point of no return when the forces of polarization overwhelm the forces that try to mitigate polarization. [There’s some teleology in their description] Anyway, according to the researchers, Republican lawmakers “may have passed” this point, headed as they are toward their version of “extreme,” whereas Democrats in the view of the researchers are “quickly approaching it” but have not yet reached that point of no return to normality and middle ground. If I were to submit these findings to Republican lawmakers, I am sure that I would hear just the opposite, that Democrats have reached the tipping point of polarization and are already immersed in extremism.


The “research” by the Princetonians appears to me to violate Karl Popper’s famous principle of falsification, that science isn’t science if it cannot be subjected to falsification. But how can one falsify a finding on unqualified “extremism”? What is “extreme” in political ideology and action? Is it an “all of nothing” approach, say for example, eliminating all taxes and initiating a full laissez faire capitalism? Is it imposing high taxes and highly restrictive regulations? Is Capitalism in itself a form of Extremism? Is Socialism in itself a form of Extremism? Does either side of the American political spectrum aim for completely Rightest or completely Leftist policies? Or, even in a highly polarized society, are there gray areas of subtle unity and weak attraction?


As cognitive and experimental psychologists tell us, most people tend to verify assumptions, principles, and rules rather than falsify them. Call such thinking confirmation bias if you like. Cognitive experiments demonstrate that when given a choice to support a rule rather than falsify it, most people choose the former, as in the “four card” test that says, “Cards with an ‘A’ on one side have a ‘3’ on the other side.” On the upturned faces of cards in the test, two of the cards show ‘A’ and ‘3,’ and two have ‘P’ and ‘7’. Most people choose to turn over the cards marked ‘A’ and ‘3’ to prove the rule, rather than turn over the other cards to disprove it.


People appear to be more secure in demonstrating the proof of what they know and believe rather than in demonstrating their own potential fallacies in thought and faith. But don’t consider this finding to be a universal principle since it, too, relies on a finite number of experiments, suggesting a tendency, but not an absolute principle that universally applies to everyone. Some people might be more inclined to disprove the assumptions and beliefs du jour. Some people do not choose the cards with ‘A’ and ‘3.’


And lest you associate the Princetonians in my description with a despairing Whitman Wail or agonizing Holder Howl for which the campus is famous, I should note that the studies on polarization include attempts to objectify their studies in the spirit of Popper’s falsification principle. To wit: the review of “Complex Systems Theory can [sic.] Lead to Deeper Understanding, Better Design of Lasting Reforms to American Democracy” by Sam Wang and others contains this statement of purpose: “Our core objective was to translate the American political system into a mathematical complex-systems framework…We want to encourage natural scientists to build models that reproduce political phenomena, create simulations to explore alternative scenarios, and design interventions that may improve the function of democracy.” In short, they want to treat the political system as a  system of parts that can be understood the way engineers understand and improve machines.


But if Popper were alive, he might point to a flaw that I find throughout these and other social science studies: Turning human thought and behavior into numbers is based on the assumption that what are largely subjective matters can be objectified by assigning numerical values. Numbers might show tendencies, but as political polls of late have demonstrated, such numbers can lie. Just look at the polls predicting the outcome of the 2016 US election.


Long read to get here. Sorry. Leave with this: Even if we want a tolerant world, we can’t achieve it when we start with polarized and polarizing assumptions.


Notes:


*EurekAlert! AAAS. Like a natural system, democracy faces collapse as polarization leads to loss of diversity. Princeton University. 6 Dec 2021. Online at https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/937038   Accessed December 8, 2021.


**Kelly, Morgan. 6 Dec 2021. Like a natural system, democracy faces collapse as polarization leads to loss of diversity. High Meadows Environmental Institute. Online at https://environment.princeton.edu/news/like-a-natural-system-democracy-faces-collapse-as-polarization-leads-to-loss-of-diversity/.  Accessed December 8, 2021.

Choosing a metaphor over a simile for the title of this essay took a considerable amount of energy. The choice, however, seemed instantaneous to me. It bypassed acceleration. I found myself at highway speed as though long before I had used some onramp to merge with thoughts that, like other cars, were zooming toward random destinations. In a split second, I was at full throttle.


Sorry, enough with the metaphor except to say that the supposedly idle mind is very much like (here’s the simile) an idling car. And the reason is that the vehicle of transport is an active brain that constantly consumes glucose. The activity is itself evidenced by dreams during sleep and daydreams. The brain never seems to shut off. The engine idles, ready to kick in the turbo charger. Advice here: Keep the tank filled. You will find yourself in need of fuel as you race down thought-highways, sometimes merging not only with traffic in an orderly flow, but also playing bumper cars with similes and metaphors. “Where,” I might ask you, “do you think analogies originate? Where do you think Ah-ha! Insights come from?”


The answers to both questions lie in sideswipes and collisions in thought-mergers. And the reason they occur is that the engine of the brain is always consuming fuel. If you find yourself in a period of writer’s block or spiritual dryness, don’t blame your missing muse; get thee to the gas station to pick up some vending-machine food.


The title of research by Camila Pulido and Timothy A. Ryan says it all: “Synaptic vesicle pools are a major metabolic burden of nerve terminals.” * If you don’t have fuel, you don’t have ATP synthesis. Your brain has, in the words of the authors, “a resting metabolic rate that is much higher than other tissues.” I suppose that’s why it is so difficult for us to “hold that thought” when we are in the midst of a conversation. We can’t apply brakes to a vehicle running on a full tank at high speed. I suppose, also, that is why we can’t really pull into the parking garages along thought-highways as we race toward conclusions. As the authors also write, “Given the vast number of synapses in the human brain and the presence of hundreds of SVs [synaptic vesicle pools] at each…this hidden metabolic cost of quickly turning synapses in a ‘ready’ state comes at the cost of major ATPpresyn and fuel expenditure, likely contributing significantly to the brain’s metabolic demands and metabolic vulnerability.” Duh! This brain-car needs a fuel supply to operate proton pumps. Insights don’t accelerate. They are like photons that always seem to travel at speed. (Sorry, I just mixed metaphors, but such is the nature of thinking. Thought collisions, as I said, are inevitable. The brain is often like—here’s the return to the simile—a self-driving car without collision-avoidance and lane-detector)


In short, even when your brain is “resting,” it is still using, even by way of leaking, fuel. The engine’s on. You still consume glucose at about half the rate of full-throttle thinking. Maybe that’s the reason that in the most unexpected moments and places in our lives, we suddenly arrive at metaphors, at similes, analogies, and insights.


Note:
*Published in ScienceAdvances. 3 Dec 2021, Vol 7, Issue 49. DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abi9027 Online at https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abi9027  Accessed December 5, 2021.

In 1935 J. R. Stroop wrote a dissertation that has since spawned hundreds of studies on the Stroop effect by experimental psychologists. Simply put: Stroop tested the brain’s ability to read the names of colors written in colors inconsistent with the name and then name the colors. Red, for example, appears in blue ink; blue, in red ink.


Now, you just had no difficulty reading the last sentence in black ink. You would probably have no difficulty reading the words if they were written in inconsistent colors, also. But if you tried to name the colors you saw in the context of words for other colors, you might find your brain struggling a bit. Not to worry. Many people have difficulty with the task that involves a highly practiced skill like reading and a background knowledge of colors.


Let’s use the Stroop effect with regard to social and political identities. I propose this in light of the commonly displayed maps of states deemed “Republican” and “Democrat.” Red states are the former; blue states, the latter.


Apparently—to me anyway—a number of TV pundits and newspaper editorialists can’t wrap their heads around “blue leanings” in red states and vice versa. Like reading, a practiced skill that conflicts with naming an inconsistent color, the commentators’ brains balk when social and political realities conflict with their entrenched thinking. And as a result, they have difficulty with behaviors and opinions that run contrary to either color designations. Thus, a Midwestern Caucasian kid recently found not guilty of murdering two Caucasian men has been labeled in a number of press outlets as a white racist. An African-American adult who allegedly drove an SUV through a parade, killing and injuring numerous people, has become de-personified as “a red SUV” that killed the people; to say otherwise, to personalize the man as an African-American, means reading “blue” written in red ink.


We don’t live in strange times, however. The Stroop effect that describes a confused brain is a human phenomenon that probably goes back to pre-literate times. No doubt one could run other experiments to demonstrate the brain’s difficulty reconciling well-practiced tasks analogous to reading and its attempts to identify inconsistent properties or uses, maybe a hand axe used as a spoon or a fork used as a writing instrument. I’ll leave the experimenting to the experimental psychologists and the interpreting to the cognitive psychologists and neuroscientists. But in these times, reading blue as only blue and red as only red can be a costly error. Nicholas Sandman, the teen who attended a pro-life rally in D. C. and who was vilified by the Washington Post, CNN, and other news outlets, won a hefty civil suit against the Post and CNN and sill has, as of this writing, other suits pending. No doubt, at the time of this writing in December, 2021, Kyle Rittenhouse also has pending civil suits.


I’ll simply note that almost all of us are burdened by contradictory and inconsistent phenomena. That media pundits have difficulty seeing tints in a spectrum of life’s colors is not unusual; in fact, given the animosity of our age, one should probably expect the color blindness. But before we condemn the pundits, we should all note that almost all of us have difficulty with the complex thoughts, feelings, and behaviors of others that we see from practiced and over-learned perspectives. Those settlements by major new outlets should provide all of us with a lesson about the social and political Stroop effect. All stereotypes contain unseen inconsistencies. Before you read “red state” or "blue state,” check the actual color of the ink.