One more thing...

I forgot to mention during my last post, but I will continue to update both my shared items and Delicious bookmarks. They are accessible from the right-hand column of this blog, or by bookmarking the hyperlinks in the last sentence.

Also, it appears that I'm not the only one feeling this way. Sharon Astyk writes a great blog, and today she wrote the following:

You see, I’m starting to feel I can’t compete with reality - any actual attention to events as they unfold points up the fact that my own doomiest imaginings are being wildly exceeded.

Let’s see - California is broke, functionally insolvent, and has stopped paying for just about everything, including its state police. Remember how often they trumpted that they were the 6th largest economy in the world - well, that’s kinda like saying the UK is insolvent…oh, and that actually might be not so far from the truth too, since they just had to nationalize their banking system. We’ve lost at least 300,000 jobs in two weeks. The New York Times may be out of business by spring. While neither rain nor sleet nor hail will keep the postal service from its appointed rounds, money probably will, and they are talking about cutting out Saturday deliveries. Homelessness and hunger are rapidly on the rise, as are suicide and murder suicide.

There’s rioting in Russia, China, Greece, and massive worker demonstrations in France and Britain. Australia is seeing record high temperatures, while many of the rest of us struggle with record lows. California’s drought may be the worst in a century. And the already hungry are among the deepest sufferers of the food crisis. The New York Times, Fortune Magazine, Bloomberg - they are all starting to use words like “Biblical proportions” “Deep Depression” “Apocalypse.” It is getting hard to compete with the mainstream doomers.

We’ve been “fixing” the problem - which is a big part of the problem - think of the word “fix” here as in “the fix is in.” We’ve just spent 8 trillion dollars bailing out the banks - more than all the wars in US history, the Louisiana purchase and the space program combined. And what did we get for it? Bank of America and Citi are still teetering, the jobs are still being flushed daily. The estimate is half a million a month - every month.

And people aren’t really very angry yet. They should be - think about what 8 trilliion dollars could actually have bought us, had anyone cared as much about the people as they do about the banks, and about the wealth of the fortunate. At some point people will realize that it isn’t going to work - and their anger will be frightening - and just. The New Hampshire state legislature is currently debating legislation that would assert that if the US implements martial law or abrogates the Constitution, it will effectively dissolve the Union. While one wonders where they were the last eight years, this is being taken quite seriously, and it would have been unthinkable a decade ago.

Eight trillion could have paid for free health care for every American, cradle to grave for a century. Eight trillion was sufficient to cover the cost of almost all the mortgage debt - every American could have been given their house and the “foreclosure crisis” ended instantly. Eight trillion was enough to build renewable energy infrastructure that could have softened the crisis, to reinsulate our houses, to provide basic food and health care to the world’s poor. The same eight trillion we were told we didn’t have when it was needed by those who wanted educations, basic medical care, decent shelter, a home, hope, a decent life, we had a plenty for the banks and the wealthiest people in the world.

A number of energy and environmental advocates don’t seem to grasp that the 8 trillion figure - and the monies spent by other nations - aren’t proof that we can build a renewable infrastructure or address peak oil if we really want to - instead, they are what we are doing *instead.* Yes, nations can print money, but in order to inflate our currency, we’d have to disentangle ourselves quite violently from the other nations with which we are economically intertwined, and that would have its price too. That is, our ability to keep bailing is limited - and the 8 trillion now buried in bank vaults and flushed down the toilet is money we don’t have for future adaptations. Think about it - we’re debating 3/4 of a trillion dollars for all the American people combined (and some of that will also make its ways into the coffers of the bank) - while we’ve already spent almost 9 times that much on the banks. 300 million Americans get 1/8 or less what the banks get. What does that say about us? And what does it say about the ability and willingness to mobilize funds for things that actually protect human lives?

I encourage you to read the whole post, but that's the part that really struck me. I guess that's why I can't keep talking about all of this, it's got such an air of inevitability. Anyway, if you want to see the full-text of the New Hampshire (state motto: "Live free or die") legislation that would define the conditions under which they will secede (and encourage other states to do the same), it's here. Quite a read. Stunning really, watching this type of history unfold. I mean, the fact that the majority of the population in the US does not realize that there is a new debate about secession going on is really quite amazing. It ought to really hammer home the seriousness of the problems. And to think, I wondered if I was being too dramatic when I wrote about the potential for new wars of secession in November last year.

I'm done

We've had a pretty good run, here in the US. At least, since the Great Depression, things have been remarkably stable. My feeling, and that of others, is that the time for relative peace and economic growth has come to an end. You can see the signs everywhere, if you look for them. Unfortunately, too many people refuse to look, or refuse to recognize them for what they really are.

The bailout is not the problem. Sub-prime lending is not the problem. The credit crisis is not the problem. Unemployment, foreclosures, and defaults are not the problem. They are merely symptoms of the real problem. The real problem lies in our paradigm, the problem lies in our belief that things will, or must, always grow, always improve, and that tomorrow will always be better than today. This blind faith in inexorable progress is belied by the simple fact that our growth is simply unsustainable. Daily, more proof arrives that the tremendous march of "progress" since the industrial revolution has been purchased at a tremendous cost- one that the planet can scarcely bear for much longer. Or, as award-winning journalist Chris Hedges argued yesterday in a brilliant article, "It's not going to be OK".

Many will wonder why nobody tried to warn them what was coming. The reality is, there are voices out there that are telling you what is coming, but it's not a pretty picture and so you choose to ignore them. For myself, I listen to those who have been right all along. I choose track-record over happy thoughts. Since the current economic crisis really picked up steam in September of last year, the "experts" have been wrong time and time again, while those few voices in the wilderness have been saying that this downturn will be worse than anyone's expecting, will last longer than anyone's expecting, and the consequences will be far worse than anyone's expecting. Those are the voices I choose to listen to now. It certainly is not the politicians that have been saying that nobody could have predicted the current crisis, ignoring the fact that plenty of people did predict it. No longer comparing the current crisis to milder recessions of the 70's, 80's or 90's, expert economists are now calling for an unprecedented depression.

Journalists are starting to realize that they've been far too complicit. Lost in all the news about why newspapers are shuttering their doors around the country is the simple fact that they have been wrong, horribly wrong, for far too long. The rise of the internet has delivered undreamt of resources to those of us who demand truth, and that truth has come at the expense of the so-called opinion makers and spin-doctors. When the media only quotes those who say that we've reached a "bottom", and it becomes clear within days (or hours) that there is no end in sight, it becomes clear that both those sources and the media themselves are no longer worthy of attention. At the same time, they are useful as they ferret out a small portion of the corruption in our modern age. A staggering amount of wrongdoing exists in all levels of government, and if the populace were truly paying attention, the government would have already been overthrown. Taking one small glance at the news of the day reveals that two of Obama's cabinet level appointees (or 17%) have suddenly remembered that they forgot to pay taxes on perks or income they received, to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars. Luckily, they remembered just as Obama won the election! Geithner has been confirmed, and Daschle is expected to be. These two people should have been disqualified on that basis alone, and yet nobody seems to think it's a problem.

Politicians only have themselves to blame, both for the current crisis and the fact that nobody is yet grasping the gravity of the situation. Like the boy who cries wolf, decades of overheated rhetoric has numbed the public to pronouncements of genuine seriousness. A week ago Friday, our new president had this to say: "Look, we are all political animals here. If we don't do this, we may lose seats. I may not be re-elected. But none of that's going to matter if we don't pass this because the economy will be in a crisis and the American people will be hurting." Ignoring for a moment the fact that his solution is unlikely to work, and just listen to the raw appeal for desperate measures. "I may not be re-elected. But none of that's going to matter." When have you ever heard a politician say that getting re-elected does not matter? It's a half-step away from admitting (as a British minister did last week) "The banks are fucked, we're fucked, the country's fucked."

Iceland's government has fallen in this crisis. It will not be the last. Civil unrest is spreading rapidly throughout Eastern Europe and China, and there have been many predictions that it will strike in America before we're done. We've thrown trillions of dollars at the problem, close to 30 banks have failed (with hundreds or thousands more poised to fail at any moment), unemployment has been rising at over half a million per month, and still we are no closer to anything resembling a solution, or even a slowing in the bloodbath.

I'm not asking anyone to take this all on faith. Read both sides of these arguments. Then go back and read the counter-arguments. Read opinions that disagree with yours, read about subjects that you ordinarily would not. Rely as much as you can using direct evidence, or any statistics you can find. The reporting of statistics can be spun, but the raw numbers themselves do not lie. Obama was indisputably correct during his inaugural speech when he said "the time has come to set aside childish things." Stop watching "American Idol", or whatever mindless drivel masquerades as entertainment these days. Are you prepared to provide for yourself and your family should the grocery stores suddenly be empty of food- or closed due to bankruptcy? Or if water stops coming free from the tap, how will you conquer thirst?

Food banks around the country are reporting a 30% increase in demand, double the increase from six months ago. Last week, on Monday- in a single day- approximately 80,000 Americans lost their jobs, and the stock market rejoiced, if only briefly. That's 15% of the total loss for December, and it came in a single day. Where will you go for food when you have job, no money, and the food banks are empty? I hope you won't be part of the rising numbers of Americans taking their own lives.

For what it's worth, the government now admits that we have essentially ignored global warming for too long- it's now irreversible. The twin crises of global economic collapse and climate change are more interrelated than most people realize. In any case, it's too late to do much to solve either- the time has now come to focus on ways to mitigate the fallout. This is what collapse looks like. A slow-motion collapse is now occurring, and time is short for you to figure out how best to weather it.

As I said, rely on those whose predictions have been proven correct, not those who tell you comforting lies. Consider this from a 2006 Maclean's article:

And when the truth can no longer be obscured, the price will spike, the economy nosedive, and the underpinnings of our civilization will start tumbling like dominos. The U.S. -- Consumer No. 1 in the lingo of Leggett's book -- will be the most vulnerable, having allowed its citizens to pile up mountains of debt. "The price of houses will collapse. Stock markets will crash. Within a short period, human wealth -- little more than a pile of paper at the best of times, even with the confidence about the future high among traders -- will shrivel." There will be emergency summits, diplomatic initiatives, urgent exploration efforts, but the turmoil will not subside. Thousands of companies will go bankrupt, and millions will be unemployed. "Once affluent cities with street cafés will have queues at soup kitchens and armies of beggars. The crime rate will soar. The earth has always been a dangerous place, but now it will become a tinderbox."

By 2010, predicts Leggett, democracy will be on the run. As with the Great Depression, economic hardship will bring out the worst in people. Fascists will rise, feeding on the anger of the newly poor and whipping up support. These new rulers will find the tools of repression -- emergency laws, prison camps, a relaxed attitude toward torture -- already in place, courtesy of the war on terror. And if that scenario isn't nightmarish enough, Leggett predicts that "Big Oversight Number One" -- climate change -- will be simultaneously making its presence felt "with a vengeance." On the heels of their rapid financial ruin, people "will now watch aghast as their food and water supplies dwindle in the face of a climate seemingly going awry." Prolonged droughts will spread, decimating harvests. As oceans warm, fish catches "will fall off a cliff," and protein will become a luxury.

The first paragraph reads like recent history or current newspaper headlines (see hyperlinks for examples, or your local newspaper), the second paragraph is yet to come. If you wish, there are plenty of others out there that have made similar arguments. Contrast the words of these prophets with the statements of your politicians, you will find very little overlap, if any. One of these groups has been consistently correct, the other group repeats lame excuses that "nobody could have anticipated the reach, depth, or severity of the current crisis" and then proceeds to promise you a return to "normal" in short order, if you only vote for them or agree with their decision to throw trillions of dollars at the crisis.

How can I begin to explain to you the insanity of politicians? They advocate spending close to a trillion dollars in a stimulus package in which they argue that every $1 of stimulus results in $1.50 in economic growth. If that were true, then why not spend like this every day? Why not spend quadrillions of dollars, and make everyone in the US wealthy? Or why has nobody noticed that every four years we have this masturbatory celebration known as an election- new politicians come to power promising change, vowing to tackle corruption and to solve the really hard problems; and yet, nothing ever changes, corruption is endemic, and the really hard problems are only growing in severity? Frankly though, we're all to blame. We keep looking to them for solutions to problems that they caused in the first place. Well, those days are ending, soon they will no longer be able to pretend that they have solutions- in fact, you can hear that in their statements right now if you are paying attention. The word "unprecedented" is used all too frequently for them to really know what they are doing. Even economists seem eager to get the stimulus on, as it will solve for them the debate over whether fiscal stimulus really works or not. Although politicians worldwide seem to act as though that debate was already settled, in fact, it's not. And what are we to do if we throw trillions into this black hole, and it doesn't do anything after all? Is anyone even asking that question? The Wall Street Journal quotes Rahm Emanuel as saying, "Never let a serious crisis go to waste. What I mean by that is it's an opportunity to do things you couldn't do before." This frank admission is chilling to anyone familiar with Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine. In short, the frightened masses which would normally oppose this type of reckless endangerment of their fiscal health (not to mention that of their children and grandchildren) can be persuaded that "desperate times call for desperate measures." Left unsaid is the fact that the desperate measures will tend to benefit the upper class of society disproportionately.

Most of the masses take some comfort in the fact that doomsdayers have been wrong before, a point I freely grant. However, doomsayers only have to be correct once. Additionally, those who believed their empires would last forever have also been wrong-- 100% of the time, historically. As the great Roman society was poised on the brink of destruction, did anyone alive at the time really believe what was happening, did they recognize the signs for what they were? Or any of the great civilizations that have sprang up to dominate their world- Mayan, Incan, Egyptian, Norse- did any of them recognize the coming collapse? Clearly, not in time to prevent it. Are we any different?

Of course, the end of the world has been promised by Jews, Christians, Muslims and assorted crazies with sandwich boards for as long as there has been a human world to end. But those doomsdays were the product of faith; reason always used to say the world will continue. The point about the new apocalypse is that this situation has reversed. Now faith tells us we will be able to solve our problems; reason says we have no answers now and none are likely in the future. Perhaps we can't cure cancer because the problem is simply beyond our intellects. Perhaps we haven't flown to the stars because our biology and God's physics mean we never can. Perhaps we are close to the limit and the time of plenty is over.

The evidence is mounting that our two sunny centuries of growth and wealth may end in a new Dark Age in which ignorance will replace knowledge, war will replace peace, sickness will replace health and famine will replace obesity. You don't think so? It's always happened in the past. What makes us so different? Nothing, I'm afraid.

If we manage to escape the current crisis relatively unscathed, will we heed it for the warning sign it is? Jared Diamond's amazing book Collapse: how societies choose to fail or succeed poses an interesting question: What did the person on Easter Island who cut down the last tree think about as he was doing it? You see, deforestation was a major factor in the collapse of Easter Island society. Diamond spotlights several other once-mighty societies that collapsed because of their stupid, short-term, profligate use of natural resources. Put simply, they used their resources until they were gone, and then they died. Their societies crumbled surprisingly quickly, often within only decades from reaching their peak. There is nothing to suggest that American society is any different, or has learned the lessons of the past. Quoting Diamond:

"One of the disturbing facts of history is that so many civilizations collapse. Few people, however, least of all our politicians, realize that a primary cause of the collapse of those societies has been the destruction of the natural resources on which they depend. Fewer still appreciate that many of those civilizations share a sharp curve of decline. Indeed, a society's demise may begin only a decade or two after it reaches its peak population, wealth and power."

If we assume this is not the great collapse, then it will certainly arrive within decades if we continue on our current path, and probably even if we make radical changes. The deniers have been far too successful, and we are utterly unprepared for the implications. They have postponed action on the most pressing of problems, citing potential damage to the economy (which after all, must continue to grow, at all costs). Well, they've succeeded, and gained the ultimate pyrrhic victory. The economy is now in the process of being destroyed, and it's too late to solve the environmental problems we will be facing. Scientific consensus is now that the human race, if not all life on Earth, will go extinct within the next 100 years. It takes a bit of connecting the dots, but they are all well-regarded scientific studies. Or, if you choose not to believe that one, how about the NASA scientist and climate expert that says Obama has only 4 years to save planet earth? I, for one, am not optimistic that he can muster the will to do so, even if we grant that it's not yet too late.

In any case, I am not going to be spending much more time chronicling this collapse. I'm definitely done posting about political and economic corruption within the US, as there are far too many articles and I have too little time. I urge you to spend whatever time and resources you can muster in preparing yourself for what's to come. I am not going to point you in the direction of "recommended reading" or some similar list. If you are interested, you can find such information on your own, but I suspect that most of you are not interested enough to even try. Pity, but consider this parting thought: before the rise of the age of oil (a mere two centuries ago), the earth was able to support approximately 1 billion people. There are now approximately 6.7 billion. If there is the slightest chance that any of our most respected scientists are correct then the coming wars, pandemics, droughts, famine, and extreme weather are set to reduce that number dramatically, if not totally erase it. Mankind has proven itself to be a parasite, remorselessly feeding on the resources of our host planet. Like a parasite, we may just be killing ourselves along with our host. Or perhaps a cancer is an apt description- growing exponentially, eventually choking out and destroying the healthy parts until the whole organism dies.

Thanks to all who have taken the time to read my postings over the past year or two, and I'm very sincerely wishing you good luck.

THE SECOND COMING

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

The Treatment of Bush Has Been a Disgrace - WSJ.com

The Treatment of Bush Has Been a Disgrace - WSJ.com

I had a choking fit as I read this editorial in yesterday's Wall Street Journal. I could almost agree with a more generic point that, as Americans, we ought to show respect to the office of the presidency. But this editorial goes far beyond that, arguing that Bush's record low approval numbers are "the price Mr. Bush is paying for trying to work with both Democrats and Republicans... Those bipartisan efforts have been met with crushing resistance from both political parties." Mr. Shapiro (who bears the credentials of "investigative reporter and lawyer who previously interned with John F. Kerry's legal team during the presidential election in 2004", not to mention total idiot) then brings up several issues on which either Democrats or Republicans (or both!) have disagreed with Bush: Supreme Court nominees, immigration reform, as well as "his refusal to retreat in Iraq [that] has enraged liberals who have unrealistic expectations about the challenges we face there."

Oh yes, poor hapless George W. Bush. He's tried so hard to reach across the aisle and work together, always making sure not to alienate those that may disagree with him. Is this guy kidding?????? In what world does he live? Here are a few of Bush's other bipartisan initiaves, stretching all the way back to the start of his presidency:

• torture
• the Iraq war
  
• indefinite detention & suspension of habeas corpus rights
  
• warrantless wiretapping of American citizens
• Telco immunity
  
• asserted that the office of the Vice-president resides in the legislative branch in order to avoid reporting and inspection requirements in the handling of classified information.
• establishment of 100-mile "constitution-free" zone inside the U.S. borders.
• Ignored warnings about the danger posed by Hurricane Katrina
• domestic deployment of the military in violation of Posse Comitatus
• The bailout
• Bailout funds bonus payouts to executives, despite bipartisan outcry
• Failure to join Kyoto protocol
• Extraordinary rendition
  
• and because it bears repeating, torturing people until they go insane.

I'm sure there are plenty more, you're welcome to play the home game. Is it really so hard to understand why he's universally hated? The term "worst president in history" has been bandied about by historians since 2006. I really cannot fathom how there are still Bush apologists out there. Let's try this: name things that Bush has done well. (Cue the crickets chirping).

Mr Shapiro ends up:

The treatment President Bush has received from this country is nothing less than a disgrace. The attacks launched against him have been cruel and slanderous, proving to the world what little character and resolve we have. The president is not to blame for all these problems. He never lost faith in America or her people, and has tried his hardest to continue leading our nation during a very difficult time.

Our failure to stand by the one person who continued to stand by us has not gone unnoticed by our enemies. It has shown to the world how disloyal we can be when our president needed loyalty -- a shameful display of arrogance and weakness that will haunt this nation long after Mr. Bush has left the White House.

No, the only "shameful display of arrogance" over these past 8 years has come from the Bush White House. He's the fucking disgrace, and there's nobody else TO blame for all these problems, unless you want to argue that it's Cheney or Rove's fault! Shameful indeed.

Thomas Friedman: Vote for ( )

Although I disagree with many of his conclusions, Thomas Friedman does get this election contest partially correct in an op-ed from 11/1/08.

Here’s what strikes me this election eve: I can’t remember a presidential campaign that was so disconnected from the actual challenges of governing that will confront the winner the morning after. When this election campaign began two years ago, the big issue was how and for how long do we continue nation-building in Iraq. As the campaign comes to a close, the big issue is how and at what sacrifice do we do nation-building in America.

Unfortunately, you’d barely know that from the presidential debates. Watching them in the context of the meltdown of the financial system was like watching a game show where the two contestants were kept off-stage in a soundproof booth and brought out to address the audience without knowing the context.

Isn't that exactly what I've been saying??

Since the last debate, John McCain and Barack Obama have unveiled broad ideas about how to restore the nation’s financial health. But they continue to suggest that this will be largely pain-free. McCain says giving everyone a tax cut will save the day; Obama tells us only the rich will have to pay to help us out of this hole. Neither is true.

We are all going to have to pay, because this meltdown comes in the context of what has been “perhaps the greatest wealth transfer since the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia in 1917,” says Michael Mandelbaum, author of “Democracy’s Good Name.” “It is not a wealth transfer from rich to poor that the Bush administration will be remembered for. It is a wealth transfer from the future to the present.”

Mr. Friedman, I don't think anyone can argue that we've seen a transfer of wealth from rich to poor. Not only have we destroyed the economic foundation for future generations, under Bush we've ALSO seen the biggest transfer of wealth from the lower and middle classes to the upper classes, leading to record income inequality and shocking lack of class mobility. The rich certainly haven't been paying their share. And you don't really believe that corporations are going to pitch in and pay taxes to help out, do you??

Never has one generation spent so much of its children’s wealth in such a short period of time with so little to show for it as in the Bush years. Under George W. Bush, America has foisted onto future generations a huge financial burden to finance our current tax cuts, wars and now bailouts. Just paying off those debts will require significant sacrifices. But when you add the destruction of wealth that has taken place in the last two months in the markets, and the need for more bailouts, you understand why this is not going to be a painless recovery.

No, indeed, this will not be a painless recovery. And "significant sacrifices" is an understatement. In an economic blood-letting like this, many are saying it could be the "end of prosperity". Period.

The Bush team leaves us with another debt — one to Mother Nature. We have added tons more CO2 into the atmosphere these last eight years, without any mitigation effort. As a result, slowing down climate change in the next eight years is going to require even bigger changes and investments in how we use energy.

Hmm, I wonder if that's due to the fact that Bush's talking points on the environment have been "deny, deny, deny". Or maybe that's because it's part of a wider Republican strategy to attempt to discredit environmental warnings? And now that peak-oil concepts are proving true, the question has become "Can we do anything fast enough to avert disaster?"

Sam Harris astounds me again!

I'm reposting this in its entirety from The Edge's annual question: "What have you changed your mind about?" I know I'm a bit late to this party, but I had a great deal of thinking to do before I knew where I stood. At first, when I read Sam's response, I was shocked, disagreeing completely. But then again, I thought that way at first about his characterization of moderate Christians. Essentially, he argues that moderate Christians

"by their lingering attachment to the unique divinity of Jesus, protect the faith of fundamentalists from public scorn. Christian liberals — who aren't sure what they believe but just love the experience of going to church occasionally — deny the moderates a proper collision with scientific rationality. And in this way centuries have come and gone without an honest word being spoken about God in our society."

EDIT: After I posted this, I read an amazing post at Apostate's Chapel that you should all read about why atheists refuse to leave religion alone.

However, the more I think and reflect on Sam's ideas, the more convincing I find them. I was automatically reacting against them because they are so radically different from conventional wisdom, or at least conventional sensibilities. The concept he expresses below, that "Mother Nature is Not Our Friend" is terribly important to understand. I had been disgusted with the attitude of arrogance and entitlement that seems to come with the differing strains of religion, without realizing that my own eye held a similar beam: the assumption that "natural" is the same thing as "the best". Now that we have developed the tools to shape our own genetic and physiological destiny (no thanks to those who attempt to quash science in the name of religion, or more vaguely, "ethics"). The question is no longer, "should we?" but "why shouldn't we?" By challenging the base assumption that nature wants humans to survive, or that we have some special place in the cosmos, Sam forces us to rethink all our assumptions about gene therapy, cloning, stem cell research, climate change, and the ethical issues surround them. Enjoy:


SAM HARRIS
Neuroscience Researcher; Author, Letter to a Christian Nation

Mother Nature is Not Our Friend

Like many people, I once trusted in the wisdom of Nature. I imagined that there were real boundaries between the natural and the artificial, between one species and another, and thought that, with the advent of genetic engineering, we would be tinkering with life at our peril. I now believe that this romantic view of Nature is a stultifying and dangerous mythology.

Every 100 million years or so, an asteroid or comet the size of a mountain smashes into the earth, killing nearly everything that lives. If ever we needed proof of Nature's indifference to the welfare of complex organisms such as ourselves, there it is. The history of life on this planet has been one of merciless destruction and blind, lurching renewal.

The fossil record suggests that individual species survive, on average, between one and ten million years. The concept of a "species" is misleading, however, and it tempts us to think that we, as homo sapiens, have arrived at some well-defined position in the natural order. The term "species" merely designates a population of organisms that can interbreed and produce fertile offspring; it cannot be aptly applied to the boundaries between species (to what are often called "intermediate" or "transitional" forms). There was, for instance, no first member of the human species, and there are no canonical members now. Life is a continuous flux. Our nonhuman ancestors bred, generation after generation, and incrementally begat what we now deem to be the species homo sapiens — ourselves. There is nothing about our ancestral line or about our current biology that dictates how we will evolve in the future. Nothing in the natural order demands that our descendants resemble us in any particular way. Very likely, they will not resemble us. We will almost certainly transform ourselves, likely beyond recognition, in the generations to come.

Will this be a good thing? The question presupposes that we have a viable alternative. But what is the alternative to our taking charge of our biological destiny? Might we be better off just leaving things to the wisdom of Nature? I once believed this. But we know that Nature has no concern for individuals or for species. Those that survive do so despite Her indifference. While the process of natural selection has sculpted our genome to its present state, it has not acted to maximize human happiness; nor has it necessarily conferred any advantage upon us beyond the capacity raise the next generation to child-bearing age. In fact, there may be nothing about human life after the age of forty (the average lifespan until the 20th century) that has been selected by evolution at all. And with a few exceptions (e.g. the gene for lactose tolerance), we probably haven't adapted to our environment much since the Pleistocene.

But our environment and our needs — to say nothing of our desires — have changed radically in the meantime. We are in many respects ill-suited to the task of building a global civilization. This is not a surprise. From the point of view of evolution, much of human culture, along with its cognitive and emotional underpinnings, must be epiphenomenal. Nature cannot "see" most of what we are doing, or hope to do, and has done nothing to prepare us for many of the challenges we now face.

These concerns cannot be waved aside with adages like, "if it ain't broke, don't fix it." There are innumerable perspectives from which our current state of functioning can be aptly described as "broke." Speaking personally, it seems to me that everything I do picks out some point on a spectrum of disability: I was always decent at math, for instance, but this is simply to say that I am like a great mathematician who has been gored in the head by a bull; my musical ability resembles that of a Mozart or a Bach, it is true, though after a near fatal incident on skis; if Tiger Woods awoke from surgery to find that he now possessed (or was possessed by) my golf-swing, rest assured that a crushing lawsuit for medical malpractice would be in the offing.

Considering humanity as a whole, there is nothing about natural selection that suggests our optimal design. We are probably not even optimized for the Paleolithic, much less for life in the 21st century. And yet, we are now acquiring the tools that will enable us to attempt our own optimization. Many people think this project is fraught with risk. But is it riskier than doing nothing? There may be current threats to civilization that we cannot even perceive, much less resolve, at our current level of intelligence. Could any rational strategy be more dangerous than following the whims of Nature? This is not to say that our growing capacity to meddle with the human genome couldn't present some moments of Faustian over-reach. But our fears on this front must be tempered by a sober understanding of how we got here. Mother Nature is not now, nor has she ever been, looking out for us.

Response: Sam Harris' "The Problem with Atheism"

In Sam Harris’ newest article (actually the text of a speech he gave at the Atheist Alliance Conference in Washington, D.C.), he makes an impassioned plea that atheists should not be known as such. Or, more properly, that they should not self-identify as an atheist. I recommend you read the entire speech, he makes a good case. I find myself in an unusual position in that I disagree wholeheartedly with him on this issue. I thought I disagreed with him in the past, but I was wrong. He was absolutely correct, and I was won over through the strength of his arguments. Not so, this time.

The main thrust of his argument is encapsulated in this quotation:

. . . We should not call ourselves ‘atheists.’ We should not call ourselves ‘secularists.’ We should not call ourselves ‘humanists,’ or ‘secular humanists,’ or ‘naturalists,’ or ‘skeptics,’ or ‘anti-theists,’ or ‘rationalists,’ or ‘freethinkers,’ or ‘brights.’ We should not call ourselves anything. We should go under the radar—for the rest of our lives. And while there, we should be decent, responsible people who destroy bad ideas wherever we find them.

He spends some time explaining that “atheist” is, at its root, an expression of negation, which makes it somewhat useless as a way to define oneself, especially vis-à-vis other people. Quoting Sam, “I think that ‘atheist’ is a term that we do not need, in the same way that we don’t need a word for someone who rejects astrology. We simply do not call people ‘non-astrologers.’” Further, he explains that racism used to be a widespread, everyday phenomenon in the United States. Even horrific, violent, deeply entrenched and institutionalized racism was not as rare as we would like to think. He explains that "there have been important, and I think, irrevocable changes in the way we talk about race. . . how many people have had to identify themselves as 'non-racists' to participate in this process?" Unfortunately, although all of this makes sense on the face of it, casual thought on the matter makes me realize that it's too facile to serve as a good metaphor for the struggle against theism.

First, while calling oneself an atheist is probably a useless way to define oneself in a vacuum, we do not live in a vacuum. There would be no need for a term like “atheist” if there were no “theists”, but that is not the world in which we find ourselves, no matter how desperately we wish it were. Whether atheism is a burgeoning movement or not remains to be seen, but I’d like to think of it as a revolution of sorts. And revolutions are inherently anti- status quo. Mr. Harris makes an intellectual gyration here, and insists that we should stand for reason and common sense, rather than against religion or ‘god(s)’ per se. Movements (revolutions?) are sometimes best defined in terms of what they are opposed to. Mr. Harris says that "atheism is not a worldview," but I'm afraid it is. Since I woke up and realized I was atheist, my worldview has been dramatically altered. It is a global change in the way I view everything-- the metaphors I use, the way I reflect on my actions and consequences of those actions, my political ideas, what is important to focus upon in my life, etc... If that is not a worldview, I don't know what else to call it.

This brings me to a related point. Many atheists are proud of the fact that they are atheists. There are extensive lines of bumper stickers, t-shirts, and related merchandise available to proclaim one’s lack of belief in the supernatural. I strongly doubt that a t-shirt or coffee mug reading "pro-reason" would command similar sales figures to those reading "godless atheist," "evildoer," "heretic," or "infidel". I also doubt that if one were to ask Sam Harris, "Are you an atheist?" that he would respond "No, but please allow me to tell you about reason and science".

Perhaps I should also explain that one of the primary reasons that Mr. Harris gives for preferring not to be so easily labeled is that people make assumptions based on those labels. As atheists, we are mind-numbingly aware of all of the arguments that believers use to attack us or shore up their defenses. I think Mr. Harris tires of responding to the same arguments over and over again, even though he has attempted to pre-empt so many of them with his other writing. As such, he's throwing in the towel; it's harder to attack something if you aren't sure what it is. From his perspective, it is so much easier for society as a whole to dismiss us as the lunatic fringe or to use canned arguments or sound-bite attacks against us once they know that we are "atheists". We should be "under the radar", it's safer that way. It seems to me this is completely backwards. The gay-pride movement did not start to gain any momentum until it became known as "gay-pride". The refusal to go away, the insistence on one's rights (even while in the minority), the appeal to change society at large-- these are all the hallmarks of great social movements. It's how monumental change occurs. This is the real reason why I can't support Mr. Harris' racism analogy: change occurred because people stood up and vociferously argued for what they believed in. It did not occur because there was an amorphous group of people that realized that racism was wrong and stealthily changed society. The civil-rights movement got loud, got organized, they made people uncomfortable, they made society change. It does not matter if this self-identification made it easier for racists to label them, or to use canned arguments to keep them in their place. They changed society because it was the right thing to do, and not just for themselves individually, but for society as a whole. This is the true heritage that atheists should lay claim to. Instead, we are too busy squabbling over the myriad ways we could name ourselves, or give ourselves a symbol (ostensibly to identify ourselves to one another), or which atheist group would be best to join. It's this tiresome rehashing of nomenclature that Mr. Harris alludes to in the first quotation above, but instead of advocating that people take action to make change occur, he changes the naming debate marginally.

Mr. Harris then changes tack, and argues that we should use this approach of stealth-atheism is we are more likely to win any given battle if we ally ourselves with those of faith with whom we might agree on any given situation. He uses the example of Mormonism. Atheists may have something in common with mainstream xians, in that neither one of us believes Mormonism is true. Therefore, we ought to somehow combine forces with those that agree with us, in some "enemy-of-my-enemy-is-my-friend" shady logic. Quoting Harris again, "to be consistent as atheists, we must oppose, or seem to oppose, all faith claims equally. This is a waste of precious time and energy, and it squanders the trust of people who would otherwise agree with us on specific issues." This may be true, but only so far as those who agree with us on specific issues are willing to ally with us. Once we've eradicated those pesky Mormons (or Muslims), then what? Who's next? I submit it's far better to avoid settling for half-measures when we could obtain the whole ball of wax. Obviously, we must have our priorities, but they shouldn't come at the expense of our identity. Making deals with the proverbial "devil" never works out the way we think it will.

Mr. Harris then moves on to advocating a return to reason in our daily interactions, which I wholeheartedly agree with. "Nobody wants to believe things on bad evidence. The desire to know what is actually going on in [sic] world is very difficult to argue with. In so far as we represent that desire, we become difficult to argue with." The problem with this is that people believe things for bad evidence all the time. People just don't think that they are the ones with bad evidence. For many, "the bible says so" or "my pastor says so" or "my friends/parents say so" is the highest evidentiary standard. For these people, it's incomprehensible that there are people in the world that don't believe in the bible. Even more difficult then, would be a debate with these folks as to solutions to problems such as global warming (See related Wall Street Journal article). It seems that there is some debate in the evangelical xian community what to do about global warming, both sides claim a biblical imperative for their solution. (By the way, the two solutions are to 1- do nothing, 2 - do something.) Everyone on both sides are convinced that they have the best of reasons for what they believe. To me, as an outsider, I think their reasons for debate are inane, but try convincing them of that.

The article winds up with a rather large exploration into the metaphysics of experience and the value of meditation, which I have no qualms with, followed by Mr. Harris' vision of what victory in this struggle would look like. "We will have won this war of ideas against religion when atheism is scarcely intelligible as a concept. We will simply find ourselves in a world in which people cease to praise one another for pretending to know things they do not know." Almost by fiat, he believes, this world will come about if we insist upon reason, rather than "atheist". While it's certainly a very worthy long-term goal, for now I will settle for rational national policy. I don't care if everyone wants to believe in god or buddha or Russell's teapot, so long as we can have stem cell research, a change in our foreign policy, gay marriage, etc... Laws, policies, the long-term direction of society is what we ought to be concerned with, not this relentless back-and-forth about what we ought to be called. Although Mr. Harris recognizes that racism still exists, he seems to believe (again by fiat) that eventually things will all be pollyanna, that "it will be a world in which the very concept of separate races has lost its meaning." A worthy and noble objective, but for Rosa Parks, it was enough to say "I will not give up my seat."

I would like to leave this subject with a few closing thoughts. As one of the comments from the website on which the speech was posted has pointed out, atheism can be a tough sell. Nobody likes an atheist, at least when the think of us as morose determinists with no joy in this nasty, brutish, short life on a lonely planet in a vast and meaningless cosmos. Mr. Harris' attempt to shoehorn the topic of metaphysical experience and meditation into this speech is his answer to this, along with avoiding the term "atheist" whenever possible. My answer is to shout from the rooftops the overwhelming relief that comes with realizing there is no omniscient judge (nay, voyeur) over all of my actions. There are no great scales on which my life will be judged. Think of all those times that I didn't keep the sabbath day holy, or when I coveted my neighbor's ox, or told a little white lie to make someone feel better. If all of those things counted against me, I'd surely be in trouble. Luckily, it's so much easier to go through life trying to do the right thing as best I can, making mistakes, learning from mistakes, and trying to do better the next day. If I also had to worry about violating dogma lest my eternal soul be in peril, I don't know how I'd continue to make it through every day.

All this being said, I fully agree that words have meaning. We shouldn't casually throw terms like "atheist" around, especially if that is not what we intend. I don't see what is damaging about saying I am an atheist. I believe the feminists have it right when they say that the English language (at least the way it is commonly used) helps entrench sexism. But, call me crazy, I also think that "In God We Trust" should be taken off our money if we mean what we say in the Constitution (or at least the First Amendment). By the way, I believe that the First Amendment does allow for freedom FROM religion, not just freedom OF religion, but that's another blog.

Finally, it's been said that there are two sides to every argument. I think that one (or both) sides usually try to reduce the argument to trite sloganeering and mis-characterization of the other position. However, that doesn't devalue the worth of the arguments, and it only convinces those that don't have a dog in that particular fight. Once people realize that this is a struggle that has immense ramifications for society as well as themselves and take the time to examine their position, hopefully the useless round-and-round that we go through with theists will disappear as they begin to question the reasons they believe what they do, and thereby the implications for our national policy.