Vera Verba

Q: You often talk about collective identities like they’re bad things. Don’t we all belong to collective identities? French, German, male or female, athletic or non-athletic, and so on?

A: Before I get all the way into this, note a crucial word, “belong.” It is sometimes used in ways that can create confusion.

Now, it is certainly true that we can all be seen as members of various groups, so let me be a bit more specific. The issues here are self-identification and the grouping of ideas.

By self-identification I mean this: You were born in a certain place. Let’s presume for this example that you were born in Canada. You can see yourself as either:

“A person who happened to be born in Canada”

or

“A Canadian”

Notice the self-definition implicit in these two statements. The first leaves your individuality unblemished. The second demotes you to being a part in a big machine.

Are you an individual, or a member of a collective?

This matters a great deal in terms of the grouping of ideas. If I am “A Canadian,” then I probably feel like I should accept “Canadian” ideas. In actual practice, people who self-identify this way will tend to accept any idea that can be convincingly packaged underneath the tag, “Canadian.”

This is a fundamental error. We should not accept any idea, based on tags or groupings. Each idea stands on its own, and each individual should conceive of him/herself as an independent unit, regardless of shared characteristics.

Finally, back to belonging: Do you actually belong to a group, or do you merely share some characteristics with certain other people?

The difference is crucial.

December 5th is the anniversary of the ratification of the 21st amendment to the U.S. Constitution which served to repeal the 18th amendment. The 18th amendment, as you probably know, brought the prohibition of Alcohol to the federal level. Previous to the 18th amendment there had been some dry states, but between January 16, 1920 and December 5th, 1933, the United States of America was a dry country.

Prohibition has been called the “Noble Experiment,” and what this experiment demonstrated (pretty convincingly) was a that you just can’t legislate away a product or service while market demand still exists. The basic economics of the equation is that efforts spent on reducing supply just increase the potential rewards for meeting the additional untapped demand.

Every black market supplier you put in jail reduces competition in the field. Every container of product confiscated (or theatrically destroyed for the press) increases the market value. All of this makes it more appealing for new bootleggers to enter the market - to figure out new and better ways to produce and supply the product.

Many people have drawn parallels between this prohibition of alcohol and the current “War on Drugs,” and the George Santayana quote “those who can not remember the past are condemned to repeat it” is often thrown around. And rightly so of course. What is the point of having such a noble (as well as costly) experiment if you don’t learn anything from it?

But what is more interesting to me is how the parallels between early 19th century alcohol prohibition and modern scheduled drug prohibition highlight the disappearance of our constitutional rights. If I were a “glass half full” or “every cloud has a silver lining” type, I might say that the similarities between the two situations offers us a lucky opportunity to really take notice of the things that have changed - perhaps even give us some insight that we might never have gleaned had we not all been condemned to repeat this (certainly not as noble the second time around) experiment.

In 1919 it was clearly understood by everyone that the Federal Government could not say “Boo” about what substances you chose to put in your own body, nor what you could buy or sell as long as you were doing business with someone in the same State. That is why a constitutional amendment was required before Congress could pass the Volstead act and prohibit alcohol sale and consumption.

It’s also why, when that amendment was repealed, it was understood that these laws were no longer constitutional. Prohibition stopped being enforced immediately, without the need for a test case to go to the Supreme Court to overturn the law. That is how clearly it was understood by everyone that the constitution protected us from laws regulating what we choose to eat, drink, snort or inject directly into our veins.

Today almost none of the people who understood this are alive - and somehow we again have pretty much the exact same sort of prohibition going on.

The constitution must have lost its power to protect us from these sort of laws sometime in the past 75 years. But when did this happen? Our government is built on the concept that we extend it power only by our consent - and that we can only lose constitutional protections by our consent. The only mechanism the Constitution provides by which our constitutional rights can be reduced (or increased) is the passing of a new amendment by a two thirds majority vote of our representatives.

There have been only six new amendments ratified since the 21st amendment returned to us our constitutional protection against prohibition type laws. They are:

• 22 - Presidential Term Limits
• 23 - Presidential Vote for District of Columbia
• 24 - Poll Taxes Barred
• 25 - Presidential Disability and Succession Rules
• 26 - Voting Age Set to 18
• 27 - Limit on Congressional Pay Increases

None of these has anything to do with prohibition or its like.

So after prohibition was repealed, we were clearly once again constitutionally protected from all substance prohibiting laws. And none of the amendments passed since then have removed that protection. And passing such an amendment is the only constitutionally valid way for us to lose such protections from our own government. Logic would then dictate that all such laws MUST still be unconstitutional.

How then is it that this is not the current understanding of our politicians, our police, and our courts?

The mechanism by which we have been slowly stripped of our constitutional rights without our consent is based on the Supreme Courts power of judicial review. As you may already know, the Supreme Court claims the right to interpret the language of the constitution, and there is no control on this power. They can re-interpret the constitution to mean whatever they choose. Interestingly, this is not a power that the Constitution grants to the Supreme Court, but one that it simply claimed for itself.

The power to interpret the Constitution is not specifically delegated to any branch of the government, and the 10th amendment reserves all such unmentioned powers to the states/people. However, this did not stop Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall from claiming in his opinion of the 1803 case Marbury v. Madison that, since courts routinely interpret law, and since the Constitution is the highest law of the land, that the highest court of the land should have the power to interpret it - and that this is what the he interpreted the Constitution to say.

John Marshall’s circular logic bootstrapping of the Supreme Court’s power created a means by which our rights can be removed without our consent. It gets around the difficult to obtain, but constitutionally required, two thirds majority vote by our legislatures. And it has lead to many changes to (almost exclusively reductions of) our Constitutional protections over the past 200 years.

This slowly creeping increase of government power, as the Supreme Court re-interprets the Constitution, prompted David Friedman to write in his excellent book “The Machinery of Freedom”:

It took about 150 years, starting with a Bill of Rights that reserved to the states and the people all powers not explicitly delegated to the federal government, to produce a Supreme Court willing to rule that growing corn to feed to your own hogs is interstate commerce and can be regulated by Congress.

Now, I am not saying that the mechanism by which the Supreme Court decides cases and interprets the constitution is necessarily a bad one. There has to be some mechanism by which unconstitutional laws can be struck down. However, each majority opinion that is handed down has, in theory, the power to change our country and affect our rights as much as any constitutional amendment. Therefore, I believe that the people should ( and are even constitutionally entitled to) have a greater voice in these decisions.

This problem of the Supreme Court re-interpreting our rights away is further exacerbated by the ever growing willingness for our congress to pass (and the executive branch to enforce) laws that they all know are unconstitutional. There is no down side for them to do this. Even if the Supreme court agrees to hear a relevant case, the law will still be enforced for many years before it can be struck down, and can theoretically just be passed again in a slightly different form. Additionally, every unconstitutional law passed is a chance for congress to play the power lottery - the Supreme Court might just re-interpret the constitution, allowing the law to stand and thus increasing congressional power.

So how do we correct this problem? How do we reclaim the power to control our constitutional protections? How do we prevent congress from deliberately passing laws to test just how far the current Supreme Court will allow constitution can be bent?

One solution might be a new amendment to the Constitution to add “checks and balances” limiting this otherwise unlimited power to re-interpret the Constitution. It would assert our right to be involved in any change to the Constitution, and it would spell out a punishment for those who would attempt to take away our rights without following the correct procedure for amending the Constitution. It might read something like this:

1. No supreme court decision shall be considered valid until it can first put to a vote by the state legislatures.

2. Votes may be cast for any opinion generated by the court. A simple majority of states is required to ratify the courts majority/plurality opinion. A two thirds majority of states is required to ratify a minority opinion. State legislatures that fail to put the matter to a vote in their next session immediately after the courts decision shall be counted as abstaining.

3. If no court opinion is ratified, the court must decide to either return to deliberations and issue new (or the same) opinions, or let the matter rest as if they had never chosen to hear the case.

4. U.S. Congressmen will receive a sentence of 1 year in a federal correctional facility for each yes vote that was recorded on a law that is subsequently struck down as unconstitutional by supreme court decision.

(Please Note that I have no rigorously logical reason to believe that the specific amendment I am suggesting here would do the job - I just know that some mechanism giving people back the control the Constitution promised us over guarding our own rights is sorely needed. Without some solution to this problem, things seem very likely to just continue to get worse.)

So what do you think? Does this amendment solve all our problems?

Maybe it will sound better after you’ve had a few drinks…

Go ahead… Drink up… it’s still legal.

One of the interesting problems with a new religion like Environmentalism is that it is not yet generally recognized as a religion. This means that some people will not realize that they have to abandon their old religion in order to practice this new one fully.

Every collective idea-organism has its traditions that are practiced to create a sense of group unity and used as signals of belief so that fellow members of the group (and infidels) can be identified. These include everyday behavior such as clothing worn, hair styles, jewelry, make up, language spoken (or at least sub-dialect jargon) - and they also include specific days of celebration that require specific religious observances. While such tokens of belief are mostly harmless (at least they are today in places with a more secular society) they risk being incompatible if you are trying to be a member of more than one religion at the same time.

My most recent thoughts on this matter were inspired by an article today in the Jerusalem post about some Jews who are also trying to be Environmentalists. They have started a campaign to warn other Jews that burning Hanukkah candles produces unnecessary Carbon Dioxide:

http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1195546797524&pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull

The founders of the Green Hanukkia campaign found that every candle that burns completely produces 15 grams of carbon dioxide. If an estimated one million Israeli households light for eight days, they said, it would do significant damage to the atmosphere.

The campaign calls for Jews around the world to save the last candle and save the planet, so we won’t need another miracle,” said Liad Ortar, the campaign’s cofounder, who runs the Arkada environmental consulting firm and the Ynet Web site’s environmental forum.

So you see, a custom honoring the story of a miracle performed by the God Jews believe in can be thought of as contributing to our damnation based on the story of the Hell Environmentalists believe in. Mr. Ortar (quoted above) who makes a living from Environmentalism (so I suppose we could call him one of its holy men), apparently also considers himself to be a Jew. However, he believes that GOD would rather get the short count on his sacraments than be bothered to perform any miracles to save mankind from Chanukah candle generated green house gases.

It is interesting to note that Environmentalism has impacted other religious traditions as well. (So they are not just persecuting the Jews.) The Christmas tree is a common Christian tradition. However killing a tree is probably the least green thing a person can ever do - other than maybe digging up and burning the millions of year old remains of sacred dead tree corpses just to stay warm. (If you were a proper natural sort of animal you’d have fur for that!)

So what is an Environmentalist who wants to remain Christian supposed to do?

A plastic tree was once an acceptable solution for those who didn’t want to kill a tree, but these days plastic is considered evil too. Apparently it doesn’t biodegrade in the ground and this makes it bad - even though rocks that don’t biodegrade in the ground are not bad - including shale which has the same chemicals in it as plastic. And when you think about it, its not surprising that plastic doesn’t biodegrade in the ground considering that it is made from a liquid that is found naturally in the ground. But somehow, the process of pumping a natural liquid out of the ground, removing part of it to make plastic, and then putting that part back into the ground where (by not bio-degrading) it is guaranteed not to hurt anyone or anything, has been deemed sacrilegious by Environmentalists.

So the only environmentally righteous solution is a live tree. (At least until the extension of plant’s rights prohibit tree-napping as a crime) But to bring a live tree into your house, you have to also include a lot of dirt and roots. This reduces the size of the tree that can be used. Much like lighting one less candle, a smaller tree with a lot of dirt attached can be seen as an apt metaphor for the reduction of competing religions that the growth of Environmentalism is causing.

And the majesty of the symbol is indeed reduced. New York City’s celebration of Xmas has only been influenced by Environmentalism to the degree that the tree lights are the more efficient LED rather than incandescent bulbs. However, the small Westchester village I live in (just north of NYC) has gone for the live tree this year. Consequently, our government sanctioned official Christmas tree is actually smaller (unless you include the huge stand full of dirt) than many of the trees in Westchester living rooms.

It is particularly ironic that the Christmas tree symbol being degraded is actually an old pagan religious symbol that Christianity co-opted and that this symbol was based on older versions of nature worship.

If Environmentalism continues to grow in mind share, it will probably have to do something similar in co-opting the symbols of other religions. In fact, the whole Hanukah story of one day worth of oil lasting for eight days could easily be co-opted as a symbol about conserving resources. What other religious symbols could be turned into environmentally conscious messages? I wonder if the Romans ever re-used those crosses for the next batch of criminals? They would certainly have recycled the nails - metal didn’t just grow on trees back then.

Recycling old religious symbols and holidays might seem particularly appropriate for Environmentalism, but it is something every collective idea-organism does as it takes over previous belief systems and/or mutates from one form to another. Is Environmentalism already doing this? Maybe so.

Environmentalism’s big holiday, called “Earth Day” is celebrated on a different day in the United States than in other countries. There is no doubt that many of the organizers of the first such celebration were also Vietnam War protesters which included many people with strong communist leanings. So it might not be just a coincidence that, while the rest of the world celebrates Earth Day on the more appropriate Vernal Equinox, in the United States the official holiday is a month later, and that the very first such Earth Day observance on April 22nd, 1970 marked the 100th birthday of Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov.

In the United States, we observe Environmentalism’s high holiday on the birthday of a famous mass murderer - a man who was more widely known by his pen name, Vladamir Lenin.

I tend to look at the world of ideas a little differently than most people do. I see the ideas that cause people to take group actions (religions, governments, corporations, racial identities, and the like) as closely related ideological organisms. I view them as the equivalent of multicellular lifeforms in idea space, constantly competing with each other and evolving new strategies for controlling human actions.

That said, I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised to see one of the newest such collective idea-organisms, start to reach for one of the same old handles that nations and religions have long used to control people. Still, I really didn’t see this particular development coming until today, when I read this article entitled “Want to Go ‘Green’? Stay Married”:

http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=3946834&page=1

Apparently a study was done at Michigan State University which came to the (fairly obvious) conclusion that when a couple divorces, and starts living apart, they use more resources than when they are together. They are using resources to light and heat two living areas, they are less likely to be sharing a car, etc. So the conclusion was that married people are greener - more environmentally righteous.

Various religious and political systems have always had an interest in human mating habits. The idea of marriage is nothing more than the sanctioning of sexual behavior by religion and/or nation state. An idea-organism that can connect itself to various biological drives is far more likely to survive and replicate, so such ideologies evolve to exploit all the built-in human fears and desires that they can. Fear, hunger, and sex drive are three of the most powerful biological motivating factors.

So, like I said, I shouldn’t have been surprised to see Environmentalism start to reach for the same handles that other collective idea-organisms have used so successfully. In fact, if it can actually make inroads into controlling the sex drive, it will have the whole trifecta. It already has the standard scare stories and dietary controls.

This table is an extended version of one found in the book, “God Wants You Dead.”

Looking at this, Environmentalism seems to be overly weighted towards using fear as a control handle, but maybe this is just because it hasn’t really managed to infiltrate the sex drive yet. Perhaps when this new collective idea-organism figures out how to have its own sort of marriage ceremony, the emphasis on scaring people will relax somewhat. Maybe Environmentalism will end up condoning polyamorous group marriages, as this would create much larger (and therefore more resource sharing) family units. Until then, we can probably expect a continuous parade of new frightening scenarios telling us how technology will destroy the earth, as this is Environmentalisms most effective hook.

Note that I am not saying than any particular such scenario isn’t plausible. It certainly makes a great deal of difference if any particular scare story is true or not, but it does not change the nature of these ideological organisms and the way they try to control us. That is why I am always suspicious when people are trying to scare me into doing what they want me to do - even when their stories sound very plausible, or are backed up by the opinions of a lot of seemingly intelligent people.

It may be that we are indeed all going to die of some sort of ecological disaster if we don’t follow all the directives of the Environmentalist leaders.

But we might also all be killed by terrorists if we don’t grant our national governments greater powers to spy on us and control our lives.

And it could equally well be true that we will all go to Hell if we don’t live our lives the way the priests of some particular religion tell us we should.

It is often hard to tell what is a real threat and what is just so much more B.S.
So hold on to your ability to make your own decisions. Do not surrender your mind to any collective idea-organism, no matter how much it scares you with hypothetical disaster scenarios. You do not need to let other people decide the truth for you. Even if the occasional bad idea has slipped into your head, your core self can still be relied on to determine the truth, as long as you are always willing to question and re-think things from time to time.

Just use the mind you have created for yourself. You have built a mental structure that allows you to evaluate the world. You have assembled the mind that you wanted from the ideas that you found to work best for you. Furthermore, if you have managed to read all the way to the end of this post, then odds are you did a pretty good job constructing that mind.

The rational mind that you have put together, let nothing put asunder.

[For more on how environmentalism acts like a religion see previous post, “Pope Blasts Marx, Misses Gore.”]

So the big news of the week from the holy wars is about the “serious issue” of teddy bear idolatry.

In September, at a Sudanese grade school, a British teacher name Gillian Gibbons let her 7 year old students name the class teddy bear mascot. They happened to chose the name Muhammad. One thing lead to another (as it so often does) and today the teacher is serving a two week jail sentence in Sudan before being deported and the New York Times is reporting protesters in the streets of Khartoum demanding that she be put to death. (There is no word yet on the fate of the stuffed bear.)

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/01/world/africa/01sudan.html

My first thought about this was, “How stupid can these Islamic people be?” but when I have a thought like that, where I find I am thinking in terms of large groups, I know it is time to take a step back and look at the situation more carefully. Of course Islamic people can be stupid, but so can people of every race, creed or nationality - and it has been my experience that the stupidest behavior is caused by thinking in terms of such groups.

Whenever I start to think in terms of large political, religious, or racial groups, rather than considering individual human motivations, I take it as a sign that my mind is going down the wrong path - that my thoughts are being manipulated by unwanted influences.

So I reconsidered the question of “Why would an Islamic person think that this teacher had done anything wrong?”, and the only answer I could come up with was, “They wouldn’t.” Not only is it obvious to you and me that this teacher did nothing wrong, but I believe that this is actually obvious to everyone concerned.

Even the most devote Islamic person can not seriously find blame with a non-Muslim teacher for allowing her Islamic school children to name the class teddy bear after the most important prophet of the Islamic faith. Some Muslims might indeed decide that there is a theological case against naming the bear “Muhammad,” but many of them would have no problem with a child giving the prophet’s name to a favorite toy. Clearly no insult is intended by the children, and the theological issue of what constitutes idolatry is complicated and much disputed.

No Muslim should find fault with a British teacher for not correcting her students on an obscure point of Islamic faith - especially when they probably wouldn’t even correct their neighbor’s child. The name “Muhammad” is the most popular boy’s name in every Muslim country, so there are probably teddy bears with that name in many an Islamic household. It would be no more unusual than for Latin American children to name their teddy bears “Jesus.”

So if we start from the point of view that no one actually thinks that this teacher did anything wrong, then what the hell is going on here? Why is this woman in jail? Why are people marching in the streets about a teddy bear?

The answer to this puzzle is simply that, while no one actually blames this non-Muslim British school teacher in Sudan for anything having to do with this (or any other) teddy bear, there are almost certainly plenty of people who blame her for being a non-Muslim British teacher in a Sudanese school.

The apparent chain of events that lead from class mascot naming to jail time, deportation, protest marches, and reports of call for the teachers death are as follows:

• 1. Students name bear and teacher gives writing assignment where each child takes the bear home.
• 2. Some parent finds the bear’s name objectionable and complain to school administrators.
• 3. School administrators report this to government officials who use it to create international incident.
• 4. News sources in other jurisdictions find this to be a compelling story.

Now we have already talked about why the students would name the bear Muhammad. It is a common name. The majority of them didn’t know that anyone would ever find this objectionable and the teacher didn’t know either. An Islamic teacher *might* have had the kids pick a different name, but the British teacher had no idea there was an issue.

That the teacher used the bear for an assignment is just good classic teaching technique - you try to connect the material to something that the students are interested in. Kids like toys - the stuffed bear is a fun toy - so you give the kids a writing assignment to take the bear home and write about what he does there. Then the kid can read to the rest of the class about the bear’s exploits. It is personal, but not so personal as a journal of the child’s own life would be, so no one is shy about it, and all the kids love it and learn from it.

So the bear makes its way home with some student, along with a writing assignment, and some parents find that their kids have brought a bear named Muhammad home and are supposed to write about it in English because a British teacher gave them an assignment. Now it is not uncommon for parents to feel uncomfortable that their children are strongly influenced by their teachers. Add to this, 3 separate cultural conflicts: Not just religion, but also nationality and language.

Nationality

The fairly recent history of Sudan is one of British occupation and conflict for independence from Britain and Egypt, with independence finally established in 1956. Britain is also still a major influencing factor in the area, and is highly involved with the United Nations attempts to involve themselves in the Darfur conflict. So one can imagine that the Sudanese view of the British is much as an American’s view might have been during the U.S Civil war, had the British wanted to send in troops to “stabilize the region.”

Language

Arabic is the official language in the Sudan, and the government is trying to get everyone to use it, although there are many other languages in the country. English is still taught to school children, as it is a common international language, but there is probably some anti-English Language sentiment, particularly among those who don’t speak it well or resent it because of its country of orgin.

The parents in question might have had any number of reasons to have ill feelings towards a non-Muslim British lady who was teaching their kids to speak English. So when some parent was offended (probably not greatly so) by Muhammad the bear, they probably also had a few other reasons to be cranky. It is not surprising that someone complained - in fact, parents complaining to schools about stupid stuff is doubtless common throughout the world.

This is the level where things should have stopped. Parents are always going to be stupid about their kids, and governments are always going to be stupid about everything that individual human beings actually value, but an educated school administrator is supposed to be smart enough to handle such a problem without it turning into an international incident.

So why would the school administrator not just inform the teacher, who would have had the kids re-name the bear, and apologized to anyone who might have been offended? The kids would have all gotten a bit of education on the religious debate concerning the proper use of the name of the prophet. The parents would have all felt like they had more power over their children’s education. Everyone would have been happy and the situation would have been diffused.

So what happened?

Best guess is one or more of the following:

• 1. The School administrator is a government stooge and not a real educator.
• 2. Anti-British sentiment exists even among well educated Sudanese.
• 3. This particular school teacher was disliked and someone wanted to fire her.

In any event, once the government got a hold of it, it was probably inevitable that it be made into a big deal. It makes a perfect distraction issue to bring up whenever anyone mentions Darfur and the international media is all too willing to let something so patently ridiculous become an ongoing story.

People often complain about media bias. They feel that their cause is often hurt by the media blowing up trivial things and making them into big issues. They don’t notice that the media does this to their opponents causes just as much.

The media does have a bias - it is biased towards the interesting. It will always hype the uncommon over the common - even the uncommon but trivial over the common but critical. When something isn’t interesting enough, the media tries to make it more interesting by giving the spotlight to extreme fringe views on the subject.

In the New York Times story linked to above, for example, it says that protesters carried swords and shouted “Kill her, kill her by firing squad.”

Does that represent the average Sudanese person?

I am quite certain it doesn’t.

What it represents is the biggest asshole in a large group of people. He is the most interesting, so he gets the most press coverage. Those who’s views are more mainstream are not interesting, and so, are not reflected by the media.

The guy with the sign that says “Just give her a stern talking to!” doesn’t get any TV time.

The guy who responds to the reporter with “Why are you asking such a stupid, biased, inflammatory question?” never gets quoted.

And no one ever seems to care what happens to the poor teddy bears…