FOR YOUR INFORMATION!

The Peripatetic Adventure of the Fisher Blog (www.fisherofideas.com)

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© April 16, 2015

A READER WRITES:

I was going through some of your very old blogs today as so windy not a day to be outside other than for a walk. Clicked on the address you provided and double clicked the blog as you suggested and found the one on your Viking Balkans cruise to be most informative.

DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

Indeed, as pointed out, there are missives about everything under the sun that are stored in this particular blog. Currently, as of today, there are 972 separate missives.

For anyone interested, given a subject that interests them, chances are I have posted something on the subject over the last decade or two.

To remind the reader, all he or she has to do is print out the subject in the blank rectangular space in the upper left hand corner of the blog showing the current entry, click on the "Q" and "Eureka!" Up comes a missive on that subject. 

To illustrate my point, I practiced this process for fun:

PRINTED IN THE RECTANGULAR BOX                                 MISSIVE (UPPER LEFT HAND CORNER)

ARMY………………………..George Washington, and His Special Brand of Leadership (3/10/08)

ANGEL……………………….Is there a little "Faust" in You? (10/20/07)

ANGER ………………………..What Killed Love? (11/30/09)

AFFECTION …………………..The Importance of Disobedience (5/30/13)

ATTENTION …………………..Talking to My Grandson -  Pay Attention, Stay Focused, Follow Through (4/25/14)

AGREEMENT…………………..Who Stirs the Drink?  The Engineer Does, but it has been stolen from him (12/5/14)

AGGRESSION…………………….Confident Thinking: Commandment Number One: Believe in Yourself! (6/13/06)

Here it asks the reader to "Sort by Relevance," or look at an alternative.  This is what comes up when you click on it: The Toxic Nature of Envy (12/26/14)

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE …..The Triangle of Success: Not What You Think! (12/13/07)

Then clicking on the "Sort by Excellence": What is buried under Techno-Utopia? (12/25/12)

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT:

 

Yes, you will see some are written during holiday periods, or whenever.  They go back to the 1990s and represent a kind of "mind map" of yours truly.  I've never mentioned this as a source for the curious, and I apologize for that. 

As the reader points out, I have recorded some of my trips.  We took a 4,000 mile trip through the Midwest visiting various universities and landmarks such as the President Harry S. Truman home and library, and state capitols.  I even kept a record of expenses.  Perhaps I'll add this to journal one day God permitting.

A PERSONAL PERSPECTIVE

Novelist Gunter Grass as a Man

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© April 15, 2015

GUNTER GRASS BIOGRAPHY

Günter Wilhelm Grass (German: [October 1927 – 13 April 2015) was a German novelist, poet, playwright, illustrator, graphic artist, sculptor and recipient of the 1999 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Grass was born in the Free City of Danzig (now Gdańsk, Poland). He served as a teen-aged soldier in the Waffen SS starting in 1944, and was taken prisoner by U.S. forces in May 1945. He was released in April 1946. 

Trained as a stonemason and sculptor, he began writing in the 1950s. In his fiction, he frequently returned to the Danzig of his childhood.

Grass is best known for his first novel, The Tin Drum (1959), a key text in European magic realism. It was the first book of his Danzig Trilogy, which includes Cat and Mouse and Dog Years. 

His works are frequently considered to have a left-wing political dimension, and Grass was an active supporter of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD). 

The Tin Drum was adapted as a film of the same name, which won both the 1979 Palme d'Or and the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. The Swedish Academy awarded him the Nobel Prize in Literature, praising him as a writer "whose frolicsome black fables portray the forgotten face of history."

Günter Grass's father, Wilhelm Grass (1899–1979), was a Protestant ethnic German, and his mother, Helene Grass (née Knoff, 1898–1954), was a Roman Catholic of Kashubian-Polish origin.  

Grass was raised a Catholic and served as an altar boy when he was a child.  His parents had a grocery store with an attached apartment in Danzig-Langfuhr (now Gdańsk Wrzeszcz). He had a sister, Waltraud, born in 1930.

Grass attended the Danzig Gymnasium Conradinum. In 1943, aged 16, he became a Luftwaffenhelfer (Air Force "helper"), then he was conscripted into the Reichsarbeitsdienst (National Labor Service). In November 1944, shortly after his 17th birthday, he volunteered for submarine service with Nazi Germany's Kriegsmarine, "to get out of the confinement he felt as a teenager in his parents' house" which he considered stuffy Catholic lower middle class.

He was not accepted by the Navy and instead was drafted in late 1944 into the 10th SS Panzer Division Frundsberg.  Grass did not reveal until 2006 that he was drafted into the Waffen-SS at that time.  His unit functioned as a regular Panzer Division, and he served with them from February 1945 until he was wounded on 20 April 1945. He was captured in Marienbad and sent to a U.S. prisoner-of-war camp.  He was only seventeen years old.

In 1946 and 1947, Grass worked in a mine and received training in stonemasonry. For many years he studied sculpture and graphics, first at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. He became a founding member of the Group 47, organized by Hans Werner Richter. Grass worked as an author, graphic designer, and sculptor, travelling frequently. In 1953 he moved to West Berlin where he studied at the Berlin University of the Arts. From 1960, he lived in Berlin as well as part-time in Schleswig-Holstein. In 1961 he voiced his opposition to the construction of the Berlin Wall.

From 1983 to 1986, he held the presidency of the Berlin Academy of the Arts.

GUNTER GRASS IN PERSPECTIVE

If anyone has read the works referred to here, I think they will agree that Grass is a comic, tortured, imaginative, and mystifying novelist of the most creative kind. 

My wonder was always why the Academy of the Nobel Prize Committee waited so long to give this man the Nobel Prize for Literature.  I can only assume it was because of his World War Two experience.

Consider the fact that he was eleven years old when Hitler’s Nazis army invaded Poland in September 1939, and went through several iterations from a Brown Shirt Youth to a combat soldier, being at the front and being captured as a prisoner of war, and he was still only a teenager at the war’s end in April 1945, seventeen years of age.

Of humble birth, but of a spirited temperament, he climbed that mountain to ultimate prominence in his many professions.  When in 2006, he admitted to having been a Nazi, he was treated as if a terrible traitor to human values when his whole war experience was only that of a boy.  It is not surprising near the end of his life to hear him saying, “I believe (in his country) to the end.”  Why shouldn’t he?

My best friend in the US Navy on the USS Salem (CA-139), flagship of the Sixth Fleet operating in the Mediterranean in the late 1950s, was Wolfgang Erdmann.

Wolfgang was one of those fourteen year olds Hitler was photographed tapping on the head in early 1945 who were to go into combat on the Eastern Front to fight the Russians who were advancing on Berlin.

He survived that chapter in his life, found his way to the United States, and was eventually drafted into the US Navy, where we met up on this ship. 

We often talked about the war, and his terrifying experience, experience I could not relate to at all, as I was in the safety of my home, my school, my community with no sense of danger and only the inconvenience of rationing.

Today, I wish to pay tribute to Gunter Grass for his art and for his life of service to others.  May his soul forever rest in peace.

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THE "JESUS STORY" CONTINUES!

Where are you on the “Jesus Story”?

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© April 14, 2015

First of all, I don't have any "drop dead" due date.  Thank you for your interest in my progress.

As I answered Henry recently, I read and read and read and let what I read settle in based upon where my mind is at the moment and governed by my experience, knowledge base, biases and limitations.

Remember, although a lifelong reader of matters religious, especially Roman Catholic, as well as the Bible and countless studies of Jesus and Paul, especially, but also Peter, James, Thomas, Judas and others, it is my "Jesus Story" and may not be relevant to anyone else.

Like all my writing, it grows out of my own curiosity, which currently is about God, about the place of the Bible, especially the New Testament, in my mindset and belief system. 

For me, a person who has lived in his mind perhaps more than in life most of his existence, none of the sources -- from my point of view -- have been honest with me.

I know little to nothing about Islam, and a little more about Eastern religions, thanks to Joseph Campbell, but at this point in my life I am kind of amazed that Christianity, which is essentially a made up religion, as is Rabbinical Judaism is unable or unwilling to share with the faithful what I have learned in this odyssey.

Only Paul's work, which was mainly a number of letters to the Gentiles, based upon two essentials of his belief system: that Jesus died on the cross and rose from the dead.  These two events turned Jesus from a great teacher to Jesus-the-Christ. 

In 70 C.E. (Christian Era, or Common Era whatever you prefer, no longer written as AD, or Adonis Domino), the equivalent of a nuclear explosion fell upon Jerusalem, completely destroying the entire province, all its records and the Second Jewish Temple, the seat of Judaism, and the seat of Jesus sect. 

The holocaust was the end of Jewish-Roman War in which Rome totally destroyed everything that was Jewish before.

The Rabbinical Judaism that was invented after that war was totally different than the Judaism that existed before the war. 

Nothing at all survives that was written about or concerning Jesus before 70 C.E.  In fact, most of what was to be written about him and the "new religion" was written in the late first century or early in the second century about Jesus, and the new religion called Christianity.

Only Paul's "epistles" survived.  Paul is believed to have died in prison or martyred in Rome in around 67 C.E.

Luke in the "Acts of the Apostles" uses an "air brush" to give the Paul experience the right twist, having prepared it for the Roman patron, Theophilus. 

Luke', writing about 90 C.E. portrays the struggling church as united in purpose to spread the gospel from Jerusalem to the Greco Roman world.

But acts as well as the gospels about Jesus were written decades after that mission (Jesus died on the cross about 30 C.E.), and after the catastrophic destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans in 70 C.E.

In fact, it is the earliest letters of Paul written between 50-60 C.E. that provide the story or the firsthand account of the Jesus' first followers, whom Paul had met with and wrote about.

Before there was a religion called "Christianity," Paul also portrays a very different story of how the Jesus movement took root beyond the Jewish World, which is accepted as "gospel" or truth personified by the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, yet the names attached to the four gospels writers are not at all authentic.  Moreover, not a single word of these gospels can be authenticated. 

Alas, its far less than harmonious beginning for the Christian faith which belies the gospels attempts to suggest otherwise.

After reading A. N. Wilson’s JESUS: A LIFE (1992) and Donald Harman Akenson's SURPASSING WONDER: The Invention of The Bible and The Talmud (1998), which incidentally details how Christianity and Judaism separated and reinvented themselves after 70 C.E., I continued my reading, and rereading many books of the past.

This is especially true of books on or about St. Paul, the quintessential outsider, the apostle so unique he defies invention.

Listed are the current reads to give me the broadest possible picture of the man and his work.  I know there are many other works on Apostle Paul, but these are works that have formed my views of the man:

Hyam Maccoby, THE MYTHMAKER, Paul and the Invention of Christianity (1986)

Sarah Ruden, PAUL AMONG THE PEOPLE: The Apostle Reinterpreted and Reimagined in His Own Time ((2010)

Henry Burton Sharman, PAUL AS EXPERIENT (1945)

A. N. Wilson, THE MIND OF THE APOSTLE (1997)

Bart D. Ehrman, PETER, PAUL & MARY MAGDALENE: The Followers of Jesus in the History and Legend (2006)

Michael Grant, SAINT PAUL (1976)

Donald Harman Akenson, SAINT SAUL: A Skeleton Key to the Historical Jesus (2000) 

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TO GET TO WHERE YOU WANT TO GO, LOVE THE JOURNEY!

Genius Realized:

Getting First Published at Age 96

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© March 30, 2015

“Genius is only the power of making continuous effort. The line between failure and success is so fine that we scarcely know when we pass it, so fine that we are often on the line and do not know it. How many a man has thrown up his hands at a time when a little more effort, a little more patience, would have achieved success. As the tide goes clear out, so it comes clear in.  In business, sometimes prospects may seem darkest when really they are on the turn. A little more persistence, a little more effort, and what seemed hopeless failure may turn to glorious success. There is no defeat except from within; there is no failure except in no longer trying, no really insurmountable barrier save our own inherent weakness of purpose.”

Elbert Hubbard (1856-1915), American pragmatic philosopher

Harry Louis Bernstein (May 30, 1910 – June 3, 2011) was a British-born American writer whose first published book, The Invisible Wall: A Love Story That Broke Barriers (2007), dealt with his long suffering mother Ada's struggles to feed her six children; an abusive, alcoholic father, Yankel; the anti-Semitism Bernstein and his Jewish neighbors encountered growing up in a Cheshire mill town (Stockport, now part of Greater Manchester) in northwest England; the loss of Jews and Christians from the community in World War I; and the Romeo and Juliet-like romance experienced by his sister Lily and her Christian boyfriend.

The book was started when Bernstein was 93 and published in 2007, when he was 96. The loneliness he encountered following the death of his wife, Ruby, 91, in 2002, after 67 years of marriage, was the catalyst for Bernstein to begin work on his book.

His second book, The Dream, published in 2008, centered on his family’s move to the West Side of Chicago in 1922 when he was twelve.

In 2009, Bernstein published his third book, The Golden Willow, which chronicled his married life and later years. A fourth book, What Happened to Rose, was published posthumously in 2012.  He died four days past his 101^st birthday.

Before his retirement at age 62, Bernstein worked for various movie production companies, reading scripts and working as a magazine editor for trade magazines. He also wrote freelance articles for such publications as Popular Mechanics, Family Circle and Newsweek.

Bernstein lived in Brick Township, New Jersey.  He died at the age of 101, on June 3, 2011.

The Invisible Wall tells the story of his older sister doing the unthinkable.  She falls in love with a Christian boy.  But they are separated culturally by an “invisible wall” that divides the Jewish families on one side of the cobble stone street from the Christian families on the other. 

When the young Harry Bernstein discovers the secret affair quite by accident, he has to choose between the strict morals that he has been taught all his life, his loyalty to his religious and selfless mother, and what he knows is right in his own head.

THE PATIENCE OF GENIUS

From Harry’s earliest recollections, as early as when he was four-years-old and started to read words on a page, he felt an urge to write.  Through grammar school and high school composition was his favorite subject.

As a young man out of high school, he attempted to publish, but received only rejection slips, but he persisted, finding work where he could but always wanting to be an author.  

He met his wife, Ruby, at a dance, and it was love at first sight.  He loved her to pieces and took a job reading movie scripts of authors’ books, but changed his focus from his writing obsession to enjoying her completely. 

They had two children, and a happy home, but he was put into a total funk when she died, and found the only way to fill his loneliness was writing, which he had always done throughout his life, publishing an article here and there, but never able to capture enough attention to make a living at it.

The Invisible Wall at first experienced a fate of which he was quite familiar – constant rejections.  

He attempted to write a novel after a short piece generated enough interest that an editor asked him to give the novel idea a try, which he did, but without success.

After Ruby died, he decided to go back to the beginnings of his life, nearly ninety years in the past, and found that he had a retentive memory of those early days as if they were only yesterday. 

Instead of being discouraged at the rejections The Invisible Wall generated, he admits in the afterward of this book that he’s never lacked confidence in himself or his ability to write.  In an amused fashion, he admits to being a rather cocky soul.

In any case, an editor from Random House called, and said she had read his manuscript and that Random House would like to publish it in a small printing.  He was so elated he couldn’t believe his good fortune.

Random House published the book, and the book reviews were unanimously positive, while The New York Times put his picture on the front page of the newspaper celebrating his being a published author for the first time at the age of 96.

Columnist from across the Western World called or visited him for interviews.  He was in demand on radio, television and in magazines.  He satisfied all these demands willingly and enthusiastically.

Other publishers wanted to publish his works.  So, at 96, he wrote a sequel to The Invisible Wall and followed it with another published during his lifetime, with one published posthumously. 

Were Elbert Hubbard alive, he would have joined the celebration as he believed with all his heart that genius was not rare, but common.  The problem, he argued, was that people pay too much attention to those that say “you’re wasting your time” or whatever, not listening enough to that inner voice that says, success is right around the corner!

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A LOOK INSIDE SELF-CRITICISM OR WHY WE ARE SO SELF-CRITICAL!

Freud’s Ambivalence: what we think conscience is, it isn’t, what it isn’t, it is.  Self-hate, then, is it self-love?

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

March 17, 2015 (St. Patrick’s Day)

As a boy, Freud was an avid reader.  He taught himself Spanish so that he could read Cervantes’ “Don Quixote” in its original Castilian.  We early readers are influenced all our lives with what we read when young.  Freud is no exception. 

Years later, Freud would write, in describing the “ego” and the “id”:

“Between the persons’ conscious sense of themselves, and their more unconscious desires (“Don Quixote” as metaphor), the horse supplies the locomotive energy, while the rider has the privilege of deciding on the goal, and of guiding the powerful animal’s movement.  But only too often there arises between the ego and the id the not precisely ideal situation of the rider being obliged to guide the horse along the path by which it itself wants to go.”

The “ego” is the deluded fantastical mad knight of “Don Quixote” who, like all realists, is utterly plausible to himself, while operating out of his tree.  Meanwhile, the horse (“Rosinante)” is at once a parody of, and an expose, of the horse as elemental force.  And where does the horse go?  It goes home to desire.  The “id ” is the horse, while the “super ego,” sometimes down to earth, sometimes relevant, sometimes gullible is “Pancho Panza,” there but not there, holding the reins of the horse, but not in control.

Not to belabor the point, but Freud often used metaphor from his early reading such as the “Oedipus Complex” and “Electra Complex” compliments of Greek tragedy.

Krishnamurti once put it plainly, “Freud’s anxiety and guilt became adopted by the world as its own.”  I use this a preface to what follows.

*     *     *

French psychiatrist Jacques Lacan observes, “It is ironic that Jesus Christ preached love thy neighbor as thyself because of course people hate themselves.”  The way people treat one another – in many cases with a good deal of cruelty – would suggest they, indeed, love their neighbors as they love themselves.  Lacan was implicitly comparing Christ with Freud.

Freud treated the Jesus Story about love as a cover story or self-cure for ambivalence: whatever we hate we love, whatever we love we hate.  If someone can satisfy us, they frustrate us, and if someone can frustrate us we believe they can satisfy us, while who frustrates us more than ourselves?

Ambivalence is the Freudian sense does not mean mixed feelings.  It means opposing feelings.  Contradictory attitudes are derive from a common source and are interdependent whereas mixed feelings are based on a realistic but imperfect assessment of love or hate or whatever. 

With ambivalence, you cannot have love without hate, or hate without love.  They are interdependent.  According to Freud, we are ambivalent to everyone and everything that matters to us.  In fact, ambivalence is how we recognize that someone or something has become significant to us.  Stated another way, we cannot help but be ambivalent about ambivalence.

We are never as obedient as we would like to think we are.  Where there is devotion, there is also buried protest; where there is trust there is suspicion; where there is self-hatred and guilt there is self-love.

Self-criticism with which we are programmed to think as a good thing is not.  Self-criticism can be our most sadomasochistic way of loving ourselves. 

We are never as good as we should be, but neither are other people.  We fain thinking others are smarter, more able, more gifted, more advantaged than we are so we can retreat into sadomasochistic self-idolatry. 

The self-critical part of us, the part that Freud calls the “super ego” is remarkably narrow minded.  It is relentlessly repetitive, and cruelly self-intimidating.   As Lacan says, “We are stuck, a stuck record of the past, unimaginative about morality and about ourselves.” 

People so inclined, and that may be the majority, think something terrible has happened to them that they are living in the aftermath of a terrible fallout, of some catastrophe, and because they think it, they would be right.

Freud read a lot of Shakespeare as a youth as well as Cervantes, both 16^th century artists, when “conscience at the time didn’t only have our modern sense of internal moral regulation, but also meant inward knowledge of consciousness.” 

Then (16^th century) the language of morality was the language of religion (Christianity).   Even then ambivalence was evident as religion divided the self from the hidden self, an unconscious morality with no discernible cultural moorings. 

Being able to reflect on our conscience, being able to look at the voice of conscience is a radical act.  If not obeyed, what is to be done with it?

Conscience is driven by acculturated stimulation tempered by controls and inhibitions from culture through the parents.  Put another way, the “super ego,” the “Morality Principle” is the domain of parents, but not exclusively.  It is also derived from the influence of peers, priests, teachers, pundits, gurus, heroes, idols, and sometimes, but not as frequently today, by God in the sanctuary of some religion. 

The “super ego’s” primary role is there to protect us from ourselves by prohibiting desires that may endanger us.  There may be other people we would like to find dead but murder endangers us and so we murder ourselves in self-reproach and punish ourselves for having such murderous thoughts.

Freud sees conscience as a possible force to character assassination, the character assassination of everyday life.  

Erving Goffman wrote about this rather definitively in “The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life.”  He suggested that we mutilate and deform our character because we judge ourselves too harshly.  So unrelenting is this internal violence that we have no idea what we would be like without it.  “Meet Your New Best Friend” was written to combat if not neutralize this mindset.  As a consequence, we know practically nothing about ourselves, which makes us vulnerable to anyone bent on exploiting this to their advantage.

Freud endeavors to show us how conscience obscures self-knowledge.  Back to ambivalence, he says guilt hides such knowledge from us by exposing it.  This allows us to justify not standing up to the internal tyranny of the self.  So frighten are we of the “super ego” that we identify with it.  We speak on its behalf to avoid antagonizing it, which is a form of bullying.

Although religious institutions would protest otherwise, they use this fault line in us to their advantage. 

Does conscience make us cowards as Shakespeare says in Hamlet and Richard III?  If it does, it is the part of ourselves that humiliates.  Then is it the part of us that makes us ashamed of ourselves for what others may think of us, or what we are or have done?

Conscience, stated another way, can seduce us into betraying ourselves worrying more about what others think of us than what we think of ourselves.  If we do something that is bad, or even evil, and get away with it, how do we escape the self that has full knowledge of the deception?  We can’t.

If conscience makes cowards of us, it is because it is itself cowardly.  Consider this.  The cowardly part of us is like a person who is afraid of new experience.  In our minds, the past may be imperfect, the present ridiculous and the future perfect, but in reality we treat the unknownness of the future as if it were in the past of something we know, or another way of staying stuck.

Why is it such a pleasure to be self-critical?  And how has it come about that we are so bewitched with our self-hatred?  Self-criticism when it is helpful, Adam Phillips says in The London Review (March 5, 2015), is self-correcting hypnosis.  It is judgment as spell or curse.  It is an order, not negotiation.  It is dogma, not over interpretation.  It is the “super ego” operating as supreme narcissist.  It is the acknowledged legacy of a religious past, a past where parents were programmed to the narrow confines of good and evil, right and wrong, the acceptable and unacceptable, as prescribed arbitrarily by some religious or secular religious authority.  What we know ourselves to be, as a result of this conditioning, is a slave to the “super ego.”

Where there is dogma, Freud insists, there is uncompleted experience.  In another sense, he is saying that the “super ego” is more than conscience.  It is the “ego ideal.”  It is ambivalence to the wall as the “ego ideal” finds the individual over interpreting his culture beginning in the family, moving on to the church, schools, the workplace, and the nation.

This nearly destroyed me as a young man when I took my “ego ideal” to South Africa and was introduced to draconian apartheid, discovering the support system of my “ego ideal” (all the above) had deserted me leaving me naked and confused, lost and self-reproaching, staggering out of the assignment and retiring and only in my thirties (see novel: A Green Island in a Black Sea).

My internal compass, the internal prohibiting father, who says, “Do as I say, not as I do” was like a malign collective parent visiting irrevocable harm to my fragile psyche under the guise of being my protector. 

In the name of all that is sacred, in the name of health and safety, it left me exposed to a life of terror beyond my comprehension, self-estranged and self-critical to the level of obsession.  In my anger at being abandoned by my “ego ideal” culture, I punished myself as if I were the author of apartheid full of guilt and wrongdoing for brutal travesty I was experiencing in South Africa.  Guilt is not a good clue as to what one values, but what one fears.  Morality born of intimidation is immoral.  South Africa in 1968 was immoral.

Freud gives us a conceptual vocabulary (“ambiguities) and constructs (ego, super ego, id), which he with his writing skills shows how the “super ego” acts as censor, judge, and dominating, frustrating father that carries a blueprint of the kind of person we should be with the operating word “should.” 

To the end Freud never resolved his issues with ambiguity or with inner authority and individual morality.  Still, each of these ego states appears to have multiple functions to show how we are slave, the doll Adam Phillips says to our ventriloquist dummy, the object to the “super ego’s” prescription.  Phillips asks:

“What is this appetite for confinement, for diminishment, for unrelenting, unforgiving self-criticism?”

Freud’s answer, we fear loss of love.  But to acquire love, there must be sacrifice that includes abandoning pride, self-consciousness, self-regard, and the possibility of rejection or humiliation. 

No surprise, we are likely to embrace confinement preferring safety to desire, and security to experience.  This comes at considerable cost.  It finds the individual being seen and treated as an object, as a commodity, expendable, replaceable.  That then begs the question, Who Put You in the Cage? (see Kindle 2015).

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JESUS STORY CONTINUES!

 JESUS, CHILD OF DESTINY?

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© March 15, 2015

From English scholar M. R. James’ (1862-1936) The Apocryphal New Testament (1924), we are told that Jesus claimed his godhead in the cradle.  Several such works after Mark’s gospel made such claims.  In any case, the story of Jesus invades history, but this does not mean it is historical. 

Much as we cannot lay bare the Four Gospels by modern historical techniques, we can analyze to the point of obsession the fragments of first century writers that sporadically become available to us through new discoveries.  Much as these fragments are valued they invariably fail to restore a true sense of the time much less the story of Jesus.  In many cases, they seem as wistful in their impact as they seem promising in their revelations.

Luke places the birth of Jesus in a particular year in the reign of Herod and at the time of the universal census commanded by Emperor Caesar Augustus.  None of this is verifiable.  In fact, it may not even be true.  Christians believe it to be so as a matter of faith and choose as well to see it as a matter of historical fact. 

Gospel of St. Lukce

Moreover, the Incarnation in traditional Christianity is the belief that the second person of the Blessed Trinity, also known as God the Son or the Logos (Word) "became flesh" by being conceived in the womb of the Blessed Virgin Mary as Jesus Christ, fully God and fully human.  Christians would say that this was something that happened in history just as Pearl Harbor and the Second World War were events that happened in history.

The Jesus Story bears a remarkable resemblance to Greek mythology.  For example, the legendary story of Semele, who was human, but also the mother of the god Dionysus. 

According to Greek legend, Semele was one of the many love interests of Zeus, who engaged in a love affair with this lovely mortal.  His wife Hera, angry with Zeus’s infidelity, decided to get her revenge, targeting the unfortunate Semele.

Hera, the Queen of the Olympian gods disguised herself and appeared to Semele one day to make Semele doubt her lover’s claims to immortality, convincing the poor mortal woman to demand proof of his divinity. Unfortunately, Semele accepted this advice.

The next time she was with Zeus, she requested that she be granted whatever she asked of him. Zeus reluctantly agreed. And so Semele ordered Zeus to reveal himself in all of his divine glory. As much as Zeus wanted to resist, he could not, and when the god showed himself to the woman, she was incinerated by the heat of his thunderbolts.

Semele, who was pregnant at the time, died immediately. But Zeus rescued the unborn child and placed him in his thigh. When the child was ready to be born, the immortal Dionysus emerged. 

To debate the historical probability that Jesus was born in Bethlehem and of the line of David is as impossible to verify as his having been divine.  The Fourth Gospel very specifically states that Jesus was not born in Bethlehem, and that he was not born of the King David line.  Yet the Fourth Gospel is no more historical than Luke.  Furthermore, it was Emperor Augustus Josephus who mentions a census in 6 C.E. before the imposition of a poll tax.  King Herod died in 4 C.E.  So, Jesus had to be born before that census.  Even so, Luke’s gospel, for many scholars, has the “look of history.” 

In the four gospels, Jesus is a very special person chosen by God, sent forth by God, and raised up by God, but never quite God Himself.  He is however invested with quasi-divine powers.  But in non-canonical or Apocryphal Gospels (James, Thomas, Peter, etc.), he is God. 

The word "Apocrypha" means "things put away" or "things hidden."  It comes from the Greek through the Latin.

The general term is applied to the books that were considered by the church as useful, but not divinely inspired. As such, to refer to Gnostic writings as "apocryphal" is misleading since they would not be classified in the same category by orthodox believers.

The term as used by scholars is "falsely inscribed" or "falsely attributed" in the sense that the writings were written by anonymous authors who affixed the name of an apostle to the  work, such as the “Gospel of Peter,” yet there is no evidence that Apostle Peter ever wrote, but clear evidence that Apostle Paul did.

Almost all the books written in both the Old and New Testaments called "Apocrypha" in the Protestant tradition are “falsely attributed.”  Likewise, “Apocrypha” is synonymous in the Catholic and Orthodox tradition as in the Protestant tradition (see Wikipedia, “New Testament Apocryphal”).

Unfortunately, within the limits of history and historical methodology, the existence of Jesus cannot be definitively proven; nor his place of birth, where it happened, when it happened, who his parents were, and how his mother became pregnant. 

The Virginal Conception of Mary, mother of Jesus, was unknown to the early Christian community.  As with many other dogmas that became instituted within Roman Catholicism over the centuries, this is but one.   No mention of this is in the Gospel of Mark or in the Epistles of Paul. 

All New Testament Gospels mention that Jesus was brought up in Nazareth in the reign of King Herod.  That would suggest that he was born before 4 C.E., which was the year Herod died.

The Gospel of Matthew tells of Herod’s jealous rage when he heard that a rival king had been born, commanding that all children under two be slain.  Josephus tells us Herod was cruel, corroborating this by telling us how Herod had forty-five prominent Jews killed for resisting his occupation of Jerusalem.  These Jewish leaders resented his subservience to the Romans and claimed he was not a good Jew, but was, indeed, a Roman sympathizing polytheist (Antiquities, XIV, 11-16). 

Matthew has Jesus, Mary and Joseph during the “Massacre of the Innocence” fleeing to Egypt to avoid the slaughter thus fulfilling the prophecy of Scripture, “Out of Egypt did I call my son” (Hosea 11:1).  There is no evidence that Jesus ever went to Egypt.  But the canonical gospels as well as the Gospel of St. Thomas has an angel informed Mary and Joseph of the death of Herod and that it was safe to return to Judea.  The Gospel of St. Thomas also has Jesus and family fleeing to Egypt (M. R. James, pp. 14-16, and 49-70).

When grown up, Jesus started preaching at the synagogue in Nazareth, where we are told he joined his father, Joseph, in the carpenter trade (Matthew 13:55).  But was he or his father actually carpenters?  A. N. Wilson writes:

In the old Jewish writings, the word “craftsman” or carpenter had a metaphorical meaning, in the language that Joseph and Jesus would have spoken.  Aramaic, the word is “nagger” and it would either mean a craftsman or a scholar, a learned man (Wilson, op. cit., p. 83).

Yet, the Gospel of Thomas makes it clear that Jesus was in fact a carpenter’s apprentice and was able to lengthen pieces of wood rather than make them shorter (James, op. cit., p. 63)

Wilson continues:

The Catholic Church, partly in order to steal a march on the Communist Party, and partly to express its keenly held belief in the sanctity of work, has instituted the feast of St. Joseph the Worker on May Day (Wilson, op. cit., p. 83).

Of Jesus’s childhood the canonical Gospels tell us nothing, but the Apocryphal Gospels fill in this disappointing gap with stimulating wonder.  For example, when Jesus was five-years-old, he made some clay sparrows on the Sabbath Day, spread out his hands, saying, “Go forth into the height and fly; ye shall not meet death at any man’s hands.”  The clay birds flew away (James, op. cit., p. 55).

The Gospel of Thomas not only displays the power of Jesus, but reveals his spite as well.  Thomas shows the young Jesus sending people away mad, deaf or blind, then later                   making them again better when they return.  Jesus even strikes people dead, solely for his amusement, then brings them back to life again (James, op. cit., p. 62).

One of Jesus’s most remarkable tricks is recorded in the Arabic Gospel and Syriac History, but not in any Greek or Latin text. 

Jesus is shown attempting to join the play other children in their game, but the children terrified run away and hide in a cellar nearby.  When Jesus asked the woman of the house if she has seen the children, she answered “No.” 

Jesus hears commotion in the cellar, and asked, “What is that noise?”  The woman says it is her goats.  Jesus answers, “Let the goats come out.”  When the cellar door is opened to the woman’s horror, all the children have been turned into goats. 

Bust of Jewish historian, Josephus 

The woman goes to Mary and Joseph and implores them to use their influence with Jesus to turn the goats back into children.  Jesus complies.  “Come my playfellows,” he calls out, “let us play together.” 

When the goats are fully human again, their mother tells the children, “See that you do everything that Jesus the Son of Mary commandeth you to do” (James, Ibid, pp. 62, 68).

We don’t see Jesus cruelty in the Four Gospels, but we can imagine here in the 21st century a child with such powers behaving precisely as Jesus is said to have behaved.  We know children can be spiteful, even cruel, some of us have only to look back to our own childhood to find such evidence.

In these four gospels, which give little insight into his childhood, we are led to assume he behaved in a human sense very well.  We do find him when he is twelve-years-old sitting in the Temple with teachers and rabbis asking them learned questions.

When Mary discovers where Jesus has been, she complains, “My child, why have you done this to us?”  Jesus answers, “Why are you looking for me?  Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?” (Luke 2:48, 49, Jerusalem Bible).

Interestingly enough, certainly most readers who have had children can relate to this, nearly all of the references to Jesus in family are ones of conflict, in which the child Jesus demonstrates quite early that he has his own mind.  Mary, the mother of Jesus is very understanding and patient with this Jesus in the bible, while Jesus is nearly always rude towards her. 

The Synoptic Gospels even suggest that Jesus is mad.  We know from Mark’s gospel that Jesus came from a large family with four brothers, James, Joset, Simon and Jude as well as sisters ((Mark 6:3). 

Evidence of Jesus existence outside the annals of Christianity are rare but significant.  Tacitus in his Annals tells of a Christian ringleader who was condemned to death during the reign of Tiberius by the prosecutor Pontius Pilate (Tacitus: Annals XV: 44). 

Pliny the Younger wrote to the Emperor Trajan saying the Christians sang hymns to Christ as to a god (Pliny: Letters X: 96-97). 

Flavius Josephus (c37-100 C.E.) refers to James the brother of Jesus, head of the Jerusalem Christian Church, calling his brother, Jesus, “the Messiah.” (Josephus XVIII). 

Josephus speaks of Jesus as a wise man, a doer of wonderful works, a teacher of such men who receives the truth with pleasure, and the race of Christians so named after him, are not extinct even now (Josephus, op. cit., XVIII).   

It is interesting to note that as the Apocryphal Gospels are discovered they invariably emphasize Jesus’s exceptionality and even his strangeness.  The 20^th century Christian preferred an idealized Jesus with a divine nature.  A century of technological explosion has changed the calculus of life and living, and was bound to change the sense of people with and about themselves and this small planet.

In Jewish historian Josephus, a man who once lived and wrote about what he observed, we have an authentic almost contemporary voice that confirms there was a Jesus, and in the time Josephus observed him, he was not thought of as God, nor as a heretic, but as a wise man and a doer who did wonderful deeds (Josephus, Ibid, XVIII.III-3).  In contrast, none of the gospel writers of the New Testament ever refer to Jesus as a “wise man” (Geza Vermes, “Josephus Portrait of Jesus Reconsidered” in Occident and Orient: A Tribute to the Memory of A. Scheiber, 1988, 373ff).

Now in the 21^st century, the climate in which Christians find themselves is that their religion is on trial,  rightly or wrongly, Christianity (and other religions as well) has been accused of being the problem rather than the answer.  As this explorer has found, there is more information available than ever before on Christianity.  Paradoxically, it widens rather than reduces the reader’s apprehension.  It simply doesn’t hold together, for reason.  

Mythmakers from the conception of Christianity have been busy formulating appealing themes, creating stories and presenting acts beyond human comprehension as probable if at all possible. 

Once Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire in the early fourth century, evidence that conflicted with the Orthodox view of Jesus was destroyed or buried.  The irony is that here early in the 21^st century belief in something larger than ourselves, or what we can touch, feel, see, experience and understand has never been more important, because we find the mind is never enough.

A proportion of the Jesus stories described here may seem fanciful, but they have survived!  Granted, turning children into goats, killing and bringing people back to life, changing water into wine, walking on water, or turning clay sparrows into flying birds has little chance to seem credible.  Then you come to a story that has the pulse of the real where a woman of the street drops behind the feet of Jesus, weeping, wetting his feet with her tears, then wiping them with the locks of her flowing hair, kissing his feet and anointing them with perfume (Luke 7:37-44).  Jesus is rebuked by his host for allowing such a sinner to be in his presence much less conducting herself in this style.  The action of Jesus demonstrated his humanity and accessibility, and like the Publican and the Pharisee, that humility and confession prove a healthier soul.

Given Christianity would become a Gentile faith, another story seems beyond invention.  It is the story of the Canaanite woman demanding Jesus heal her daughter.  His reply was that it wouldn’t be worth the scraps from the Jewish table to its dogs to do so, that is, to Gentiles.

New discoveries of the Jesus Story such as Nag Hammadi in Upper Egypt of a cache of Gnostic writings in 1945, the Dead Sea Scrolls near Qumran in 1947, and other discoveries show Jesus was a morally serious man, that he may not have said precisely what the gospels and apocryphal gospels say, but it is clear he had a theology from the beginning, and no discovery has diminished that fact. 

The aim is still to one day reveal the historical Jesus, which means getting beyond what we already know, or is recorded in the referenced sources here, as well as getting beyond the Roman Catholic Church’s very specific view of what is conceived as the Catholic faith. 

Catholicism has survived and triumphed, and Protestantism has not shown much more interest in the Semitic origins of Jesus.  As the impact of traditional Christianity continues to dwindle, perhaps the Qumran Scrolls, and other writings, which in all probability were written during the lifetime of Jesus will be able to depart from myth to embrace some sense of history.  One thing is certain.  The Jesus Story shall survive.

CURRENTS OF CAPITALISTIC DYSTOPIA and ATAVISTIC DISPLACEMENTS

Currents of Capitalistic Dystopia and Atavistic Displacements

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© March 10, 2015

Are we on the cusp of a new Renaissance or a Society Revolution?  This may seem a rhetorical question, but it is six hundred years almost to the date when Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to the Wittenberg Chapel door in Germany and started the Protestant Reformation.

Nearly eighty years ago sociologist Pitrim Sorokin noted that we were ending a six-hundred year Sensate Day, when psychosexual materialism and blatant self-indulgence were then reaching their apogee. 

Among the books he has written are “Social and Cultural Dynamics” (1937), “The Crisis of Our Age” (1941), “Man and Society in Calamity” (1942), “The American Sex Revolution” (1956), and “The Basic Trends of Our Times” (1964).

Each of these works is a measured concern for the future.  On the basis of a vast body of evidence he writes:

We find every important aspect of the life, organization, and the culture of Western society is in the extraordinary crisis … Its body and mind are sick and there is hardly a spot on its body which is not sore, or any nervous fiber which functions soundly … We are seemingly between two epochs, the dying Sensate Culture of our magnificent yesterday and the coming Ideational Culture of the creative tomorrow.  We are living, thinking, and acting at the end of a brilliant six-hundred year-long Sensate Day.

The oblique rays of the sun still illumine the glory of the passing epoch.  But the light is fading, and in the deepening shadows it becomes more and more difficult to see clearly and to orient ourselves safely in the confusions of the twilight.  The night of the transitory period begins to loom before us, with its nightmares, frightening shadows, and heartrending horrors.  Beyond it, however, the dawn of a new great Ideational Culture is probably waiting to greet the men of the future (Social and Cultural Dynamics, 1937, Volume III, p. 131).

FAST FORWARD TO THE 21ST CENTURY

Eric Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee in “The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies” (2015) take the baton from Sorokin and in doing so reveal some startlingly disruptive changes, while Tyler Cowen in “Average is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation” (2015) is equally dramatic.

Much of what these authors have to say puts the future in the context of an incredible but mainly quiet revolution in terms of what the Computer Age has done, is doing and will continue to do to Western society and beyond.

The U.S. government started a program in 1996 called the “Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative” (ASCI), and developed ASCI Red, which was designed to do a trillion calculations per second.  It continued to be the most powerful computer until 2000.  ACSI Red was little smaller than a tennis court and used as much electricity as 800 houses and cost $55 million.

The equivalent in power of ASCI Red was launched by Sony of its PS3 in 2005, fits comfortably under your television set, runs on a normal power circuit, and sells for about $400.

Gordon Moore, one of the founders of the computer chip company, Intel, noticed in 1965 that silicon chips were getting more and more powerful at a remarkable consistent rate.

For the past half century, computer chips have double in power or half in price every 18 months.  This has brought about something of a miracle.  Transitioning from the ASCI Red to the PS3 Sony, has been, according to these authors, “the greatest invention in human history which has improved at such speed over such a long period.”

Put this altogether and it seems obvious that computer technology is going to seriously impact and disrupt our daily lives.   Large categories of work, especially work that is mechanistically precise and repetitive, or work that is already automated will disappear for workers.

What is going to happen has already happened as the New Industrial Revolution or The Second Machine Age has been going on right under our noses.   Computers are not a new invention, but their impact on economic growth has been slow. 

We have had a number of iterations in this scheme of things: the iPod replaced the CD Walkman, the smartphone replaced the cellphone, as well as essentially replacing the laptop and desktop, and the iPad has marginalized the personal computer.

Quite incredibly, perhaps because these gadgets are mainly opportunities for consumers on the job and in their leisure time to entertain themselves, they have not succeeded in replacing human labor on machines.

Author John Lancaster writes in “The London Review” (March 5, 2015, p. 6):

Most of the real productivity benefits of the computing revolution happened a few decades ago.  We have more and cooler devices, but what these gadgets do, for the most part, is entertain and distract us.  They do nothing to aid productivity, and may even diminish it.  The light bulb changed the world; Facebook is just a way of letting people click ‘like’ on photos of cats that resemble Colonel Gaddafi.  On this view, Moore’s Law has mainly led to an explosion of digital activity of not a very consequential type.  Real change would involve something like a ten or hundredfold increase in the potential of batteries, but that requires progress in chemistry, which is a lot harder than cramming more circuits into a silicon chip.

Technological unemployment, which we are now facing, involves the use of labor outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses for labor.  A fundamental axiom of economics is that economic processes are based on human wants, and since human wants are infinite, the process of supplying them is also infinite.

The economy will not come to a halt until human wants do.  Since that will never happen, there will be enough work for everyone except during occasional recessions, stagflations, depressions and crises.  But that work will also constantly be changing.

The disappearance of work happens to individuals, not to economies.  A job lost in one place is replaced by a new job, which may be somewhere else.  In 1810, agriculture employed 90 percent of all American workers.  In 1910, it employed 30 percent; in 2010, it employed less than 2 percent.  The American population in 1810 was 7,239,881; in 1910, 92,228, 496; and in 2010 it was 308,745, 538.

One of the most productive industries in American history has been that of agriculture.  With less than 2 percent of Americans directly involved in farming, not only do farmers feed the nation, but agricultural products are a major American export.

The First Industrial Revolution took 150 years to come to complete fruition, starting with the steam engine, the railroad, automobile, the airplane, the assembly line, progressing communications to the telegraph, telephone, movie picture, electric typewriter, and so forth into the twentieth century.

Oxford economists, Michael Osborne and Carl Benedikt Frey, using mathematical and statistical calculations, see sweeping changes in 702 occupations.  Here are the top five occupations seen coming out of this Second Industrial Revolution: (1) recreational therapists; (2) first line supervisors of mechanics; (3) emergency management directors; (4) mental health and substance abuse social workers; and (5) audiologists.

The bottom five are: (698) insurance underwriters; (699) mathematical technicians; (700) sewer, hand; (701) title examiners, searchers; and (702) telemarketers.

Choreographers at (13) come ahead of physicians at (15), writers at (123) and editors at (140).

IS THE FUTURE TO BE A REVOLUTION OR A RENAISSANCE?

Frey and Osborne claim in the next two decades 47 percent of employment as we know it today is in the high risk category, meaning that potentially many of the jobs white and blue collar workers now have could disappear.  

The less paid workers are more at risk.  This will be a manifestation of the Computer Age placing its indelible mark on society.  The poor will be hurt, the middle will do a little better, and the rich will do very well.

Computer and automation productivity is expected to soar but to be increasingly disconnected from pay.  That said the typical American worker’s income has barely gone up since 1979, and has actually fallen since 1999, failing to keep up with the rate of inflation, while paradoxically, that same worker’s productivity has gone up in a nice straight line.  Put another way, the amount of work done by a worker has gone up, but that worker’s pay has not.

Profitability is accruing to capital rather than to labor. 

This can be dramatically illustrated.  Imagine an economy in which the 0.1 percent own the machines, the rest of the 1 percent manage the operation of those same machines, and the 99 percent either do the work not done by the machines, or are unemployed. 

That is what automation has done, is doing and seemingly will continue to do, as capitalism finds its capital triumphing over labor, which means the majority of people who have to work for a living.

New technologies are not expected to make businesses 10 percent more efficient but ten times more efficient.  Meanwhile, home ownership, which is the staple of and best measure of the laboring class wealth, is expected to collapse in price.

John Lancaster writes:

(As the value of homes drop) there is no reason why the median home in Palo Alto, in the heart of the Silicon Valley shouldn’t cost $50,000 … The prospect of millions of jobs being rendered obsolete, private home values collapsing and the prices of everyday goods going into a deflationary spiral hardly sounds like a recipe for nirvana (opt. cit., p. 7).

Imagine how this “news” might hit someone in Palo Alto in a median home that cost $400,000.  As we have seen many times before, when real estate values go down in one part of the country they follow in all the other sectors as well.

He continues:

The disappearance of 47 percent of jobs in two decades must be right on the edge of which a society can bear, not so much because that 47 percent, as because of the time frame … (This) is of a hyper capitalist dystopia.  There’s capital, doing better than ever, the robots doing all the work, and the great mass of humanity, doing not much, but having fun playing with its gadgets… (Ibid, p. 8)

It took the First Industrial Revolution or First Machine Age 150 years to reach completion.  Compress this into 20 years with society having inadequate time to deal effectively with all the inevitable challenges and you have the currents of dystopia.

We know from history of the Roman Empire's total collapse in 476 C.E. with the invasion of the Visigoths and Germanic tribes from the north.  But long before that, Rome denied its changing circumstances, and failed to deal with its obvious socioeconomic unraveling.  Instead, it entertained its citizens in mass extravaganzas in the coliseum rather than rallying its citizens to embrace the challenges of a new day.  The lessons of history never seem to take.

What we are seeing across the United States in 2015 as well as in the rest of the Western world is hyper capitalistic dystopia and atavistic displacement because "the robots are coming."  Isn’t it strange that we are intimidated by the inanimate objects that we have created?      

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