The Peripatetic Philosopher reports some confusion with my book, Near Journey's End:

AS WITH MOST OF OUR AMERICAN HISTORY, THE PRESENT IS ALWAYS A SURPRISE 

We Americans, in my experience, react beautifully to crisis while failing miserably to anticipate trends which seemly are always beyond the pale of our optimistic mindset. We have the aplomb of always being the measure of the crisis no matter how imposing or cataclysmic. It has put our nation, and by extension, the world in some jeopardy because the world now mimics America to a greater or lesser degree, as democratic capitalistic enterprise is the principal game in town. 

Paradoxically, that applies equally to our so-called "enemies," such as Russia and China as to our so-called "allies," such as France, Germany, Japan and Great Britain.

We have arrived at this unwitting juncture and unanticipated circumstance the result of two great wars (WWI and WWII) as our capitalistic democracy is being followed liberally (France, Germany, Japan and Great Britain) or illiberally (Russia, China and Singapore) across the globe, often demonstrating our inevitable capacity for excess.

Should you simply go to Amazon.com, and type in NEAR JOURNEY'S END, then tap on the cover, it will allow you a "Look Inside" the content of this book. If you do no more than read this, you will get a sense of the book. Then if you read the book, you will see there is a segment on "The Way Out" of our dilemma.

In the "Afterword," I write:

When you write a book, you are opening yourself to reveal something inside that you might feel you have no business communicating although it burns in your heart to say. That is because you don’t know if anyone else experiences what you have experienced, or worries about the same things that cross your mind when you’re trying to fall asleep.

There is a bit of arrogance with a book such as this. First of all, I’m not a trained scholar but a peripatetic philosopher, reader and researcher, a person who has worked at all levels of society from a sacker at an A & P Supermarket as a boy, as a laborer in a chemical plant for five summers to pay my way through university, then as a chemist and chemical sales engineer, industrial psychologist and executive for two Fortune 500 corporations rising to a global executive in both, working in South America, Europe and South Africa, as well as across the United States.

JRF



NEAR JOURNEY'S END: CAN THE PLANET EARTH SURVIVE SELF-INDULGENT MAN?

Amazon.com, Kindle Library, paperback book: $29.95; e-book: $9.95

The Peripatetic Philosopher on the Power of Belief:

 What we can learn from Hinduism.

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

© October 28, 2018

The Power of Belief 

“Amish and the Jews have it right," Klaus writes, “everybody can believe what they want to believe, and they make no effort to convert.”  The Hindus have it better.

The Amish population is around a quarter million while the world Jewish population is about 15 million with 6.8 million of that total in Israel.  By contrast, Hinduism is practiced by a billion souls, most of them in India, while Confucianism which is not actually a religion, but an ethical discipline is practiced by a billion with most of them in China.  Christianity is the world’s largest population with nearly 3 billion souls with Islam the next most populous religion with more than 1.5 billion practicing the faith.  That said, Hinduism appears to be the least contentious and polarizing faith on the planet for reason. 

Hindus, like Confucians, do not believe in God.  They believe in hundreds of thousands of gods with every sect, or sub sect of Hinduism worshiping its own God, Goddess, or holy creature. 

With Hinduism, you can pay your respects to some beliefs and not to others or you can believe in none at all.  You can be vegetarian or eat meat.  You can pray or not pray.  None of these choices determines whether you are a Hindu.  There is no apostasy or heresy because there is no core set of beliefs, doctrine or commandments.  Nothing is required.  Nothing is forbidden.

Sir Monier-William (1819 – 1899) captures the essence of this in Hinduism (1877):

Hinduism is all tolerant . . . It has its spiritual and its material aspect, its esoteric and exoteric, its subjective and objective, its rational and irrational, its pure and impure.  It may be compared to a polygon  . . . It has one side for the practical, another for the severely moral, another for the devotional and imaginative, another for the sensuous and sensual, and another for the philosophical and speculative.  Those who rest in ceremonial observances find it all-sufficient; those who deny the efficacy of works, and make faith the one requisite, need not wander from its pale; those who are addicted to sensual objects may have their tastes gratified; those who delight in meditating on the nature of God and Man, the relation of matter and spirit, the mystery of separate existence, and the origin of evil, may here indulge their love of speculation.  And this capacity for almost endless expansion causes almost endless sectarian divisions even among the followers of any particular line of doctrine.     

Incidentally, the absorptive power of Hinduism is illustrated by its impact on Buddhism.  Buddha was Indian, and Buddhism was founded in India, but it has been essentially absorbed into Hinduism in India today.  That is not the case with Islam in India.  But it is a fact that no Al Qaeda terrorist so affiliated has been found in India.  On the other hand, India is a Hindu country that was ruled for 400 years by Muslin dynasties so its history of tension with Islam is real. 

While India is an emerging economic, political and technological power with more than a billion souls in the largest democracy in the world, the Hindu caste hierarchy and its cultural beliefs and practices make this something of a daunting task.  British historian, Paul Kennedy (born 1973) writes:

The sheer rigidity of Hindus religious taboos militated against modernization: rodents and insects could not be killed, so vast amounts of foodstuff were lost; social mores about handling refuse and excreta led to permanently insanitary conditions; a breeding ground for bubonic plagues; the cast system throttled initiative, instilled ritual, and the influence wielded over local rulers by the Brahman priests that this obscurantism was effective at the highest level (The Rise & Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000, Random House, 1987, p. 13).

Acquiring Independence from Great Britain in 1947, only 71 years ago, it is now a nuclear power, burgeoning economic market with an emerging professional class of engineers, technicians and scientists, Kenney adds:

Here were social checks of the deepest sort to any attempt at radical change.  Small wonder that many Britons, having first plundered and then tried to govern India in accordance with Utilitarian principles, finally left with the feeling that the country was still a mystery to them.

That is because Hinduism is not a religion in the conventional sense, but a loose philosophy, one that has no answers but many open questions with its only guiding principle that of ambiguity.  Still, it is a misnomer to consider India a “Third World” county as it is a do something society comfortable in contradiction and obscurantism, while not obsessing with its history or mountainous climb out of once pervasive poverty.   Then there is the United States of Anxiety.

The American sickness that won’t seem to go away.

The United States has a history of anxiety despite its legendary accomplishments worrying about losing its competitive edge and hegemony. The country retreated back into complacency after the successful conclusion of WWII in 1945, only to be stunned with the Soviet Union’s successful launching of the Sputnik satellite into space in the late 1950s.  The American Space Program followed with the push for new math and science in schools.  

The US went through a similar anxious period when OPEC in the 1970s cut off oil supply, and the economy tanked with double digit inflation and double digit unemployment.  Forty years later oil exploration in Alaska and off the coastlines of the nation has put ecological sentiments on hold.  

The economic boom of the 1960s following WWII did not prepare the nation for the emergence of Japan, Inc. as a competitive threat in the 1970s and 1980s.  Once sacrosanct American industries -- the automotive industry, and manufacturers of machine tools, electronics, glass products, and household appliances -- felt the economic presence of Japan, Inc. shaving away market share with higher quality less expensive products, panic set in.  Pandemonium followed.  While America slept, Japan, Inc. suddenly appeared to be the economic superpower of the future.  

That proved not to be the case, but as we moved into the 21^st century, commercial American airliners filled to capacity with passengers were commandeered by Al Qaeda terrorists and flown into the Twin Towers in New York City and the Pentagon in Washington, DC on September 1, 2001.  The Twin Towers were destroyed taking the lives of 3,000 citizens and the Pentagon severely damaged. 

What now appears in hindsight a monumental miscalculation, perhaps even a watershed moment was the preemptive invasion of Iraq with the suspect intelligence from the CIA that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.  American political scientist Fareed Zakaria (born 1964) puts this in some perspective by referencing Great Britain’s descent:

(In the Boer War of 1899 in South Africa) the British commanders resorted to brutal tactics – burning down villages, herding civilians into concentration camps (the world’s first), sending more and more troops.  Eventually, Britain had 450,000 troops in southern Africa fighting a (Afrikaner) militia of 45,000.  The Boers could not hold Britain back forever, and in 1902 they surrendered.  But in a larger sense, Britain lost the war . . .

Fast forward to today.  Another all-powerful superpower . . .  takes on what is sure will be another simple battle, this one against Saddam Hussein’s isolated regime in Iraq.  The result a quick initial military victory followed by a long, arduous struggle, filled with political and military blunders and met with intense international opposition.  The analogy is obvious, the United States is Britain, the Iraq War is the Boer War – and by extension, America’s future looks bleak (Post-American World, W.W. Norton & Co., 2008, pp. 172-173).   

A common sentiment to Great Britain’s decline from international dominance is “if only it had avoided the Boer War,” while others are saying “if only the United States had avoided the Iraq War.”   

In any case, five years after the start of the Iraq War, there was the economic crash of 2008 demonstrating self-indulgent America was to pay for its consumer mania along with the prohibitive costs of that war.  The Federal Government came to “bail out” General Motors and Chrysler from their bankruptcy status with the rationale “they were too big to fail.”  The era of behavioral politics without consequences continued.

*     *     *

It would be comforting if some learning took hold from these episodes, but there is little evidence that is the case.  Wall Street in 2018 is again unhinged.  People are spending like there is no tomorrow and the American political system has lost its ability to compromise; its ability to bite the bullet and endure the pain of correction, putting that off for another day. 

Meanwhile, across the length and breadth of the nation, America has become a contentious and polarized society with no one seemingly in charge or manning a highly dysfunctional political system with the nation's constituency in complete denial of its complicit role in this state of affairs. 

America’s high anxiety status is not new and has been going on at least since the “panic of 1837” which found the United States in financial crisis.  Then as now an overly rigid political system became captive to money, special interests, a sensational media, and adversarial ideological groups in Washington, DC and across the nation. 

Author Fareed Zakaria writes:

A “can do” country is now saddled with a “do nothing” political process, designed for partisan battle rather than problem solving.  By every measure -- the growth of special interests, lobbies, pork barrel spending – the political process has become far more partisan and ineffective over the last three decades (The Post-American World, 2008, p. 212).

Today there are few moderate Democrats and Republicans in Congress or in either party with the result gridlock.

If the American people could only loosen the screws a single turn, take themselves less seriously, retreat from the debilitating myth of “American exceptionalism” and embrace the world as it is, not as they would like it to be; if the American people and its political leaders could learn something from the opposite end of the cultural spectrum, such as that of Hinduism, perhaps it is not too late for America to regain its momentum, not only for the United States, but for the world at large.   

The Peripatetic Philosopher on The Problem of Talking Past Each Other:

 The Implicit Problem with Conversing 

 James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© October 27, 2018

Listen to politicians answering the media, professional managers and athletes responding to beat sports reporters, college presidents and department heads explaining poor student retention and academic performance, then consider ourselves in conversation with each other.  

What do we have in common?  We find ourselves talking past each other.  We answer a question without answering it going on some tangent, talking about a different subject while believing we are talking about the same thing. 

This is not new.  The idiomatic allusion to interaction was on display in a conversation between Thrasymachus and Socrates on the subject of “justice” in Plato’s Republic.  If you read the dialogue, you will see that neither man addressed any of the issues raised by the other.  Two different concepts in the exchange need not have been disputed but are confused, however, as the two participants become carried away with the idea of what is strong (and weak) in terms of justice. 

This fallacy occurred to me when comparing M's response a Klaus dictum, stating her belief in God and in the authority of the Bible, quoting it for confirmation, then leveling the charge that Klaus “must have an inferiority complex.”  This was the exchange:

Klaus writes:

Belief in a God or not makes humans feel more significant since the universe is so large and the earth is infinitely small speck in comparison.  We want to feel special which we are not and thinking that a God made humans makes many feel less insignificant.

My response:

Being neither a scholar nor a theologian, I hesitate to even offer a layman’s views of how I perceive certain issues . . . The author(s) of Ecclesiastes 1: 1-18 said it all.  In reality, what has really changed except for ourselves, who are only what we THINK we are.  Either Klaus has an inferiority complex or I am an egotist, but never felt insignificant and I like me. 

Klaus again:

I find M’s comment fascinating. The comment I made about people needing a god has nothing to do with having an inferiority complex or being an egotist. I once owned a book that listed over 2,000 gods. These gods initially served the purpose for explaining the world about which early humans had absolutely no concept. The earth has gone through five extinctions. If the last one had not occurred when a large meteor hit the earth and eliminated all the dinosaurs, we would probably not even be here.

There are still many people on this earth who believe the biblical story of how it all began as factual. They think the universe is only a little over 6,000 years old. I don’t care if they believe that, but some of these people are obsessed with making everyone on the planet believe that.

There are Christians who are that way and currently Muslims who are also determined that we all think as they do. My comment about people still determined to believe in a god has to do with the fact that they cannot accept the reality of the universe, the five extinctions that happened on this planet and the mystery about how it all came about.

So they believe that a god created them which I assume makes them feel special. We are not special any more than all the living things that existed before us. As I said before that does not bother me, but the turmoil they want to create because they can’t stand anyone not believing as they do which indicate that they are insecure.

My Response:

Yuval Noah Harari covers in nearly a thousand pages the fact that we are an animal and have been around since Pleistocene Epoch or about 2.5 million years with the last period of extinction, the fifth, occurring some 66 million years ago and called the “Cretaceous Period.”

The disappearance of the dinosaurs and the emergence of Homo Sapiens is still at the conjecture stage despite all the results, but has little to do with this exchange.

Ecclesiastes was written between 450 – 200 Before the Christian Era (BCE), which in terms of Homo erectus (man standing upright and walking) is only an instant in the history of the species, Homo Sapiens.

So, M and Klaus are talking past each other.

Now, the question of our being “significant” or “insignificant” has less to do with these data other than the fact that our Christian culture tells us we are special, and our American culture tells us we are “exceptional," which are subjective premises and have little to do with the indisputable fact that we are an animal like all other animals, and should treat other animals as we would expect our own species to be treated.

Klaus has a problem with religion and belief in God, which we know because he protests too much, while implicit in his rationale as is true in M’s is the duality of belief/disbelief in the soul.  Blame Plato.

 Plato divided the soul into three parts: “reason,” “spirit” and “appetite.” The latter he called “thymos,” or what motivates the best and worst in us. “Thymos” is a desire for a desire making it the psychological seat of the desire for recognition as well as the psychological origin of political action.  Remember, St. Paul was Greek and schooled in Plato and Socratic thought.

Our idiosyncratic nature is such that:

We all love ourselves; we are born egotists, and since our egos are fragile, we will do about anything to protect them. This makes meaningful exchange difficult.

We are all more interested in ourselves than in anyone else in the world. We attempt to turn the conversation around to what we think, feel and value. Failing that, we become bored, stop listening, or excuse ourselves from the conversation.

Every person you meet wants to feel important. Treat people with respect, whatever their station in life, and it will be returned tenfold. Be condescending and they will see you as an adversary; show them that you care, and the balance falls in your direction.

We each crave the approval of others, so that we may in turn approve of ourselves. The hardest person in the world to make friends with is ourselves. Everyone suffers this handicap, and everyone is grateful when relieved of this by complimenting them in some manner. Thus we arouse attributes of their positive side. The barriers of suspicion vanish making productive conversation possible.

Western Civilization was built on the "thymos" of this imaginative and subjective foundation, mainly by the Roman Catholic Church up through the early 16th century and then subsequently by the Protestant Reformation with the Industrial Revolution, Scientific Revolution and now the Technology Revolution to follow up to our day.

Klaus doesn’t say anything that cannot be verified historically, and M is right that she has been energized by her religion, which has given her a sense of self-worth and dignity, what Plato would say is her “thymos.” But, of course, this is buried in the exchange with them talking past each other.

PS Francis Fukuyama explores Plato's thymos in some detail in "The End of History and The Last Man" (1992), as does Yuval Noah Harari in "Homo Sapiens" (2015) and "Homo Deus" (2017).

The Peripatetic Philosopher on Importance of Having a Point of View:

Crossing the treacherous waters of differences

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

© October 24, 2018

M writes (reference: Klaus: October 23, 2018)

Being neither a scholar nor a theologian, I hesitated to even offer a layman's views of how I perceive certain issues which have been thoroughly scrutinized, analyzed, researched, reviewed, discussed, assessed, studied, critiqued for hundreds of years and which, to date, have never been successfully resolved. The author(s) of Ecclesiastes I: 1-18 said it all. In reality, what has really changed except for ourselves, who are only what we THINK we are.

Either Klaus has an inferiority complex or I am an egotist, but I have never felt insignificant and I like me.

Dr. Fisher responds:

Dear M,

What is apparent is that you and Klaus have differing points of view. Part of this, no doubt, is due to differing cultural experience.

You are a poet and, incidentally, Klaus is an artist. You grew up in the Midwest as did I during the Second Word War. Klaus grew up in Europe partly during that war coming to America as a young man, serving in the United States Army as an officer, subsequently pursuing an education and becoming an educator.

You both have active and curious minds, looking at the same things differently. I can relate to that.  I was trained to believe as you do while questioning those beliefs, including belief in God, as does Klaus.

Were you to take a peek at my library you would see that I have read scholars who support and question the myths of our Christian/Judaic culture, and belief system. 

It is not only Friedrich Hegel who claimed we invented God with the supportive narrative of the Old and New Testament, but many other scholars have as well. As you point out, this will no doubt continue as long as man is man.

Nietzsche wrote that “God is dead!” That was anti-climactic since God had departed from the central focus of Western man long before the close of the 19th century. What Nietzsche was alluding to was that secular society was steamrolling into the 20th century with the sacred and profane being left behind.  Nietzsche died in 1900 and is often quoted but seldom read.

Atheism and agnosticism became popular alternatives to Christianity and Judaism in the 20th century. In fact, many Christian scholars whom I have read appear closer to those beliefs than to Christianity, alas, that includes many in the Christian hierarchy.

Roman Catholics clerics were once the only literate class in Western Civilization schooled in Latin, keeping the records and books, collecting the taxes, and managing the kingdoms of royalty, who preferred oral to written reports, as many could not read. That Catholic dominance began to unravel with the Protestant Reformation.

In my personal naiveté, I grew up believing Christianity was about theology and that Roman Catholicism was about its mission, only to find in my long life and traveling through several continents that Christianity is predominantly political and has never lost its taste for power and influence. To state it another way, Christianity has failed to adjust with the times.

Now, having said that, we have to look no farther than the Americas to see what Catholic inculcation has done to South America while the United States unshackled from that yoke with the Protestant Work Ethic has prospered in a liberal democracy. At the same time, this is not without problems for America. The “God of Plenty” which has little to do with religion has taken on a life of its own. 

In the lap of material prosperity and industrial efficiency, America has accepted something of a Faustian bargain, compromising its moral worth buying into the myth of “American exceptionalism.” 

While you and Klaus have differing views on God, there is a general unwillingness of our consumer society to sacrifice some material certainty for the sake of our spiritual integrity. Religion is on the sidelines unable to change much less influence this status. We make moral compromises daily and lie to ourselves in support of the idea of “self-realization” and personal growth. The irony is that this has weaken our resolve and made us more pliable to societal manipulators, including the new gods of science, information technology, media moguls and so-called experts. 

I applaud you and Klaus for resisting these mind managers to think for yourself, and be willing to share this with others. 

 

Be always well,

Jim

  

The Peripatetic Philosopher : Has America become one giant Jerry Springer show?

A TUTORIAL OF IDEAS

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

© October 23, 2018

Reference:

People write to me via e-mail on a regular basis with comments or criticisms or explanations soliciting my response, not necessarily to convince them one way or the other about their reflections but to use me as a sounding board for their ideas. 

When I’m in a writing project, I fail to respond but I do not delete their offerings.  I am currently between books and thought this would be a good time to launch this little forum. 

We are in a dramatic time, a time that those in power would prefer to deny, but nonetheless are being marginalized by, for and because of it.  True, they still hold the power even though they do not control the source of power, which is knowledge amazingly distributed throughout the populace.  

Those in power have successfully created a passive responsive society, successfully carrying it through the 20^th century and into the 21^st century, manipulating and managing to support their egregious self-interests, but alas, they can no longer afford the luxury of this style or support its demands.  In short, they are not in charge, but who is?  The answer: no one is.

Modern leaders do not rule.  They react, manage and steer, taking the least controversial action leaving the situation to fester, the people to remain confused, and the chaos to mount while precariously maintaining their power.

The conundrum is that the reality of the imagination and the imagination of reality has hit a wall.  As a consequence, all the aberrancy of behavior and false striving are expressions of the “Present Ridiculous.”  

A Facebook blogger summarized the present with this lament:

 Am I the only one who thinks that America has become one giant Jerry Springer show?

Into the void with no one in charge, people are becoming their own doctors by surfacing the Internet for the causes of their maladies.  They are reading books by so-called experts and finding them not only wanting but failing to compute with their life experiences. 

People are painting, making furniture, sculpting and writing poetry, not to realize acclaim but to give spiritual expression to the wonder within.  

It is the “Age of the Amateur,” as it was some 500 years ago when monks and priests and other clerics secretly pursued science at the risk of losing their lives to the Roman Catholic Inquisition for going against Church doctrine, while ultimately changing the world. 

We are now jammed up with managers who are atavistic, professionals trained for anachronistic functions, leaders who actually thought leading was separate from following, which has given rise to leaderless leadership, as there are no leaders anymore only pretenders in these roles. 

People at the top thought that they stirred the drink of contemporary life, but they were wrong.  Change comes from the bottom of the social structure, seldom from the top.  With that as introduction, let the tutorial begin.

BELIEF IN GOD

Jim,

This occurred to me today. The belief in a God makes humans feel more significant since the universe is so large and the earth is infinitely small speck in comparison. We want to feel special which we are not and thinking that a God made humans makes many feel less insignificant.

Klaus

DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

Klaus,

Whether you are a believer in God or not, most people would admit that Klaus has a point. Why do so many of us believe in God?  

He also has a point in implying that believing gives the believer comfort in his consciousness to the fact that he, alone, is a conscience animal on this hostile planet,  This first gave birth to the shaman, then the tribal chief, then the king as God’s anointed, and then to religions of all sorts ultimately crystallizing for Western Man in Christianity some 2,000 years ago.

St. Paul, the architect of Christianity, successfully posited the Christian myth that human freedom was not to be found on earth, but only in the Kingdom of Heaven.  He successfully preached this message to the Gentiles, leaving James, the brother of Jesus, to remain isolated in Judea unable to support much less fathom the ambitions of Paul.  

German philosopher Friedrich Hegel (1770 – 1831) claims Christianity had the right concept of freedom but managed to seduce the faithful with the idea that freedom was not to be found in this life.  They failed to realize that God did not create man, but rather that man created God; that man created God as a projection of the idea of freedom.

Meanwhile, from Hegel's philosophical point of view, Christianity became a faith of enslavement, of conformity and alienation, and would lead ultimately to the "divided self" of Western Man, with man often acting against himself.

Christians of every description would challenge this while in many ways personifying this assessment. That said, Christianity has been the life force of Western Civilization, and without that spiritual commitment over the centuries there would be no forum for this exchange.

PS If this forum is to have any viability, readers will invariably be exposed to ideas perhaps in conflict with their own.  We are in a secular age, but millenniums of religious faith have given us the world we find ourselves living in. 

Peripatetic Philosopher announces publication of NEAR JOURNEY'S END:

NEAR JOURNEY'S END -- CAN THE PLANET EARTH SURVIVE SELF-INDULGENT AMERICA?

BOOK DESCRIPTION:

NEAR JOURNEY’S END traces man’s history, mainly in the Christian era, from “Past Imperfect” to “Present Ridiculous,” to ultimately be stalled in America’s current quest for “Future Perfect” reality, by its “cut & control” practices, only to inadvertently entertain man’s possible extinction. It is the 11th hour and America’s course can be corrected by putting the same energy into responsible stewardship now haplessly ensnared in self-indulgent cultural narcissism. To do otherwise, social psychologist James R. Fisher, Jr. contends, man’s fate may be on course to a fait accompli.

Imagine the symbolic essence of America’s identity, the Statue of Liberty, literally sinking out-of-sight into the New York Harbor.   If so, what then?

NEAR JOURNEY'S END -- paperback price: $29.95

                                             e-Book price: $9.99

Amazon.com Kindle Library

Publishing date: October 16, 2018

                                             

Contents

Acknowledgements Foreword PREFACE PART ONE: "PAST IMPERFECT" PART TWO: "PRESENT RIDICULOUS" PART THREE: "FUTURE PERFECT" AFTERWORD TWO BOOK REVIEWS -- SAPIENS & HOMO DEUS BIBLIOGRAPHY ENDNOTES ABOUT THE AUTHOR INDEX

The Peripatetic Philosopher shares NEAR JOURNEY'S END with his readers:

MOST MATURE WORK?

Confessions of a Writer in the Midst of a Work

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

© August 25, 2018

To those who may be interested:


For the past several weeks, I've been working on an essay, updated only slightly, that I'm massaging with the care seldom shown in my works before as I've always been in a hurry to get it out, in print, so as to move on to what is fomenting in my mind. I suppose that is because I started so late to be a full time writer (1990) although having written sporadically before including several published essays (early 1970s) and one book (Confident Selling, Prentice-Hall, 1971).

One of my colleagues at Honeywell accused me of using the company and its people as my laboratory, and being little interested in either the company or the people much beyond that. I was employed by Honeywell from 1980 - 1990, and although that comment was brutal, I suppose there is some truth to it. 

Novelist and philosopher Charles D. Hayes, once wrote in one of his books, that I was an expert on organizational culture and behavior but never found an organization in which I was comfortable. Again, Charles had (and has) a point.

Recently, the Clinton County Historical Society (Clinton, Iowa) hosted a soiree for me in which I talked at some length on how I became a writer, suggesting that I knew it was my destiny as early as when I was a five-year-old because I thrived in a climate of trauma. I have always been more comfortable observing behavior than participating in it, although I was a four-sport athlete in grammar and high school which forced me out of that incubator.

I also confessed to that CCHS audience that it has taken me a lifetime to recognize, admit and accept that I am a natural introvert as Dr. Alfred Adler would define that inclination. 

Yet, as this is another confounding thing about labels.  I was a successful chemical sales engineers with Nalco Chemical Company while going against the grain of what was called "selling," developing my own approach which was essentially counterintuitive.  I explained this approach, and why successful in my first book, Confident Selling (1971).

It was accepted without preamble by Prentice-Hall (P-H) two weeks after receiving the manuscript, and in print for twenty years (1971-1991) selling over 100,000 copies. 

Since I wrote it in six weeks, and sent it off unedited, I thought this writing business was a breeze. Nearly fifty years later, I can tell you it is hardly that. It is very hard work with rejections and discouragement part of the drill. 

If writing is your call, and this I expressed to the CCHS audience, then al-oneness is not a punishment but an elixir. There is something to being alone and not needing the company of others for validation.  It is a kind of joy being one's own best friend, looking for answers from empirical data in one's own life rather than from secondhand sources. A crowd for me is three people, or someone else other than my Beautiful Betty.

Several years ago, a friend and former principle turned historian, (the late Gary Herrity), said to me, "Jim, do you know what your genre is?"

I smiled and said, "My genre?"

"Yes, how would you classify your output which is somewhat mind boggling."

"Life," I answered, "I'd say my genre is life."

Unsatisfied with this answer, he continued, "I don't believe that would be very satisfying to a publisher."

I smiled again, "You've noticed? They're not standing in line waiting for my output."

"Doesn't that bother you?"

"Doesn't that bother me?" I repeated. "Should it?"

Obviously, this ended the inquiry, and so we went on to other things.

When you hear from several sources, including your own family, that you are different, and it is treated as a pejorative, you feel more at home with dead authors who have experienced a similar conundrum, knowing that when you are gone, someone will gain encouragement from your going against the grain.

Someone wrote that I repeat many of the same insights and stories in several of my books. I asked him if he had a problem with that as such novelists as James Patterson write 50 or 60 books telling the same story with different scenarios and characters and they are all national bestsellers.

He wrote back, "But they are entertainments!"

Indeed. People will read my latest book, which is one of the shortest and will see in the end notes and bibliography of a lifetime of reading, but with little sense that it has been gestating for many years in the back of my mind.

I wrote the book in 1999 in a rush with my good friend and archivist Canadian George Daly, keeping it in his files. Then I wrote it again in 2004 and went to a copy place and had it bound as my only copy. Then another Canadian friend, the academic and chemist, Henry van Eyken suggested I read Israeli scholar and historian Juval Noah Harari's two books, SAPIENS and HOMO DEUS, which I did. 

About every tenth book I read makes I think.  When that happens, I appreciate the writer's diligence and applaud his mastery.  It was apparent I had covered many of the same themes as Harari in NEAR JOURNEY'S END if more modestly.  His two polished and expensive editions totaled nearly 1,000 pages to my mere 200. 

Clearly, the good professor is on the Information Age's bandwagon, and those who read me, know that I am not.

Professor Harari sees man or Homo sapiens on the way to extinction, and I see man in transition. He sees algorithms and data as the new religion, and I see God and the soul and the conventional religions of Christianity, Judaism and Islam taking a respite from the hysteria in the catacombs of antediluvian times to regroup.

My little book should be out on Kindle in September written from an American's point of view, being critical of narcissistic America which fails to grow up or face the reality of the challenge of the "Internet of All Things," as Dr. Harari puts it.

If interested, stay tuned.

JRF

  

The Peripatetic Philosopher shares a book review - HOMO DEUS:

A Brief History of Tomorrow

Homo Deus

A Brief History of Tomorrow

Yuval Noah Harari

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

© August 7, 2018

Formerly, when religion was strong and science was weak, men mistook magic for medicine; now when science is strong and religion weak, men mistake medicine for magic.

Thomas Szasz (1920 – 2012), Hungarian American psychiatrist

BACKGROUND

The reader may not be familiar with Psychiatrist Thomas Szasz who always thought outside the box and developed ideas that invariably went against the grain of popular wisdom including the notion that mental illness was a disease whereas he considered it a metaphor for labeling people of difference into convenient little boxes. 

When I reviewed Yuval Noah Harari’s “Sapiens,” I recognized he had the research of 70,000 years of man-like animals on earth with which to hang his ideas, along with an uncanny ability to make such ideas enchanting, entertaining and credible (see review July 4, 2018, theperipateticphilosopher.blogspot.com). 

GETTING THE READER’S ATTENTION

In “Homo Deus,” alas, this author does not have that same luxury.  Nonetheless, he demonstrates, once again, an ability to get our attention, while entertaining and challenging or reinforcing our sense of things.  To wit:

For the first time in history, more people die today from eating too much than from eating too little; more people die from old age than from infectious disease; and more people commit suicide than are killed by soldiers, terrorists and criminals combined.  In the early 21^st century, the average human is far more likely to die from bingeing at McDonald’s than from drought, Ebola or an al-Qaeda attack. 

Professor Harari goes on to say:

Half of humankind is expected to be overweight by 2030.  In 2010 famine and malnutrition combined killed about 1 million people whereas obesity killed 3 million. 

None of this information is new, but that is not the premise of this volume.  It is a warning that we are on our way out as a species and that 90 to 95 percent of those driven by traditional humanistic verities will be part of  “the useless class” if they still exist, superseded by what Nietzsche called “Superman” (German Übermensch); Hitler called the “Master Aryan Race”; and Harari now calls “Homo Deus” (Latin for “man as God”) or a superhuman robotic computer driven species. Stated another way, he sees Homo sapiens reduced to biochemical impulses that track data and algorithms generated by this new species on supercomputers.
The author uses statistics to show Homo sapiens is not in its finest hour:

In 2012 about 56 million people died throughout the world (war killed 120,000 people, and crime killed another 500,000). In contrast, 800,000 committed suicide, and 1.5 million died of diabetes. Sugar is now more dangerous than gunpowder.

Admittedly, Homo sapiens is not a happy camper; he has lost his moral compass, and thus his way. Wealth is no longer isolated to wheat fields, gold and oil wells, but to what we as a species know. So, why is the Homo sapiens species on track to extinction? Well, that is the body of this book as this author sees our species great days behind us, and now robotics, artificial intelligence, and sophisticated computers taking over what before was assumed to be human consciousness.

Now that religion is weak, as Thomas Szasz reflects, science and medicine are the new magic. No need to worry about heaven and hell much less reincarnation as these beliefs are relegated to old mythology. We are rushing to replace this with a new mythology and this is the anthem of Dr. Harari’s international best seller as he puts words to this theme.

Indeed, no need to wait for a Second Coming to overcome death.  It was once the domain of priests, rabbis and Muslim priests, but engineers have now taken over.  The Silicon Valley is now in charge with the writing on the wall: equality is out; death is irrelevant; immortality is in . . . In seeking immortality humans are in fact trying to upgrade themselves to gods.

The new human agenda, according to Harari, is happiness which is as ambivalent to define as consciousness is to perceive. We are still seemingly chasing ghosts only now they are being defined by biochemists and neurophysiologists, pharmacologists and psychiatrists.

We have become a pill popping nation as we jump from stress to boredom and back again with hardly a moment of what we would call “happiness.” Soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan took sleeping pills and antidepressants to cope with daily life at the warfront. Harari writes:

The biochemical pursuit of happiness is also the number one cause of crime in the world.

If this appears as a truisms, it is because too many of us experience this in our daily lives as the capitalist juggernaut defines us, and in so doing defines happiness as well, which is pleasure and pleasure is often reduced to a pill. Harari eases us into this:

With each passing year our tolerance for unpleasant sensation decreases, and our craving for pleasant sensation increases. Both scientific research and economic activity are geared to that end, each year producing better pain killers, new ice cream flavours, more comfortable mattresses, and more addictive games for our smartphones, so that we will not suffer a single boring moment while waiting for the bus.

THE BOOK OF DARWIN, THE NEW BIBLE

Professor Harari had ample research data to state and justify his case in SAPIENS. Much to the author’s chagrin, however, that does not seem to be the case with HOMO DEUS as 40 percent of students with a BA degree still believe in the biblical story of creation. Obviously, early programming and inculcation speaks to this while a full 25 percent with MA and Ph.D. credentials cling to similar beliefs.

Belief in God, despite all the evidence to the contrary, apparently has given comfort to their souls. Not surprisingly, professor Harari goes to great lengths to disprove the existent of God or the actuality of a soul. Small wonder why so many still cling to such beliefs in this Scientific Age.

Elsewhere I’ve written: faith is freedom; belief is a stop sign. Faith in God has given me solace in my own quiet. On the other hand, I find the Bible great literature but only in that context and distinction. Likewise, I credit my Irish Roman Catholic early parochial school training as being indispensable to me in my development while realizing and accepting the fact that it is a flawed human institution.

You will see in “Homo Deus” that the author sees Homo sapiens are doomed for extinction but cautions, not to assume that this will occur any time soon:

Homo sapiens is not going to be exterminated by a robot revolt. Rather, Homo Sapiens is likely to upgrade itself step by step merging with robots and computers in the process, until our descendants will look back and realize that they are no longer the kind of animal that wrote the Bible, built the Great Wall of China and laughed at Charlie Chaplin’s antics.

But then he jumps to the premise in HOMO DEUS that all organisms are simply algorithms, or systemic data driven calculators that have no room for God, for soul, for free will or for intuition, but in the final analysis have the complexity of a vending machine with nano-robotics running through the bloodstream gauging the activities of hormones, neurotransmitters and neural networks that autonomously diagnose problems and repair damage.

In the late 18th century as the Industrial Revolution took hold, man became a replaceable part in a giant machine. Now, according to this assessment, man has gravitated to be simply a machine himself.

Likewise, there is no apologies for absolutes in this treatise:

99 percent of our decisions – including the most important in our life choices concerning spouses, careers and habitats – are made by the highly refined algorithm we call sensation, emotions and desires. 99 percent of bodily activities, including muscle movement and hormonal secretions, take place without any need of conscious feelings.

HUMANISM, THE NEW FACE OF THE SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION

A good third of the book is dedicated to exposing what the author considers the new god of conventional religion, humanism. Humanists worship humans, and Harari is as disenchanted with this orientation as he is with theism.

We see the humanist template in liberalism, communism and fascism. Humanism buys into the idea of soul; the idea that the individual is unique; that the customer is always right; that every individual regardless of his status in society deserves sufficient welfare to preserve his physical, social, emotional and economic integrity; that human feelings are the source of all meaning and authority; and that one man one vote and democracy is the savior of civilization.

The author counters:

Having dismissed the overblown notion that Homo Sapiens exists on an entirely different plain from other animals, or that humans possess some unique essence like soul or consciousness, we finally climb down to the level of reality and examine the particular physical or mental abilities that give our species the edge . . . no matter how you define intelligence, it is quite clear that neither intelligence nor toolmaking by themselves can account for the Sapiens conquest of the world . . . Twenty thousand years ago, the average Sapiens probably had higher intelligence and better toolmaking skills as a species . . . Modern schools and employers may test our aptitude . . . (but) the welfare state always guarantees our basic needs . . .

What is surprising in HOMO DEUS that was not apparent in SAPIENS is that there is often an absolutism to the author’s language as if the reader is to accept the notions expressed on face value. It becomes quite apparent in the balance of the book that Homo sapiens is on the way out. In the not too distant future, evolution on steroids will find 90 percent (yes 90 percent) of us not sufficient to exist as computers, algorithms and data will launch a new race of man who will be superior to existing Homo sapiens today.

For instance, the only thing science believes is that sensations and emotions are biochemical data processing algorithms with dataism generated from this activity the new god. Science will admit Homo sapiens has a conscious mind, but that mind is something very different from soul. Paradoxically, while there is no proof of a soul, science admits to knowing precious little about either the mind or what is consciousness.

That said the life sciences believe that life is all about data processing and that organisms are simply machines for making calculation and taking decisions. Harari admits the analogy between organisms and algorithms can be misleading. In the 19th century the mind was viewed as if it were a steam engine, seeing the mind and body as if pipes and cylinders, valves and pistons that build and release pressure and thereby producing movement and action.

Sigmund Freud’s psychological models, he says, were marked with this mechanized influence. Now we have computers and the sophisticated technology that have replaced this mindset. Alas, like the steam engine, we have a whole new jargon in the soft and hard sciences to replicate the blessedness of this new mystical tool, the computer that 200 years ago belonged only to the steam engine.

WHERE THE AUTHOR IS RIGHT

Professor Harari is right when he says, “All large scale human cooperation is ultimately based on our belief in imagined order.” Think about it a moment: a nation is a mythical construct as is a corporation as is a government as is the New York Stock Exchange as is the family and the community, and as is the state and the church. Trust and the reality of our imagination has given these entities providence over our destiny although a case could be made that they are simply the imaginings of what we deem reality.

Elaborate symbols, rites and passages, ceremonies and belief systems are all inventions in support of our sacred notions and crucially dependent on manifested trust. This could all disappear in a moment should convention, conformity, dependence or fear that is holding us to such constructions suddenly dissolve into myth.

People weave a web of belief and meaning with all their hearts. Eventually, over time, these inevitably unravel, and then the author states, we can hardly imagine how anyone could have thought that way.

“A hundred years hence,” he writes, “our belief in democracy and human rights might look equally incomprehensible to our descendants.” He continues, “Sapiens rule the world because only they can weave an intersubjective web of meaning: a web of laws, forces, entities and places that exist purely in their common imagination.”

On December 21, 1989, Nicolae Ceausescu, communist dictator of Romania, organized a mass demonstration of support in the center of Bucharest. Previously, the Soviet Union had withdrawn its support as the Berlin Wall had fallen and revolution was sweeping through the Communist Block.

Ceausescu resisted this trend by mobilizing a rally by busing in 80,000 people to the city’s center to demonstrate to all Romanians and to the world at large that he was firmly in charge. The crowd was enthusiastic and cheering as the dictator and his wife appeared on a balcony mounted in the square. For eight minutes, he praised the glories of Romanian socialism, and then someone booed. He ignored the boo and attempted to continue his speech when others throughout the crowd started to boo. Then the mass audience started to whistle and shout abuses. The television audience throughout Romania heard the booing crowd, while Ceausescu kept frantically yelling, “Hello! Hello! Hello!” Suddenly, the people of Romania recognized the old man in the fur hat had no power over them. In that instance, totally unplanned or anticipated, his reign came to a crashing end.

The author explains that there are two kinds of reality: subjective and objective. Subjective reality depends on our personal beliefs and feelings; objective reality exists independent of such beliefs and feelings, such as gravity. This was subjective reality on display.

HUMANISM MAY BE ABSURD, BUT WHAT OF DATA RELIGION?

Professor Harari must be applauded for not worrying about stepping on uncooked eggs. That said the balance of the book is equally entertaining and confounding as was the first three quarters if you are stalwartly defending humanism as the legitimate replacement of traditional religion.

Science is today where religion was a millennium ago. The professor is careful not to offend the new religion. He writes:

Meaning and authority always go hand in hand. Whoever determines the meaning of our actions – whether they are good or evil, right or wrong, beautiful or ugly – also gains the authority to tell us what to think and how to believe.

That platform now belongs to science, and Harari is a willing acolyte in its dominion. For example, humanism assumes that each human has a single authentic inner self. He attacks this with science with the aplomb of a data religiousness. He writes:

The yang and yin of modernity are reason and emotion, the laboratory and the museum, the production line and the supermarket. People often see only the yang, and imagine that the modern world is dry, scientific, logical and utilitarian – just like the laboratory and the factory. But the modern world is also an extravagant supermarket. No culture in history has ever given such importance to human feelings.

While nodding, and saying, I suppose that is true, the author a few pages later rubs salt into that wound:

When I try to get in touch with my inner self, I am more likely to fall into one or another capitalist trap. My current political views, my likes and dislikes, and my hobbies and ambitions do not reflect my authentic self. Rather, they reflect my upbringing and social surroundings. They depend on my class, and are shaped by my neighborhood and my school. Rich and poor alike are brainwashed from birth. The rich are taught to disregard the poor while the poor are taught to disregard their true interests. No amount of self-reflection or psychotherapy will help, because the psychotherapists are working for the capitalist system.

If you grant a modicum of truth to this, beware because the author is building a case to show how religion and the humanities have lost touch with the technological realities of the day forfeiting their ability to question what will happen in the job market and the social fabric of society when it finds that artificial intelligence has come to outperform humans in most cognitive tasks.

The author asks:

What will happen to human society when biotechnology enables us to have designer babies, and to open unprecedented gaps between the rich and the poor? You will not find the answers to any of these questions in the Qur’an or sharia law, nor in the Bible or in the Confucian Analects, because nobody in the medieval Middle East or in ancient China knew much about computers, genetics or nanotechnology . . . in order to navigate a storm you need a map and a rudder rather than just an anchor.

This author sees radical Islam far worse than the Christian West, which he sees also anchored in the past, while radical Islam has yet to come to terms with the Industrial Revolution much less the Scientific Revolution.

Christianity (the author admits) was responsible for important economic and technological innovations. The Catholic Church established medieval Europe’s most sophisticated administrative system, and pioneered the use of archives, catalogues and other techniques of data processing. The Vatican was the closest thing twelfth century Europe had to Silicon Valley.

THE QUEST FOR MEANING IN THE AGE OF SCIENCE

Now the author goes for the jugular which is meant to garner our attention in the waning days of Homo sapiens. Our species is seen to be atavistic and as protective, elaborate and pervasive as humanistic themes may be to reassure us, they are anachronistic. The author writes:

Science undermines not only the liberal belief in free will, but also the belief in individualism . . . over the last several decades the life sciences have reached the conclusion that this liberal story is pure mythology. The single authentic self is as real as the eternal soul, Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny.

He goes on to say:

Not only governments fall into this trap. Business corporations often sink millions into failed enterprises, while private individuals cling to dysfunctional marriages and dead-end jobs. Our narrating self would much prefer to continue suffering in the future, just so it won’t have to admit that our past suffering was devoid of meaning . . . We see then that the self too is an imaginary story, just like nations, gods and money . . . Humans are in danger of losing their economic value because intelligence is decoupling from consciousness.

[Readers of some of my works as well as those of Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker will see similar cautionary tales, as we do not buy totally into evolutionary biology or brain science with the absolutism of this author and therefore are alleged to be anchored in the ethical, moral, cultural and political ideas of Locke, Rousseau and Jefferson of 18th century wisdom. Indeed, none of these authors have predicted the extinction of Homo sapiens as a species as does this author.]

This denouement is represented by the emerging “useless class” where the majority of Homo sapiens will lack sufficient skill or mind to compete. This author points out that only 2 percent of Americans work in agriculture and 20 percent in industry, while 78 percent work as doctors, webpage designers and so forth. He adds, “When mindless algorithms are able to teach, diagnose and design better than humans, what will we do?” He writes:

We might end up with an algorithmic upper class owning most of the planet . . . most of the planet is already legally owned by non-human intersubjective entities, namely nations and corporations . . . If gods can possess land and employ people, why not algorithms? . . . Once Google, Facebook and other algorithms become all-knowing oracles, they may well evolve into agents and ultimately into sovereigns.

Professor Harari’s assessment has teeth to it as today, 2018, 1 billion people earn less $1 per day while another 1.5 billion earn between $1 and $2 per day. What is worse, some 62 people who are the richest in the world are worth as much as the poorest 3.6 billion people on the planet. With the world’s population in excess of 7 billion, these 62 billionaires hold as much wealth as the entire bottom half of humankind.

In the future this professor sees algorithms as god in the new data religion where technological progress has a very different agenda than humanism:

It doesn’t want to listen to our inner voices. It wants to control them. Once we understand the biochemical system producing all these voices, we can play with all the switches, turn up the volume here, lower it there, and make life much more easy and comfortable. We’ll give Ritalin to the distracted lawyer, Prozac to the guilty soldier and Cipralex (an antidepressant) to the dissatisfied wife . . . The humanist recommendation to listen to ourselves has ruined the lives of many a person whereas the right dosage of the right chemical has greatly improved the well-being and relationships of million . . . According to modern psychiatry, many ‘inner voices’ and ‘authentic wishes’ are nothing more than the product of biochemical imbalances and neurological diseases . . . (people suffering) clinical depression walk out on promising careers (as) biochemical glitches makes them see everything through dark-colored lens.

If this sounds like a psycho-pharmaceutical commercial, it is nothing compared to this author’s Dataism as the new religion:

Dataism was born from the explosive confluence of two scientific waves. In the 150 years since Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species, the life sciences have come to see organisms as biochemical algorithms . . . the same mathematical laws apply to both biochemical and electronic algorithms. . . If humankind is a single data-processing system . . . The supreme value of this new religion is ‘information flow’ . . . According to Dataism, human experiences are not sacred and Homo sapiens isn’t the apex of creation or a precursor to some future Homo deus. Humans are merely tools for creating the Internet of All Things . . . This cosmic data-processing system would be like God. It will be everywhere and will control everything, and humans are destined to merge into it.

As Yuval Noah Harari cannot escape his programming in his short life of some forty two years to date, it is obvious he is a creature of our times with a well-developed point of view, a view that the reader is rewarded with if he reads and ponders his entire treatise, and does not stop, and say “enough already.” Professor Harari does not limit himself to the discipline of history, but enters an arena of disciplines looking back 70,000 years and forward into our present millennium to assess what the future would seem to suggest. In this new Data Religion with super-super computers, the human brain is helpless to fathom much less master new and ever expanding algorithms.

Perhaps the Oracle of Las Vegas sits at the end of the Yellow Brick Road processing these data and algorithms, calling all the shots as the Internet of All Things. We cannot predict the future, as Harari admits, as technology is not deterministic, but this prophetic predictor residing in Las Vegas has made a career of predicting the outcome of sporting events, why not Data Religion?

That said 50 years from now, when many of us are gone, and most likely Dr. Harari as well, this book may be considered either silly or prophetic. That is the nature of having a point of view.