Michael Prescott's Blog

Medium uncool

As you may have heard, famed Brazilian spiritual healer "John of God" (aka João Teixeira de Faria) has been arrested and faces charges of molesting and even raping numerous women who came to him for treatment.

The Washington Post reports:

Zahira Lieneke Mous, a Dutch dance choreographer, made the pilgrimage four years ago, seeking to heal sexual trauma she said she had suffered in the past.... She recounted in an interview with Brazil’s Globo TV last week how she waited in line twice to experience his healing. On the first visit, he scribbled a prescription for an herb she was told would help her. The second time, he offered a private consultation — a “spiritual cleansing.” Mous agreed. “You’re made to feel special somehow,” she told Globo TV.

She waited until everyone else in line had their turns, until finally she was alone, and “John of God” invited her into his office. And then into his bathroom.

That’s where Mous said he raped her — all while leading her to believe it was part of her healing.

She is among hundreds of women who have recently come forward with sexual abuse allegations ...

There are said to be as many as 300 women claiming abuse, although of course it's impossible to know how many of these claims are well-founded. Making things even worse for the medium, he initially missed a deadline to surrender to authorities and is believed to have withdrawn millions of dollars from several bank accounts, presumably in a bid to flee the country. He is now in police custody.

Although I've occasionally run across accounts of psychic/spiritual healing that seem legitimate — for instance, the George Chapman case — it's fair to say that this area attracts a huge number of charlatans preying on desperate people. And of course there is no reason why even a legitimate medium could not be guilty of gross personal misconduct; as far as I can tell, there is no correlation between psychic or mediumistic abilities and personal character, just as there is no correlation between musical or artistic talent and personal virtue. It is also possible that a legitimate medium could be corrupted over time by the adoration of his followers, gradually changing from a sincere spiritual seeker to an ego-driven cult leader.

In this case, I have no idea what the real story is — whether John of God has always been a fake, or whether he once had (and possibly still has) legitimate abilities but succumbed to the temptations of money, power, fame, and sex. Conceivably, the allegations are untrue or exaggerated; it appears that roughly a dozen women have filed complaints, so I'm not sure where the estimates of hundreds of victims are coming from.

Overall, though, I'd say it looks very bad for John of God and those who believed in him.

Ban social media

Years ago I contemplated writing a blog post called "Usenet is hell." For those who don't remember, Usenet was an early bulletin board system that allowed people to chat with each other in unmoderated forums. I guess it's still around, but I haven't heard anything about it in a long time. But I did use it, back in the day. 

Until I decided it was hell.

Here was my reasoning. The heavenly planes, we are told, are self-selecting. People of similar beliefs, similar temperaments, similar levels of spiritual and emotional development cluster together in spheres manifested out of the collective unconscious of the inhabitants. Each community is essentially friction-free. 

Earth, by contrast, is a far more challenging environment. Souls at all levels of development are thrust into a shared reality. Advanced spirits and primitive, barely evolved spirits coexist. Though we can choose our friends, we cannot choose our relatives, our neighbors, our coworkers, or the people we rub elbows with on the street. Conflict, oppression, violence, and cruelty are the predictable results of disparate people bumping up against each other. 

And then there was Usenet. Here was an environment that seemed appealing at first, but ultimately struck me as being as unheavenly as possible. Anyone with access to a computer could join in any conversation. People with widely differing worldviews, psychologies, and levels of maturity interacted directly. In theory, this was a great opportunity to bring people together and expand everyone's horizons. In practice, it was a recipe for malice, intolerance, and abuse, as people who normally would never meet suddenly came in contact and discovered how much they disliked each other.

The conflict was exacerbated by the unique properties of online communication. People could post anonymously, allowing them the freedom to viciously mock, insult, and defame their opponents. The social cues that mitigate conflict in personal encounters — facial expression, tone of voice, body language — were absent, making misunderstandings and escalation of conflict far more likely. And the loudest voices, the most obnoxious, hateful, and crazy ones, inevitably dominated any discussion. In a variant of Gresham's Law (bad money drives out good), the bad commenters drove out the better ones. 

A constant babble of angry and spiteful voices all putting each other down, spewing venom, spitting malice — it seemed a lot like hell to me, and I mean that literally. If heaven is a community of likeminded souls in a "consensus reality," then hell must be a community of angry souls in perpetual conflict, trapped in a reality that reflects their lowest drives and crudest impulses. 

Usenet is largely irrelevant now, having been supplanted by more popular forums: Facebook, Twitter, and other platforms categorized as "social media." These forums initially promised more control over your personal community of online friends. You can friend or unfriend, follow or block. But the discussions are still unmoderated, and the reality is that conflict is still ever-present. The inexorable compulsion to take potshots at anonymous semi-strangers from the safety of our computer keyboards overrides all safeguards. Facebook and Twitter started out as rather benign environments filled with cat videos and cameraphone pics of tonight's dinner. Today they are hotbeds of controversy and acrimony, as people rake each other over the coals for differences over politics, religion, sexuality, TV shows, comic books — you name it. 

And it's tearing out society apart.

This sounds like an overstatement. But I don't think it is. Since the rise of social media, our society has become more polarized than I can ever remember. Of course there will always be strong differences of opinion in a democracy, but I can't recall a time when the two sides actively hated each other with such reckless passion. It used to be the case — and by "used to be," I mean three or four years ago — that only the most marginal members of society talked about a new civil war. Now the idea has gone mainstream, with many sober commentators observing that the lack of mutual respect or even basic civility between left and right is reaching the boiling point.

Many factors no doubt have contributed to the rise of incivility in our national discourse, but social media may be the dominant one. It's not just a question of being constantly confronted with opinions contrary to your own, thrust at you and demanding your attention. It's the angry, personal tone of much of the messaging. You open your Facebook or Twitter feed, only to see yourself characterized as a moron, a monster, a terrible human being, a fascist, a racist, a communist, another Hitler, another Stalin, a loser who lives in his mom's basement, a paid tool of corporate or collectivist interests, a liar, a scumbag, a clown, an ignoramus, an illiterate, a redneck trailer-trash rube, a welfare-cheating leech, a garbage human being, a piece of shit. 

It's almost impossible not to respond in kind. We are not hardwired to turn the other cheek indefinitely. The fight-or-flight reaction kicks in. We either leave the forum or we start to hit back. And the more we hit back, the more "triggered" the other guy gets, and the more he lashes out at us. 

Multiply this encounter thousands of times over the course of the year for any given social media user, then multiply that result by the number of users in our society. Is it alarmist to suggest that it's having an impact? Or unduly negative to suggest that the impact is predominantly bad? 

I think we have become addicted to a technology that is demonstrably detrimental — detrimental to ourselves as thinking, caring persons, and detrimental to society as a community of shared values and mutual respect or, failing that, at least mutual restraint.

And I don't think the worries about Civil War 2.0 are necessarily overstated — or at least not much. We may not be on the verge of a new Fort Sumter incident, but it's entirely possible we are entering the territory of Bleeding Kansas, on a national scale. 

What to do? I'm doing my best to cut back on social media. I've deleted my Twitter account, but this was no real hardship, since I rarely used it. More difficult is restraining myself on Facebook. The goddamned site really is adductive — literally so. I believe that getting positive feedback ("likes") gives you a small jolt of pleasure, which then prompts you to seek more "likes." Eventually you're always thinking of pithy things to post that will earn you more of those all-important thumbs-up. As "likes" become more important to you, negative and hostile responses loom larger also. Your ego gets increasingly caught up in a meaningless, pointless  game of oneupmanship. You're like a gambling addict pumping quarters into a slot machine; you know you should stop, but not yet — you just need to pull the lever one more time ...

If quitting is hard, and participating is destructive to self and others, what is there to do? My modest proposal: ban social media.

Outlaw Twitter, Facebook, and similar forums. Dissolve their parent companies. Delete everyone's account. 

A drastic measure? Yes. Practical? In theory, sure, though I'm not holding my breath for our political class to take on multibillion-dollar compilations, especially since these platforms are so easily weaponized for use in political campaigns. 

Would such a ban be an unconstitutional infringement on free speech? Many people would say so. My view is that banning a platform is different from banning speech. People would still be free to vent in many other forums; they just wouldn't have the particular forums offered by social media companies. As an analogy, many communities have banned billboards because they regard signage as detrimental to the beauty of their neighborhoods. This is an inconvenience for advertisers who wish to use billboards as a promotional tool, but it's not a violation of their rights; they are still free to advertise in other ways. One platform has been outlawed, but others are available. The judgment has been made that the negatives posed by billboards (they're ugly, they obstruct views, they distract drivers, etc.) outweigh their positives. 

I've come to believe that the negatives of social media likewise outweigh the positives, and in a far more serious way. The incessant drumbeat of online conflict is ripping at the seams of our social fabric. Life without Facebook and Twitter might be marginally less convenient for some of us, but societal breakdown, open warfare, and blood in the streets would be an inconvenience of considerably greater magnitude. 

Do I think such a ban will actually happen? Not a chance. But it's the most straightforward way out of the digital hell we've unwittingly constructed for ourselves. And as our online anarchy continues to escalate, real-world chaos can't be far behind. 

The drunk at the bar

Not too long ago I wrote a post about how the Internet may be subtly changing our brain function and creating anxiety in the process. Recently, however, it occurred to me that there’s another, much more obvious factor at work in producing the edginess and unease that characterize modern society – an unease that makes little sense when you consider the unprecedented safety, affluence, and comfort that most people in developed nations enjoy.

When the Internet made its debut, it was hailed as a revolutionary communications technology that would allow us to get in touch with people from all parts of the world and to be exposed to all points of view, thus leading to greater international understanding. This was a wonderfully idealistic way of looking at things, and like so many idealistic dreams, it has foundered on the sharp rocks of reality. While undoubtedly the Internet has fostered some degree of global understanding, it has probably done more to introduce us to points of view that we would be better off not encountering. The egalitarian nature of the Internet, where anybody’s comment counts as much as anyone else’s, has led to a peculiar situation in which all too often we find ourselves hemmed in by idiocy.

Think of it as the “drunk in the bar” syndrome. Everyone is familiar with the movie trope of a drunken bar patron spouting off a bunch of nonsense while the guy on the barstool next to him listens uncomfortably. In real life, nobody takes the drunk at the bar seriously, for two reasons. First, since we are up close and personal with him, we can see that he is just an inebriated slosh whose slurred ramblings can be safely disregarded. Second, we encounter him in a social context, surrounded by other bar patrons who are presumably better grounded than the drunk and able to see him for what he is. Our own skepticism is thus reinforced by the healthy skepticism of those around us.

But on the Internet, everything is different. The crank, the loon, the angry drunk, the mentally disturbed loner is not always immediately identifiable as such. He can seem pretty rational. All we have to go on is his typewritten words and his avatar. We are seeing only what he wants us to see. We aren’t seeing the whole person. We aren’t reading body language. We aren’t hearing tone of voice. One set of typewritten words is very much like another. As long as the errors of grammar, spelling, punctuation are not too egregious, we are inclined to assume that whoever produced them is a basically reasonable person – by which we mean, of course, a person like us.

In addition, we read this Internet comments alone. Though there may be other participants in the online discussion, they are distant from us. We don’t have the advantage of a crowd of essentially rational bystanders who are able to instantly back up our own intuitive assessment. Each other person is at just as much of a loss as we are, and each one is dealing with the drunk at the bar in isolation.

None of this would matter if there weren’t so damn many drunks at the bar. One of the unsettling things about the Internet is that it has exposed just how many disturbed people there are. They were probably always out there, but in the pre-Internet age, we rarely noticed them. Most of them were never very social; their letters to the editor were probably not printed; their tirades against the TV news or the Illuminati probably went unheard. They existed apart from the rest of society, largely unknown, without a voice.

The Internet has given them their voice. That may be good for them, but it’s not so good for the rest of us.

It’s not so good, in part, because encounters with these people on a daily basis can become extremely trying. Dealing with craziness is hard. Just ask any psychiatrist. The rate of burnout in those parts of the medical profession that deal primarily with the mentally ill is extremely high. Not only is it frustrating, even exasperating, to try to handle crazy people, but it can also be mentally and emotionally destabilizing. The well-known “gaslighting” phenomenon comes to mind. If enough people try to convince you that your perceptions are wrong and your grasp of reality is shaky, you may start to believe them. Paradoxically, the crazy people can make you question your own sanity. Trained professionals at least have some idea of how to deal with this problem. The ordinary layman does not.

But there’s a larger reason why it’s not so good to give the drunk at the bar a megaphone. As more extreme and bizarre ideas flood our intellectual space, they tend to crowd out more sane and rational positions. In economics, there’s a rule called Gresham’s Law, which holds that bad money drives out good. On the Internet, it seems that bad ideas drive out the good ones, at least in many cases.

The exponents of crazy theories are not restricted by logic, facts, moderation, common sense, or consideration of other people’s feelings. They are not restricted by anything. This makes them annoying, but it can also make them effective. They simply shout down any objection, sweeping aside factual criticisms with wild inventions, and deflecting logical objections with personal attacks. Internet arguers are much like the people in Yeats’ famous poem “The Second Coming.” 

The best lack all conviction, while the worst   

Are full of passionate intensity.

The unrestrained, ruthless proponents of nutty ideas have a built-in advantage over anyone pleading for sanity. Sanity is boring. Sanity speaks with a quiet voice. Sanity is polite, self-effacing, willing to admit to self-doubt, open to criticism, and aware that its judgments may be wrong. In online debate, all of this comes across as weakness, while the ranting bluster of the drunk at the bar comes across – at least to many people – as strength. And so the crazy positions gain adherents, while the sane positions, humdrum and uninspiring as they are, slowly retreat.

The foregoing is not, of course, an original observation. It’s just something I probably should have included in my earlier discussion of Internet. The sheer power of this new technology to shape our culture and our national discussions is actually rather frightening and very poorly understood.

By the way, I don’t exempt myself entirely from the above criticism. I’m sure I’ve had my own “drunk at the bar” moments, both here and on social media. The very nature of posting opinions online seems to encourage shoot-from-the-hip punditry, which can often backfire. Blogs and social media mean that none of our thoughts, no matter how fleeting, need to go unexpressed. But many thoughts are probably better off unexpressed. And unfortunately, those with the self-restraint to stay quiet are probably the more reasonable and rational ones, while those who pop off at any opportunity are the more excitable and crazy ones. This is another way in which they dominate the conversation and seize more territory in our intellectual space.

I don’t see a way out of this situation. Barring some massive solar flare that wipes out electromagnetic communications for the next generation, the Internet is here to stay. And truly, I wouldn’t want to be without it. But there are times when I almost wish that it would go away.

Or at least that the drunk at the bar would finally shut up.

The Internet vs. the Zeitgeist

Many years ago I read an odd little book called The Alphabet Versus the Goddess, by Leonard Shlain. It’s one of those desperately magisterial tomes like Julian Jaynes’ Origin of Consciousness — an overview by a nonspecialist attempting to assimilate a raft of information from disparate disciplines into a new overarching theory — and like Jaynes’ book, it’s worth reading even if most of its conclusions are probably wrong.

Shlain’s theory is that the advent of widespread literacy, especially in alphabetic languages, brings about changes in brain function, shifting the dominant hemisphere from right to left. He believed that the right hemisphere is associated with “female”traits while the left is associated with “male” traits; thus, the switch from one hemisphere to the other precipitated societal changes that worked to the disadvantage of women. In the original period of alphabetic literacy, the old goddess religion, matriarchal and pacific, was suppressed and replaced by new god-centered, patriarchal, militaristic faiths. In the much later period after the invention of the printing press, when literacy was rapidly extended to much of the population instead of being limited to an elite, there were further reactions against women, including the witch-burning manias that flared up unpredictably around Europe. Finally, Slain speculates that the rise of movies, television, and the Internet — all of which place more of an emphasis on visual information — will cause a shift back toward equality of the sexes and a more peaceful world.

I am skeptical of the gender assignments given to the two sides of the brain, and even more skeptical when Shlain extends his thesis to the cells of the eye, distinguishing between “male” cones and “female” rods. I am also skeptical that the goddess religion, as he describes it, even existed; while fertility statuettes with exaggerated female features turn up in many prehistoric sites, it’s a bit of a stretch to infer a matriarchal society, much less a time of Edenic peace. We don’t even know if these female figures were goddesses or simply charms, perhaps used to ensure a favorable pregnancy.

Though Shlain’s thesis is far from proven, one aspect of it has stuck with me – the idea that changes in communication technology can rewire the brain, with destabilizing societal effects.

Which brings us to what’s going on today.

Throughout much of the developed world, and certainly in the United States, we see intensifying polarization between increasingly extremist and uncompromising ends of the political spectrum. On a daily basis we’re treated to public displays of hysteria – wild outrage expressed by both left and right, though for different reasons. No area of life is off-limits. Escapist movies about comic-book superheroes give rise to charges of racism and sexism. Twitter and Facebook have become ideological battlegrounds. Restaurants offering ethnic foods are flashpoints for controversies about “cultural appropriation” (as if all culture is not appropriated from somewhere). Sports shows and teams are boycotted for political reasons. Everything is a hot button issue.

Many explanations for this new intensity in our political life have been advanced. It is said that the middle class is being “squeezed”; yet statistics indicate that while both middle-class and lower-income shares of the population have shrunk over the past 35 years, the percentages of Americans defined as upper-middle class and rich have grown – suggesting the middle class is contracting mainly because some of its members are migrating to a higher tax bracket.



Source: Urban Institute study

Or it’s said that middle-class affluence simply has less to offer us than it once did. But this seems to be a case of looking at the past through rose-colored glasses. Recently, in doing research for a time travel novella that takes place in 1972, I was intrigued to discover how much lower the standard of living was for middle-class people in that era. Houses, for example, were significantly smaller and had fewer amenities, while many ubiquitous modern-day items would have been considered science-fiction. A computer you carry in your pocket, which connects you to databases throughout the world and incidentally serves as a videophone? Household robots that vacuum or mop your floor? Wall-size flatscreen TVs with hundreds of channels, many commercial free and uncensored, in high definition? Self-driving cars, prosthetic limbs almost indistinguishable from the real things, medical treatments using genetic engineering to target specific cells, an orbiting telescope that sees to the ends of the universe …?

No matter how you look at it, our opportunities for leisure, recreation, and discovery are greater than ever. And the average middle-class American today lives like a sci-fi character in a '70s TV show  

It is also claimed that people are frustrated by unchanging social problems such as race and gender discrimination; but again, this claim doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. There is far less discrimination in the developed world today than in any previous generation. As an example, a newspaper article I came across from 1972 reported casually that the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks had just voted to reaffirm their policy of not admitting blacks as members, a policy that was only rescinded in 1976 under intense legal pressure. The same newspaper regularly published the names of divorced couples in what I took to be a sign of the social stigma attached to divorce. (Mary Tyler Moore's groundbreaking sitcom of that era was originally intended to depict her as a divorcée,  but the network balked at anything so controversial.) Interracial relationships were illegal in many states and virtually unheard of anywhere. Gays had to remain closeted or face ostracism and abuse, including physical attacks. And on and on. No matter how you look at it, society has grown much more open and tolerant. A black president, a serious female presidential candidate, gay marriage – all would have been completely unrealistic 40 years ago.

Crime is down, too. Way down. Parts of New York City that were virtual no-go zones four decades ago are thriving now. Remember the scene in 1973's Live and Let Die when James Bond nearly gets killed in Harlem? That's right - in 1973, Harlem was too dangerous for James Bond. 

And let’s not forget that in 1972 draftees were being sent to fight and die in Vietnam. The casualties that the US accepted in that unpopular war were far higher than US losses in any recent conflict (58,209 American deaths in Vietnam vs. 4,497 in Iraq and 2,356 in Afghanistan), yet the war dragged on for years, and those who opposed it were labeled traitors.

America of forty years ago often seemed to be spiraling into chaos, with assassinations, urban riots, war, Watergate, the energy crisis, sky-high homicide rates, skyjackings, rampant prejudice and closed-mindedness, cult movements, apocalyptic predictions of the End Times, and TV fodder consisting almost exclusively of mind-numbing pap ("the glass teat," Harlan Ellison called it) ... and if we think our present conditions are worse, we are only fooling ourselves. 

But if the external circumstances – the economic, social, political, and cultural climate – have not worsened, and have in fact improved by any objective standard, then why are people becoming so upset about everything, to the point where it can reasonably be argued that we’re experiencing a “cold Civil War”?

People often point to cable TV and the Internet, both of which feed news consumers a steady diet of inflammatory stories while encouraging people to confine themselves to channels or websites that reflect their own biases; as a result, people become trapped in an echo chamber or bubble that reinforces and amplifies their opinions. This is clearly true. But I’m not sure it’s the whole truth, and this leads us back to Leonard Shlain and The Alphabet Versus the Goddess.

It’s at least arguable that the advent of the Internet poses as big a social and psychological challenge as the advent of literacy did for previous societies. I’m not sure anyone yet understands how the brain is affected and changed by the constant processing of online information – not only when one is sitting at a computer, but when one is using a smartphone or any web-connected device. It may not be too far-fetched to think that literacy altered brain function by making the left brain more dominant. Is it possible that the Internet is altering brain function in some new way?

What if the intuitive process of clicking on links and following one link to the next while chasing down snippets of information tends to activate the intuitive faculties of the brain, popularly supposed to reside in the right hemisphere? Perhaps this very process, endlessly and obsessively repeated, has the effect of deemphasizing or inhibiting those qualities associated with the left hemisphere — notably logical reasoning, goal-setting, and objectivity. There is a widely publicized claim that Internet usage correlates with a decline in attention span; though this study may be junk science, it’s hard to deny that the rapidity and convenience of the Internet can make it intolerably frustrating to plow through the pages of a book in search of information. There may be other, more subtle changes in neurological/psychological functioning that are not yet understood or even recognized. Could the surge in diagnoses of attention deficit disorder, autism, and Asperger’s syndrome be related to widespread neurological reprogramming?

Let’s suppose so. Even if most of us aren’t affected that profoundly, we may still feel as if things are somehow getting out of control. The changes in our mental processing may bring on the same kind of anxiety, confusion, mania, and hysteria (think of the witch burnings) that Shlain sees as the historical result of rapid advances in literacy.

In other words, it’s just possible that we are undergoing a massive transition from one mode of consciousness (developed as a result of general alphabetic literacy) to a new mode of consciousness (currently developing in response to the new technology of the Internet). And because we experience this change as something alien, we look for a cause outside ourselves, even though actually it is the inner workings of our mental mechanism that are directly responsible. Feeling confused and lost, we latch on to any convenient bogeyman to explain our chronic insecurity. We don’t hunt witches, but we do harass anyone who thinks differently than we do. Alt-right types mock and insult their critics and spread vicious memes. “Social justice warriors” define anyone who disagrees with them as racist, misogynistic, fascist, etc. The problem is always Someone Else.

By getting wired up to an endless supply of digital information, we may be rewiring our own brains – and experiencing all the unintended side effects that go along with a neurological remodeling job. The trickle of information from books and magazines that we perused in our spare time has become a spurting garden hose of facts, opinions, memes, urban legends, “fake news,” lies, distortions, slanders, and insults, illustrated with vivid images and sounds, 24 hours a day. And our beleaguered brains are melting under the strain.

Again, this is only a speculative hypothesis. It may be all wrong. It’s almost certainly at least partly wrong. But it just might be partly right. It could help to make sense of the rapid and baffling descent into hyper-partisanship, political polarization, and escalating demands for safe spaces and trigger warnings (on the left) and border walls and authoritarian crackdowns (on the right). In an era of relative peace and prosperity, when the West faces no true existential threat remotely comparable to the Axis powers of World War II or the USSR of the Cold War, it is truly strange that we find ourselves coming apart at the seams. We live in what should be seen as a Golden Age, yet we’re obsessed with apocalyptic visions and paranoid fantasies.

Instead of scanning the cultural and political trends of the modern world to understand our anxieties, perhaps we need only direct our attention to the softly glowing screen in front of our face.

Eating crow

Okay ... so.

Looks like I might've been just a tad wrong in my last post. 

Let us count the ways, shall we?

(Oh, and I know I said the last one would be my final post on Trump, but that's because I thought he would lose. This one really will be my last political piece for a while. Pinkie swear.) 

I wrote: 

The election, of course, is not yet over – and yet it is. At least at the presidential level, the outcome is already known. Indeed, one bookmaking outfit is already paying out to its clients who bet on Hillary Clinton. There’s no reason to think the firm will regret its decision.

Yeah, well, best-laid plans, mice and men, yada yada. 

In coming months, there will be endless debate about whether or not Donald Trump, under other circumstances or following a different strategy, could have won this election. For me, the answer is simple: the Donald Trump we know, the Trump who exists in our universe, could not have won. He simply lacks the right stuff. [etc.]

Swing and a miss! 

This election was the Republican Party’s to lose – and lose it they did.

Or ... not. With a Republican President, House, and (almost certainly) Senate, as well as gains in governorships (the GOP now holds 33 of them), the Republican Party is as well positioned as it could possibly hope to be. At least for the time being, it has won back the fabled Reagan Democrats and recast itself as a populist party that is not the vassal of Wall Street arbitrageurs (even if its standard-bearer is an obnoxious Manhattan plutocrat). 

Most likely, a President Trump would not prove to be a dictator, if only because being a dictator requires a mental focus, determination, and courage that Trump doesn’t possess. ... Had he been elected, he probably would have spent most of his time goofing off on the golf course or on social media, while his vice president, chief of staff, and cabinet members did the heavy lifting.

At this point I have no idea what kind of president Trump will prove to be. His victory speech was surprisingly low-key and gracious, even if it did feature the usual unrealistic promises. 

... it could be argued that electing Hillary Clinton actually pushes us a tad closer to banana-republic status by cementing the idea that the rich, powerful, and politically connected are above the law.

This I still believe. In fact, throughout Election Day, as I pondered the looming reality (so I thought) of a Hillary victory, I found myself increasingly depressed and angry. The idea that this kleptocratic serial liar would be rewarded with the presidency after a lifetime of cheating justice and failing upward was infuriating and deeply discouraging to me. A four-year slog through a Hillary administration seemed like an almost unbearable prospect. Honestly, if I had voted on Election Day, I might have pulled the lever for Trump just out of sheer despair at the alternative — even though I still think Trump is dangerously unqualified and temperamentally unfit for the job. 

In such a discouraging political environment, it’s easy to give up hope. Some academics argue that, having crossed our own Rubicon, we’ve effected the transition from a republican system of government to an “elective monarchy” not too dissimilar from that of Imperial Rome ...

Not necessarily wrong, but last night the people reminded us that they are still in charge, and that the "elective" part is at least as significant as the "monarchy" part.

In this country there’s still enough innate suspicion of government to prevent a Hitler, Stalin, or Mussolini from gaining power, and, for most Americans, life is still comfortable enough to make manning the barricades an unviable proposition.

I think this is true, and I sincerely hope it won't be put to the test. In fact, I hold out a smidgen of hope that Trump and the Republican Congress will rein in the imperial presidency at least a little. (Okay, okay ... it's unlikely. I said it was a smidgen.)  

Another unattractive feature of today’s politics is the assumption that one’s opponents have been hypnotized, duped, and brainwashed – assuming, of course, that they are not actually evil. The possibility of honest, intelligent disagreement is rarely broached.

I've been guilty of this as well — sometimes tarring Trump supporters in general with the brush of the alt-right white supremacist crowd, who represent only a small (I hope) subset of his voters. Most of the people who voted for Trump did so because they want a new direction, because they feel that the smug, self-satisfied elites are out of touch and out of control, and because they had no confidence in either the competence or the integrity of Hillary Clinton. These are valid reasons to support a candidate.

The truth is, the media and the #NeverTrump crowd (including me) made little effort to understand where Trump's support was coming from, outside of the spittle-flecked Pepe-the-Frog social-media trolls who were noisy and hateful, but probably not especially numerous. The more mainstream dimension of Trump's support largely eluded us, leaving us unprepared for his upset win. 

So there you have it. That's my mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. Having been wrong in my forecasts of the last three presidential elections, I now confess I am hopelessly out of touch with the American zeitgeist. Just when I think I've got it figured out, everything changes. Sort of like life. 

For people (like me) who are still worried by the potential (large) downside of a Trump presidency, I'll add that, if nothing else, last night's outcome teaches us that our powers of prognostication are limited, and wildly unexpected things can happen. This can be a calming and even liberating thought. It reminds us that, even in our personal lives, the trajectory we believe we're on can be altered at any moment, sometimes for the better. You think you're destined to be alone for the rest of your life ... and then your eyes meet hers across a restaurant. You think you'll be poor forever ... and then your latest crazy idea takes off and makes you a million bucks. You think you have nothing to look forward to ... and then suddenly you do.

If Trump's surreal victory proves anything — if the consensus-defying election of an abrasive, septuagenarian reality TV star who's never held political office carries any larger message —it's that anything is possible. And if we ever think we have all the answers, reality shows up to give us a swift kick in the ass. 

Ouch! 

The last Trump

Lately, as you may have noticed, I haven’t published very many new posts on this blog. The reason is that I’ve been preoccupied with politics, and I’ve found it’s exceedingly difficult to focus on spiritual matters when immersed (emotionally, at least) in the clash and grind of a presidential campaign. With this post, I hope to close the book on this election so I can get back to our usual subject matter.

The election, of course, is not yet over – and yet it is. At least at the presidential level, the outcome is already known. Indeed, one bookmaking outfit is already paying out to its clients who bet on Hillary Clinton. There’s no reason to think the firm will regret its decision.

In coming months, there will be endless debate about whether or not Donald Trump, under other circumstances or following a different strategy, could have won this election. For me, the answer is simple: the Donald Trump we know, the Trump who exists in our universe, could not have won. He simply lacks the right stuff. Nobody handicapped by Trump’s liabilities could realistically have attained the White House. He is a man with zero knowledge of public policy, a man who quite possibly cannot explain how a bill becomes a law or name the three branches of government. Worse, he has no interest in learning anything new, because he believes he’s already a universal expert. Knowing nothing about military matters, he boasts that he knows more than the generals. Knowing nothing about international trade deals, he boasts that he can make the best deals. Knowing nothing about campaign strategy, he ignores his advisers and pursues a hopelessly self-defeating course.

A candidate who won’t prepare for debates, who spends his nights tweeting insults to celebrity journalists, who limits his media appearances to a few friendly venues on Fox News and talk radio, who insults and ridicules constituencies he needs to win over, who foments pointless and destructive intraparty feuds, and who behaves like an emotionally unstable six-year-old ... is simply not going to win. There’s a story that when Donald was a small boy, he became so unhappy at a friend’s birthday party, presumably because the attention was on his friend and not on himself, that he picked up the birthday cake and threw it on the floor. Trump has said his temperament has not changed since he was in kindergarten. This appears to be true. He is still the angry little kid who throws the cake on the floor.

Still, it’s possible to argue that some version of Trump could have won this election – a Trump 2.0, a Trump from a parallel universe, a Trump who could master his worst tendencies, learn a modicum of self-discipline, memorize a smattering of salient facts, and organize a serious campaign with a competent get-out-the-vote effort. A Trump, in other words, who could pivot and act presidential, as the Trump of the primaries promised to do – which is just one of many promises that have not been fulfilled. A better Trump, a more adult, less volatile, less thin-skinned, more serious Trump who actually heeded his advisers and did the things that serious candidates do, might very well have won against the scandal-ridden, socially maladroit, and personally unlikable Hillary Clinton, who represents a continuation of eight years of policies that are widely felt to have been disappointing. This election was the Republican Party’s to lose – and lose it they did.

In an earlier post I pondered the question of whether Trump is a fascist. I concluded that he is probably not a true fascist but more of a right-wing populist with proto-fascist tendencies. To me, this still seems like an accurate assessment of Trump as he came across in the primaries; but in the general election his message became so muddled and his behavior so bizarre that I’m not sure what assessment to make of him today. Most likely, a President Trump would not prove to be a dictator, if only because being a dictator requires a mental focus, determination, and courage that Trump doesn’t possess. He’s a flighty, narcissistic popinjay mainly concerned with protecting his own image and preserving his persnickety vanity. Had he been elected, he probably would have spent most of his time goofing off on the golf course or on social media, while his vice president, chief of staff, and cabinet members did the heavy lifting.

So I don’t think we’ve dodged the bullet of fascism, as some people say. On the contrary, it could be argued that electing Hillary Clinton actually pushes us a tad closer to banana-republic status by cementing the idea that the rich, powerful, and politically connected are above the law. It’s palpably obvious that Hillary and her friends in high office saw to it that the FBI “investigation” into Hillary’s server scandal was fatally hobbled. This is hardly a surprise, but it is a disappointment and a worrying harbinger of the next four (or eight) years. We can expect Madam President to use the machineries of the IRS, the Justice Department, the EPA, and other bureaucratic organs to harass and stifle her political enemies when possible. This is, after all, the same Hillary who, as First Lady, tried to put the career civil servants of the White House Travel Office in prison simply so she could replace them with her Arkansas cronies.

In such a discouraging political environment, it’s easy to give up hope. Some academics argue that, having crossed our own Rubicon, we’ve effected the transition from a republican system of government to an “elective monarchy” not too dissimilar from that of Imperial Rome (though with the key difference that Rome never worked out a rational method for the transfer of power). Even if this perspective is valid, it doesn’t mean the United States is finished. Rome survived for hundreds of years after the republic died, achieving its greatest power, wealth, and influence in its imperial phase.

Besides, it may not be valid. The similarities between the United States and ancient Rome are arguably more superficial than real. And history doesn’t have to repeat itself.

What can we do to improve our prospects? For starters, we can eschew overheated rhetoric and irresponsible fear-mongering. Although it’s become de rigueur for each side to foresee an apocalypse if its candidate loses, the partisanship this time has been more feverish than usual. The hard left predicts a Fourth Reich if Trump wins, while the hard right predicts civil insurrection, even civil war. It’s time to remember Kipling’s advice to “keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you.” The American system of government and the American people have both proven exceptionally stable, a fact that has consistently frustrated radicals and revolutionaries of all stripes. In this country there’s still enough innate suspicion of government to prevent a Hitler, Stalin, or Mussolini from gaining power, and, for most Americans, life is still comfortable enough to make manning the barricades an unviable proposition.

Another unattractive feature of today’s politics is the assumption that one’s opponents have been hypnotized, duped, and brainwashed – assuming, of course, that they are not actually evil. The possibility of honest, intelligent disagreement is rarely broached. And yet trade-offs are an essential part of democracy, and sensible compromise is the key to good governance. There’s nothing disreputable or traitorous about seeking common ground; the effort to find and uphold shared values has been the cornerstone of American politics throughout our history. Our best hope for the future is to reach out to those with whom we disagree, to respect each other’s differences, and, in the famous words of Lincoln’s second inaugural address, to “bind up the nation's wounds” while showing “malice toward none [and] charity for all.”

If we want a better country, we can begin by being better people. Let’s wash the stain of this election season off our hands and get to work.

A no Trump bid

No, this isn't a political blog. But sometimes I can't help myself. 

I posted something in Facebook that I thought was pretty good, so I decided to post it here, too, with added links.

After all, there's more to life than, um, death.

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I spent part of Sunday reading online articles on the question of whether or not Trump is a fascist. Some argued yes, some argued no. You can easily find the same opinion pieces by Googling Trump + fascist. Anyway, after digesting all this back-and-forth, here's my opinion:

Trump is not technically a fascist. Fascism, among other things, involves the direct use of physical force to intimidate opponents. Gangs of brownshirts roaming the streets, death threats and assassinations, that sort of thing. It also historically has meant the explicit demand to overthrow democratic institutions and institute autocracy. And it is rabidly collectivist, insisting that all individual purposes must be subordinated to the state.

On the other hand, Trump does employ some of the theatrics of fascism – the strongman bluster (complete with Mussolini's jutting chin), the jingoistic demonization of "the other," the hyper-nationalistic calls for a return to the glory days of the past ("Make America great again"), the word-salad speechifying that defies rational analysis but hits hot-button buzzwords. And Trump resembles historical fascists in two other ways: his aggressive non-intellectualism and his worship of brute strength (he admires Putin) with a corresponding contempt for weakness.

Perhaps the best way to characterize Trump is that he is a right-wing populist with proto-fascist tendencies. That's not to say all his supporters are wrong in feeling left out and left behind, frustrated and angry, fed up with the establishment, and convinced that they do not factor into the political-economic calculus of the elites. They have perfectly valid reasons to want to upset the apple cart. But Trump, in my opinion, is not the answer. He appeals to the worst in human nature, and he appears to be a pretty poor example of human nature in his own right. As George Will quipped, "Is there a disagreeable human trait he does not have?"

America, we are better than this. We really are.

Gasbag's grab bag, part deux

A further farrago of fascinating factoids and fulminating fatuities. 

Roger Knights points me to this Wikipedia entry on "Consilience": 

In science and history, consilience (also convergence of evidence or concordance of evidence) refers to the principle that evidence from independent, unrelated sources can “converge” to strong conclusions. That is, when multiple sources of evidence are in agreement, the conclusion can be very strong even when none of the individual sources of evidence is very strong on its own. Most established scientific knowledge is supported by a convergence of evidence: if not, the evidence is comparatively weak, and there will not likely be a strong scientific consensus.... [emphasis added] 

Consilience requires the use of independent methods of measurement, meaning that the methods have few shared characteristics. That is, the mechanism by which the measurement is made is different; each method is dependent on an unrelated natural phenomenon....

As a result, when several different methods agree, this is strong evidence that none of the methods are in error and the conclusion is correct. This is because of a greatly reduced likelihood of errors: for a consensus estimate from multiple measurements to be wrong, the errors would have to be similar for all samples and all methods of measurement, which is extremely unlikely. Random errors will tend to cancel out as more measurements are made, due to regression to the mean; systematic errors will be detected by differences between the measurements (and will also tend to cancel out since the direction of the error will still be random). This is how scientific theories reach high confidence – over time, they build up a large degree of evidence which converges on the same conclusion. 

This line of reasoning is often used to support psi and postmortem survival. Though I personally think that some of the evidence for both is very strong even on its own, there's no question that the existence of multiple sources of evidence, derived from various channels of investigation, strengthens the overall case. Yet you'll still find Skeptics who insist that looking at "the big picture" is invalid, and that the only scientifically respectable approach is to pick the evidence apart on a case-by-case basis.

Please note: I am not saying that working on a case-by-case basis is wrong — only that it shouldn't be the exclusive approach. Individual cases should be evaluated in light of the larger pattern that emerges from all the research. For instance, if a medium of a hundred years ago describes the dying process in terms that are remarkably similar to the descriptions given in NDEs today (see Greg Taylor's Stop Worrying ..., pp. 139ff, for an example), the two cases reinforce each other and strengthen the argument for the veridicality of both mediumship and NDEs.  

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The Atlantic is running a story that claims that, statistically speaking, 2015 was the best year in recorded history for the average human being. I assume that the statistics are correct, yet somehow the story doesn't ring true for me. Personally I don't feel as if 2015 was the best year in history. Is this simply because the media tend to focus on violence and disaster (the explanation usually given), or is there a deeper reason? 

I think it's because the "average human being" means someone living in the developing world — which is where a large majority of the human race can still be found. (According to one site, there are 1.2 billion people in developed countries, and 5.9 billion in developing countries.) And for people in the developing world, 2015 may well have the best year so far, at least for those lucky enough not to be living in war-torn hellholes like Libya and Syria. 

Most, if not all, readers of The Atlantic, however, are First Worlders. For us, things may not seem so rosy. The middle class is squeezed and, by some measurements, shrinking. Governments seem unresponsive to our concerns and invested only in catering to powerful lobbies and elitist interests. Our boom-and-bust economies give us no confidence that whatever modest personal wealth we've accumulated will last. Our electorates are increasingly polarized and driven into the arms of extremist candidates on the right and left. Oddball issues like transgender rights for first-graders make headlines. There is a widespread conviction that we are on the decline economically, socially, morally, militarily, and politically, and that the next generation will be worse off than we are. 

In the face of this fin de siècle attitude, The Atlantic's statististics offer cold comfort. Somehow I suspect that a 5th century Roman version of The Atlantic would have hyped A.D. 475 as the best year in history for the average person. And for the vast multitudes of Visigoths and Huns, it may have been. 

Rome fell in 476. 

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Our own sometime commenter Cyrus Kirkpatrick, author of Understanding Life after Death, is interviewed by Michael Tymn on his blog. It's an interesting conversation. 

Cyrus is one of the very few Americans to have visited North Korea. His varied travels, documented on his Facebook page, make fascinating reading. 

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Finally, this dose of holiday cheer: 

Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night!

Hail to the king!

There was a time when I opined frequently on political topics on this blog. Eventually I took pity on my long-suffering readers and stopped talking about politics. Today, however, I’m doing a rare political post.

I justify this ill-conceived departure from the norm by pointing out that, although political, this post is nonpartisan. It’s more of a philosophical rumination, inspired by two essays I read recently, both by a Houston Baptist University history professor, Collin Garbarino. The essays are “Laughing at the Death of Our Republic” and “No, America Is Not Collapsing Like the Roman Empire Did.” 

(Similar ideas, but presented from a more pessimistic perspective, were apparently put forward by F.H. Buckley in a 2014 book, The Once and Future King, reviewed here. I haven't read this book, though I've sent a sample to my Kindle.) 

Garbarino has a provocative take on American history and our current state of affairs, and the more I've thought about it, the more it seems to ring true. In fact, it's one of those points that seem obvious once they are made explicit.

Our original system, a constitutional republic, is dead and gone, he argues. And it has been dead for some time. Does this mean America is going the way of ancient Rome, which started out as a republic and ended up with an imperial system? Garbarino says no: 

We’re not heading for an imperial system because we’ve already worked out an alternative to our dead republic. … We now have an elected monarchy. Sure, we don’t call it that, but that doesn’t change that that’s what we have. …

We didn’t end up with an imperial system (and we won’t) because history isn’t cyclical, and Americans stopped trying to emulate Rome. We found a way to navigate the end of republican government without 60 years of violence [which Rome endured in its civil wars]. Our elected monarchy is actually far superior to Rome’s imperial system. We have a tradition of peaceful transition and a constitutional method for succession, two things that Rome never mastered.

One thing we do have in common with the ancient Roman Empire, however, is that we still pretend that we have a republic. Both America and Rome managed to inaugurate new forms of government without actually changing the constitution. Hundreds of years after Augustus, some Romans still paid lip service to the Republic, even though they recognized that political power rested in the person of the emperor. We do something very similar.

On paper, our American form of government has changed very little over the last 200 years. In reality, our government operates in a manner that would be unrecognizable to the drafters of the Constitution. Every branch of government has gone through a radical change in its relative power, and we didn’t have to rewrite much of anything. …

Forms of government are like a man’s facial hair. We don’t get from clean-shaven to beard overnight, but at some point we’ve got to make a judgment call. I’m looking at what we’ve got now, and it’s pretty hairy. Not that there’s anything wrong with a beard. …

The idea of “Rome” lasted for more than 2,000 years, long outliving any of its particular forms of government. This is the genius of countries like Rome, Britain, and America: Change without acknowledging it. This is true conservatism. Conservatism finds a way to navigate the future without breaking with the past. This genius is why people continue to argue over history. Transition is messier than a clean break. It’s also much more stable, and it’s most stable when no one notices that it’s occurring.

[“No, America Is Not …”]

Note that Garbarino is not at all alarmed by this development. He is actually quite sanguine. For one thing, the transformation has already taken place, and we’ve pretty much gotten used to it, even without realizing it. For another, the American political system has been in a state of evolution from the beginning. Garbarino writes:

I don’t think America is in decline. … On the contrary: America’s relative power in the world is at its height. Of course, one might justly characterize our current geopolitical situation as a worldwide race to the bottom, so perhaps saying America is still on top won’t impress anyone too much. …

I find the conflation of the idea of “America” with any particular form of government, in this case a republic, unhelpful. My stance is that America has persisted under various forms of government. The first happened to be a republic, but those days are long passed [sic].

(“No, America Is Not ...”)

Garbarino traces the origin of an elected monarchy to the Civil War and the administration of Abraham Lincoln. He argues that Lincoln's creation of the IRS set in motion a chain of events resulting in a vast federal bureaucracy that inevitably took power away from the legislative branch. I don't know if Lincoln's administration is the proper starting point or not, but I do think the basic claim is correct – our large, unelected bureaucracy has fundamentally changed the federal government and the relationship of the executive and legislative branches. During the era of the spoils system, when presidents filled nearly all civil service positions with party operatives, the bureaucracy was effectively an extension of the presidency. Today, civil-service protections make it impossible for presidents to stock a whole federal agency with handpicked cronies, but a president still appoints the top people. In many ways, the president and his bureaucracy are the only game in town – and, Garbarino says, the voters know it.

We’ve moved into a period in which everyone expects the president to act as an elected monarch. Few Americans vote—except for a presidential candidate, because the president is seen as being the only person who can fix our problems. Is it any wonder that we invest so much time, money, and emotion in the presidential election cycle?

The typical American—and, indeed, Congress—views the president as having the powers of a monarch. The president himself knows that he has the powers of a monarch. It seems that the only people in America who aren’t convinced of the president’s status as our elected king are four, maybe five, justices on the Supreme Court.

(“Laughing at ...”) 

As Garbarino observes, only lately are we coming to understand that the US has undergone a slow but radical metamorphosis. I would add that for the most part, we understand it imperfectly, through a prism of partisan distortion. When George W. Bush was in office, his critics said he was "shredding the Constitution," abusing his office, signing too many executive orders, etc. Now that Barack Obama is president, his critics are saying the same things about him. From Garbarino’s point of view, both Bush and Obama governed in ways that the founding fathers wouldn't recognize, yet they did so because the system itself has changed. In today’s America, any president is going to behave like an elected monarch, because that is what the modern American president has become.

In short, the American system has evolved from its republican origins, in which the president was decidedly secondary to the Congress, to an elected monarchy in which the Congress plays a considerably reduced role and the president dominates the political scene. Congress, by and large, has been content to surrender its prerogatives to the so-called “imperial presidency," just as the Roman senate did not mind handing off its powers and responsibilities to a succession of emperors and a growing imperial bureaucracy.

In both instances, the context was similar. The Roman senate – paralyzed by infighting and factionalism, weakened by corruption, and out of touch with the average citizen – was increasingly unable to get anything done. The same has been true of our own Congress in modern times. Despite a few periods of congressional activism, the general trend has been for Congress to dither and dawdle while failing in even its most basic duties – to pass a budget, for instance.

Nature abhors a vacuum, and the vacuum of political power left by the decline of the legislative branch has been filled by presidents who use executive orders and the machineries of the federal bureaucracy to get things done. Obama has pushed further than his predecessors, but in doing so, he is simply following the century-long trend of an expansionist executive branch.

If Garbarino is right, the transformation of the US governmental system is a fait accompli. It's not what the founders intended, and there are certainly many opportunities for abuse, but the original republican system wasn't perfect, either, and fostered plenty of abuses of its own. In many ways the elected monarchy with its inefficient but orderly bureaucracy has functioned better than the laissez-faire constitutional republicanism of the 18th and 19th centuries.

I might add that if this is true, maybe we should stop fretting so much about the nettlesome issue of political dynasties. In an elected monarchy, political dynasties are probably what we should expect. The rule of the "elites" in Washington and on Wall Street, in corporate boardrooms and on college campuses, may be equally unavoidable. After all, Imperial Rome was run by a small coterie of wealthy and influential families while the masses of people ignored politics and went about their business, usually unmolested and often quite prosperously.

For years I've sensed this fundamental shift in America, and I’ve hoped for an American Cicero who could revive the ideals of the original constitutional republic. But no Cicero has arisen, and, come to think of it, the historical Cicero succeeded only in slightly delaying the end of the Roman republic. He died a martyr to a lost cause.

Rather than resisting a change that has already largely taken place, it might be better to just go with it. An elected monarchy isn't the kind of America we may have thought we wanted, but it appears to be the America we’ve got. We’ve lived with it this long. Maybe it's time we made our peace with it.

Water baby

Here's an interesting news story about four Utah police officers who say they heard an adult female voice calling for help from an upended and partially submerged car. When they turned over the car, they found the driver, who had apparently been dead for hours, and in the backseat, an eighteen-month-old baby. No one else. 

The baby survived and is reportedly in good condition. 

Naturally, if you read the comments appended to this article, you'll find various skeptics rushing to the conclusion that the driver - the baby's mother - must have actually been alive right up to the last minute (despite the fact that the front part of the car was deeply submerged, meaning she was upside-down in freezing water for 14 hours), or that the cops misheard the babbling river as a voice, or that they are all "lying for Jesus." This stuff is mixed in with bigoted remarks about Utah and Mormons, and the usual snarky asides about the Flying Spaghetti Monster and Sky Daddy.

It's kind of interesting how the Internet lets you see the best and worst of human nature in the very same place. The cops and other rescue workers who braved hypothermia-inducing waters to save the child are obviously good people. The folks who post dumb and gratuitous insults aimed at those same cops (or at those who believe them) are obviously ... well, you know. 

As for what actually happened, my guess is that either the mother's spirit lingered at the scene long enough to impress a telepathic impression on the cops, or the baby's spirit guardian intervened.