Category: Philosophy

Christmas in times of war

On By Swarn GillIn Commentary, Humor, Philosophy, Pop Culture7 Comments

What is this war on Christmas I keep hearing about?  Is it real?  And if so, how will it lead to the downfall of the United States?  My feeling is that both sides of the argument are both a bunch of scrooges, so let’s take a look.

The Ghost of Christmas Past

I am not going to spend a lot of time going into the detail of the origin of Christmas.  And when I say origin I don’t mean the birth of

From BlogSpot.com

Christ.  Scholars agree that he was not born in December.  Using December was classic early Christianity.  A time when many already celebrated the solstice, Christianity took the day to celebrate the birth of Christ to make it appear as though everyone was celebrating it.  A celebration in December goes far back into human history.

Moving closer to the present we see the celebration of St. Nicholas’ day in Early December where gifts are given starts to overtake Christmas as a popular holiday.  Martin Luther, hero of the reformation and part-time door abuser, decided that the celebration of St. Nick be moved to Christmas eve, and even suggested that instead of St. Nick bringing presents it was the Christ Child (ChristKindl).  I find it interesting that Santa has been usurping Christ for some time.  The attempt to have a cherub-like Christ Child deliver gifts didn’t really work.  Unknowingly many North Americans mock Martin Luther’s attempt to keep the focus on Christ by calling Santa, Kris Kringle.

It’s important to remember that historically, wishing someone a Merry Christmas was only done on Christmas day and not in the weeks preceding.

Fast forward to the recent past what was life like in America before this war on Christmas?  Well anybody who has been around long enough can tell you that corporate America and marketing has been taking over Christmas for some time, and this trend has only continued.  The way Black Friday has become so ridiculous in terms of now trumping Thanksgiving is a good example of what I mean.  Jesus Christ and St. Nicholas would be turning over in their grave (or heavenly cloud shelter) knowing that the kindness, compassion, and generosity they tried to live their lives in accordance with has been replaced by the stress and greed.  So if you haven’t noticed Christ disappearing from Christmas slowly over the past 50 years you haven’t been paying attention.

The Ghost of Christmas Present

So we now live in this age of political correctness and people being easily offended.  We also live in a country that has been dominated by

From http://www.dsscorp.com

Christianity for some time and has been used to justify slavery, segregation, preventing interracial couples from marrying, and most recently homosexual couples.  We’ve never had a non-Christian President, nor does one appear to be electable in the near future.  So it’s perhaps not completely out of the question that people might be worried about Christmas being shoved in their face.

That being said, should wishing someone a Merry Christmas really be offensive?  In India, even many Muslims celebrate Diwali (the festival of lights) and wishing people a happy Diwali is not a national debate even though there are certainly a diversity of people in that country who may celebrate different holidays.  As the American population grows it makes sense that businesses should try to not be exclusionary around this time of year.  Hanukah and Kwanza are around this time and you are likely getting time off from work for so this does represent the holiday season.  So if you don’t know exactly who you are addressing as a business why not try to be more inclusive in your marketing and advertising.

As individuals though should we really be that offended if someone wishes us a Merry Christmas and we aren’t Christian?  Should we call the emergency number at Fox News because our favorite department store now says Happy Holidays and not Merry Christmas?  Perhaps I know all the wrong people but any time someone has wished me a Merry Christmas I never got the impression that the subtext was apparently “convert to Christianity you heathen pond scum”.  People seem sort of friendly when they say it and have good intentions.  I am an atheist but I grew up in Canada and my mom celebrated Christmas so we all did.  My memories of Christmas are filled with warmth, togetherness, lots of cookies and chocolates, presents, and decorations.  There wasn’t a lot Christ mentioning at Christmas for me but my parents were charitable people, and we often had wayward international students who couldn’t go home for the holidays at our Christmas dinner.  I’m pretty sure Christ would be pleased at the way we celebrated his day.  One of Jesus’ big things was tolerance.  Perhaps getting easily offended isn’t the best way to keep Christ in Christmas.

And here’s the thing war on Christmasers©, how is your Christmas going to change in anyway?  Is the day going to be less fun?  Are you going to love Jesus less on that day?  Are you going to give or get less presents?  Are you going to have to drink even more now to tell your sister she is too fat and that’s what she gets for getting knocked up when she was 16?  You can still have the best Christmas ever without nativity scenes on your capitol building lawn.  And since it tends to be Fox news and other conservatives carrying the banner of this war on Christmas you might also take a look at your own hypocrisy because you also support corporations, capitalism, intolerance towards minorities and other religions, and turn away from the plight of the poor.  These are some very non-Jesus-like qualities.

Holidays are about relaxing.  This is something we desperately need to do in a society that doesn’t value leisure time in favor of the pursuit of money.  This is a shame because the pursuit of happiness is far more fulfilling.

The Ghost of Christmas Not Yet To Come

So there are two possible futures my dear Scrooges.  One involves many angry atheists and other minorities being wished a Merry

From http://www.andrewbradley.com

Christmas by well meaning people.  The years of offense that these poor souls who have been wished a Merry Christmas endured will lead to aneurisms causing us to marvel at the power of two simple words.  The angry secular battle will win out in the media, business and government.  Everywhere you go there will be signs that say Happy Holidays and you will look up in despair because you know that even though it is the holidays, Jesus has all been forgotten by everybody, except for all the millions upon millions of families who will still be celebrating Christmas in this future which still makes calendars available to the general population.  These will not be happy Christmases though because you won’t get to hear about Christ because whenever you turn on the TV it’s just filled with advertisements, trying to convince you to spend your money on presents you don’t really need by a rotund man with a beard that has got to make it difficult to drink a bowl of soup.  People in need of help around Christmas won’t get it because after all it’s only the holidays and not Christmas.  And since there is no love for Jesus anymore (except for about half of the American population) what is really the point of being nice anybody anymore?  What day is it today?  The 25th?  Oh whatever.

The second choice is to remember that Jesus was a good human regardless about how you feel towards his divinity.  He cared for the poor, showed tolerance towards others, and was kind.  We should be like this all year, but these qualities are worth celebrating at least once a year.  Peace on Earth and good will towards men (and women).  What more can summarize the Christmas spirit better?  What could honor Jesus better if that is what you believe?  Shouldn’t such words be the central tenet of everyone regardless of race or religion?  If Christmas is to have any meaning on the 25th or on any day of the year it is in what you do to make things merry for your fellow human and not just saying the words.

So I wish everyone a Merry Christmas!  Take time to rest.  Spend it with family and loved ones if you have them.  Help people as your time and budget allows.   If you are feeling sad during the holidays, giving is a great way to fill any emptiness you might feel.  Try to spend your time around joyful people, because in this cold and flu season joy is the best contagion worth catching. 🙂

Sincerely,
Jacob Marley

Only the Lonely

On By Swarn GillIn Philosophy, Prose and Poetry, Psychology6 Comments

From childhood’s hour I have not been
As others were; I have not seen
As others saw; I could not bring
My passions from a common spring.
From the same source I have not taken
My sorrow; I could not awaken
My heart to joy at the same tone;
And all I loved, I loved alone.
Then- in my childhood, in the dawn
Of a most stormy life- was drawn
From every depth of good and ill
The mystery which binds me still:
From the torrent, or the fountain,
From the red cliff of the mountain,
From the sun that round me rolled
In its autumn tint of gold,
From the lightning in the sky
As it passed me flying by,
From the thunder and the storm,
And the cloud that took the form
(When the rest of Heaven was blue)
Of a demon in my view.

Alone by Edgar Allen Poe

I wanted to preface this post with one of my favorite poems.  I spend a lot of time thinking about how we interact with people because I love company, I love talking to other people, trying to understand them as I try to also understand myself.  I have a wonderful wife, great friends, and am surrounded by bright and energetic students and colleagues, but an incident recently made me feel alone, and I started contemplating what it means to be lonely, to feel alone.  I’ll understand if this isn’t a fun read during the holiday season! 🙂

Being alone can have two different meanings and I’d like to focus mostly on only one of them.  One can of course be literally alone with nobody else around.  I equate this more as solitude and solitude can be a

From http://www.capuchinfranciscans.org

good thing.  It can be a time of reflection, possibly getting in touch with nature, and can be a very rejuvenating experience.  Being alone however can mean lonely and this is quite different.  Certainly you can be literally alone and feel lonely, but I find that loneliness comes in many shapes and forms and is most strongly felt when one is not literally alone.

When I moved away from home to go to graduate school I didn’t know a soul, and since I didn’t have the money to come down and look for housing I unfortunately lived in the dorms for the first couple of months (a horrendous experience I might add!).  I ate my meals in the cafeteria and University of Oklahoma is a big school.  There were probably about 500 people eating their meal and I would of course find a spot that wasn’t next to anybody and eat my meal.  Now there are some people who might have just sat down next to somebody and started talking, but I’m not that way.  It really hits you that you don’t know anybody and yet you are surrounded by people.  It is a very intense feeling of loneliness.  I would have felt less lonely if the cafeteria was empty.  This of course was compounded by the fact that I had just moved away from home and so when you are feeling very lonely it is easy to think more about the friends and family you’ve left behind.

Of course this feeling of loneliness is something you get used to, to a certain degree.  Being in new social

From guestofaguest.com

situations where you don’t know anyone, can feel awkward especially if you are like me and seek genuine conversation over the normal small talk.  It’s a skill you have to learn to get good at the small talk to get to the better stuff.  I think a lot of introverts are like that, but they just refuse to play the game.  A lot of people think I’m an extrovert, but I just think I’m an introvert who has learned to be more brave with time. 🙂

One of the more intense feelings of loneliness I think occurs when we don’t have someone to be intimate with.  I am not just talking about physical intimacy, although we certainly crave and miss that as well, but just the intimacy of even a close friend; somebody that you can share thoughts and feelings with, and most importantly be yourself around.  This type of loneliness is compounded by the presences of others, especially those we wish to be closer to but are not.  When you’re shy or lack confidence in approaching someone I think we all start to even get down on ourselves thus worsening the situation instead of making changes to improve our situation to feel less lonely.

Loneliness of this kind can lead to all sorts of behavior that can be unhealthy to you and others.  In a desire to get intimacy we may turn to sex as a substitute which gives momentary pleasure but not the intimacy we crave that is longer lasting and ultimately more fulfilling.  We may turn to a group of friends that become “drinking buddies”.  This may feel like fun temporarily, but often those friends aren’t confidants are even people that you can really be yourself around, and at the end of the evening you still come back alone and feel empty again.  We may seek out chat rooms on the internet, and sometimes you can even get to know someone really well, but it’s just no substitute for being in someone’s physical presence.

I have also noticed a type of loneliness that I could best describe as intellectual or behavioral loneliness. A sort of loneliness you feel when it feels like you are the only one who thinks a certain way.  Like being surrounded by a bunch of pro-gun people and after the umpteenth school shooting you are thinking

From http://www.biography.com

maybe we should pass some gun laws, and they say make the teachers wear guns!  Or wondering if you are the only one who thinks that Julia Roberts isn’t that great of an actress!  I know many people who often feel lonely when raised in a certain religion and feel doubts about their beliefs, but feel alone because nobody else seems to be asking the same questions.  I would imagine realizing you’re homosexual and not knowing anybody else who is, has to feel very lonely too in this sense of loneliness I am talking about.  When you feel like you are different from everybody else.  Poe was a pretty depressed guy, but I think this is the type of loneliness he speaks of in his poem and what inspired this post.  This loneliness is both unsettling yet necessary.  I am not sure if I can explain why I think that.  I just do.  Perhaps this is why the poem has captured me.

The most painful feeling of loneliness however comes from the people we love the most when we fight, or a relationship is ending.  When I was having marriage troubles and it seemed like divorce was imminent, since we both live far from our families we had no place to go so we had to live in the same house, sleep in separate rooms.  It was horrible.  I never felt so alone in my life.  Here was somebody I was so close to emotionally, and so close in proximity, but all of a sudden I felt there was a great distance between us.  Someone I loved so much and yet I felt like touching her was inappropriate and maybe even talking to her intimately was inappropriate, it was terrible.   I am sure many have experienced this before, but it’s not something that I would want people to go through.  Because for all the ways of feeling lonely I’ve talked of already this is the only one that I didn’t feel like I learned anything from.  Maybe I should have, but I didn’t.  It just sucked.

My goal in  exploring this topic is the recognition that loneliness is a very shared experience.  We’ve all felt it in its various forms and so what seems sort of cool and interesting to me is that even through loneliness are we together and I take some comfort in that.  I wish you the least amount of loneliness possible, but loneliness is something all people have to bear throughout their lives and I have found it to be an extremely good source of self-esteem to have battled through lonely days towards better days.  It makes you appreciate good company even more. 🙂

Correlation vs. Causation

On By Swarn GillIn Commentary, Education, Philosophy, Politics, Psychology, Science7 Comments

I decided to write a response to one of the many excellent posts written by a fellow blogger.  It became long enough and I thought a worthy enough to be a blog post of it’s own!  If you are interested in the idea of correlation vs. causation you can read his blog here first.

In your last paragraph I was reminded of Dawkins’ argument in the God Delusion when he is talking about miracles.  Since miracles are by definition unique and rare events there is no way to really disprove a divine explanation.  This is of course if the same thing doesn’t keep happening again and again, which if it does, you really don’t have a miracle on your hands anymore.  He uses the example of the one documented miracle in Catholicism in which some 100,000 witness near Fatima, Portugal reported the Sun doing some odd things including zigzagging towards them and crashing to the Earth.  Dawkins argues that in looking for a natural explanation for the event, all of them, including the possibility that all 100,000 people are lying are actually more probable than the laws of physics being thwarted for a group of people in one part of the world (no other people reported seeing anything other than those at the event).  So I think that you are very correct that we the “correlation does not mean causation” argument does not negate a particular postulation for why a correlation exists.   However I would go a step further and say that it is not even an argument in of itself.

It is of course the responsibility of anybody who poses a correlation to provide a reason why such a correlation exists.  Provided you have done that, then the “correlation does not mean causation” response isn’t a logical argument in response to yours.  The person on the other side of the debate must either address why your reasons why are not valid, or must present something else that correlates better and why their reason for x causing y is more probable.  So I think you might be giving a little too much weight to the argument in how much it actually negates a correlation between two variables.

In many areas in science we can say why pretty easily because there are usually physical laws that explain why quite easily, and those things are testable and repeatable.  In social science this may be harder to do.  Especially since it is not always clear what all the variables are.  For instance it is clear that there is a positive correlation between gun deaths (accidental, homicide, and suicides) the amount of guns per capita in a population.  There are plenty of psychological factors of course to consider here on why would a person own a gun or why would someone choose to kill themselves?  There are practical questions like how to we get people to be more responsible about locking up their guns so their kid doesn’t pick it up, how to we make sure that more people remember to store their guns unloaded, how can make guns safer from accidental misfires, and how can we make sure that people who buy again are well trained in how to use it? There are likely even bigger questions like how does income disparity lead to increased crime in general? What are other ways that don’t involve firearms where people can be made safe?  All of these and plenty more are likely part and parcel of explaining gun violence, but that doesn’t change the fact that reducing access to guns would result a lowering of the number of gun deaths.  So making some laws that create a national gun registry, that do better background checks, and limit the type of weapon the general public could buy, would make some sense even though it clearly won’t eliminate gun deaths completely.  If by a counter-argument someone says “correlation does not mean causation” they haven’t actually addressed the argument being made.  They actually have to find an example with all other variables relatively constant between the U.S. and that country, except gun control laws, and show that an opposite correlation exists. i.e. Restrictive gun control laws and increased gun deaths, or high gun ownership and low gun deaths.  And that would be for a country with similar economies, democratic, with a high standard of living, and that doesn’t have mandatory military service in which the high amount of gun ownership isn’t because they keep their piece given to them in the military (Switzerland the example always used here).

So in the classic humorous example that has been around for awhile is that graph between global temperature and the number of pirates.  I can’t just show that graph and say see…look how the number of pirates is impacting global temperature?  I actually have to provide a reason why pirates might impact temperatures.  I can say there is less plundering and razing of towns so the urban heat island effect has increased thus raising global

From Wikipedia.org

temperatures.  Obviously this is a silly argument, but a response of “correlation and causation are different”, while a true statement, does not negate my assertion.  There are many ways to disprove my assertion but pointing out a correlation is not causation does not. Because the truth is, “correlation does not always mean causation” so one has to go past this statement to further argue one’s point.  This is true for many arguments that contain logical fallacies.  You could take the classic argument used against gay marriage.  Well if we let gays marry, pretty soon we’ll have to let people marry their pets.  Well this is of course the slippery slope logical fallacy.  Slippery slope arguments may not be incorrect, but are very often wrong.  So it’s not enough for me to counter your slippery slope argument with “Hey that’s a slippery slope argument”.  I would be quite wrong to think the argument was done, because they could actually be right.  Some events do lead to a chain of events that are far from where things started.  To win the argument I would actually need to argue that there has never been a push for legislation to marry a pet, that if anybody has tried this they were a crazy person, that this is not a psychological drive of human beings as a species, etc.  I could also point to many other marriage related laws or other laws that have not led to a hyperbolic slippery slope situations.

To say that “correlation and causation are not necessarily the same thing” is actually a Straw Man argument (which is fallacious) because the argument assumes a position that you have not taken in the argument.  Correlating variables is a valid method for discovering relationships, and by presenting that correlation, one’s assertion is not that correlation is a valid method, but rather that two variables are related to each other.  And to say two things are correlated doesn’t imply that this is the only important variable, or that even it is the primary or secondary cause of a particular event.  One has simply said there is a relationship and a counter argument must challenge the relationship.  A correlation must be presented along with some sound reasons why there is a correlation, and an argument in response must challenge those reasons.  The art of argumentation isn’t easy and few people can actually argue well. 🙂

The Whole Story

On By Swarn GillIn Commentary, Education, Parenting, Philosophy, Pop Culture, Psychology11 Comments

Who doesn’t love a good story? We see it television, in movies, and in books. We all love good stories told around a campfire, around the dinner table. We love writers and directors and people who can weave a good story together. Are stories just something that purely are for entertainment if they are fiction, and education if they are true? Is there any such thing as a true story (and if there is, is it exciting enough to listen to)? Is there any such thing as a fictional story?

There are plenty of people I’m sure who have addressed this topic, so I don’t think I am coming up with anything new here. The value of stories and storytelling has been on my mind ever since I read Patrick

From kkc.wikia.com

Rothfuss’ two books The Name of the Wind and A Wise Man’s Fear. The main character in that book is from a group of people that are somewhat gypsy like. They live their lives on the road traveling from town to town putting on performances of plays, telling stories, acrobatics, and playing music and singing songs. They are performers. The main plot of the series (which is not finished yet and I’m anxiously awaiting the 3rd and final book in the series) is that the main character is trying to determine the truth behind a traumatic childhood incident (don’t want to give too much away). The source of the traumatic event was something that he heard as a story and thought it was just a myth, something not real, and thus when this myth does seem real he questions his own memory of the event, since he was a child and could possibly have just made a story fit what he witnessed, or did it really happen. As this main character grows and travels he hears more stories from different cultures and different people. Stories are always slightly different because good storytellers exaggerate a bit here and there and of course stories generally change throughout time as they get passed down and pass from region to region. taking on aspects of the culture they move into. In a way the main character is learning about what’s real through what everyone thinks are fictional stories. Taking bits and pieces from all the different stories and putting it together into a narrative that might explain what happened to him as a child. The books represent masterful storytelling themselves, but the author really hits home the value of stories in general. The main character states at one point “There is truth to every story”.

Truer words were never spoken.

Fiction is defined as:

1. a. An imaginative creation or a pretense that does not represent actuality but has been invented.
b. The act of inventing such a creation or pretense.
2. A lie.
3. a. A literary work whose content is produced by the imagination and is not necessarily based on fact.
b. The category of literature comprising works of this kind, including novels and short stories.

Even the most damning definition of fiction here “A lie” can carry with it truth.  If you know someone is lying you might know then that the opposite is true.  You might know that to find truth more investigation is needed.  You might try to understand why I’m lying and learn something about why people lie. I think we need to be mindful that this doesn’t necessarily mean that there still isn’t any truth to be found within the context of our imagination. And I think everybody sort of gets that, but for a while I was heavily into non-fiction because I was like I have so much to learn, and I still do, but I think in my mind I had forgotten sort I also decided to write about this today because of an article I read recently regarding stories and how they impact our view of the world. For instance if we are old stories about violence repeatedly this may skew our view of how prevalent violence is.  The article has many more thought provoking ideas than that, but the gist is that stories shape our lives, because we do search for meaning in every story and when we read only one kind of story all the time, whether it is non-fiction, a news story in the media, or in a movie, our neurons start to forge pathways that make that one kind of story a narrative for our life.  So it seems it is important to actually fill yourself with different types of stories.

I love reading.  My wife and I actually read stories together, with usually me reading and her listening.  I tend to read in a British accent most of the time, because hey it makes the story sound better for me, but I also try to do different voices for different characters.  She likes the way I read, but I sort of wish she would read to me more too, because when we started she was the one that read to me, and it was actually her getting into the reading and doing different voices that made me feel comfortable getting into it. 🙂  She says I’m better at it, and maybe that’s true, but I just hope I haven’t taken something away from her that she enjoyed doing.   I do find value in reading a story out loud, telling it.  It makes you think about the characters more, what their moods and emotions might be.  I sort of find that when I read to myself I pay

Orpheus and Eurydice (from www. maicar.com).

more attention to the non-dialogue part, where as when I read out loud I pay more attention to the dialogue.  It’s a very different experience.  I strongly recommend giving it a try. 🙂  Rothfuss’ books have also made me think that it would be cool to have, instead of a book club, a story club where once a month you meet and tell stories to each other.  I am super excited to read stories to my child that is soon to be in this world, and I hope I can share the appreciation I have for the value of stories. 🙂

It’s not nothing

On By Swarn GillIn Philosophy2 Comments

 

Suddenly 3 chords came together and I had a melody that I thought I would blog about.

The first chord came in a very interesting book by Charles Seife called Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea.  This chord has been playing the longest.

The second chord occurred once while watching a debate on-line about whether religion still had value.  A difficult debate to have to say the least, but in that debate a physicist posited one of life’s larger questions which to be honest I am not sure I had asked before even though I like to think about such things.  “Why is there something rather than nothing?”  This chord was played again just recently by a fellow blogger who asked those in the blogosphere to answer the question “If God created the universe, why did he do it?”  This is like striking the same chord, but in a slightly different key.

The third chord was just now struck after reading a blog post by another blogger who had the statement “You cannot define yourself in the absence of another.”

So now let me try to bring it together if I can.  One of the intriguing thoughts I had from the first chord was how concept of nothing was tied to the concept of infinity.  Mathematics before was tied to geometry.  Things with area and volume and shape. There was no room for zero, nor was their really room for the infinite.  Accepting zero as a number meant you also had to accept infinity because when you divide any number by zero that is what you get (or negative infinity if you want to be picky).  Here we have two things are really the exact opposite of each other: everything and nothing.  I find that absolutely fascinating.  At least in a mathematical sense, one defines the other.

The second chord further made me contemplate nothing.  You might be thinking to yourself “Contemplating nothing Swarn?  You must be popular on the weekends with all that excitement”.  And you might be right with your sarcasm.  Well even if you are wrong with your sarcasm, I do appreciate sarcasm.  Anyway, back to nothing.  So in the answer to the question why is there something instead of nothing, I thought, well if there is just nothing.  Then not only is it not very exciting, there really is nothing to define.  In fact you can’t even define nothing, unless there is something for which to compare it to.  Pure nothingness or non-existence, even in the presence of something can at best be only categorized as such.  There are no measurements to be made or pictures to take of it.  It’s nothingness.

With the 3rd chord the melody began.  I thought about definitions of words.  I thought about any definition you might look up in the dictionary.  Not surprisingly you’ll find other words there to help you understand what one word means. You can look up those words.  But what if words started to disappear from a language?  As this happens our ability to define any one word disappears.  I then imagine 3 words left “cat”, “dog”, and “not”.  Cat – not dog, Dog – not cat.  The word “not” doesn’t get a definition, you just have to learn it contextually. 🙂  Definitions of any word cannot occur in the absence of other words.  More to the point it seems sensible to me that in answer to the question why is there something instead of nothing the answer becomes “there has to be”.  We cannot even know nothing without their being a universe.   Whatever everything might be it’s in the universe.  Or multiple universes I suppose.  And anything that isn’t, is nothing.  Nothing by itself, as already discussed, has no value either.  Nothing and everything are two sides of the same coin.  They define each other.

Now right now you are probably thinking I want to have what he’s smoking, or else “Get a job hippie!” (I have a job thank you! 🙂 ).  So what if there is no reason for everything other than existence had to happen?  And what if, as Douglas Adam said, “Whatever happens, happens”?  What if it’s then all on our shoulders to create purpose?  Maybe that’s the best gift we can give to someone.  The freedom to develop their own purpose in life. With the recognition of course that purposes can change as we do as well as the universe around us.

Vigilance

On By Swarn GillIn Philosophy, Psychology10 Comments

Well I have been absent from the blogosphere for a while thanks to a busy semester, but I guess that just means I have more to say!   The topic I wanted to write about today is sort of a good one to start back blogging about.

It seems, although somewhat subconsciously, that I have been trying to compile a list of what I think are the most important human virtues.  While I think most people could rattle off a list of such qualities, I’ve been trying to pare down the list to the essentials.  It occurred to me that many qualities are somewhat related.  I’ve written about the importance of compassion.  In it I think are many other qualities like empathy, generosity, kindness, etc.   Humility is another one that I think is really important and have blogged about before.  So today I want to talk about what I think is a 3rd very important virtue and that vigilance.  To be clear and add some definition, vigilance, to me, is also the quality of determination and more importantly perseverance.

One of my favorite quotes from a person of history is this quote by Gandhi, “Nearly everything you do is of no importance, but it is important that you do it.”.  At first such a quote might

From http://www.voanews.com

seem kind of depressing, but I do not think this is what Gandhi was saying, and I think that this quote speaks to the importance of vigilance in life.  Life is full of mundane tasks that must be done, not all of them are joyful, nor are they painful, they are just chores that need to be done, often daily; things like brushing your teeth, washing dishes, taking out the garbage, etc.  And it’s not to say that these things might not be joyful for some people too.  There is something nice about the feeling of clean teeth, or a clean kitchen, but even if there isn’t, it is important that these things be done.  Even if you are rich enough to have someone who does a lot of chores, you are likely to still have tasks that need to be done that are sort of mindless.  These tasks are often, most of the things we do in a given day.  So I think Gandhi recognized this aspect of our lives, but also recognized the importance of those actions as being valuable over time, even if they have little immediate impact.  Children for instance need consistency over time as they themselves experience so many new things, a parent who is consistent in their actions and being there for their child is important.  Relationships require trust that demands a certain constancy of character in others that you forge relationships with. Good health and long life requires a lifetime of good choices about hygiene, nutrition, and exercise.  I have often told people that getting a Ph.D. is not as much about how smart you are, but your ability to persevere through a lot of work, hoops, and bureaucracy (I don’t necessarily mean this disparagingly, because for me it was worth, for others I know it was not).  I think it is true that sometimes we even seek this constancy in things that we don’t like.  The saying “Sometimes the enemy you know, is better than the enemy you don’t”, speaks to situations where people are willing to put up with something or somebody that is unpleasant simply because they have become used to it and at least know how to deal with it.

I think it is easy for vigilance to get caught up in the idea of routine, and maybe it sometimes is, but even that is not necessarily a bad thing.  Those with autism depend on routine as a way of making sense of their world, and I don’t think we are all that different.  Most of us need

From http://www.sodahead.com

some sense of routine, because our lives are always in conflict between change which brings uncertainty and those things that we can count on which makes us feel safe.  Routine can sometimes be very helpful when facing adverse moments in life.  Having something to focus on, having something that you feel you need to do, however mundane the task, might be can help us from falling into depression or becoming apathetic.   I can’t speak for all people, but I have observed this being helpful for others and certainly for me when I was going through adversity.

Recently I was in New Orleans for a conference and the keynote speaker for the conference was talking about how her spirituality has helped her and that she feels like God works through her because when she looks at the things she has done, she doesn’t know how she has been able to do it.  She feels like she herself is not capable.  I think it is easy to understand why many people feel that way.  I think for most things we do, we are used to seeing the immediate result of a particular action.  But the quality of being vigilant is one that builds a wisdom and experience over time.  I liken it to a river that erodes to make a canyon.  If you could talk to the river at any one moment in its life it would be unaware of how much it is doing.  Miniscule fragments get washed away every day however.  I likened the speaker’s statement to asking this river a couple hundred thousand years later to look around and see what it has made.  I think the river would be surprised at the deep canyon it has made, since each day it only perceives a little less rock underneath and at its side.  The weathering of rock by the river is a story of vigilance and I think that we can easily fall into the trap of not realizing how great things are possible when we remain vigilant over long periods of time.

I think it’s important to remember that cause and effect occur over various timescales.  Rewards of our labors and actions may often take years to come to fruition.  So, although our actions may seem to be of no importance in the short term, over the long term the benefits can be remarkable.  Keeping this in mind helps me find more value in the mundane, and gives me the courage to push through when life seems difficult.    But like all things in life there is still a balance to be found, so don’t be afraid to make adjustments when life teaches you another lesson.  The extreme consequence of vigilance may be stubbornness and we must also be vigilant about not developing too many bad habits.  😉

Peace all!

Society. Fixed. Done.

On By Swarn GillIn Commentary, Education, Philosophy7 Comments

There is one solution that really solves all our problems.  It’s just two words.  In these two words there is no more hunger, no more war, no more cruelty, or rape.   There is equality amongst gender and races.  People can have guns and don’t have to have taxes imposed on them.  Everybody makes smart decisions about their health, about sex, about when to be a parent, about how to be a parent, and raise their children well.

You probably know people like this, and you know people who advocate it because it’s so obvious and easy.  It’s called Personal Responsibility.  I capitalized it because it’s so important and because it is the answer.  Alright, I’m done blogging.

…hang on…nope…I just remembered something.  We don’t live in a utopian fantasy.

  • You shouldn’t need to have a law that tells you to wear a seat belt or text while driving I know this is important so I drive safely
  • You shouldn’t need a law that forces you to get health insurance or makes you be a responsible employer and take care of your employees by giving them a living wage
  • You shouldn’t need to have laws that force you to hire women and minorities as it should be self evident that gender and race don’t matter and that ultimately it boils down to who is best for the job
  • You shouldn’t need to have gun control laws.  One can be trained how to use a gun and keep it in a safe place away from children
  • You shouldn’t need to impose regulations on corporations.
  • You shouldn’t have taxes imposed on you.  If something is important I’ll be happy to contribute some money to someone who will do what needs to be done.
  • You shouldn’t need to get welfare because you can work.
  • You shouldn’t need money as an incentive to work.
  • You shouldn’t get raped if you are personally responsible about what you wear and how you behave (umm…how about being personally responsible and not raping someone?)

These are just some of the common complaints you hear from people in regards to laws, governance, and “responsible” behavior.  Anyone can see how sensible these statements are, theoretically.  Yet one wonders why indeed do we have laws or talk about imposing such laws and regulations?  If everyone was as awesome as you, who feels so injured to have something imposed on you when you already know you should do it, what’s the point of government sticking its nose in your business? Why is society dictating my behavior when I already know better?  You know your business and conduct yourself responsibly.  Right?

For now I am going to pretend that nobody is willfully ignorant (which is also pretty utopian).  The problem of course is, that personal responsibility is kind of like the nature of God.  Everyone has a different definition of what it means.  If every citizen in the country had the same definition of personal responsibility things might be alright.  Although this in itself would be hard for a big country, in which everybody lives in different regions and by definition the regional disparity requires different needs.  It only takes a handful of farmers to feed a lot of people, yet those farmers are just as important as the whole lot of people they feed.  So the first step would be for all people to accept within a country at the very least that people in all parts of the country have value and we may have to contribute some of our income to them.  This might include roads, education, and protection.  Protection itself can come in the form of a police department, fire department, or military.  One could argue that if everyone was personally responsible the need for a police department kind of goes away.

A personally responsible society however also recognizes their place in the world and in nature, and so realizes that the decisions they make might adversely impact other countries and wants to make sure that it is nice to other countries.  They recognize the value of preserving wildlife and rare species and is responsible about what it hunts and where it builds.  They recognize the true cost, not only in monetary units of drilling, mining, extracting.   This type of responsibility also costs some money because sometimes we might have to do things a little more expensively to preserve ecosystems or protect the environment.  This personally responsible society doesn’t mind.

And accidents do happen.  There are infectious diseases, natural disasters, etc.  Society pays for things in which nobody is to blame.  It is the personally responsible thing to accept that and contribute to help mitigate damage and help rebuild and repair.

Most of the people in this personally responsible society don’t feel too much stress, because the very rich realize that they don’t really need all that money and are quite happy to use their massive wealth to help out the person who doesn’t make too much of his own.  As a successful head of corporation he is extremely happy to contribute more to society because he has a lot of excess.

What a great place to live, but of course it doesn’t exist.

So perhaps the first question we might ask,  “Is everybody capable of this broad set of requirements for personal responsibility?  Of course the answer is no.  Nurture plays a big role in this.  We have belief systems, disparity in education, disparity in resources.  Even if nurture could everywhere be equal, we still have genetic differences.  Some people have physical and mental disorders.  Trauma happens in people’s lives that impact their ability to function at a high capacity.  Even when it’s an accidental event, and not something like murder or rape.  The free market ends some businesses, causing people to lose jobs.  Theoretically new jobs are created, but those might be in some other location.  Another country even.  Also as time goes on we make new discoveries in science and technology.  The industrial revolution has brought about climate change, but it seems unlikely that we started building all these factories knowing the harm it would do in the future.  As we become aware of things, new areas of responsibility become apparent.  So there is going to be a natural evolution towards winners and losers, new problems to deal with as old ones become understood and more cost efficient, and the personally responsible thing to do would be work together to continue fighting that imbalance.  It requires vigilance.

The next question we need to ask is “What can be done to make people more personally responsible?”  There is no quick fix, and there is no one answer.  Education can make us better aware of problems that impact society.  Of course knowledge and wisdom are very different.  In Plato’s famous treatise on love he talked about agape and love of humanity; a brotherly love for all mankind.  We need more of this kind of love, but people fear (and perhaps with good reason) that it comes at the cost of a loss of individualism.  I’m not certain that is completely true, but it might be.  But this love must extend to more than just to our fellow human, but to life itself.  The planet.  Our home.  We must also be humble and lose our conceit.  It may have served us well in our evolutionary past, but now survival is not so difficult when we are working together.

Love for the humanity and the planet, however begins at the individual level.  It begins by showing compassion and love to those in our lives and those we meet.  Helping those who need help and also thinking about how best to help them.  Being personally responsible is a journey within our own lives and does not happen overnight.  It is journey that doesn’t end when you’re 30 or 40 or 50, but continues your entire life.  And it is everyone’s job to be personally responsible but always keeping in mind that some people simply don’t have the ability to contribute as much as you, often through no fault of their own, and when you help raise them up and show sincere concern for their well-being they are likely to reciprocate that generosity.  Finally we must value happiness over wealth.

And even after all that…it’s a struggle.  The great thing is though if we do a better job of keeping these virtues in our heart we will never struggle alone.

Related articles

I’ve Got a Feeling

On By Swarn GillIn Philosophy, Psychology9 Comments

A few years back my wife and I had some trouble in our marriage.  I remember it being rather a shock to me that all of a sudden what seemed like a happy marriage seemed to be falling apart so quickly and was full of such heartache and pain.

But I am not here to talk about that.  It is in the past, and we have rebuilt and things are wonderful with our first child on the way.  What I would like to reflect on though is how feelings translate into actions.  The shock I felt was because I had this incredible amount of love in my heart.  But these feelings did not translate into a behavior that would have qualified me as a great husband.

I am sitting in on a wonderful class right now taught by a colleague in the Psychology Department on campus called Love, Lust and Attachment.  We were discussing in class how we go about measuring relationships.  Ultimately emotions cannot be measured, but behavior can and let me to thinking about why those two things are so often in a disconnect.

A must see documentary that will break your heart. From en.wikipedia.org

All of us have intense emotional experiences.  They can be intense sadness at a story on the news or a documentary; intense feelings of joy as a baby is born; intense anger at a betrayal, intense love for a partner and/or friend, intense fear when frightened by something.  It struck me that these intense emotional experiences have a real physical impact on us, and I began to wonder if this physical impact deludes into believing that it has more of an impact on our actions or behavior than it actually does.  Many people are often moved to tears by a sad story, but few act on that feeling to do something about it.   We may love someone deeply, but does that feeling of love translate into actions that make the other person feel loved?  Does our outrage over a defunct government move all of us to write our representatives?

The motivational speaker finds success in not so much giving us new things to think about, but rather tries to get people to direct their emotions, ideas, and thoughts into actions.  Few emotions in of themselves lead to immediate action without conscious thought.  Things like fear or disgust may be good examples of ones that do, for these emotions from an evolutionary standpoint impact our very survival.   But for the most part it seems that emotions are what motivate us, and yet only a small fraction of the emotions we feel actually lead us to a behavior that is the consequence of that emotion.   Furthermore we may simply lack the understanding of how to effectively behave to show how that emotion is affecting us.  I remember William H. Macy’s character in Magnolia’s words “I really do

From catdangle.com

have love to give, I just don’t know where to put it”.  I think many of us can identify with this character.  Acting on our emotions is often like wandering around in the dark, especially when we haven’t had positive examples in our lives.

Perhaps the only relevant answer in the end is that we live in a world with limits.  While I might be able to feel love for many different women, I only have the time, energy, and resources for a finite amount.  While I may feel deeply passionate about numerous social causes, once again those feelings cannot translate into an equal amount of actions.  There are only so many hours in the day.  We must rest and recharge to function adequately in our daily lives.  Of the many emotions we feel throughout the day we must pick and choose the actions we take.  And sometimes certain tasks are more important in the moment and we must let put intense emotions aside.

When I was young I felt like I was full all this emotion that was going to make me a great person, but I felt that none of it was coming out.  Emotions can be overwhelming and sometimes even paralyzing.  I felt like the real me was buried deep within myself.  I am proud to say that each day I’ve felt like that person was getting closer to the surface.  I am not sure if I’m the person I want to be yet, but I believe it is important to:

1) Let yourself feel what you feel.  Embrace the ones that make you feel good, and forgive yourself for the ones that frighten you or make you feel weak.  All emotions have value.  They teach you about yourself and raise awareness in your conscious mind about things you deem important in your environment.

2) Reflect on those emotions and choose a course of action that is according to your morality.  One that hopefully benefits you and the world around you.

3) Then reflect on the translation of emotion into action so that you can make adjustments if necessary.

Remember, no one is a natural, but we can all try to do more, and become better people.  We are changeable.  Accept it and don’t fight it, because then your emotions will never weigh you down and you will realize that you are learning and not making mistakes.

Skills and Value

On By Swarn GillIn Commentary, Philosophy, Politics, Uncategorized4 Comments

Topics are building up in my head faster than I have time to write them, and so despite the fact that I swore I was going to write about numerous other topics, particularly in the area of psychology a Facebook conversation has led me down a different path.

The conversation was about a McDonalds worker who wanted her $8/hr salary to go up to

From money.cnn.com

the living wage of $15/hr.  Which is still not a terribly high wage.  The conversation that ensued went as you’d expect.  Most people (who are in good jobs and living comfortably) saying that working at McDonalds requires no skill and thus should be paid accordingly.  Or criticizing the person for not doing more with their life and thus have no one but themselves to blame.  One person did make the argument that no wage has kept pace with inflation, which is true, but minimum wage has gone up at an even slower rate.

I made numerous arguments in response, most importantly challenging the assumption that the person had all these choices in their life.   Most of the people reading this blog live in a position of privilege.   And it’s not your fault.  Your parents probably pushed you, help educate you, made you aware of different options for your life, encouraged you to do well in school.  You probably grew up in relatively safe neighborhoods.  You had friends that were similar to you.  You had good schools to go to, with a lot of skilled teachers.  But not all neighborhoods are safe.  Not all parents care enough to encourage your education.

From blog.volunteerspot.com

Not all schools are equal in the quality of education they provide.  Some environments make it easier to fall into a bad crowd.  Not everyone has the freedom to go for further training after they get out of high school.  Maybe they have to work to take care of a sick parent who has massive bills because they couldn’t afford health insurance.  There are a million scenarios that could limit the opportunities one has.

I also made the argument that I did not choose my career path as a meteorology professor because of the money.  It is because I loved it.  I am glad it pays well enough for me to live comfortably.  But should all of a sudden a McDonalds job become available that pays more.  I am not going to jump ship and say, “Yay more money, flipping burgers all day is going to be awesome!”.

An argument was made by someone that garbage men get paid a good wage so they

From nypost.com

could do that instead of working at McDonalds.  Okay true.  But we can’t all be sanitation workers let alone teachers, lawyers and doctors.  It’s also important to remember that at one time sanitation workers didn’t get paid very much.  Thanks to unions though they could organize, strike, and refuse to pick up garbage until they made a decent wage to live by.  Because picking up the trash and removing waste from our streets is actually an important and necessary part of our society.

I think education and teachers are extremely important.  But do I think that makes a job that doesn’t require as much knowledge and skill less important?  Of course not.  There is nothing inherently more valuable about my role in society than someone who picks up the garbage.  In fact someone could argue that picking up the trash is perhaps more important.  When trash was in the streets, things like the bubonic plague happened.  Hygiene and sanitation are extremely important.  So let’s go a step further.  Is there anything more inherently valuable about my job than a restaurant worker?  Arguably we can have a world without restaurants and everybody cooks their own food.  Might  not be a bad world, but that’s not ultimately our world.  People like to go out to eat.  There will always be restaurants.  So restaurants are just as much part of the fabric of society as anything else.  So should the required skill level in any job be what determines the wage.  The sanitation worker, from a skill level is just as demanding as a burger flipper and yet makes more.   Is that right?  I would further argue that an employee earning a living wage at any job has more loyalty to the company and stays longer thus becoming better at their job.  If you’ve had bad service at a McDonalds, maybe it’s because they are constantly having to train new people since the pay is so bad that people leave after a short time.  The money isn’t probably worth the level of abuse they get from customers.

Now there are even more good arguments to be made about a McDonalds worker making a living wage.  They would need less social programs saving the taxpayer money, they can perhaps afford to move to send their kids to a better school to break the cycle of poverty, not to mention they may now have more free time to better themselves or spend with their kids, which also helps break the cycle.  However what concerns me the most is the attitude towards the poor.  One commenter on this thread said that “it serves them right making a low wage for their self-inflicted wounds”.  I was like wow.  As I’ve just argued it is extremely judgmental to assume the wounds are self-inflicted, but basically this person is saying:

“Hey poor person, sucks about the mistakes you made in the past.  You deserve now to suffer the rest of your life because of that”.

How callous is that? I wonder if that person has ever had somebody so unforgiving to their mistakes. And how should the poor person respond?

” Thank a lot Captain Hindsight.  Now that I realize my mistakes I’ll go back in time and fix it.”

Furthermore we can see how materialistic our society is by people who would look down on poor people in such a way.  Because where is the condemnation to the rich owner of

From socialmarketbuzz.com

McDonalds or any corporation?  Why don’t we judge him just as harshly?  Because he has money of course.  And obviously he must be working really really hard in order to make all that money.  This is of course nonsense.  A single mother working two jobs to support her family is most definitely working harder than the CEO of McDonalds. And I doubt that mother is having fancy lunches on an expensive account and playing a round of golf out in the sun with business associates.  But even if they were equal, why is that CEO more valuable than the person working at minimum wage jobs?  The corporation itself made almost $30 billion last year in revenues.  And the CEO’s take home pay is $9 million a year.  Is that CEO that much more valuable than one of his employees?  Is he/she that much more skilled?

And if workers should get a living wage, many argue about how much everything will cost.  But there is a second option.  The company could make less money.  The CEO could make less money.  Is that likely?  Perhaps not, but in the free market there is always somebody who is going to take an advantage of an opportunity and will undercut the competition and take home only 2 million a year instead.  That CEO is still living a better life than 99.99% of the people in this world.  If we want to equate a monetary value to skill, a CEO still makes far beyond what his or her skill warrants.

The Great Pyramids, one of the 7 wonders of the world, was built on the backs of slave labor to entomb the rich and powerful.  When I look at the vast wealth of a few, at the expense of countless millions who can barely meet their daily nutritional needs for themselves and their families, I wonder how much things have really changed.  What’s clear is that by dehumanizing the poor as many do in this country it allows a system to continue that allows the rich to get richer and the poor to get poorer.  So it saddens and sickens me when I hear people idolize wealth and abhor the poor.  If the income gap continues to widen in this country I can tell you that statistically speaking one is more likely to find themselves in a poor man’s shoes.  Perhaps only then will people learn.

Questions

On By Swarn GillIn Philosophy4 Comments

The human mind is amazing.  Think of things you can imagine.  Some are real.  Some are fantastical.  Some are not possible.  Some may be possible.  The range of what we are minds are capable of coming up with is astounding.

From http://www.daviddisalvo.org

Now humans are also curious.  Part of our imagination may be to visualize something and then ask ourselves.  How can I make this dream, this fantasy I have, real?  The fact that we can make any of these dreams real is impressive.  Any inventor though will probably have more failures than successes.

You may be questioning where am I going with this, and you’d be right to question me.  The truth is I don’t exactly know and luckily this is part of the point.

Given what are minds are capable of, and given that only a handful of our dreams ever can become reality, is it possible that we can dream up questions which have no answer?  I can ask a lot of questions that have no answer.  For instance I might ask “When we build a ship capable of traveling across the galaxy how many planets can one visit in a lifetime?”  Of course there are answers that you can give, but how much accuracy or value would such an answer have?  It is first contingent on a device we don’t have, asks us to know the number of planets in the galaxy which is something we don’t know, and we also are uncertain what our lifetimes might be at some future date when this device is available.  Such a question might have value.  If I cared enough about the answer I may devote my life to trying to see out into our galaxy more clearly, or build a faster than light speed spaceship, or perhaps try to increase our life expectancy, so that one day people can see lots of planets potentially.

The question is a loaded one because of all the uncertainties in the question, and it has no precise answer.  There are however grander questions we can ask.  What does God want from us?  There is uncertainty as to God’s existence so the answer becomes difficult.  And even if there was one, most cultures disagree on God’s nature, so trying to determine what God wants becomes rather challenging.

From library.sasaustin.org

But we can get even grander.  What is the meaning of life?   I would respond back with “whose life?” or “how do you define life?”  But let’s go a step further to a related question: Why are we here?  The simplest of all questions.  Not much ambiguity to it all.  Those who might have an answer have no evidence to back it up.  Many would simply say they don’t know.  And answers of course vary from person to person.  Of all the many questions we can ask, perhaps we can answer them all;  partly by answering some smaller questions first before getting to the bigger parent question.  But what if there are some questions like “Why are we here?”  that have no answer?  What if this question is a simply a product of our wonderful minds.  Nevertheless one of our inventions.  We invent machines, concepts, why not questions? And while the question “Why are we here?” seems a natural question to ask,  must every question have an answer?  Maybe our answers are inventions as well. What if the only answer to that question is “We just are”.  That seems quite unsatisfying because “Why” has not been addressed.  Making it not really the answer at all.  Just a truth which we might have to accept.

And if “Why are we here?” really has no answer, can’t existence still be wonderful? Does there have to be some grand plan in order for you to be happy?  Is there no value in a satisfying career, making the world a better place, raising your child to be happy and strong, bringing smiles to the faces of friends and family, giving to those who have less than you?  Maybe it is these smaller questions we should be trying to answer with our lives.  The bigger question has almost no value to the countless millions who live in abject poverty. If you are reading (or writing this blog) you have the privilege in life to ponder this big question more deeply.  Would the answer really change you all that much?  Is the answer preventing you from being a good person?  Do you need an answer to see that love is better than hate?  That peace is better than violence?  That generosity is better than greed?  Would an answer make learning physics, chemistry, or biology meaningless?  Would an answer make creating art, writing, or making music any less enjoyable or meaningful?

The only seems clear is that there are many questions to be asked, many questions that are important, and that we should never stop asking questions. 🙂