The 4th Age of Sand

On April 11, 2015January 8, 2017 By Swarn GillIn Commentary, Philosophy, Pop Culture, Psychology35 Comments

As I have immersed myself more into the world of social media, commenting on articles, the blogosphere there’s a very real attraction to it for me. I like putting ideas out there, I like being social, meeting people I never would have met. Overall I’m very positive about the way we communicate. Douglas Adams in a wonderful speech he gave (transcript here) talked about how humanity has made enormous leaps via, what he calls, the four ages of sand. Sand being made of silicon he outlines the 4 ages as:

1) Using silicon to make glass for the telescope

2) Using silicon to make glass for the microscope

These two allowed us to see the macro and micro universe around us.

3) The silicon chip. Computers with their ability to do many calculations quickly allowed us to model the process of how things work.

4) Silicon for fiber optics in the communication age.

Although of course at the time of the speech we didn’t use satellite as much as we do today, but there are still a lot of computer chips involved in those! The point is that Douglas Adams saw the power of being able to communicate with people remotely as a powerful tool.

Yet when we look at this great age where the world is being connected we tend to get overwhelmed by stories of social media addiction, the loss of time spent in the physical world, face to face communication, and some often harmful interaction.

It is this last one that is on my mind right now. I watched the interview recently with Jon Ronson on The Daily Show and he has a new book where he talks about internet shaming. One of the people he focuses on in his book is Justine Sacco. You may remember her, she was the one who made a joke tweet on her way to South Africa from Heathrow and from only having 170 followers to a landslide of people waiting to lambaste her at the end of her flight. His book looks at the history of shaming and what it means in todays day and age. He wrote a good piece in the New York Times if you don’t want to read the book. It’s a great article, long, but most definitely worth a read.

After years of using digital media for communication there are many challenges to overcome. I think that ultimately when you write things that people are going to read, you have to be a great writer. Without our physical gestures and voice intonation it’s easy for meaning to get lost. It’s easy for a joke to sound serious. It’s easy for well meaning advice or information to sound condescending. It’s easy for sincerity to be taken as sarcasm. But I was thinking that good writers are not so unambiguous and we pick up things like sarcasm and sincerity better. Maybe when we communicate through writing we need to think about how we say it more deeply before we do so. I think part of the illusion lies in the fact that we think we are actually having a conversation and try to type out things like we are, but in fact communicating through writing is not very much like a face to face conversation at all. Justine Sacco’s life was destroyed for making a joke to her few twitter followers, poking fun at white privilege and walked out of a plane into an absolute hellscape of a virtual mob who wanted her to hang. Someone on twitter was even there to take her picture as she walked off the plane.

This story also reminded me of recent events concerning the pizzeria owners who said they wouldn’t cater a gay wedding. A friend of mine linked me an article about how we really don’t benefit from publicly shaming those owners regardless of how discriminatory and prejudiced their views might be. Seeing that those bigots had over $800,000 raised in their name infuriated me and I could feel the anger rise in me and wanted to join the mob of people shaming the for their views. Luckily it occurred to me that being upset and shaming bigots doesn’t really change anything and that it would be better to put goodness into the world instead and decided to set up a fundraising account for an LGBT youth group in Indiana that does a lot of good work in schools and for young members of the LGBT community.

It’s amazing how easily we can succumb to being part of “the mob” through digital media. I’ve been caught up in it and I am sure many who read this have as well. When you reflect on it, it’s an empty feeling though. You get to feel bold for being part of

From http://www.killyourdarlingsjournal.com

a righteous fight, and yet remain anonymous in that sea of virtual people calling out for someone’s blood. This is the other facet of the age of the internet is that posting comments behind the veil of a computer screen, or smart phone screen is that we feel protected and thus we say and do things we wouldn’t normally do. Everybody is familiar with “trolls” and the divisiveness they cause with their comments. In the end best advice really is “don’t feed the trolls”, but someone always does and arguments ensue. I know for me the internet allows me to be bolder than I am perhaps in real life and while sometimes I think it helps me gain some additional confidence in myself, more often I just use the internet as a shield to give compliments and say things I am too shy to say in person. Too often I also find myself assuming a more negative intention in the comments of others because the internet is full of people saying things that I don’t think they would say to your face. It’s kind of like how drinking affects people. Some people become open and honest in a kind way, others become belligerent and mean. For me I feel that it’s something I have improved on and need to keep improving to be the man on the internet that I am in real life.

I am not down on the communication age, I just feel like we’ve invented an important bit of technology that we haven’t figured

out how to use to the best of its ability yet. I think that there are a lot of important ways that the internet can be used that our too valuable to ignore. We can learn about issues all over the world that can foster our love of humanity and can help us see that we do truly live in a global community. Social media was used to organize a revolution in Egypt to overthrow a terrible dictator (sorry Egypt it hasn’t gotten much better), when in the past there would have been no easy way to send the message to everybody simply through a land line. Social media has been used to bring things to the light that would have caused more harm. A video of cop shooting a man in the back, racist chants from a sorority in Oklahoma, a video of a NFL football player knocking out his wife (not really about exposing the football player, but how it helped exposed how the NFL organization tried to cover up evidence they had about the incident) are examples of how the sharing of certain information has value. But I think we owe it to ourselves to try and take ourselves away from the mob mentality. What if Justine Sacco had made her joke to your face. Even if you weren’t clear that it was a joke would have you ran down the halls calling her a racist? You probably would have just removed yourself from her social circle, but you could have also taken her aside and turned it into a teachable moment about why her joke might not be found as funny, or asked follow up questions to understand her intention. Shaming is a terrible thing and how many of us have made jokes or comments we regret? How many times have we been wrong in our attitude or thinking and needed a chance to learn from our mistakes to come out better on the other side? Doesn’t everybody deserve that chance? Is it necessary to traumatize somebody for a few thoughtless words? Let’s instead try turn negatives into positives. Let’s try to teach instead of shame. Let’s try to understand instead of judge. I am no saint in this area, but I’m going to keep trying, because the benefits of this communication age I think are enormous. It is our disconnection from each other that leads to fear and mistrust I believe, and we can know and understand so many more people and issues today than we could 30 years ago and I truly believe that the power of the internet can lead to a new golden age for humanity.

Ideally Though

On March 28, 2015 By Swarn GillIn Musings, Philosophy, Psychology, Science16 Comments

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about a particular issue in this world and I think made an important and worthwhile change of view. It’s not really a complete 180˚ turn, but I am asking questions in a different way, and feel like I am becoming more grounded about the issue. That issue is for a later post, because in trying to understand my change of heart, because I feel like my original stance is not wrong. After some soul searching I’ve come to the conclusion that the problem was that I was being too idealistic and it has lead me to think about ideals, and how we can sometimes get caught up in them and that it’s not always that helpful.

So what is an ideal? We all have them. We’ve all known people that are overly idealistic and while those people can be enjoyable to be around and make for engaging conversation, sometimes such people can appear a little naïve. I may be one of those kinds of people at times. The dictionary defines “ideal” as person or thing regarded as perfect, or a standard of perfection, a principle to be aimed at. I realized that the reason ideals can get us in trouble is because they do involve some personal vision of perfection. I have written about perfection before and how it can be an unhealthy concept since a) we all have different ideas of perfection and b) to my knowledge perfection has never been reached, so do expectations of perfection do us a disservice? I believe at times they can.

If by definition an ideal represents some state of perfection, one that either cannot be reached, or cannot be reached easily or quickly being dogmatic about your ideals can lead to rigidity in thinking, it can also put you in a “future mindset” too easily when problems exist in the here and now. For example you may hold the ideal that war is pointless, unnecessary and we should all live in peace. I love it, and I’m on board. But unfortunately there is war. And while I do believe that we may someday get to a place where we find better ways to resolve conflicts than through war, it’s not clear that will happen anytime soon, and there is always the possibility that war may always exist, despite how obvious alternate solutions might be. So given that there is war, we can’t get caught up in an ideal of world peace that we forget to treat soldiers humanely who have been injured physically and emotionally and give them the medical and psychological treatment they need during, and after their service. Hell even the immutable physical law, the Ideal Gas Law which describes the relationship between pressure, temperature, and volume of a gas doesn’t really exist. The law describes how a gas would behave under ideal conditions. Ideal conditions that while we can get close to we have been unable to reach. So it’s important to remember that ideals are just that, and not in anyway a truth we can find in the present.

There are many fine and lofty ideals out there. It’s easy to just start thinking, I wish the world could just see things my way and it would be a better place, but that isn’t likely to happen. But I don’t think ideals are a waste of time. The part of the definition of an ideal that I like the most is it being something to aim at. Ideals are like far away targets and it’s easy to imagine yourself hitting the target, but instead we should simply see it as a direction to head and not worry so much about whether we get there. Focus on the journey and pay attention to what is actually happening. It could be that solutions in the present don’t necessarily conform to your ideals but they are the right thing to do for the time that you live in.

Headlong

On March 14, 2015 By Swarn GillIn Musings, Parenting, Philosophy, Psychology9 Comments

Well between being a dad and a professor, blogging has taken a backseat. This of course doesn’t stop the ideas from flowing, so I just thought I’d get at least one of them out even though I’m having to wake up at 5:30 am to do it!

My blog post is once again inspired by my son. One of the things my son likes to do is drink, whatever we might be drinking, from our glasses. I find myself enjoying this quite a bit, because it’s clear that he wants to do things like we do. At times he will often try picking up our glasses and try to drink from them, with of course disastrous results, but his drive to be like us is clearly strong. The reason why I enjoy this so much though is because there is something wonderful just being around someone who is clear is striving each day to be more than they are. You might say, well of course babies/children strive to be more than they are, because they have to grow and develop those basic cognitive and locomotive skills. So I know I’m not saying anything groundbreaking, but it made me reflect on a number of things that I think have meaning at any age, and gave me some important reminders as I move forward in life both as an individual and parent.

As I was reflecting on this last night it occurred to me the importance of failure. While, as parents we marvel at our child’s successes I wonder how often we think of their failures. If I really start to think about it I know that every achievement of my

son is built on the back of many more failures. Whether it was a failure sit up, stand up, walk, or clutch an object in his hands, these activities failed numerous times before he was able to master them in any meaningful way. And it occurred to me that if you are not failing at anything right now, you quite simply are not growing. In these early stages of life the failure to success ratio is high. My son is constantly reaching in ways that exceed his grasp, but is undeterred by failure and this is something I find wonderful and inspiring. While he still needs help sipping from a drinking glass because he cannot lift it up to his lips in a controlled way on his own, I know that he will get it. Sometimes I wonder if I slow his progress by helping him though. He’d probably learn a lot faster if I let him fail more often, but of course the amount of spills I’d have to clean would be a drain on my time and resources. It takes away from other things that I could be doing which would be important for parenting or important for myself. And of course in some cases these failures might be detrimental to him as well. We need fluids, and if we are constantly spilling ours then we aren’t getting the sustenance we need. This is, of course, one of the things we must balance in life. Doing an activity that we’ll fail at is an energy cost, and thus we must have energy in excess to afford to fail. Growth implies risk, and risks can be costly. That doesn’t change the fact that without taking risks we tend to stagnate.

Dhyan_box — Sometimes my son even enjoys falling. 🙂

So what deters us from this completely necessary quality of risk? Since risk involves the uses of resources and energy, there are environmental factors that simply put limits on the risks we can take. The beautiful thing about children (and often scary at times) is that they think nothing of the risks they take. No matter how many times he fell trying to walk, or get down from the sofa or bed, he still did it. As we grow and become aware of more things we learn restraint. If I lived in one of many places in Africa where clean drinking water is scarce, one of the things I would make dead sure of is that I didn’t leave a glass of drinking water within in reach of my son, because drinking water is precious and we could ill afford to have any spilled. So the risks we are willing to take or let others take are governed by the energy and resources (or the perceived energy and resources) we have available to us. I think this is something we forget. It is very common in the world to denigrate the poor and criticize them for not lifting themselves out of their poverty. Since risk leads to growth, and risk is at least partly a function of the security of energy and resources in our lives, those that have limited resources simply cannot achieve as much as those of us with privilege can achieve. While there are always remarkable stories of people crossing that boundary, on average a person who starts off with more will always have the potential of achieving more. Therefore we’d be well served to stop judging those in poverty and that they require our compassion to help raise them up. Should I wish to let my son fail at drinking water from a drinking glass I have the resources to supply him with endless amounts of water. It seems that the path to a better society comes from those of us who have an excess in resources finding a way to create an environment for those in need to have some minimum level of security so that they feel safe to take risks.

Our inability to take risks can also be impacted by our memories of failures. There comes a point where feelings of failure can be somewhat traumatic. It can make us not want to try something again. I have postulated, not sure if it’s true, that one of the reasons why babies don’t form a lot of memories is because if they did they might be scared to take risks. This is something that a young child absolutely has to do just to be able to master basic movement and communication skills. My son has fallen hard at times, and after a few minutes he is back trying the same thing again. This short term memory seems a blessing at this age but it won’t last forever. Of course if we reflect on failure we would see that it is teaching us something, and that we probably should worry about failure a lot less than we do. If you’ve tried something a number of times and still failed, well maybe the lesson to be learned is to not do that activity anymore. That in of itself can be a success. Learning about what you can’t do, moves you in a different direction to try things that you have a better chance of succeeding. If energy and resources are finite then there is wisdom in not continuing in an activity once we realize that it is beyond us. This means the only truly detrimental failure is the failure to never try.

dhyan_cutlery — My son, failing to use cutlery in any meaningful way. 🙂

It’s easy once you get to the age of 40 to play it safe. Likely your life is already full of failure and it’s simple to say “enough is enough” and just survive. I was joking yesterday with my wife, given the extremely fast rate my son is figuring out how to use an iPad (and believe me we don’t give him a lot of access) that maybe that’s why kids always have to figure out technology for their parents, because once you have kids it’s easier to stop learning and let them (who learn things much faster and easier than you) do it for you. Ultimately this is not the type of person I want to be. I want to continue to grow, and over the last couple of months I’ve realized there are numerous areas of personal growth that I want to achieve and while I may like myself, to rest on my laurels would also be a mistake. I watch my son attempt tasks that are beyond his abilities and must remind myself that I must never stop trying to push my limits, and to take chances doing things that have a high chance of failure. It’s surprising how cautious we become as we age. It seems that perhaps the real secret to staying young is to maintain at least a shred of fearlessness and at least an ounce of self-confidence that defies what we think we know of ourselves. I must also remember to turn my parental instincts in a way that supports experiences of failure for my son. I’m not saying that I would intentionally cause him to fail, but only to remember that loving my son is not about preventing him from ever failing, but rather allowing him to fail, and stepping in at the right time to help him learn the most from his failures. So smile at your failures. They got you this far, and here’s to hoping you have many more.

More than Words

On January 16, 2015 By Swarn GillIn Commentary, Philosophy, Politics, Psychology5 Comments

The discussion of free speech has once again risen up after the Charlie Hebdo massacre. For some interesting reads please take a look at this article on the Ethics of Free Speech and this article that presents a Muslim’s perspective on the situation. Many of the ideas in these articles are important and so I wanted to throw them out first so that I don’t repeat their points too much. If you’re too lazy to read them (I barely had time to write blog posts anymore so I understand)though I’ll list some important points that are guiding my thoughts right now:

How do we decide what freedom actually means?
From http://bearingdrift.com
The argument for freedom of speech often gets turned into a “Those who want that freedom” and “those that don’t”. This is a false dichotomy because generally the disagreement lies where along a spectrum of “Freedom” we must draw the line on free speech.
Is freedom of speech always a good thing?
Words have power

When the news broke about what happened in France on January 7^th, I have to say my reaction was not one of surprise. Muslim extremists are nothing new, and given the anger that was sparked when Danish cartoonists depicted the prophet Mohammed in their publication, I just wasn’t surprised.

Now this not to say that I didn’t think it was a terrible tragedy. Of course it is. I don’t want anyone to think that my position is that those at Charlie Hebdo got what was coming to them. There is a difference between not being surprised and thinking such an act of violence against them was deserved. There is no question that these Islamic extremists have got it wrong. They don’t understand their faith, they will fail in achieving whatever dream world they want to live in, and they will simply cause more harm to others and themselves with time. I can say that with certainty, in the long run, they will fail to get what they want and it is clear that all good people should and do oppose their aims.

Before looking at Charlie Hebdo let’s take a closer look at this whole cartoon depiction of Mohammed stuff. Perhaps by putting things into context you will understand why I was not shocked to find that this happened. First, we can agree that killing somebody over such a thing as a cartoon, no matter how offensive,

From the South Park Wiki. The picture of Mohamed was available, but I chose to show Buddha instead. I’m okay with that. 🙂

is ridiculous. That being said it is not unreasonable for someone to be offended when their religion is ridiculed. People do it all the time, they just don’t go all the way to killing somebody. I am sure there are many other moderate and peaceful Muslims who were offended by Charlie Hebdo or the Danish cartoons previously. And of course some number close to 100% of them never killed anybody over it. Satire, comedy and comic depictions of religious figures is not new, but it is relatively new. Such things quickly got you killed in Europe not so long ago if you tried to ridicule Christianity or religious leaders. And while I believe the world as a whole, on average, progresses forward in terms of morality and reason, there are pockets of people going in reverse. As an example, I find it interesting that prior to 9/11 there was no outcry about a South Park season 5 episode in which various deities from other religions banded together to save the day. I guess Mohammed was not ridiculed but still a cartoon is a cartoon. This episode was even available after 9/11 for a number of years and has only recently been pulled. I guess it was off the radar for awhile and perhaps South Park Studios didn’t want to take the chance anymore. The point is that the backlash against Islam post 9/11 seems to have had a more polarizing impact on Islam and the west, such that those who wish to do us harm have looked for more reasons to do so. Therefore, it seems to me, those who perpetrated the attack on Charlie Hebdo would have likely found another target had they not been drawing cartoons, but their doing so simply added them to a list of possible targets. Crazy people generally don’t have good reasons to cause such harm, so should we be surprised that in a country with a lot of Islam vs French tension, where a magazine is ridiculing Islam that this simply puts them on the radar of the crazy people? Personally I don’t think so.

Now let’s get back to freedom of speech. We can also agree that it’s important, but just because you have the freedom to say something that doesn’t mean you should. If you’re wife asked you if she looked fat in something, then you would have the freedom to tell her the honest truth, but I think you know how well that will work out for you. Also having freedom doesn’t necessarily mean that there aren’t consequences for exercising that freedom, and law may have very little to do with it. In truth, I have the freedom to go and kill somebody. But there are consequences to that action. Those consequences may simply be a fear of getting caught, more often than not though it is our own moral center that prevents us from doing such a thing. We may even have a good reason to do so, but I also think about what my friends and family would think about me, how I would provide for my child, the times I would miss with my family, etc. We are free to do a lot of things when you think about it, but our choice to act on those freedoms must be weighed against the consequences of our actions.

One of the Charlie Hebdo satirists said “We can’t live in a country without freedom of speech. I prefer to die than to live like a rat” in regards to whether he was

worried about angering Muslim extremists. While I can feel a certain amount of respect for someone who lives by their convictions, I do wonder about the value of that conviction. Of course, the chance of dying from a terrorist attack in the west is extremely small, and perhaps if he knew that there was even a 10% chance of being a target of Muslim extremists, he might not have been so sure of himself. I am also opposed to religious extremism (or really any kind of extremism) but if I am going to have convictions on the matter that are worth dying for, satirical cartoons seem like a strange way for me to take a stand. If we want to defeat extremism, are satirical cartoons helping the situation? I doubt if any extremist has looked at one of their cartoons and said to his fellow crazy Jihadists “Hey guys…you know what…I didn’t get it before but this cartoon has really shown me we’re being ridiculous. Let’s just relax and maybe talk to some more moderate imams about interpreting the scripture in the Koran more carefully”. Furthermore it seems one of the best way to quash Islamic extremists is actually by having most of the Muslims who are more moderate on your side. Doing something that most Muslims find offensive, might not anger them into attacking you, but it doesn’t exactly win their hearts. Therefore if anybody thinks that drawing satirical cartoons of Mohammed is in any way taking a stand against Islamic extremists then you are quite simply wrong. It does nothing but divide people. At best, those who appreciate the cartoons are a group of secular intellectuals who appreciate the wit and who already agree with the points you are making. At worst, those who appreciate the cartoons are bigots wishing to eradicate all Muslims from their country. The point is, such cartoons aren’t helping and are most likely making things worse.

What people seem to forget is that 1) being right isn’t always the most important thing, and that 2) even if you want to be right there are multiple ways to make your point. Richard Dawkins is right about a lot of things, and yet many people, even humanists, atheists, and agnostics think he’s an asshole. In thinking about these cartoons, I was reminded about my confrontation with the gay bashing fundamentalist Christians who came to our campus. I asked the main guy point blank “Even if you are absolutely 100% right do you think that your offending and insulting them is going to convince them to your point of view?” He was sure that they were going to hell and so he felt that what he was doing was the strongest most direct way to get them to change their sinful ways. Anybody else of course can see that such anger and unkindness would never win the hearts of those they intend to save. The only people who are supporting them are those who already agree with them. So even though Islamic extremists are crazy, they don’t understand their faith, they cause harm, and their actions will ultimately cause them to fail to achieve their over arching aim, how we expose the extremists for what they are is just as important. Being martyrs is one of those possibilities, but the freedom to draw cartoons of the prophet Mohamed just seems like a silly way to make that stand.

Freedom of speech is an extremely important one to a free society. Speech has the power to sway. As it sways it can raise the consciousness, inspire, and lift men and women to more. However, speech also has the power to divide, misinform, offend, anger, and mislead. To quote Uncle Ben Parker “With great power, comes great responsibility”. I don’t wish for any government to censor publications like Charlie Hebdo. Taking away freedoms doesn’t help the situation either, and is never an answer to terrorism (i.e. The Patriot Act). Nevertheless, no matter how “in the right” we think we might be, let us also think about how we communicate our message. Freedom of speech is an important one to fight for, but there are many other good things to fight for and so it’s important to not get so lost in one fight that we start to lose the others.

Climate Change for the Masses (Part II)

On December 7, 2014 By Swarn GillIn Commentary, Education, Pop Culture, Psychology, Science3 Comments

Well it would seem that a group blog idea with a weather and climate theme has fallen apart, and so I’ll have to do my blogging about it here instead. Several months ago I began what I hoped would be a 3 part series, themed around the John Oliver’s “Last Week Tonight” Episode on the climate change debate. In my first blog post I wanted to try and investigate what type of people don’t accept the evidence on climate change, based on my own experience in getting into various discussions on the topic with people outside my discipline. In this blog article I’d like to take a look at the actual media portrayal of the problem which was more the central theme of John Oliver’s segment.

If you haven’t watched the clip, John Oliver critiques the media for having one person who accepts the scientific evidence, with one person who denies it, saying that this gives an unfair representation of the scientific consensus on the issue. Over 97% of the scientific literature from over 10,000 scientists across earth and biological sciences have concluded that human induced climate change is a fact, making it appear as though it is a split issue is quite simply dishonest. And this absolutely true, but it is in fact even worse than that.

The 50-50 split looks even more in favor of the deniers when the media is always using the same person to represent the scientific side. If you watch many interviews on the subject you might actually get the picture that it seems to be only one guy who thinks human-induced climate change is real while many other people don’t think it’s happening. If you always saw the same guy “for” an issue and many other people on TV saying they are “against” it would be somewhat natural to think that the “against” side had a better argument. Of course you’d be wrong in thinking that. This is called the “Appeal to Popularity Fallacy” (or ad populum for you Latin Lovers). An extremely common one used nowadays. Of course as it turns out, it is the logic of the arguments and the strength of the evidence that makes for who has taken the correct issue on the stance. Of course there are many biases and fallacies that we naturally gravitate towards because it is in our evolution. Being the outcast in a group didn’t get you very far early in our evolution and the same is in a large part true today. Although generally today, no matter how different you might be, with a large population you are likely to find a group to connect with. But in terms of genetic history being an outcast in a group of social animals who may be relatively isolated from other populations doesn’t really give you anywhere to go, and since survival on your own is more difficult “following the herd” is part of who we are. Of course, in this instance, there is no real punishment for accepting scientific evidence but sometimes I think our wiring doesn’t really care.

The 50-50 perception unbalances even further when you consider who Bill Nye. Now don’t get me wrong. As a scientist, I know he’s

a scientist, and that he has the ability to not only understand the issue, speak intelligently about it, and accept the hard work done by so many scientists to reach the conclusions they have about climate change. But to the public there are a lot of negatives about Bill Nye that would make his credibility more suspect, especially to people who are on the fence or deniers themselves. First of all Bill Nye is not a climate scientist. He is not an expert in the field of climate science and as such this will weaken his credibility as an advocate. In fact Bill Nye is most famous for his use of science concepts for educating children. Climate change is a very adult issue that will require adults in government and voting adults to accept the scientific evidence and put forth appropriate policies to address the issue. Bill Nye is also a celebrity and many people have negative attitudes towards celebrities who get involved in issues that are political. In Canada, David Suzuki is a very famous scientist and naturalist, but is not very knowledgeable about the issue and so while he has tried to be advocate for climate change, he has not done very well when addressing even the most common fallacious criticisms put forth by deniers in a debate format. He was hoping his popularity would help change the minds of people, but in fact it has likely hurt those who might be willing to listen to a well reasoned debate on the subject. So I think Bill Nye may have similar impacts.

Now don’t get me wrong, because I am not convinced that the media is intentionally using Bill Nye for the purposes of misleading others. For them, he is a celebrity and known and will add a few viewers whether people have grown to hate him or love him. He is also an excellent public speaker, and he is also eager to break away from his previous persona as a scientist for children (honestly go back to getting children excited about science, I think it’s too late for congress now!). So what is the solution to making the debate fairer? John Oliver’s suggestion is not a bad one, but of course they are unlikely to get 100 people on the stage for a debate. We nerdy introverted scientists simply need to become better communicators. We need to get involved in educational outreach and scientific discourse at regional, state, and national levels. Since there are literally 1000’s and 1000’s of people researching this field and concluding that man is impacting the climate just as we hone our research and analytical skills we must also hone our communication skills so that we aren’t just contributing through the publication of an article in a scientific journal. And media, you could do a better job of finding actual experts to have on your programs. You could do a better job also by being honest and saying we know this is not even close to a split issue in the scientific community and have more debates about what the best way about addressing the issue is, rather than trying to debate whether it is an issue at all.

If you are interested in learning more about climate science, learn about what the common myths are about climate change and why they are not well reasoned arguments, and be able to investigate climate change science at various levels of complexities I strongly recommend this site called Skeptical Science.

Hero Worship

On November 13, 2014November 14, 2016 By Swarn GillIn Commentary, Philosophy, Psychology15 Comments

I know this post will be very unpopular with some people I know, but I write it not as someone who means to offend, but simply as someone who wrestles with ethical principles all the time and this is a subject I’ve though a lot about. I guess I was inspired to share my feelings about this after reading an article that talked about the dangers of automatically associating heroism with anybody who is in the military. I’ve written about heroes before and how there are a lot of people in this world worthy of being called a hero, but most people don’t know about. In this country it seems that if you’ve joined the military and are deployed you are a hero; plain and simple. In fact usually when someone joins the service they are automatically seen as honorable and brave. Adopting any attitude that is in opposition to glorifying the soldier is seen as treasonous by many. The only narrative we are allowed to accept is one that paints the recruit as someone who nobly has joined to serve their country and defend American freedom (this turns out to not be the reason, most people join the military). To think otherwise, it means you don’t appreciate the fact that soldiers died for your freedom. You are ungrateful and you don’t understand the cost of being free. I’ve always taken offense to this generalization, and it seems to me that many people who say things like this experience nationalism in the same way that the devout experience religion.

It’s not that I don’t think it takes a lot of guts to join the military, knowing that one day you may be placed in a situation in which people are trying to kill you. In the middle of combat it is either kill or be killed and to come out of such a situation alive requires

some pretty good team skills and awareness in an extremely stressful situation. There is certainly something to applaud and be amazed by such people. Many of us perhaps would not be able to face such an extreme situation. The question is, does that quality mean that this is their only defining quality of character? And do we not have the right to complain about the context in which these soldiers are placed to take part in this very dangerous combat? People often criticize us peace-lovers if we don’t support the war, and say we are not supporting the troops. But I can think of no better way of supporting the troops than wanting them home and safe and not fighting in a conflict for which we have no business being part of. If your child wants to do something that could get them killed, for which you don’t think there is any valid reason for them to be doing, if you don’t want them to do that are you being unsupportive? Perhaps you just value their life more. And when you don’t support a war, many consider you unpatriotic. Most of those people have no problem criticizing Obama and his policies, so why is it unpatriotic to criticize a decision to go to war?

Often, of course, these things come down to your point of view. If the act of joining the military and the willingness to put yourself in harm’s way automatically makes you a hero, and a brave and honorable person, then every member of the military anywhere must also have such qualities. It may even include rebel forces, or terrorists. Such people believe in their cause just as much as anybody in the military. In some way this would make war even more horrible if the most brave and honorable of men and women are always being killed, it seems to me a terrible way to solve a problem. The

problem is that we tend not to see just any soldier is honorable, but only the ones that fight for us, our allies, or causes that we agree with. To say that a Nazi soldier was as honorable as any allied soldier would not go over well. And of course in order to justify killing the “enemy” we must dehumanize and make them less than they are. When they kill civilians they are the scum of the earth, and when we do it, it’s an accident in the course of an honorable fight. Was every Nazi a Jew-hating genocidal maniac? That seems unlikely. Many were perhaps simply fighting because they had been recruited, because they wanted to provide for their family, because the country was destitute at the time and thought the fight was a cause that could improve the German standard of living. There are likely many other reasons, but how easy would it be to kill someone if he was no different than you, but just happened to live in a different country?

In Henry V, one of the well-known scenes from the play involves King Henry disguising himself as a common soldier and walking through his troops on the eve of a big battle. His troops are tired, sick and will be outnumbered the following day. At one point the King questions one of his men about whether or not they should trust the king, that

what if his reasons for this fight are unjust and is just leading them all to slaughter. A soldier gets angry at this and says that he fights for King and country and that if the King’s reasons be unjust that that is a crime he will have to answer for when he dies and that it is something for the King’s conscious to deal with, and not the soldiers. This seems to be the ultra-nationalistic mentality that many in this country subscribe to. If there is an afterlife then perhaps this is true, but even if there is some supernatural judge up their making us answer for our crimes, does that morally justify leading men to their slaughter even if their loyalty leads them to be willing to do so (although at least in King Henry’s time the King fought along side his men instead of sitting thousands of miles away)? Just because someone is willing to die for you, should they? Is it not even more morally wrong to take advantage of that loyalty for an unjust cause? It seems that context is important. When it comes to killing shouldn’t we need more than simply, “this is just what our government wants, so we have to do it”? Shouldn’t we make absolutely sure that our cause is just? Shouldn’t we also really make sure that other means of solving conflict aren’t a better option?

For the most part, honor and courage being automatically associated with the military mystifies me for a couple of reasons. First I find it very uncomfortable to surrender my choice about what causes I fight for. Would I have enlisted to fight Nazi’s in WWII. I think that’s likely especially given what they were doing in concentration camps. But would I have happily then gone to Korea 5 years later? Absolutely not. And while I realize on some level a military probably wouldn’t work if we got to pick and choose which conflicts we wanted to fight in, when it comes to pointing a gun and killing somebody else I think I should believe in that cause, not do it because someone else believes in the cause. I want to live a moral life. The Nuremberg trials even set the international legal precedent that “just following orders” cannot be used as a defense for committing atrocities and absolving guilt, but only lessening the sentence. I simply don’t want to be put in a position where I am asked to fight and kill others unless I think it is the best and only course of action. I don’t find any honor in simply killing or dying for someone else’s cause.

Secondly, many people will question your lack of courage when you say you don’t want to be a soldier, or say at least that a soldier has more courage. I’d like to say that I am not afraid of dying for a cause I believe in. Dying is a pretty easy thing to do after all. Many people have done it, and you only have to do it once. What I am afraid of is killing. My grandfather fought in WWII. He didn’t talk about it much and I admired the courage it takes to get through such a terrible conflict in which so many, including his brother, were killed. I never asked him how many people he killed though. He was a good man. It was hard to imagine him killing, and if I were to guess, I think he is the type like many who would have carried the weight of those he killed. Even in a cause he believed in. He would have wondered, “what kind of man was it that I killed? In different circumstances could we not have been friends, shared a shot of scotch whiskey and kept each other laughing all night?” I know such questions would plague me. I know the average person loves his/her family, is kind to his/her neighbors and would help those in need. And perhaps it is come to the mind of many in the military, “Perhaps that soldier’s leaders have taught him/her dehumanize me in the same way I had been taught to dehumanize them.” Maybe they have doubts. I certainly would. Like, what if my bullet misses and hits some civilian or my own comrade? What if we were told to attack the wrong target and it was a school instead of a military hideout? If I choose an action that could end my own life, that is my choice, but ending someone else’s life is another matter altogether. From a psychological point of view, one could easily argue that putting yourself into a situation in which you give up your right to choose the causes you fight for, and are willing to kill people you really don’t have a problem with, can be seen as mentally unsound as opposed to a decision filled with honor and courage.

In the end, I can’t subscribe to the idea that those who join the military are the best example of bravery and honor. There are people in the military who have done terrible things. Rape in the military is a huge issue right now. Where is the honor there? Of course we want our military to be honorable, and there are many who are. But there are also many honorable people in different facets of society. If we are going to celebrate heroism let us not only do it for the glorification of war. There are many people who have courage and face difficulties and adversity everyday. Sometimes it takes more courage to live than to die. Let us at least bestow the label of honor, courage and heroism to wherever it applies and not apply it blindly. Such things prevent us from having honest conversations about important issues concerning conflict, war and violence. I bear no ill will towards soldier, and appreciate the sacrifices that they go through. Particularly because I know many of them did not join the military because they wanted to fight in a war. And maybe I don’t understand or am a coward, but personally I’m glad that we have found better ways to deal with conflicts and that there are a smaller percentage of people dying in wars today than in our past. It gives me hope for the future.

Do you really want to hurt me?

On October 3, 2014October 3, 2014 By Swarn GillIn Musings, Philosophy, Psychology2 Comments

I have always been interested in how the emotions we feel translate into behaviors actions. One of the things I have always wondered about is why feelings of hurt make us want to hurt others. Now I don’t want to over-generalize, but I think all of us, at some point in our lives, have felt hurt to the point that if we didn’t lash out at another person, we have really thought long and hard about it. I am not talking as much about physical pain here, although there certainly is an instinct to obviously fight back at times physically. I am talking more about feelings of hurt at the emotional level. Sometimes we have inflicted pain upon those closest to us and people we love. Such things never lessen the pain, and tend to only make it worse since we are, in general, compassionate beings who know that we’ve inflicted pain upon others. This usually just adds guilt in with the emotional pain we are already experiencing. The question becomes why do we think it, and why do we do it? As usual I don’t really have any answers, but will just explore some possibilities.

While it’s true that perhaps we do end up being strengthened by the hurt we feel, there is a period of time where it doesn’t feel that way.

The first thing that comes to mind is that it is sort of a primitive survival mechanism. If you’ve ever felt really hurt by someone’s actions towards you, you know that it takes a toll on you physically. Our emotions are a product of the release of various hormones and other chemicals in our body, and so a certain emotional state can have a strong effect on our physical systems. Thus we can actually feel like we are in a fight for our life and the only way to win is by defeating the threat that has impacted us so strongly at the emotional level. This can also be done on a larger scale. Governments can (and have) play up threats to one’s existence and way of life, and dehumanize the enemy to rile up many people into an emotional state where they want to lash out at the threat. It seems clear that feeling threatened on an emotional level, by making it feel personal, making you feel fear, can incite one to fight back. The simplest answer is very often the right one, so perhaps feeling hurt simply makes us feel threatened so fighting back feels necessary to our survival.

Of course what it doesn’t explain is why we might inflict pain on those that we care about. When unknown

enemy or someone you don’t really care for who has hurt you or who you believe is hurting you, it almost makes sense to want to hurt them back. But if you’ve ever lashed out at your spouse or partner in anger, at your child (either physically or verbally), it almost seems counter-intuitive that this would ever be a solution to alleviating your own feelings of hurt. Sometimes those that we lash out at, aren’t even the ones that have hurt us, and so it seems even more strange that we should have such behavior. On a more personal level, it seems to me that in my life when I experience a lot of hurt I often feel like I’m in the dark. Perhaps that is not necessarily the best analogy, but what I’m getting at is that the solution for making oneself feel better is not clear. So perhaps that’s why I equate it to being in the dark, because when you are in the dark it is difficult to find a way out. Depending on the depth of the pain we may start to panic and fear sets in, so we get desperate. We want the pain to end, and get out of that darkness so bad that we claw, and scramble, and we try to move quickly. But like any fast movement in the dark we don’t know what we are grabbing at, we don’t know what we are reaching for and we hit all sorts of things along the way, hurting others and ourselves. Flailing in the dark is never going to be best solution over keeping calm and thinking our way out of that dark palce.

Delving deeper I wonder if there isn’t something uniquely human about this quality that goes beyond some

sort of animalistic behavior and is perhaps darker, even if it isn’t necessarily malicious. When I’ve felt really hurt by someone, it’s easy feel like you don’t matter to them. Just like I said it is counter-intuitive to hurt people we care about, so when you feel hurt by someone who cares about you, it’s easy to arrive at the conclusion that they don’t care about you anymore; that they are indifferent. I think apathy is one of the toughest emotions to have to deal with. When you feel like nobody is paying attention to you, it’s easy to get depressed, and more often than not we react in a way that tries to get us noticed. Usually in not the most healthy way either. The feelings of hurt may have us thinking that the world is so indifferent to us that our existence does not matter. Many suicide attempts are simply cries for help from people that do not feel “noticed”. In some way I think we’d rather somebody hated us than were indifferent to us. And so it seems sometimes lashing out at someone may simply be a mechanism for being noticed. If someone is angry at you, it means you matter. It means that they can at least feel some emotion for you even if it is a negative one. To reach that point though it is truly sad, because what we usually want is love and compassion, and when we become so desperate that the opposite becomes the next best thing, perhaps then we truly are in the dark.

The real problem is that I don’t know a good way out of this behavior. There are all sorts of clichés and memes, and self-help books that tell us that harming others is never a bona fide way of alleviating our feelings of hurt, but nevertheless we seem to drift towards hurting others who hurt us. Most of the time we just hurt people in a moment and then we quickly realize what we’ve done and apologize. Sometimes we feel justified in hurting others for the short-term satisfaction it brings, even though it doesn’t end our suffering over the long-term. When I look at war torn countries, where so many people have lost loved ones, and you wonder how can they alleviate the hurt that they feel without continuing a cycle of violence and feelings of hatred? I wonder if this just isn’t a darker part of who we are, and the only thing we can really do for ourselves is to be aware of it, and hope that in the moment we can focus on what will eventually lead to true happiness in the long-term instead of just hurting others, especially those we care about, even if they’ve inflicted pain on us. Maybe they are just as in the dark as we are.

How Our Will Is Not So Free – Part II

On September 4, 2014August 16, 2016 By Swarn GillIn Musings, Philosophy, Psychology, Science13 Comments

In Part I, I hoped to get you into a relaxed frame of mind as you consider the possibility about the existence of free will. That perhaps our subscribing to free will is more trouble than it’s worth and that life can be no less wonderful without it. So here is the way that I like to look at our ability to make choices.

In a previous blog post I talked about the fortunes of life perhaps depending on the choice between Pepsi and Coke, so let’s stick with soda (or pop if you

prefer) to start our little thought experiment. Let’s say you live in a world in which there is only one beverage you know about, and that beverage is Coke. When you are thirsty and you need something to drink, there is no decision to make it is going to be Coke. Free will does not enter into the decision.

Now this is not particularly realistic. So let’s add a choice like Pepsi into the mix. They taste different, but both can quench your thirst. Which one do you choose? Well let’s see what might go into making a decision. You are at the store that sells the only two beverages that are available and which one do you choose? Likely your choice will come down to statistical probability. If you absolutely had no preference, your decision would simply be random. Over the course of your life you would probably have picked Coke 50% of the time and Pepsi 50% of the time, provided you had a choice. Nothing in your life that you have learned has caused you to lean one way or another, there are only two choices, and thus your choice is limited and can be simply equated to flipping a coin.

You might say at this point, wait, I can choose to pick Coke or Pepsi more often. Okay then, but why would you? What particular reason would you have for choosing one over the other? This question is particularly devilish so I’ll get back to it later. As for now, you have no reason to choose one more than another, and so quite simply you wouldn’t; it’s a flip of the coin, which isn’t free will. Generally people don’t do anything without a reason.

Now let’s throw in a reason. Your mother who you revere and think is wonderful always brought you a special souvenir coke when she’d go away somewhere, and so drinking Coke sometimes reminds of that warm feeling. This is an influence that impacts your decision making. All of a sudden your preference for Coke perhaps goes to 60% (40% Pepsi) because when you’re thinking about your mom you’re in a mood for Coke, taking away from it always being a completely random decision. Now since Coke is a little less sweet, perhaps your blood doesn’t react well to too much sugar, a genetic trait running in your family, and you can’t tolerate Pepsi as often and all of a sudden you’re at 75% Coke, 25% Pepsi. Then you find that the makers of Coke are a little more efficient at running their business and are able to have more sales on their product. As someone who is money conscious all of sudden you are buying Coke 85% of the time, Pepsi 15%. A really hot girl or guy is in the Coke commercial – 90%/10%. Finally your Dad is a mean person who beat you as a child and he always drank Pepsi. All of a sudden you are only drinking Coke again. Your choices are a function of the things that influence you.

For every answer there is a question. You’re money conscious, but where does that come from? Perhaps your father despite being abusive was very disciplined with money and so you gained that skill from him. What if you decide that you aren’t going to let your father’s action impact your decisions and

get a Pepsi out of spite. Great, but what would cause you to be so defiant and rebellious. Perhaps your mother showed that trait. Perhaps you were inspired by Martin Luther King, Jr. that you learned about in school. Perhaps you were inspired by the movie Braveheart. There may be many possible influences, the point is that you believe that defiance is a positive way of dealing with such childhood trauma and that idea had to come from somewhere. Many people do not have such boldness. Perhaps that is not a weakness, perhaps they just feel the best way to cope is for them to completely dissociate themselves with their Pepsi drinking dad as way of staying stress free and peaceful. They learned this from a self-help book that they read on letting go of the past.

Now going back to an earlier question, what prevents you from just preferring one drink over another for no reason? People seem to do things for no reason all the time, and I would have to agree. But doing something for the hell of it is also a trait. There are people who will never be like that all their lives. Some people say, I’m just going to be a Coke drinker even though I like both of them well enough, because hey why not, I’m a wild and crazy guy, and I just want to be on team Coke. Where does this spontaneous side come from? An aunt you love and revere whose always taking chances and is a thrill seeker? A friend you went to college with who just loved to be spontaneous? But if your spontaneous next year you might just be on Team Pepsi.

The reasons for our decisions are so varied and complex that such a breakdown for why we make the decision we do is not always clear, but it is clear that we are conditioned by multiple influences over different scales of time to reach those decisions. Your choice of beverage might really be something like this:

Coke 70% – Tastes better, grew up with it, family drank Coke

Trying something new 10% – Your mom always encouraged you to try new things and that variety is important so you aren’t afraid to take a chance when something catches your eye

Dr. Pepper 10% – You also like the taste and it reminds you of your years in grad school when you and your friends used to always take a break from studies and get a Dr. Pepper

RC Cola 5% – They were out of Coke, you wanted a cola and you hate Pepsi

Tolerable Beverages 5% – when your favorite choices aren’t available you can tolerate maybe an Orange Crush, Fanta, or Root Beer because it’s better than any of the other choices you’ve been given.

And then finally you might have a special category of beverage you’d hate and never choose unless you had been in the desert a real long time and had no other choice.

In our minds we think about all the things we have drank and see them all as choices and feel like we are consciously making the choice with our free will, but the truth is that we are conditioned into those choices and if we really thought about it, we usually do get a Coke, and the other beverages are choices but low probability ones.

Can our lives really be predicted so easily? Our decisions already pre-determined? The answer, of course, is “no”, because life is full of unexpected events. Even if everything that occurs is deterministic you are an incredibly small part of everything and cannot follow the chain of events. And perhaps your penchant for trying new things leads you to a beverage you love more than Coke. Perhaps you fall in love with a girl who loves Dr. Pepper and that becomes your preferred drink since you both like it and it’s something you can share.

Life is full of events that we don’t know are coming and it is those intersections that throw us out of our comfort zones and give us new experiences that shift the probabilities and possibilities of choices we can make in any given situation. Whether you are open or closed to new situations also depends on the various things that can influence us as human beings. We are animals born with a unique mixture of genes, in a part of the world we had no choice in, raised by people who we had no choice over, while our senses feed us information every day we exist to a brain that has been conditioned over millions of years to process all that information amazingly well and do its best to help us survive. Yet most things we will never know or understand fully, closing off an entire range of possibilities that we might choose from. And so what if we are not consciously making our choices? We are a complex mixture of nature and nurture and in such a symphony who wants to pick out a single note from a single instrument. Just sit back and enjoy the music.

How Our Will Is Not So Free – Part I

On September 4, 2014April 27, 2016 By Swarn GillIn Musings, Parenting, Philosophy, Psychology, Science8 Comments

For any of you who are foolish enough to read my blog you are used to a lot of rambling. I can’t promise this will be too different, but I would like to be a little formal and have an actual thesis for this post. I have posted my thoughts about free will in respect to religion, but even if one is not religious the idea

that we have free will is extremely pervasive and I think it is ultimately a not necessarily helpful concept to believe in. The choices that we think people have are an illusion and we tend to instead judge others because people do not make choices that we would make. It prevents us from really helping those who are violent, disturbed, hurting, depressed, etc. It has us believe that there are people who are inherently evil allowing us to dehumanize them and cast them aside, when instead they might simply have brain abnormalities, be traumatized, influenced by people as messed up as they are, or simply lost and confused in a world that is beyond them and behave desperately. I think it also acts to separate us from nature and is a great source of human conceit. Free will is not something we ascribe to plants or animals and thus also gives us the illusion that we lie in a place above all else. Whether you believe that the supernatural has imparted us this blessing of greatness or you think that evolution is a pyramid in which humans rest on top, both these notions are ultimately dangerous because they allow us to justify great atrocities against nature as we continue to satisfy our own self-importance.

In the first 8 months of watching my son grow it is clear that free will is not something he was born with. He started out simply crying when he was hurting, uncomfortable or hungry, and sleeping when he was sleepy. Not a lot of free will going on there. As I watch him change, I see him simply become aware of more things. When he first could see our cats, not surprisingly he was curious and wanted to touch them. Now that he’s been outside he asks to go outside (well not in words). Now that he realizes the comfort of being held he asks to be held. He also mimics. He sees us eating something and he wants to eat it. He sees us using a remote, our phones, computers, and he desperately wants to use those too (or rather put them in his mouth).

Before I formally begin my argument for the absence of free will I want to put an excellent quote from an article I read some time ago from the New Yorker which has had a large influence on my thoughts in trying to understand why we are the way we are and where this sense of self comes from that I blogged about some time ago.

“I believe we inherit a great river of knowledge, a flow of patterns coming from many sources. The information that comes from deep in the evolutionary past we call genetics. The information passed along from hundreds of years ago we call culture. The information passed along from decades ago we call family, and the information offered months ago we call education. But it is all information that flows through us. The brain is adapted to the river of knowledge and exists only as a creature in that river. Our thoughts are profoundly molded by this long historic flow, and none of us exists, self-made, in isolation from it.”

The reason I want you to keep this in mind, because not only does it support the argument I am going to make (doesn’t of course make the statement true), but most importantly I want to reveal to you that just because I don’t think we have free will, doesn’t mean that I don’t find life absolutely amazing. The idea expressed in this passage speaks to me in a way I cannot fully express, but I find this idea beautiful. It tells me that we are product of processes that function over many different scales of time. From what we learn each day, to what nature has molded us into over millions of years. We can extend even further and look at the billions of years of evolution which has produced us , and we can go back further to old stars dying and being the seeds for our own sun and solar system which allowed one fortunate planet to even allow life to evolve. So the fact I may not be quite as in control of the process is hardly depressing. In fact it removes a lot of the pressure if anything. I can simply marvel at all that has taken place for me to sit here and write these thoughts out today back to the beginning of time. It is humbling, inspiring, and magnificent.

I shall now let you pause a bit before going on to the next blog post, because going back to the beginning of time is something that requires some deep reflection. 🙂

Returning Your ticket

On August 22, 2014May 21, 2015 By Swarn GillIn Parenting, Philosophy, Psychology, Stories24 Comments

Let’s say you are on a big cruise ship. Over 6,000 men, women, and children are on board. This cruise ship promises to take you to paradise and it’s not a lie either. A place where everybody is happy, nothing bad ever happens, and everybody gets along in love and friendship. Children are laughing and smiling and running around. Nobody

is hungry or hurting. Everybody lives in harmony. There was no charge to even be one of the passengers. You’re on for free and who wouldn’t pass up such an opportunity.

As you are making your way to paradise, the captain announces that due to some unknown structural defects that they need to get rid of about 100 passengers or the boat will sink. Fortunately there are an equal amount of bad criminals who have done some bad things and don’t really deserve paradise on board and the captain knows who they are and asks everybody else to throw those people overboard. Would you still want to be on that boat? Keep in mind that by even looking the other way, you are an accessory. But many people, I think, given the promise of such a wonderful destination they could make it work for their conscience.

Now rewind the scenario and the same announcement comes on and says we need to unload 100 passengers or we all sink, and paradise will never be reached. It’s only 100 people and still some 6,000 people will get to go to paradise. But everybody wants to go so nobody volunteers. People get tense and some people start deciding for themselves who might be bad or good, who might be too old to survive the journey and thus can justify getting rid of them. Would you still want to be on the boat? Again doing nothing to help still makes you an accessory. In this scenario, not that the group who stays must develop some sort of justification for why those people will have to die. Judging them without evidence, making assumptions, perhaps developing a philosophy that gets people to volunteer, convincing the more gullible of passengers that they will get to paradise anyway by making the sacrifice (even though they don’t know that to be the case, no matter how strongly they believe it to be so).

Let’s rewind again except this time the captain announces that his good friend the Grim Reaper will be coming around and taking the lives of 100 people at random. It

could be your child, your friend, your wife. Slowly everybody watches 100 people keel over without knowing why they had to die. Would you still want to be on that boat? If you stayed, what justification would you come up with to be okay with those deaths?

Let’s rewind one more time. Instead of the Grim Reaper, the captain announces that everybody will be restrained while a psychopathic killer, wrought by the same person who made the paradise, will be coming around to kill 100 random people. Having little control over his actions and lack of moral center, he will beat, rape, and torture these people before he kills them. Many or all of these people are innocent. Most importantly some are children. Young children, perhaps even babies. Children in their innocence and purity must be physically and sexually abused in order to reach this paradise. Would you still want to be on the boat? What justification would you invent to be okay with this if you stayed?

In one the most influential books to me was The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky. In that book one of the Brothers Ivan is having a conversation with his younger brother Alyosha in a chapter I believe called “Revolution”. Ivan is an atheist and a collector of news stories around Russia of atrocities committed against children. He questions the religious harmony that Christianity offers (I do not single out Christianity here, only relaying the religion that was used in the book). We are all supposed to follow The Bible and follow its moral teachings. The goal being that we will all come to know God on Earth and secure our place in Heaven afterwards. But we are also supposedly given free will and thus some do not follow. This allows for the possibility of great harm to innocent children: abuse, rape, torture, death (not even counting all the natural/accidental causes that take the lives of children). Ivan claims that if this is the price of harmony then he would like to “respectfully return his ticket” to the Creator.

In reading that passage, I could not help but agree with Ivan. Being a father now only reinforces that idea more. If there is a Creator who is omnipotent and decides what happens to all His creation and that there is a reward of Heaven for those who are good, then I submit that this existence is simply not worth the price given all the suffering that does and has taken place already to get there. There are of course many other atrocities that happen to adults, that make it not worth the price either, but it is especially hard when I think of the harm that comes to children. The logic of a Creator who commands us to act according to His moral guidelines in order to achieve some post material existence paradise at the expense of harm to innocent people, simply does not add up. It’s not enough for me to say that “God works in mysterious ways” or that “no one can know the mind of God”. It’s not enough for me to know that God has taken the innocent up to Heaven either. Because what is the point of this existence if they had to suffer here? And for the life of me I really don’t understand why that can be enough of an explanation for anyone else. I’m open to any and all explanations as to why the tears of a suffering child are worth this paradise?

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Cloak Unfurled

Category: Psychology