Tag: morality

Hyena Ethics: When Harming Others Feels Righteous and Pleasing

Posted on by Daniel Gauss

by Daniel Gauss

Free image from Pexels: courtesy Balasz Simon

Metaphorically, if hippo ethics is the impulse to respond to suffering with compassion, hyena ethics is the impulse to enjoy, justify or morally authorize suffering.

Harm toward another person has been morally justified when it is an act of deterrence and this is, in fact, a rationale for legal punishment. By punishing individual wrong doers, we feel we can reduce the degree of harmful behavior in our society as others may be restrained from similar behavior if they know punishment will follow. We feel that limited harm may prevent greater harm, and it is harm inflicted out of necessity, not out of glee.

There is, however, another type of harm which is much darker and more sinister. It is harm we inflict because it gives us a sense of personal satisfaction and even pleasure, and it is often confused with moral action. This type of harm is so commonplace that it is often not questioned or challenged. It is at the core of much unnecessary human suffering on a personal, societal and international scale.

It is the harm we cause because we feel the other “deserves” it purely because the person is different from us, has upset us and/or we simply enjoy the idea of harming them because we no longer see that person as a human being deserving of our respect or kindness.

What makes this act of harm so insidious is that many of us do not even recognize the irrational impulse behind it, because, in part, it is couched in neuro-chemicals that “hide” it from our moral investigation and make it seem unquestioningly right. It is harm which is morally wrong but which feels right to us. We harm others thinking we have every right to, when, upon closer inspection, we do not. We want to hurt the person we consider to be a bad guy, but it turns out that we are the bad guy. Read more »

Sunday, August 23, 2026

A Search for Meaning, A Quest for Purpose

Posted on by Bonnie McCune

by Bonnie McCune

“The world is so full of a number of things, I’m sure we should all be as happy as kings.” —Robert Louis Stevenson

Over what is slowly becoming a lengthy session of being alive, I’ve found this statement to be absolutely true. I’m usually thrilled with the variety and my experiences so far. However, those things the world is full of aren’t necessarily always pleasant. Or desirable. We’re thrust, will we, nil we, into a stew of unknowns.

One of the mixed blessings of our contemporary way of life is the instantaneous nature of communications. We don’t have to search for the status of bad weather and storms near us; we get the news complete with visuals, sounds, quotes and opinions. Ditto for horrid happenings—from deadly crashes to wars to terrorists to epidemics.

On a more personal level, experiences of individuals. Yes, occurrences like falling in love or having a baby can make you euphoric. But the death of a loved one, the loss of a pet, getting fired from a good job does the opposite. We have a euphemism for these: we might call them challenges, not setbacks or evils. They shouldn’t plunge us into desperate thoughts. We should rise above them, learn from them.

This admonition doesn’t usually affect my inner status, which is easy to send into a panic. Several weeks ago, I spent the entire night nagged by the thought that I hadn’t paid my state property tax. Which I hadn’t. But throughout the night, I envisioned the tax man pounding on my door to levy penalty after penalty as the days passed because the state hadn’t deposited my delinquent check. Then I figured a whole line of checks would bounce because my bank account would be overdrawn. I’d have no way to appeal these decisions; it says so right on the tax website. My luck in getting a human to answer an official phone is zero, despite my customary plea to the automated responder to “I want a human, I want to talk to a human.” Read more »

Friday, June 26, 2026

New Troubles In Belfast

Posted on by Barbara Fischkin

by Barbara Fischkin

John Hume, Nobel Prize Laureate
John Hume—who won the Nobel Peace Prize, for his work in Northern Ireland—as I imagine him looking down today from the heavens.

“John Hume would not have tweeted. He would have been on Kinnaird Avenue.” —As stated by Sara Morrison in conversation with Jenny Holland

A twenty-first century version of the Northern Irish “Troubles” erupted this month on Kinnaird Avenue in Belfast.  This was not a continuation of the centuries-long war between Catholics and Protestants. It was about race, not religion. The attacker was a Sudanese immigrant. The victim and his main savior were white men born in Northern Ireland. The attacker brutally stabbed his victim, gouging out an eye. The savior ended the attack with a hurley stick, the Irish version of a baseball bat.

The riots that followed—labeled as anti-immigrant which sounds correct to me, if over simplified— involved masked mobs, weaponized bricks, petrol bombs and the ensuing arson, burnt homes, displacements and similar decibels of the fear that has engulfed Ireland for centuries, albeit with different enemies. And then, of course, as happens everywhere riots occur, the police arrived: The Police Service of Northern Ireland, with its riot squads and water cannons.

This happened between June 8 and 11. On June 13, thousands in search of a happier ending, gathered outside City Hall to condemn racism in Northern Ireland.

The above is what I think happened from reading news reports. And social media. Most not from Belfast, itself.

Northern Ireland has long been a place reported on from afar. My husband and I, as American journalists, moved to Ireland to live in both Dublin and Belfast in 1984, as that sectarian violence—religion-based with many eruptions over centuries—was underway. We went on a grant my husband was given from St. John’s University in New York, pushed by Irish-Americans who felt the current “troubles,” were underreported. Despite knowing this, it was shocking to find out that so many other international foreign correspondents reported on Northern Ireland from London. Or from farther away. A New York Times reporter based in London, described how terrified she was to finally spend an overnight—or perhaps more—in Belfast. This was something my husband and I did regularly. Read more »

Sunday, May 24, 2026

Gandhi and the Move from Micro to Macro-morality

Posted on by Daniel Gauss

by Daniel Gauss

Raj Ghat in New Delhi, India (all photos by Dan Gauss)

Standing at Raj Ghat, the memorial for Gandhi in New Delhi, near where his corpse was cremated, I began to think about a problem I’ve been grappling with for a long time. With all the good, kind-hearted and sincere people in the world, why is the world not becoming a substantially more humane place?

I am surrounded by incredibly sweet people. I’m often deeply moved, and genuinely amazed, by how generous and compassionate they are, and the lengths they go to in order to be helpful. If you were to judge the world solely by these folks, you would think it to be a gentle, caring place. Comedian Patton Oswalt wrote (after the Boston Marathon bombing), in regard to those causing harm in the world, “The good outnumber you, and we always will.” So, then, why are the good people losing?

It’s pretty clear that the world is not a gentle, caring place. There are at least 50 state-based armed conflicts right now, corruption and duplicity thrive, greed runs unquestioned and unchecked and our climate is deteriorating. In the USA our prisons are full, children struggle to read, income inequality is outrageous and people are barely scraping by paycheck to paycheck. We are in another war. Many of our cities are still racially segregated and class divisions cause unjust treatment and disparate life opportunities and outcomes. Our cities are filled with homeless. The news seems like an unending sequence of cruelty and incompetence.

Standing in silence before the eternal flame at Raj Ghat, reflecting on all that this man did, I felt that his determined effort not only to become more humane, but also to challenge the larger systems that produce suffering, provided the beginning of an answer for me.

After visiting Raj Ghat, and wandering through the nearby Gandhi museum, which traces his life from infancy to death, my big theory now involves what might be called “micro-morality” and “macro-morality.” I think most people shoot for and are largely satisfied with micro-morality…politeness, kindness, volunteering, controlling their temper, forgiving, being nice.

Gandhi demonstrated that micro-morality is essential, but not good enough. Read more »

Sunday, May 3, 2026

Sorry Kiddos, We’re Not In Wonderland Anymore. We’re Not Even In Kansas

Posted on by Bonnie McCune

by Bonnie McCune

Much worse. Evidently, we’re in a country that’s gone mad. Bonkers. Off its rockers.

At first, I thought the problem was me. I’ve never felt like I fit in. Even as young as age six, I noticed that I didn’t act or react the way my peers did. Bullying or bragging or doing dangerous stunts held no appeal. By the time I reached the age of reason, which is 12 according to experts, I was accustomed to being the outsider, different, and by college, I prided myself on being unusual.  Many things people took for granted as normal, I thought were weird

It wasn’t until the current leader of this country achieved power again that I realized I’m not the crazy one. We’re inhabiting a completely irrational world. Perhaps it’s always been that way, and I simply was too naïve or slow to realize it.  Evidently, we live in a country where its leader can openly mock other religions, leaders, and countries with impunity.  He feels no hesitation in making fun of people with handicaps or who don’t agree with him. He delivers mind-blowing threats with nary a blink.

Is there anything more unreal than a nation in which the leader has been found guilty of lying under oath, stealing/theft, and numerous other charges without a twitch from a number of authorities. Donald Trump has been adjudged liable, or indicted in numerous criminal and civil cases covering a wide range of legal violations, including falsifying business records, mishandling classified documents, sexual abuse, defamation, and attempting to overturn the 2020 presidential election.

All with complete impunity. Read more »

Tuesday, April 21, 2026

Compassion and Responsibility, the Moral Architecture of the Mind

Posted on by Herbert Harris

by Herbert Harris

Adam Smith

Why should we care about each other? Is it disguised self-interest? Is altruism a “selfish gene” that gives the species a survival advantage? Is responsibility an illusion?

Economist Adam Smith took on these questions at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. Better known for his foundational economic theories, Smith is remembered as one of the patron saints of the modern free market. Milton Friedman famously idolized him by wearing neckties featuring Smith’s image. But it is very hard to imagine Smith being pleased with today’s “utility monster” economy. This is because Smith’s other foundational contribution was a moral philosophy that placed sympathy at the center of our moral lives.

Smith’s approach drew from David Hume, who argued that we can’t derive moral truths from simple statements of fact. There is always a leap from talking about what is to saying what ought to be. Moral statements were seen as matters of feeling rather than facts. Smith used this starting point to construct a theory of moral sentiment grounded in the natural sympathy we feel for our fellow human beings. Could mere feelings ground a sturdy, compelling moral system? Philosophers have long sought alternative foundations, but the barrier between is and ought is formidable.

A strong contender having a recent resurgence is virtue ethics. Traditionally associated with Aristotle, it views moral life as a product of virtuous character. What is a virtuous character, and how do you get one? For centuries, there were no solid answers. The recent resurgence of interest had a number of champions, including Philippa Foot, who argued that the virtues can be grounded in the biology of what it means for a human being to flourish. A naturalistic foundation for moral philosophy seemed a promising new approach, but psychology and neuroscience have been generally indifferent to concepts like normativity or flourishing, which are essentially “oughts.”  However, recent developments in computational neuroscience may offer points of alignment between the brain’s predictive architecture and the language of moral philosophy. Read more »

Monday, February 9, 2026

Jackasses in Jackboots: When Ice Met Minnesota Nice

Posted on by Mark Harvey

by Mark Harvey

ICE Agent, Photo by Betto Rodrigues

The biggest hazard on my one trip to Minneapolis was being invited to too many family picnics and possibly dying from an overdose of mayonnaise. You have to go to Minnesota to really experience what’s known in the vernacular as Minnesota Nice. The term springs from the sincere desire those northern people have that you’ll take a second helping of bratwurst and potato salad, then get home safely, and call your host or your family when you do. It’s kind of wonderful and kind of smothering, akin to having one too many comforters on your bed.

So I don’t think too many of us were expecting Minnesota to be our modern-day Gettysburg, when all those nice people came out onto the streets to fight Trump’s reviled brand of fascism. Minnesota was largely out of my news feed until these past few weeks when the jackbooted thugs from ICE began to tear apart the famously neighborly city of Minneapolis. Occasionally I’d hear about a brutal cold front coming down from the arctic or an exceptional year for the Vikings, but there just weren’t that many sensational stories coming down from the Land-O-Lakes.

Before Trump and Kristi Noem sent their band of thugs up to Minnesota, the people there were busy carrying on what appeared to be, on the whole, enviable lives. Statistics never tell the whole story, but when it comes to quality of life, Minnesota consistently ranks in the top five US States based on metrics like poverty levels, health care, safety, education, and fiscal stability. Its consistently high safety ranking—factors like crime rates, quality of hospitals, quality of roads, and speed of emergency medical services—certainly took a blow when the masked goons dispatched to “make cities safe again,” showed up and wiped their boots on the Constitution.

We all saw the grotesque murders of Renee Good, a young mother, and Alex Pretti, a young ICU nurse, by trigger-happy ICE agents just weeks apart from each other. Even with all the other violence going on in the world—Ukraine, Gaza, and the rest—those murders were hard to watch. Whether it was the stuffed animals in Good’s car or the mournful version of Taps played as co-workers wheeled Pretti’s coffin down the hall of the Vets’ Hospital where he worked, there were poignant emblems and imagery reminding us that those two never should have been shot dead. Read more »

Wednesday, December 17, 2025

Inferior Men: Donald Trump and the I Ching

Posted on by Mark Harvey

by Mark Harvey

The dark power at first held so high a place that it could wound all who were on the side of good and of the light. But in the end it perishes of its own darkness… —I Ching, #36, Ming

Ji Chang (King Wen)

Years ago, someone gave me a copy of the I Ching, Book of Changes, translated by Richard Wilhelm. It’s a heavy little brick, more than 700 pages, and bound with a bright yellow cover. When I received the gift, I looked at it skeptically and never expected to read it. To my surprise, it’s been with me ever since, I’ve read it dozens of times, and the spine of the book is sadly broken from too many readings.

I grew up in a family with fairly skeptical parents and some very skeptical siblings. I vividly remember asking my parents if Santa Claus was real at an age when parents should definitely not disillusion a child of that belief. My parents looked at each other with pained expressions and then, too honest to lie about it, tried to let me down gently. So nothing in my formative years prepared me to like the I Ching.

Not all I Chings are equal, and there are some pretty flimsy versions out there. There’s even an app called I Ching Lite. Of the English versions, the Wilhelm/Baynes translation is one of the most respected.

The I Ching is said to be almost 3,000 years old and originated in China’s Zhou Dynasty. The structure consists of six stacked lines (called hexagrams), each either broken or unbroken. You’ll remember from your high school math that if you have two binary options (broken or unbroken) on six lines, you end up with 64 possible combinations. And that’s what the I Ching looks like: 64 hexagrams, each with its own special meaning. Read more »

Sunday, December 7, 2025

Gramscian Hegemony and American Justice: The Myth of Individual Moral Blame

Posted on by Daniel Gauss

by Daniel Gauss

Antonio Gramsci’s theory of hegemony helps explain how the power structure of modern liberal-democratic societies maintains authority without relying on overt force. Many definitions of hegemony point out that it creates “common sense,” the assumptions a society accepts as natural and right.

It works by getting inside our heads and convincing us of concepts that would not hold up under rigorous investigation. Our criminal justice system is built on such taken-for-granted principles, many of which go unchallenged despite producing deeply inhumane consequences.

Crime, for example, is assumed to be a personal “moral failing” rather than a systemic problem. Why some people (mostly poor and marginalized) fail morally is not understood or explained. Instead of understanding crime as a product of poverty, racial segregation, inequality and limited opportunity, our system treats it as evidence of bad individual character or individual moral flaws, basically recycling old theological ideas while ignoring more than a century of psychology and sociology.

The judicial system still draws from an outdated worldview, uninformed by social science, that assumes the validity of an unquestioned social hierarchy, based on inequality of opportunity, and shifts responsibility onto individuals who are often living in trying and corrosive conditions. This amounts to a form of blaming the victim instead of accepting social and economic responsibility for others. Read more »

Sunday, June 15, 2025

Being Good After Hegel and Nietzsche

Posted on by Christopher Horner

by Chris Horner

What does it mean to live a Good Life in the secular west? Good can mean more than one thing, of course: apart from moral good – doing the right or ‘good’ thing, there is the idea of ‘good’ as flourishing, being happy, fulfilled. The latter matters to us a lot, judging by all the self-help books, YouTube influencers, Rules for Life and so on. For very many lucky enough not to have to worry about poverty or war there still seems a grinding anxiety about how to achieve a happy life. That life seems to be Elsewhere. But why? Some would argue that the angst is due a loss of a shared way of life, one grounded in a conception of human purpose. So, we get nihilism and sense of anomie. Yet lost wallets are returned, and courtesy is still exhibited in everyday situations. If this is moral anarchy, it is not as chaotic as one might expect. Nevertheless. I think something has changed for moderns.

With the decline of an Authority often associated with the Christian church in the West, many people experience the question of what one should do as a burden. As an unlamented Paternal Authority wanes, anxiety about happiness and fulfilment takes its place. The new Superego command is to enjoy oneself, be the best one can be, stay fit, be loved, and be attractive. Consequently, we turn to an army of experts and coaches eager to provide us with ‘rules for living’. And the appetite for moral judgment hasn’t left us either: yet more rules about what one ought to say or not say (rather than action that might change anything).

Modernity—however we define it—follows the Enlightenment. Kant described Enlightenment as the end of tutelage and the accession to maturity, with the responsibilities that come with freedom. Freedom is understood as the end of the tyranny of princes and prelates, the chance to fulfil one’s desires. However, greater knowledge of the self leads to greater doubts about those desires, and the causes of Desire itself. The  autonomy promised by Enlightenment seems compromised from the start. While Nietzsche, along with Freud, is regularly cited as the key figure in this creeping sense that the subject isn’t master in their own house, Hegel foreshadows both. For Hegel, too, there are no simple, undivided identities: we are divided subjects. Read more »

Monday, January 13, 2025

Hard Times and The Forgotten Man: Remembering the 1930s

Posted on by Mark Harvey

by Mark Harvey

Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed—
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.
—Langston Hughes

Dust Bowl, Oklahoma

The years from 1930 to 1945 were some of the most trying times in American history. Our forebears suffered close to ten years of The Great Depression and then, with next to no pause, were thrust into five years of World War II. It’s no wonder that so many men and women of that generation who survived those struggles came away with a quiet stoicism and other-worldly courage. I have a nostalgia for a time I never saw because I knew many of the people who were shaped by those times, and I miss them.

George Orwell said, “Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.” That’s one affliction I don’t suffer from. I consider the generation that weathered The Great Depression and World War II to be, for the most part, a cut above any generation since. I don’t think it was necessarily their innate character, but rather their mettle shaped by the age.

Having read a number of letters written to the White House during The Great Depression (from a wonderful collection in Down and Out in the Great Depression: Letters from the Forgotten Man by Robert S. McElvaine), I know that the times led to much bitterness and suffering. How could it not? But a tender humility and reserve also runs through much of the correspondence. Many of the writers address the president or first lady as if they were intimate family who might somehow wrangle them a job or free them from their desperate situation. One thirty-one-year-old woman expecting a baby writes,

Dear Mrs. Roosevelt: I know you are overburdened with requests for help and if my plea cannot be recognized, I’ll understand it is because you have so many others, all of them worthy…. We thought surely our dreams of a family could come true. Then the work ended and like “The best laid plans of mice and men” our hopes were crushed again.

A widow with a fourteen-year-old son writes to Eleanor Roosevelt asking if she has a spare coat to get through the winter and even offers to pay for postage if the first lady will send her one. A woman with seven children and just sixty-five cents to her name writes to Franklin Roosevelt asking for help to feed children too proud to beg for lunch.

In reading these letters, it’s clear that many of the writers truly believed Eleanor or Franklin would actually send them a winter coat or give them a job. Read more »

Monday, April 8, 2024

Third Places and American Libraries

Posted on by Mark Harvey

by Mark Harvey

Don’t join the book burners. Don’t think you are going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they ever existed. Don’t be afraid to go in your library and read every book…  —President Dwight Eisenhower, 1953

Andrew Carnegie

The other day I stopped in at one of those coworking spaces to see if it would be worth joining in an effort to increase my productivity. Productivity, in my case, is a fancy word to describe getting my taxes done on time, answering a few emails, staying atop some small businesses, and doing a little writing. I’m not exactly a threat to mainland China.

Unfortunately the place I visited had all the charm of a gulag in far east Russia, with poor lighting, and about four pale characters staring at their computer screens as if they could see the eternal void in the universe and had a longing to visit. No thanks.

It did get me thinking about “third places,” and libraries in particular. I believe the term, third place, was coined by the writer Ray Oldenburg in his book The Great Good Place. First places are our homes, second places are where we work, and third places are where we go to get relief from the first and second places. They include churches, libraries, pubs, cafes, parks, gyms, and clubs.

My second place is a beautiful ranch in Colorado, so I have little to complain about, but when it comes to the close work of being on a computer, I really value third places. Scholars have described Oldenburg’s third place as having eight features including neutrality, leveling qualities, accommodation, a low profile, and a sense of home. In short, it’s a place that is welcoming, not fancy, free of social hierarchies, free of dues, and imparts no obligation to be there. That perfectly describes American libraries, one of our greatest institutions. Read more »

Monday, March 4, 2024

On War: A St. Patrick’s Day Offering

Posted on by Barbara Fischkin

by Barbara Fischkin

My 1985 photo of the priest who helped me to sneak into Armagh Jail, Father Raymond Murray: Jail chaplain, with former inmate Catherine Moore.

I arrived in Ireland in the mid-1980s to cover the seemingly intractable bloody conflict colloquially known as “The Troubles.” I studied up on materiel: Armalite rifles, homemade fertilizer bombs, the plastic bullets protestors ducked. And on the glossary of local politics: Loyalists were mostly Protestants who wanted to remain British citizens; Republicans were mostly Catholics who yearned for a united Irish nation. I interviewed people on both sides of the conflict but more women than men. I wanted to make their voices heard in the United States.

I was taken by one issue that had already created international headlines—the strip searches of female political prisoners.

But the stories I read did not quote the women who were being strip searched. They quoted politicians and  sociologists instead of the women themselves. The stories said the policy was routine, part of the process of getting inmates out of civilian clothes and into prisoner uniforms. Not true. This was actually a well-conceived British military psychological operation to humiliate the women, a technique intended to “break” the women.

I decided that the only way to write about this was to getting inside the 100-year-old stone walls of Her Majesty’s Prison Armagh—and to talk to the women directly.

But to get in, even to speak to only one woman, I had to lie. I could not say I was a reporter. I had to say I was a cousin, visiting from the states. The Northern Ireland Office, run by dutiful Protestant colonists controlled by the British, kept the press out. Perpetrators of abuse do not like publicity. Now, as St. Patrick’s Day approaches, and two larger wars rage—wars that unlike the one in Ireland threaten us all—my mind keeps racing back to what is better known as “Armagh Jail.” Read more »

Monday, July 31, 2023

At Great Remove: The Bureau of Indian Affairs

Posted on by Mark Harvey

by Mark Harvey

I would go home to eat, but I could not make myself eat much; and my father and mother thought that I was sick yet; but I was not. I was only homesick for the place where I had been. –Black Elk

Chief Sitting Bull

According to Lakota Indians, in early June of 1876, the great tribal chief Sitting Bull performed a sun dance in which he cut 100 pieces of flesh from his arms as an offering to his creator and then danced for a day and a half. He danced until he was exhausted from the dancing and the loss of blood and then fell into a vision of the coming battle with General George Custer at Little Big Horn. Moved by his vision, thousands of Cheyenne, Lakota, and Arapahoe warriors attacked Custer’s 7th Cavalry Regiment on June 25th, 1876, and overwhelmingly defeated it in what is today southeastern Montana. In the battle, Custer, two of his brothers, and a nephew were killed along with 265 other soldiers.

The battle was inevitable. The Bureau of Indian Affairs had insisted that the Lakota remove to a reservation by January 31, 1876, to accommodate white miners and settlers in the area. The Indians hated the idea of living on a reservation and giving up their life of hunting on the great plains so they refused to move to the reservation. Custer was sent by General Alfred Terry to pursue Sitting Bull’s people from the south and push them north to what would be a sort of ambush. But the brash young Custer far underestimated the number of Indians gathered near the Powder River and also their ferocious resolve to fight his regiment. Read more »

Monday, July 24, 2023

My Grandfather’s Ghost

Posted on by Barbara Fischkin

by Barbara Fischkin

My father David Fischkin and my mother Ida Siegel Fischkin at their wedding at the Rockaway Mansion, Livonia Avenue, Brooklyn, New York. February 23, 1936

Again, I thought about changing my name.

I dreamed about publishing essays under a new byline. I tried out pseudonyms for my next book. I wrote down alternate names, said them out loud. A name change would make introductions easier. Now, when I extend my hand and say “Fischkin,” people look at me funny, as if I might be holding live bait.

I can live with Barbara. As a first name, it is dated. But Barbara will come back in style. First names do. I was almost named Benita. Benita Fischkin. Think of that. My mother loved that name, until a friend said a cute nickname for me could be Mussa—close enough to Mussolini.

That was all my mother Ida Siegel Fischkin had to hear. She was a passionate supporter of the State of Israel, a lifetime Hadassah member and a child survivor of an antisemitic pogrom. Benita went down the drain. As a little girl, bored with Barbara—too easy to spell—I asked my mother if she had ever wanted to name me something else.

“Benita,” she said. My mother hid little from me.

Wow, I thought, wishing she had gone through with it. A name like that dripped with fame, fortune and beauty.

Benita as a baby name for a newborn girl must have been making the rounds of pregnant mothers in our Brooklyn neighborhood, circa 1954. Very odd since this was less than a decade after World War II. My guess: When it came to villains, Hitler was the main event. I bet no one ever said: “For a boy, how about Adolph?” Read more »

Monday, March 13, 2023

This, This Most Confused World

Posted on by Mark Harvey

by Mark Harvey

Opinion has caused more trouble on this little earth than plagues or earthquakes. —Voltaire (1694 – 1778)

Turkish province of Kahramanmaras after the earthquake.

About the only good thing that comes out of huge natural disasters is that it brings otherwise feuding and even warring countries together in humanitarian rescue efforts. Immediately after the recent earthquake in Turkey and Syria, rescue teams from all over the world amassed huge amounts of food, medicine, clothing, and rescue equipment, boarded airplanes and trucks and swarmed into the two heavily damaged countries to do some genuine, unadulterated good.

An 80-member world-class search and rescue team plus four search dogs with world-class noses from the UK hit the ground in Gaziantep, Turkey, barely two days after the quake. The team arrived with specialized seismic listening devices, concrete cutting equipment, and shoring materials. The crew is self-sufficient and brought its own food, water, shelter, communication, and sanitation gear.

An 80-member rescue team from China, also with four dogs, arrived in Turkey the same day as the UK team. The Chinese came with 20 tons of medical and communications equipment. Read more »

Monday, January 16, 2023

Restoring Eden: Our Long Journey to Recover American Lands

Posted on by Mark Harvey

by Mark Harvey

American Beavers (Castor Canadensis)

If you submitted yourself to the idiotic torture over last week’s battle to elect the speaker of the house for the 118th Congress, then you deserve a break from that idiocy and the chance to think about something else. American politics at the national level make toxic uranium dumps seem like tea gardens. The petulance and pettiness of many of our politicians make daycare centers seem like bastions of diplomatic protocol.

But there are things to think about in this great land that are a salve and rampart against the most cretinous of our congresspersons: the many efforts of Americans to steward lands back to health.

Let’s not mince words: in a few hundred years on this continent, we have trashed millions of acres and imperiled thousands of species. From Seattle to Tampa, from Galveston to Fargo, and even in parts of Alaska, what we’re facing is the aftermath of a resource-eating orgy. Now we face the unpleasant hangover and picking up all the broken bottles. But some Americans with pluck, eternal optimism, can-do, and deep allegiance to the land are doing it. Read more »

Monday, December 20, 2021

America’s Futile War on Drugs

Posted on by Mark Harvey

by Mark Harvey

Sometimes our American ideas about social problems and how to fix them are downright medieval, ineffective, and harmful. And even when our methods are ineffective and harmful, we are likely to stick to them if there is some moralistic taint to the issue. We are the children of Puritans, those refugees who came to America in the 17th century to escape King Charles.

To say Puritans had strong beliefs is as understated as saying Genghis Khan enjoyed a little pillaging and conquering out on the Asian steppes. The Puritans were believers like no believers before them. And in general, they weren’t a lot of fun. As if religious services aren’t serious enough, the Puritans eliminated choral music and musical instruments from their churches because those touches were a little too much like the papistry of the Catholic Church. Puritans in Massachusetts even banned Christmas for a spell as they thought the holiday had a pagan origin and therefore embraced idolatry.

The journalist H.L. Menken put it well when he said, “Puritanism is the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.”

So when you forge a nation with some strong puritan roots along with some marvelous practicality, such as the United States, sometimes you get pretty mixed up results. The prime example is our colossally counter-productive “War on Drugs,” now 50 years in the works. Read more »

Monday, July 13, 2020

Moral Relativism and the Concrete Universal

Posted on by Christopher Horner

by Chris Horner

Photograph taken by author
                                                                                                                                    

There are some notions, ideas and arguments, that no matter how often they are exposed as fallacious, are rebutted and refuted, seem to recur again and again. Moral relativism is one of them.[1] Put simply, this is the view that one’s moral judgments are delimited by the culture or period in which one lives, so that it is impossible to make meaningful moral judgments about other times and places, since they had or have criteria for what is good or bad that may be quite different from one’s own. It seems to be stuck on ‘repeat’. The perennial nature of such ideas ought itself to make us pause before we repeat the ritual of refutation. We need to ask, what, exactly, the attraction is  – what is it about the idea that seems to make it so irresistibly attractive and inevitable? Rather than an error to be corrected by better reasoning, it looks more like a symptom. Moral relativism never seems to go away, no matter how often philosophers try to swat it. The same is true of a related notion – ethical subjectivism (the view that  moral judgments rest on personal taste, or emotions and nothing more). So rather than just show for the umpteenth time why the arguments for moral relativism are flawed, it would be better to go on to ask why they have this quality of eternal recurrence. There is an insight at the bottom of the idea that has got twisted, and its ‘symptomatic’ aspect has something to do with the nature of alienation in modern society. Read more »

Monday, April 20, 2020

Politics and the Beautiful Soul

Posted on by Christopher Horner

by Christopher Horner

If you want to deserve Hell, you need only stay in bed. The world is iniquity; if you accept it, you are an accomplice, if you change it you are an executioner. —Jean-Paul Sartre

We need to learn, or re-learn, how to build comradeship and solidarity instead of doing capital’s work for it by condemning and abusing each other. —Mark Fisher

Hell is other people —Jean Paul Sartre

Politics is difficult. Doing politics, that is. The boring meetings, the leafleting, the marching in the wind and rain (if you can leave your house), the arguments, the confrontations and the blank incomprehension, the ad hominem attacks and much more. But the largest problem by far is other people. Some are the unconvinced, some are the apathetic and then there are the hostile, those you are opposing. More problematic, though, can be those who are supposed to be on your side. They can be difficult to endure. How many of them would you want to meet if you had the choice? Too often, in my experience, it is only a few, as the sheer hard work of trying to arrive at something like a collective will wears everyone out and tries everyone’s patience. Not all politics is like that of course:  there can be the sense of comradeship from working with others one wouldn’t otherwise get to know. The experience of making a difference and working for a meaningful goal can be a wonderful thing.

This is hard to sustain though, when we experience defeat and frustration. The bitter moment in which one realises that for now (for how long?) the other side has the day. This has been a recent and bitter experience for the UK  Labour Party supporters of Jeremy Corbyn in 2019, and of the many in the USA who marched and canvassed for Bernie Sanders in 2020, only to see him him stopped in the primaries. And quite apart from one’s official enemies, there have been real battles within those parties. With failure comes the temptation to have done, to walk away, either into inaction or in order find another, and inevitably smaller, group of like-minded activists. This latter has been a reliable feature of left politics for as long as anyone can remember: an addiction to splitting.  After all, if the others aren’t part of the solution, they must be part of the problem, right? Read more »