Culture

The current infatuation with multiple cultures in America seems enlightened on the surface. However, it is important to bear in mind that cultures often stand in the way of greater human progress. Idolizing a culture without a critical and analytical eye is childishly naive.

I was aghast yesterday as I listened to an NPR quiz show. The guest celebrity was a rap singer who was overtly and unabashedly bragging about his American subculture of violence, robbery and drug abuse. The audience seemed to find this quite humorous. I found it disturbing and symptomatic of a sick society.

Similarly, the recent fascination in America with Islamic cultures seems a natural reaction to being aggressively attacked on September 11th, 2001 by a wealthy Saudi madman and his minions. However, the equivocation of cultures which behead women for adultery and hang young men for being gay to American culture is just plain stupid. Many Americans seem unable to take the critical step to investigate a culture's full spectrum of positive and negative traits. I speculate that this is based in intellectual laziness or a delusion that smiling at everything about a culture will keep people from that culture from creating mayhem.

Human cultural development follows patterns which can be readily discerned by studying history critically and analytically. This implies the use of science, a foreign culture indeed for many contemporary Americans, it seems. Science isn't about being blissfully ignorant. It isn't about denying the unpleasant in hopes that it will go away.

Multiculturalism in America can serve a wonderful purpose to enrich the greater American culture. However, the present approach media and politicians are taking toward multiculturalism is shallow and inane, generally. Blanket acceptance of any culture as "great" or "cool" is counterproductive. Fostering the elements of any culture which advance universal human rights and world peace is common sense. Learning the difference takes time, study and openness to truth.

Intelligence

The human brain has propelled the evolution of our species. The natural selection which led to the development of the frontal lobe has, in some ways, jettisoned our species out of the non-human evolutionary sphere of the planet. I see our species as out of sync with the evolution of other species, which do not have the capability of synthesizing their own environments and their own DNA. Perhaps evolution itself is evolving.

The implications for humans and the planet are becoming glaringly evident, as polar ice caps melt, flooding increases, the quality of the food supply deteriorates and potable water resources become more precious. While many Green advocates focus backward at the swath of environmental destruction our species has left behind, others wisely look to the future. The truly intelligent of our species consider mobilizing our frontal lobes to place us in sync with the planet's natural environment and attributes. Renewable energy, low-carbon footprints, reproductive education, local food production, biological diversity management. These all make sense and provide a hopeful alternative to the impending train wreck of fossil fuel dependency, real estate profiteering, overpopulation and natural-resource exploitation.

The intellectuals in colleges and universities worldwide have been slow to understand their role in all this. Still clinging to traditional academic hierarchies and bureaucracies, based in arcane competition and publishing showmanship, they have seemingly been incapable of mobilizing their considerable resources to focus on the crucial, real issues facing the planet. Instead, they have focused on the politics of change, rather than change itself. In the U.S., this is understandable, since the funding mechanisms of higher education are highly politicized and capitalized.

So, as our species gapes at its self-induced environmental threats, our public preparatory educational systems are at a low point. The price of higher education is excluding many inventive and innovative minds from campuses. The increasingly undereducated, uninformed and mass-media-mesmerized populace rallies against raising taxes, quality testing and detaching student loans from gouging private banks. Those of academic provenance and privilege, who largely populate and control the influential academic environments, climb a few flights higher in their ivory towers for better views of multi-billion-dollar sports complexes and entertainment venues, where they play chess with star athletes and toe-tap to celebrity performers.

I see publicly funded education as a basic human right and a basic human responsibility of those who have children and the whole society. And, I think it is imperative that publicly funded education includes the highest levels of education available in a society. An intelligent society should provide unlimited, quality education to those who qualify for it. An intelligent society should understand that providing this would yield those with the ideas and skills to save the human species from its own follies.

Texting

I recently had an experience which baffled me. An old friend posted a comment on my first essay for The New Humanism, a journal of the Harvard Humanist Chaplaincy. She was good enough to email me to alert me to her dissatisfaction with the comment on retrospection. When I read the comment, I was stunned. It didn't read at all like her, as I have known her for about 25 yrs..

The comment has been removed with her consent. I have processed my initial feelings of disappointment and anger at the glibness of the comment in the context of a journal, which I highly respect as a serious forum for Humanism. The whole experience has made me think quite a bit.

It seems we are all becoming sloppy with our speech in print. That is, with texting and Facebook-ing day in and day out, our communication is becoming too immediate and uninhibited in general. This is one of very few situations which have effected me in this way, but I hear stories quite regularly in media about cyber-bullying and bad communication in new media. More contact, less quality. I feel the pull of it, the challenge to be who I am with one line.

My own style of writing is frequently criticized in on line situations. I have been told I am too formal, too stuffy, cold, too intellectual, too uptight, etc.. I have stopped frequenting chatroom situations because of this and have no intention of embracing Twitter.

There are reasons why I write as I do. I began my schooling with severe dyslexia in a Roman Catholic school in 1955, when Catholic nuns saw dyslexia as a sign of the devil. I spent many hours crying in a closed coat closet at the back of my first grade classroom. This unintentionally Skinnerian method scared me into reading from left to right eventually. I learned to slow down and ignore the mockery of my classmates as I picked through the words through restrained sobs.

Later on, I had two pen pals. One in Australia and one in France. They were wonderfully encouraging tutors. The girl in Australia, who planned to be a nurse, gave me my first compliment as a writer. She wrote that she waited every week for my letters and saved them to read at night before she went to sleep. My French correspondent, who wrote to me to learn English, gave me confidence by allowing me to explain English idioms to him and coach his study of my language. Since I was useless at French, this was a true gift: I learned that I could communicate intelligently with someone in another culture without having to be discouraged by my deficiency in their language.

My pre-medical course in college was grueling for me. It was a bad fit, but my parents urged me on for their sake. In my sophomore year, I desperately wanted to be an English Literature major. I was immature and seventeen. I allowed myself to be talked out of it by my parents. My English Literature professor at the time became quite upset and ignored me for the rest of the time I was at that campus. In a strange way, I took his anger as a compliment.

The years have given birth to a series of personal journals with diary entries, poetry and short stories. I am a writer. I have been since an early age, but I have only been able to say that I am a writer with confidence for the last several years.

Now I find writing is becoming casual speech, and casual speech is corrupting writing, in my opinion.

I know I am definitely not the first 60-year-old who has felt like a stranger on a strange planet. But, I am not happy or comfortable feeling that way. I want to be in tempo with the Zeitgeist. I try to maintain an interest in expanding and changing technologies.

I guess I have found a boundary which I do not wish to cross. 'It's all good' has never been my slogan, because it isn't all good. Some of it is pretty awful. I will continue practicing considered, honest and mindful speech to the best of my ability. Whether by mouth or by keyboard. It is who I want to be and who I continue to try to become.

Education

Education in the US has been corrupted by capitalism. Public education is one victim of this corruption. Quality education is no longer an American civil right. The result is obvious and disastrous. Poverty, violence and crime are the inevitable net effects.

A person who wishes to practice any form of self improvement must be invested in personal education. However, American society is being steered away from valuable educational experiences by corporate interests who wish to capitalize on the dearth of easily accessible public (free) education. Education is being marketed as a commodity, not a process of growth and enlightenment with value of its own.

Professional education has led the way. Endless certifications and specialities have evolved in all forms of human service, education and public service. Initially, the concept of continuing education developed as a method to protect the consumer and taxpayer from inadequately prepared service providers. It has morphed into a bureaucratic industry which exists for its own sake and its own profits and endowments.

I would challenge anyone who would claim that professional services, public services and human services have actually improved as a result of this certification industry's growth and domination of workplaces. The deterioration in public services, human services and public education should be obvious to anyone with an IQ over 100, who can read.

Education for profit is evolving into bad, overpriced or inaccessibly priced education for everyone at a time when easy access to information is at a peak, thanks to the computer. The government has bought into this process hook, line and sinker. The neoconservative and libertarian cheapskates. who do not want to pay taxes for anything but killing people in other countries in the name of Freedom, have succeeded to keep the poor down and the middle class treading the treadmill of re-education and constant new re-certification, geared to salary grades, not knowledge or human understanding.

A nation based on true meritocracy would have free public education for all who qualify throughout the educational spectrum from kindergarten through doctorate.

Education

There is a current debate about the costs of college education in the US. The education industry (yes, it is an industry in the full corporate sense) has worked with government and professional interest groups to degrade public education in favor of private education, which costs a lot of money and makes a lot of money for a lot of people.

The focus of the current debate is the college loan scam, which has become a lucrative business for banks. High interest rates, bankruptcy-free guarantees of full repayment, thanks to bought-off legislators who have supported the gutting of public-financed educational loans over two decades. Another ruinous part of the Reagan legacy.

Education, I believe, ultimately has little to do with a degree from a college. Degrees are tickets to job interviews. Education is something else altogether and usually ensues with effect long after a student gains a degree.

However, shouldn't an intelligent government, self-proclaimed as a democracy, wish to be representative of an intelligent constituency? The quality and quantity of free public schooling in the US are inferior to the quantity and quality of free public schooling in most of the other wealthy world democracies. It is shameful. It is contributing to the corrosion of the quality of American life, and life around the planet.

Meanwhile, those who make over $250,000 per year in the US are wailing at the prospect of paying increased taxes. This group is 1.5% of the US population. And, for the last 8 years they have been calling the fiscal shots for the government of the US. Do you call that democracy? Are you happy with the results?

Part of practice is understanding the world around us. This is called 'study' in Buddhism. Traditionally, when there were very few literate people in society, Buddhist monks carried the burden of literacy and the arts in many cultures, as did Christian monks, imams and rabbis in the West. Today, dedication to a Middle Path entails study of all of society and understanding one's place in it. It entails placing one's steps along the correct path to further personal and human evolution.

Those who begrudge free education of all human beings by refusing to contribute to that cause do not practice. They are consumed with greed and blinded by nearsightedness which comes with addiction to personal pleasure at the expense of the greater society. It is the responsibility of those who do practice to try to show those who are so obsessed with greed the way to a life which can bring greater happiness to all.

Elite

The elite, who by aggression, wealth and/or ancestry lead lives of luxury, are an insulated human minority. Yet, they govern. The Bin Ladens know the Bushes. They are friends. Be conscious of the absurdity of war and diplomacy in a world manipulated for the comfort and amusement of the elite. Modern democracy, which is actually representative Republicanism, in which the people chose leaders from the elite by an easily manipulated election process, is a method propogated by the elite to control the many by offering them the illusion of control of their own lives.

Until the great majority of human beings become conscious of their individual mortality from an early age, through secular and comprehensive education, this pattern of the subjugation of the many to the will of the few will continue.

As a secular humanist with that education and understanding of my mortality and my place on the planet, I attempt to awaken as many individuals as I can. This is part of my practice. Freedom is not a political slogan. Freedom is the liberation from the slavery of self-delusion and self-subjugation to the elite.

Refuge

There is a lot of attention being paid to the subject of immigration in the so-called developed world. Economic refugees, or migrant workers, are claiming a right to cross borders illegally to earn money to support a life based on ignorance and poverty in their home countries. Political refugees in the U.S. are just as likely to be aligned with fascist regimes as with opposition groups seeking social justice. All lines are blurred. Overpopulation makes it impossible for governments to justly consider each case with the compassion it deserves. Borders are porous due to air travel and the sheer numbers of people willing to break immigration laws.

The refuge these people seek is elusive. The lawfulness they subvert by illegally entering a more civilized society is key to maintaining the civility of that society. So, these refugees subvert the quality of the idealized society to which they flee. Rarely do these refugees return to their home countries for the purpose of effecting real social and political change. More often, they attempt to create a microcosm of their root culture within the society which grants them refuge. This too subverts the cultural integrity of the very place which they seek as refuge. After all is said and done, their root culture is what drove them to seek refuge in the first place. The propaganda of corporations which rely on these people for cheap labor would have you believe that this behavior is culturally enhancing by adding to the hyped diversity factor. In reality, alienated, undereducated and impoverished people have very little to give to their environment. They are more focused on getting than giving. They have to be to survive.

The only real refuge from poverty, cruelty and ignorance is education. If developed countries estimated and spent the expense which refugees incur on building and staffing schools in underdeveloped regions of underdeveloped countries, potential refugees could be given the tools to turn their native lands into decent places to live over time. Accepting and enabling refugees to remain ignorant for the purpose of enslaving them for financial gain is not commendable.

For those in developed countries who are in need of refuge, the solution is the same. Education, combined with hard work. I myself was born in a developed country to relatively uneducated and intolerant people. I found refuge in my schooling, though it was extremely difficult for me to overcome learning and cultural disabilities, to which I was born. Running away to become an uneducated and underpaid worker (slave) or a dependent on someone else never occurred to me. I suppose I owe it to my upbringing that I never felt that escape on that level was an option. I stayed in my community, endured violence and derision, worked like a dog, and managed to learn a great deal about life and people, as well as science and literature. But now, at an age when I often need refuge from pain, disease and social discomfort, I can and do rely on my ability to learn, to immerse myself in study and research with a goal of improving my life, despite adversity. That refuge is part of my daily practice.