How Things Really Are

(As Far As I Can Tell)

And Why(As Nearly As I Can Discern Without Too Much Guesswork)

A Millennial Worldviewby S. A. Joyce

File name: document.docCreated: 6 January 2012 @ 00:27

Modified: 15 January 2017 @ 12:23Pages: 192Words: 0

Characters: 0File size: 595968

Contents

Preface...........................................................................................................................................5Introduction...................................................................................................................................6

Historical Context.............................................................................................................11

The Path Ahead................................................................................................................13

Part I: The Underpinnings of Human Knowledge.........................................................................15Chapter 1: Knowledge and Certainty.......................................................................................16

Chapter 2: Reality, Truth, and Evidence...................................................................................24

Reality...................................................................................................................................24

Material Reality................................................................................................................24

Conceptual Reality...........................................................................................................26

Semantic Reality...............................................................................................................29

Truth.....................................................................................................................................32

Evidence............................................................................................................................... 34

Universal Reality...................................................................................................................35

Brief Review of Key Ideas.....................................................................................................36

Chapter 3: Belief.......................................................................................................................38

Conditional Belief................................................................................................................. 38

Committed Belief..................................................................................................................39

A Reasonable Approach to Belief.........................................................................................40

God as Creator: An Illustration of Reasoning in Conditional Belief.......................................42

Textual Outline for Premises and Inference of a Sample Argument................................43

Analysis of the Argument.................................................................................................45

1

Summary of the Argument’s Implications and Limitations..............................................47

Chapter 4: Free Will and Responsibility...................................................................................49

The “Free Will versus Determinism” Debate........................................................................49

Implications of Free Will with Regard to Moral Responsibility.............................................53

A Pragmatic Resolution........................................................................................................ 53

Attributability and Accountability....................................................................................53

Society’s Responsibility....................................................................................................55

Part II: Psyche: Mind, Spirit, Soul, and Being...............................................................................59Chapter 5: Distinguishing Mind, Spirit, and Soul......................................................................60

Spirit..................................................................................................................................... 60

Mind..................................................................................................................................... 63

Soul.......................................................................................................................................65

Implications of Mortality......................................................................................................69

Chapter 6: Being.......................................................................................................................72

The Essence and Justification of Being.................................................................................72

The Importance of Being......................................................................................................74

Further Implications of Being...............................................................................................75

Unequal Distribution of Being..........................................................................................75

Human Non-beings..........................................................................................................76

Part III: Real-World Implications..................................................................................................79Chapter 7: Politics.................................................................................................................... 81

Smokescreen Issues..............................................................................................................83

Enemy Groups..................................................................................................................83

2

Flag-Burning.....................................................................................................................85

School Prayer...................................................................................................................86

Socialism.......................................................................................................................... 87

Real Issues............................................................................................................................ 90

Abortion...........................................................................................................................90

Creationism......................................................................................................................91

Gun Rights........................................................................................................................91

Gun Control......................................................................................................................98

Voter Fraud....................................................................................................................103

How Are We Doing at Self-governance?.............................................................................106

Chapter 8: Economics.............................................................................................................110

A Tale of Two Ideologies................................................................................................111

Macroeconomics? What Is It, and Why Should It Interest Me?....................................114

Essential Concepts of Economics........................................................................................116

Wealth and Money........................................................................................................117

The Multiplier Effect......................................................................................................121

The Job-creation Cycle...................................................................................................121

Unemployment..............................................................................................................123

Inflation..........................................................................................................................123

Taxes..............................................................................................................................125

Common Myths about Economics......................................................................................129

Macroeconomic Problems and Solutions...........................................................................141

3

Cyclical Economic Swings: Inflation and Recession........................................................141

Wealth Stratification and Redistribution (The Two Sides of “Class Warfare”)...............141

Part IV: Popular Mythology........................................................................................................149Chapter 8: Myths about Religion and Belief...........................................................................151

Myths about Scripture........................................................................................................151

Myths about Believers........................................................................................................155

Confusion about Non-believers..........................................................................................157

Myths about Belief.............................................................................................................165

Chapter 9: Myths about History.............................................................................................168

Chapter 10: Myths about Science..........................................................................................172

Part V: How Things Might Someday Be......................................................................................179Chapter 11: Justice.................................................................................................................180

Chapter 12: Rebalancing Work and Leisure...........................................................................186

Reflections................................................................................................................................. 191

4

Preface

Every once in a while, the accumulation of papers, notes, and odd bits of stuff on my

desk demands to be sorted through and either properly stored or disposed of. At such times, I

must skim each item to evaluate its importance and judge whether to discard or file it, and if

the latter, where. In the process, I sometimes find myself reviewing things I’ve written some

time ago and have since put out of mind. Some of the old ideas, read with fresh eyes, develop

meaning with respect to more recent events and works. And the notion occurs to me that it

might be worthwhile to organize and consolidate these shorter works into something of

broader scale—not merely a loose anthology, but a more integrated progression of related

thoughts which, taken as a whole, offer some new, cumulative insight, of which the individual

works fall somewhat short.

This time, the product of this synthesis is a series of essays that clarify questions—and

propose a few answers—about how we think about just about everything. It’s a collection of

ideas on various topics to which I’d begun devoting some serious thought about the time I’d

retired and decided to go back to university. (As it happened, my re-matriculation occurred on

the cusp of the millennium; hence the sub-title, “A Millennial Worldview.”) Taken together,

these essays afford a general, organized outlook on how we (Western thinkers in the early third

millennium) gather, evaluate, and use information, and on which techniques seem to work

better than others. In other words, it’s a thoughtfully practical approach to confronting and

dealing with reality, both the everyday sort and major issues, based on the knowledge pool of

our time. And what thinking person wouldn’t find such an analysis and summary useful?

5

Introduction

“Things,” as alluded to in the title, How Things Really Are and Why, are various key

aspects of the common reality we all inhabit, yet about which we somehow acquire very

different perceptions and develop very different opinions. Some of these differences are

philosophical in nature, and require some abstract reasoning ability to make sense of them.

Abstract thinking is an innate human ability. Nearly all human beings above the age of eleven

years or so have it, but only a minority exercise it enough to make it work reliably and discover

that it can be both fun and useful. The rest dismiss the things we’re about to discuss as

pointless and not worth bothering about. And to some extent they’re right; many abstractions

have little or no practical point in and of themselves. Yet discussing them offers substantive

insight into how we ground our thinking on important and very real issues like morality and

justice, rights and obligations, and the distinction between perception and reality.

The things we’re about to discuss are pivotal to a fundamental comprehension of both

nature and human affairs, how we perceive our universe and understand how it works, from

both material and human perspectives. The better our understanding of human perception and

reasoning, and the better our ability to discern what we truly know from what we merely

believe, the better our chances of narrowing down our conflicting notions of reality, by paring

away, layer by layer, the most highly improbable and demonstrably absurd from serious

consideration. We thereby make prudently cautious yet purposefully incremental progress

toward developing an ever clearer collective vision of the common reality that binds us all, and

thereby prepare and empower ourselves to deal with this reality more cooperatively,

intelligently, and effectively.

6

Since our discussion here concerns the general interest, we’ll avoid philosophical and

technical jargon. We’ll keep the tone conversational, and most concepts in laymen’s terms. In

instances where this isn’t practical, we’ll explain any obscure concepts well enough that no

passably educated adult who understands collegiate level English (or secondary-school English

and knows how to use a dictionary) need feel excluded.

As we’ll presently see, for anyone—myself included—to make a blanket assertion about

“how things really are” with an air of absolute certainty would be grossly presumptuous. After

all, most people assume they know how things really are, even when what one person “knows”

is vastly different from, or even directly contradictory to, what his neighbor “knows.” So, how

to tell which, if either, is more right—or at least less wrong? This is where the “and why”

comes in. Why we believe something (or how we know it) is just as important as what we

believe (or think we know). Beliefs can be held for good reasons or for bad ones, and

understanding the difference can offer clues to whether the beliefs themselves are good or bad

—the terms “good” and “bad” here distilling to “true” and “false” or “likely and unlikely,” but in

other cases also to “beneficial” and “harmful,” “moral” and “immoral,” “rational” and

“irrational,” or the like. In most cases, I intend to avoid the term “evil,” which implies malicious

intent. Such an assumption is inappropriate where something bad occurs unintentionally, or

because of a non-ethical agent, such as weather.

It comes down to sources and methods. Many people rely heavily on ideology or simple

belief, on speculation that seems to support these, on categorical rejection of evidence or

argument that conflicts with them, and on the reassurance of like-thinking associates and

companions. Others demand a more rigorous and impartial standard of verifiable evidence and

7

methodical reasoning based thereon, and choose sources with demonstrable success records.

Most people are somewhere between the two. They rely on a mix of mainstream news,

partisan punditry, advertising, word-of-mouth among neighbors and coworkers, and their own

so-called common sense to tell them what’s true. They trust their chosen sources, but do little

independent investigation or logical analysis to discern whether these sources are themselves

reliably and consistently in tune with reality.

Indeed, quite a few leaders accepted by many as reliable authorities are simply

ideologues with diploma-mill “degrees,” who’ve gotten themselves recognized on the basis of

personal charisma and the popularity of their professed views, rather than the critical

impartiality of their observations and the soundness and depth of their reasoning. It’s nigh

impossible to make a fair judgment about what reality is or isn’t, if the closest we ever get to it

is the unexamined opinions of others who might well be no better informed than we ourselves

are, and whose entire repertory of ideas is based on high sounding fiction, antique notions,

emotional appeal, misrepresentation of evidence, and made-up “facts.” Clearly, there are

significant differences in the reliability of source authorities. They command much public trust

by virtue of their being in print, on radio, or on screen, or because they consistently tell their

fan base what it wants to hear. But they’re not at all equal in terms of substance, supporting

evidence, unbiased reasoning, and credibility, and thus rack up very different scores in an

independent fact-checking contest.

Theology, for example, is founded on ancient word-of-mouth myth and cryptic

prophecy, which in turn have been interpreted by priests, recorded by scribes, and not

infrequently embellished by both (with the consequences of multiple interpretations and

8

increasing sectarianism). Theologians are experts on scriptural texts and church doctrine. The

best ones are also knowledgeable about the historical and cultural contexts of these writings.

Such knowledge makes for interpretations reliably reflecting the circumstances of their origin,

including some instances in which the source found it desirable to take on someone else’s

identity to establish credibility,1 to “adjust” the truth to advance an agenda,2 or to encode the

message to avoid persecution or death.3 Some theologians are not so expert at discerning

whether a text reflects literal reality or something else—allegorical teaching or illustrative

myth, for instance—and the more mystically inclined are as apt as any uncritical lay person to

accept a scriptural text as literally true by default, without serious question. The product of this

variable and often undisciplined and biased process is popularized and sustained by a public

eager to believe the unbelievable whenever its implications are more attractive than those

offered by a sometimes dull or even grim reality.

Politics is likewise based largely on ideology, some of which may be related to reality

and some of which is clearly not. It’s often based on notions of what ought to be, which in

1 Examination of Hebrew texts reveals at least three authors prophesying under the name of Isaiah over a period of

more than two and a half centuries.

2 The text of Deuteronomy, which laid to rest the early polytheistic tradition of Israel, is traditionally attributed to

Moses, but the style of writing is much more recent (circa the reign of Josiah) than the other books of the

Pentateuch. The book of Job is a non-historical story advancing the then-new (post-exilic) demonology of Satan.

3 Jews, and later early Christians, were often oppressed, and had to choose their words carefully to avoid

imprisonment (or worse) of either themselves or their associates. The gospel of John, for example, is extremely

cryptic. It was most likely a code intended for the understanding only of certain designated Christian leaders of the

time, but became subject to wildly speculative interpretations centuries after the code had lapsed from living

memory.

9

many cases are at odds with the facts of what actually is or can be. Impressed by their assumed

power, some (far too many) politicians presume to impose their ideological will upon reality by

force of law, with consequences ranging from incoherent nonsense to worthless or even

counterproductive policy, from public embarrassment to outright injustice. And, when the

truth of reality eventually emerges to expose the violation of public trust, the result is long-

term erosion of political authority, which then becomes suspect even when it restricts itself to

matters with which it’s legitimately empowered and competent to deal.

In contrast, science is based on a methodology that has historically delivered, with a

rapidity and reliability far superior to any prior system, usable results, from wonder drugs and

life-saving technology, to horrendous devices of death and destruction. Science doesn’t have

all the answers, for its scope of inquiry is limited to observable or detectable natural

phenomena; its investigation into these is ongoing, and thus its theories can’t be considered

final. Science can offer the empirical facts of discoveries and inventions, but it can’t provide

moral guidance on whether or how we ought to use them. This is because it isn’t within

science’s power to answer questions of virtue or justice, which are human concepts, not

material phenomena. Furthermore, scientists themselves are the first to admit that the

answers they have aren’t absolutely complete or certain. However, this open

acknowledgement of science’s own imperfection has turned out to be an advantage. For, in

confronting this weakness, science has devised a self-correcting methodology, which routinely

reviews and retests its established laws with respect to new evidence, and revises or replaces

theories found to be problematic.

History has likewise shown itself to be a passably reliable source of information—

10

provided we consider the source, which for most of the history of history has been the seldom

impartial opinion of the ultimate victor in any given dispute. Like science, history is based on

evidence and reason. Unlike science, however, history usually can’t be empirically tested to

verify by duplication what actually happened in the past. We can only discern what was

impossible and what was imperative at the time, and sort out the remaining possibilities as to

which were most probable in light of often sketchy evidence and questionable testimony.

Indeed, much of history’s evidence is not material in nature, but appears in the forms of written

opinion, decree, protest, or report; and it’s often more rhetorical than logical. So, it’s often

evidence more of the way people have subjectively experienced and speculated about reality or

judged it in terms of their own biases, rather than how it actually unfolded. It often takes some

detective work to develop a passably realistic view distilled from the opinions of those who

lived the past and presented it from their own various perspectives. Thus, we must be always

on guard against those who present slanted views of the past in order to advance ideological

agendas of various sorts.

Historical Context

I began this work in the early years of the third millennium CE. For roughly four

thousand years (2000 BCE to 2000 CE), various groups—Egyptians, Assyrians, Babylonians,

Persians, Macedonians, Romans, Byzantines, Mongols, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, Russians,

Austrians, British, French, Dutch, Germans, Japanese, Americans, and Soviets—have taken turns

conquering and dominating others. Although some particulars varied in each case, the general

pattern was a self-perpetuating cycle: The victors subjugated the vanquished, occupying their

land, abusing and enslaving their people, confiscating their assets, outlawing their beliefs,

11

destroying their culture. It was a universal tradition of punishing and shaming one’s enemies,

offering the victors a perverse sense of “glory.” But among the vanquished, such oppression

inevitably bred resentment and unrest, which grew until rebellion and aggression broke out,

sparking the next war. And the cycle had repeated again and again, century after century. It

was accompanied by a gradual escalation of weaponry—from arrows and spears, to swords and

catapults, to muskets and cannons, to machine guns and tanks, to biological and chemical

horrors—until 1945, when the first use of nuclear weapons by one nation against another

brought World War II to an abrupt close.

The ensuing acquisition of similar weaponry by other nations, both allies and

adversaries, forced everyone to contemplate the prospect of “MAD” (mutually assured

destruction), the fall of civilization, if not indeed the self-extermination of all humanity. So, the

United States gambled with a new strategy for peace. As in previous practice, it began with

victorious troops occupying their defeated foes’ territories and placing them under military

authority. On the Soviet side, conquest as usual involved annexing “satellite” countries and

subjugating their people. But on the American side, instead of oppressing the conquered, the

task was to establish institutions of humane law and justice, under which the native civilian

populations were granted limited rights of domestic self-governance under restrictions set by

the occupying power. The United States also provided massive aid to rebuild the ruined nations

of both friends and foes, restoring their economic vitality and allowing them to regain national

respectability. Instead of taking everything from the vanquished, it gave them the means for

growth and the opportunity for prosperity. What did America get in return? Lots of trading

partners! In other words, the strategy gave everyone something to lose if ever again they chose

12

to become oppressive or aggressive. Western Europe was finally stabilized, transformed from

its ancient tradition of mutual aggression and oppression into an alliance of nations devoted to

addressing common concerns.

Over the next forty years, most of Western Europe’s remaining empires dissolved, some

with a final flare of rebellion or social chaos, some through stoically peaceful resistance, and

some more or less amicably. Eventually, even the Warsaw Pact broke up, and the Soviet Union

—which everyone had come to think was here to stay—suddenly collapsed. For a time, there

was instability as East and West learned to live and work with each other. And there was

localized genocide in the former Yugoslavia. But otherwise, for a fleeting decade, the world

seemed as if it might be approaching a hopeful new era, in which peace and cooperation might

replace war and conquest as the accepted norms—at least in the developed world. But then

came the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, and we were reminded that some not only do

not share our happy vision, but are determined to extinguish it.

The Path Ahead

As investigators of reality, we may, with reasonably guarded confidence, arm ourselves

with the authority of science and history, taking into account their acknowledged

imperfections. We may also take into consideration often less than objective religious and

political opinion, as well as popular (and sometimes unpopular) opinion—often revealed in the

form of diaries, letters, artistic and journalistic commentary, interviews, debates, propaganda,

and the like—not as evidence that the opinions are true, but as evidence of the predominant or

innovative thinking of a culture or an era. From this, we may glean clues about actual events

and motives for the behaviors of individuals and groups. We can then make a number of

13

informed assumptions that most thinking people would grant are highly probable and

acceptably safe, and build reasoning upon these and related evidence to glimpse whatever

plausible possibilities we may. We might then apply this reasoned vision to some advantage,

insofar as having a view that corresponds closely to reality constitutes an advantage, even if

reality should turn out not to be what we might prefer it to be. For even understanding what

we don’t and can’t know is an advantage, in that such understanding allows us to assess the

strengths and weaknesses of our starting position and our ability, and thus our prospects and

most promising trajectory for success. Though perfection isn’t an achievable goal for us

humans, improvement nearly always is—as long as we’ve the ambition and persistence to

pursue it, and the critical judgment to avoid the opposite.

14

Part I: The Underpinnings of Human Knowledge

In this section, we’ll cover such basics as distinguishing knowledge from belief,

examining the different ways people think, and what’s meant by “truth,” “reality,” and

“perception.” Yes, very basic concepts that everyone knows. But oddly enough, different

people have wildly different ideas about them; so, what one person “knows” about them can

be significantly different from what another person “knows.” If a discussion about such matters

often seems as confused as if it were being conducted in different languages, that’s because it

essentially is: different people using the same words to refer to very different things or ideas.

Thus, we need to come to a common understanding of terms for the purposes of discussion.

The common understanding here will be the author’s—mine—since I’ve no way of knowing

what the reader’s (yours) is. We need to converse in the same language with mutually

understood definitions of terms, in order to ensure we’re on the same track. You don’t have to

agree with my definitions, but you must understand what they are in order to comprehend

what you’re reading.

15

Chapter 1: Knowledge and Certainty

I think, therefore I am.

–French philosopher René Descartes

Epistemology, the study of what things we can know and how we know them, has been

around, in one form or another, since our ancestors first tried—mostly unsuccessfully—to

figure out earth, water, air, and fire. But in the seventeenth century, French philosopher René

Descartes decided to take an intensely rational look at the issue of human knowledge: how we

acquire it, evaluate it, and justify it. He took note that some ideas are more certain than others,

yet it seemed to him that there was always some room for doubt about everything. Could

there be any exceptions to this pattern? Is there anything we can know with complete

certainty, with absolutely no question or doubt whatsoever?

In his Meditations, Descartes sets about the task of figuring out which ideas—if any—he

can know with absolute certainty. He eliminates everything that might be subject to any form

of doubt. He considers, for example, that he’s sometimes deceived even by his own senses—

whether through illusion, misdirection, or misinterpretation—and that he sometimes finds it

difficult to distinguish thoughts that occur when he’s been dreaming from those that occur

when he’s been awake.

He thus distills the absolutely knowable to a single observation, and a thought derived

directly and inescapably from this observation: Cogito, ergo sum, Latin for “I think, therefore I

am.” This statement is to be taken in its most basic sense, of “I” as something that thinks,

which implies only mind, and not necessarily a physical presence of body and sensation, which

16

he concedes might be mere illusions or hallucinations within the mind. Even if he can eliminate

everything else, Descartes can’t escape that, in the very act of questioning and analyzing what

he can know, he’s engaging in the process of thought. And the process of thought requires

something capable of thinking, namely a thinker. And since the thought is obviously occurring

to him, there’s no denying that the creator of the thought, the thinker—Descartes himself—

must exist, at least as a cognitive awareness, even if everything else—his body, his pen, his

desk, his room, his world—were mere illusions created entirely by his thought.

Now, in the process of arriving at this revolutionary conclusion, Descartes tries to

exhaust every other conceivable possibility. He even speculates about the possibility that his

mind might be secretly controlled by an “evil genius.” Perhaps, muses Descartes, his own body

and the world around it don’t really exist, but are only intricate illusions crafted and implanted

in his mind by the evil genius.

But if we accept the evil genius as a possibility, then we could as easily speculate that

perhaps Descartes himself is not doing any active thinking at all. Instead, he might be passively

experiencing a series of thoughts created, not by his own mind, but by the mind of the evil

genius—a series of thoughts that cleverly includes this very bit of speculation about the evil

genius himself. Thus, we could further reduce Descartes’ vision of what is absolutely knowable,

from existence as an actively thinking thing, to existence as a merely passively experiencing

thing.

Yet even if he doesn’t do his own thinking, even if he experiences thought the way we

might experience a pre-determined plot in a very engaging motion picture with other sensory

and emotional input (smell, taste, touch, equilibrium, intuition, happiness, fear, sorrow, anger)

17

added, the subject of the genius’s machinations nonetheless exists as an experiencing and

perceiving awareness. Even this awareness, passive though it may be, clearly implies existence

of an aware being: Percipeo, ergo sum. “I perceive, therefore I am.”

This is absolutely certain to anyone with conscious experience, which is to say, virtually

every human who isn’t brain-dead, and probably many of the higher animals. All conscious

things exist as experiencing things, even if they have neither the intellect to analyze their

experience nor the language to express it. A crocodile probably doesn’t do much thinking, yet it

perceives itself, if only as a powerful appetite.

This confirmation of our existence, through the evidence of being able to experience

something, is the only thing we can know with absolute certainty. Our perception forces that

essential bit of knowledge upon us. Even if what we experience is pure illusion, the fact that we

experience anything at all allows us to conclude our own existence beyond any doubt

whatsoever. By comparison, every other sort of thought has some shadow of doubt over it,

howsoever faint that shadow might be. In some cases (such as “I am a physical, living thing”),

doubt is barely perceptible (since, without evidence for an evil genius, that scenario appears

contrived and improbable), while in others (such as “I will live forever”), doubt may be strong,

but sometimes not sufficiently so to dispel a will to believe in immortality.

So, if the only thought of which each of us can be absolutely certain is “I exist,” how can

we determine what else is real and what isn’t? Indeed, what’s the point of discussing the

matter at all, if it’s possible that all that exists is my own mind, and everything else is imaginary?

This last question practically answers itself, because even if there’s really nothing outside my

own awareness, there’s nothing to be lost (and at least a measure of entertainment to be

18

gained) by speculating about my various illusory experiences and perhaps discussing them with

my illusory fellow beings. Indeed, if my mind is controlled by a Cartesian evil genius, then I

have no choice in the matter: I must experience whatever speculations the genius presents to

me. However, if my experience reflects some actual reality outside my own mind (as I’m

inclined to assume, for want of a more plausible explanation), then there might be something,

perhaps even a great deal, to be gained by studying and discussing the matter (or something to

be missed by not discussing it).

While “I exist” may be the only thing one can know with absolute certainty, experience

offers some consistent clues that some other things are distinctly probable. If we observe

something that appears to be a solid object (a brick wall, for example), and we try to walk

through that apparent object as if it weren’t really there, then from that moment forward

experience will tell us that such an action has unpleasant consequences, and we’ll be less apt to

try it again. So, we cultivate the habit of treating anything that appears to be a solid object as if

it is indeed a solid object, unless we have good grounds to suppose otherwise. Even if we later

learn that solid objects are actually made up of atoms that are mostly empty space, we still

treat things that appear solid to our eyes as if they were indeed solid, because we prefer to

avoid the unpleasant experience of trying to move the mostly-but-not-entirely empty matrix of

our own atoms into the same space occupied by the mostly-but-not-entirely empty matrix of

the other object’s atoms.

But what about things we can’t detect with our physical senses—gravity, magnetism,

electricity, or radio waves, for example? In these cases, although we can’t experience a

phenomenon directly, we can clearly observe its effects: massive objects fall, rather than hang

19

in midair; compasses point northward; motors turn and light bulbs glow; voices and music from

far away sound from a radio speaker. Again, an accumulation of evidence provides clues to

what’s probably real, and a lack of evidence for something suggests it might not be real. While

we’re never absolutely certain, we learn by experience what’s most likely true (i.e., what

accurately reflects reality) and what’s most likely false (what doesn’t reflect reality) and develop

a feel for what degrees of conditional certainty might lie between these two extremes.

Likewise, we may observe in a mirror what seems a reversed image of our own form.

When we encounter similar forms which act and speak in much the same way we do, this

suggests to us that those similar forms are beings like us, with similar experiences, wants, and

needs. Continued experience among these others seems to confirm this suggestion. Even so,

there’s a possibility that they aren’t really like us, that they’re animals or machines with the

knack of mimicking our appearance and behavior, or perhaps they’re mere figments of our

imaginations. But, in the absence of any evidence to such effects, we hold with a high degree

of confidence the belief that they are other, kindred beings, like ourselves, and not mere

products of our own imagining. Indeed, we’re so confident of this, that we say we “know” that

they are. Even though this knowledge is less than absolutely certain, we have enough

confidence in it to risk our lives on the assumption, and to build our entire social and moral

structure around it.

Moreover, we learn to trust some of these others-like-us, to the extent that we’re

inclined to credit what they say as true, without our personally witnessing the things or events

about which they tell us. We don’t know from personal experience that a fellow named

Thomas Jefferson wrote the American Declaration of Independence, for many people have

20

never seen the document, and no one now living has ever met the man. However, we’ve been

told by people we trust that Jefferson wrote the Declaration, and this assertion is affirmed by

many references we’ve come to think of as reliable, so we’re happy to say with reasonable

confidence that we know this statement is true.

On the other hand, trust breaks down when someone else makes a claim contrary to

what we already think we know. Suppose, for example, we’ve been taught that Jefferson was a

devout Christian, but now someone shows us the evidence of Jefferson’s own correspondence

revealing that he was not. We then find ourselves in the dilemma of having to decide which—

the teaching or the evidence—is actually in accord with reality. Insofar as evidence is a

manifestation of reality, we might think that people would tend to give evidence the edge in a

contest with any other form of information. But this is often not the case. For whatever

reasons, many people simply choose to retain their existing beliefs, and ignore both any

evidence for competing claims and the lack of supporting evidence for their own opinion. Far

from resolving the issue of what’s real and what isn’t, this maneuver simply puts the believer

into the unhappy situation of waging a perpetual and ultimately unwinnable war of personal

bias against earnest inquiry and hard fact. Even so, popular but erroneous beliefs can win

influence over public policy for a time, thus to this extent hampering people’s ability to deal

forthrightly with reality, until the truth finally comes to light and the bogus policies are

rescinded.

Obviously, though we might be able to justify a high degree of certainty in many things,

as we’ve seen, absolute certainty is out of the question in all but a very limited field: the

existence of one’s conscious self as a prerequisite for experiencing anything. One step away

21

from this point-size foundation of absolute certainty of “me,” there lies an array of near-certain

probabilities. Each is perched on assumptions that seem reliable enough in light of consistent

experience: [1] that my experience closely corresponds to some external reality independent of

my own mind, and [2] that logic, guided by experience, is a reliable tool for analysis and

interpretation of that external reality. Among these near-certainties are that there are other

individuals like me, each with its own individual mind and physical body, though neither of

these may be exactly as we experience them through our imperfect mechanisms of sensation

and perception.

Since knowledge of anything outside this still narrow range of near-certainty requires

additional layers of assumptions, it also involves additional degrees of uncertainty. This is what

gets us into trouble when we assume too much beyond what existing evidence clearly shows.

We humans thirst for knowledge. But we mustn’t be so greedy for it that we claim to “know”

things that are categorically unknowable from available information, ideas that amount to

nothing more than opinion or belief, based solely on hopeful or fearful speculation. We must

be prepared to change our opinions if conflicting evidence comes to light, or else end up being

forever out of step with reality and incurring whatever additional risks this might entail. We’re

wise to be skeptical. But when the evidence is relevant and overwhelming, then wisdom directs

us to adjust our opinions to the evidence (not the other way around).

If we approach such epiphanies with a positive attitude, we treat them as learning

opportunities from which we can benefit. Learning an unpleasant truth is preferable to being

guided by an appealing falsehood, for the truth can lead us away from peril, whereas the error

could lead us, in blissful ignorance, straight into it. Even the discovery that an idea is false,

22

without the compensating offer of a truthful alternative, is a positive, if less than satisfying,

event. For as our esteemed Mr. Jefferson himself commented in his Notes on Virginia, “He is

less remote from truth who believes nothing than he who believes what is wrong.”

23

Chapter 2: Reality, Truth, and Evidence

The truth will set you free, but first it will make you miserable.

–20th U.S. President James A. Garfield

Any process works more efficiently and effectively if it has a feasible plan of operation.

Inquiry is no exception. Here are some of the key tools (and at least one pitfall) we encounter

in an effort to figure out whether our investigative efforts are leading us closer to reality or

luring us further from it.

Reality

The word reality was used, without explanation, a number of times in the previous

chapter. However, the term is understood and used very differently by different people and

groups. Some think reality is what is expounded by a favorite authority—a religious or political

dogma, for example. Others think of reality as scientific law. Still others think of it as a

personal or institutional worldview. What such views have in common is that they’re products

of the human mind, which we’ve already found to be variable, fallible, and often too easily

misguided. Therefore, for the purposes of this discussion, we reject such definitions of reality,

and we propose something else entirely, something independent of mind. We can think of

reality as being of two kinds: material and conceptual.

Material Reality

Material reality, as understood here, means an actual thing, event, or state of affairs,

which either exists now, existed previously, or will exist eventually. We may have vastly

different perceptions, interpretations, recollections, and predictions of and about reality, but,

24

for reasons we’ll explore soon, in practical terms there is but one reality in which we’re all

immersed and within which we interact. Our perceptions, interpretations, and such are mind-

dependent, but the material reality external to our minds is not. There are no alternative

material realities, only alternative frames of reference within it and alternative opinions about

it. (The reader may disagree with this, but must understand it as the writer’s intent, in order to

avoid confusion in any discussion involving material or physical “reality” or “actuality.”)

Now, it’s a popular view that what we perceive with our senses is reality. This is only

approximately true. What human senses provide is not a direct connection to reality, but a

representation of patterns of light, sound, chemistry, and tactile sensations as translated to

electrochemical impulses and interpreted by the brain. We can sense only a small part of

what’s actually out there. For example, we have a visual range of only about one octave of the

electromagnetic spectrum; we can’t see infrared, radio waves, ultraviolet, x-ray, or gamma

radiation, even though we can create devices to detect them. Our hearing is limited to about

ten octaves of acoustic vibration; we can’t hear below 15 hertz (infrasonic) or above 20,000

hertz (ultrasonic), although some other creatures can. We have no inkling that objects we

perceive to be massive and solid are actually mostly empty space, and we have difficulty

visualizing the idea that “empty” space could actually be “curved” in a dimension with which

our three-spatial-dimension-plus-time brains are not evolved to deal.

Still, our senses provide useful information about reality, albeit in a filtered and coded

form that can be detected by our senses and (usually) made sense of by our brains. Imperfect

though our physical senses might be, they’ve demonstrated themselves crucial to our survival,

and routinely guide us through our daily activities. But we should bear in mind that the images

25

and impressions our senses sample from the world, and the associations and evaluations our

minds inevitably contribute to them, combine to yield a less than faithful caricature of the raw

reality that’s actually “out there.”

Conceptual Reality

Conceptual reality is the existence of an idea. An idea isn’t a material thing or event, but

it may concern the material world in some way, and it may indirectly affect the material world

by influencing the behavior of the person in whose mind the idea exists. Now, there’s a subtle

distinction here that sometimes gets ignored. A concept that actually exists is real—as an idea.

But the concept’s content—what the idea is about—might be something that isn’t real. To

illustrate, consider the concept of a flying unicorn. The concept might exist in someone’s mind,

on paper, or in some other form. If so, then the concept exists; it’s real—as a concept. But this

doesn’t imply that the concept’s content—a flying unicorn, an actual living, breathing, winged

equine with a single horn—exists as well as a material thing. There’s a discontinuity between

the existence of concepts and the reality of their contents.

Concepts can be about things that actually exist, about things that might probably or

possibly exist, about things that do not exist and are purely imaginary, and even about things

that are categorically false and cannot actually exist. If we forget this distinction, between the

existence of a concept and the actuality of its content, then we commit the fallacy of reification,

an error of reasoning that assumes that the content of a concept exists simply because the

concept itself exists. This is worth mentioning because—perhaps surprisingly—it happens all

too often. From the existence of an idea about a flying unicorn, a perfect circle, or God, some

people are inclined to infer that the idea’s content—an actual flying unicorn, an actual perfect

26

circle, or an actual God—must exist as well. (Of course, people are typically somewhat selective

about this. Many people who’d ridicule the idea that flying unicorns really exist nonetheless

insist that God exists, despite that verifiable evidence for the existence of either ranges from

ambiguous to non-existent.) Certainly, such things might be real, but certainly not simply

because ideas about them exist, nor even because such ideas might be very popular. Or they

might not be real, but not merely because someone—or everyone—holds an opinion that they

don’t exist.

Conceptual reality—in the form of ideas of meaning, purpose, and value—probably

holds little importance for most creatures, and none at all for inanimate objects. However, it

plays a major role in the realm of human activity.

For instance, a “game” doesn’t exist as a material object. To be sure, game boards,

fields, equipment, and devices exist as such; but a game itself is instead an organized activity

involving the interaction of humans (and sometimes other creatures) with either physical

objects or animated images, according to a specific set of rules concocted by the game’s

designers. Without the conceptual reality of rules, the material aspects of a game have no

meaning, purpose, or value; and the game wouldn’t exist as such, even though people might

still throw, strike, catch, and carry objects for other reasons.

Likewise, a city doesn’t exist as a material thing or event, but as a concept of the

aggregate activity of many humans interacting in an artificial environment of buildings, streets,

businesses, utilities, government, and laws. The notion that a city is simply a material collection

of structures and people is absurdly simplistic: The Egyptian pyramids are a collection of

structures, and at times there may be many humans wandering among them, yet this

27

assemblage has no meaning or purpose whatsoever like a city. A city has a different function

altogether, specifically, to provide and maintain an environment for people in a certain

geographical area to interact in their daily activities of production, consumption, education, and

recreation. If this conceptual reality isn’t present as an organizing and motivating force, then

neither is function; and without function, the material objects alone don’t constitute a city.

A popular and prominent form of conceptual reality is institutional doctrine. Christian

doctrine, for example, stipulates that redemption of a person’s soul from eternal damnation is

possible through acceptance of Jesus as savior. The doctrine is described in Christian scripture,

and is subscribed to by about one third of the world’s population, so there’s ample evidence

that the idea, as such, exists. But is the idea true? Is the content of the idea in accord with

reality? Many fervently believe so; others aren’t convinced, but believe—or hope or fear—that

it’s possible or even probable. But we can’t know, because there’s no verifiable evidence of a

soul that survives physical death, no reliably consistent and confirmed eyewitness account of an

actual state of eternal damnation. Furthermore, there’s no extant independent (i.e., non-

biblical, e.g., occupying Roman) record of the birth, trial, or execution of a specific early-first-

century spiritual teacher named Jesus, thus only the scriptural testimony of men who’d never

actually met Jesus4 that such a person even existed. In short, there’s no verifiable evidence of

anything to be redeemed, nor of any state from which it might be redeemed, nor of a

4 The earliest synoptic gospel, “Mark,” was written fifty years or more after the purported crucifixion of Jesus; if the

writer ever met Jesus personally, it would have to have been as a youngster, and his memories at the time of

writing would have been far from fresh, and very likely embellished. The letters of Peter might be an exception.

However, expert examination reveals they were probably written by the same scribe who penned much of Paul’s

output. Thus, there’s reasonable suspicion that their true source was actually Paul, not Peter.

28

redeemer, and thus no basis for knowledge that the idea expressed in the doctrine corresponds

to any known reality. On the other hand, it’s a matter of historical record that Yeshua (the

Aramaic equivalent of “Jesus”) was a fairly common name among male Jews of the time. It’s

also a matter of record that, for at least a couple of centuries, the Essene sect had been

fervently advocating a Zoroastrian-style dualistic (forces of good versus forces of evil) mystery-

religion offshoot of Judaism. Thus, it’s entirely possible that one or more among them

preached redemption of soul from damnation, and that some followers seized upon the notion

that their leader was an incarnation of God. And perhaps one was, for who can prove

otherwise? But no human being, as long as he’s alive, will ever know for certain. And the dead,

even if they know, aren’t saying.

Other examples of conceptual reality include artistry and sport, business and industry,

fairness and justice, money and credit, professions and hobbies, science and philosophy, states

and nations, and many other mind-based human institutions, endeavors, and principles that

require ideas of meaning, purpose, and value—essence, utility, and desirability—for their

functional existence.

Semantic Reality

The use of language sometimes introduces oddities that would seem to suggest the

possibility of different realities for different people. For example, does the statement “I am the

spouse of the U.S. President” correspond to reality? It depends on to whom the pronoun “I”

refers. If it indeed refers to the one person on the planet who is married to America’s current

chief executive, then it corresponds to reality. But if the statement refers instead to any of the

other billions of Earth’s inhabitants, or to a fictional character, then that same statement does

29

not reflect reality. Whether it does or doesn’t depends entirely on the “I” pronoun’s referent.

This isn’t sorcery; it’s simply an example of the tricks that language can play on the mind. On

the other hand, “The first U.S. President was Abraham Lincoln” does not correspond to reality,

but “The sixteenth U.S. President was Abraham Lincoln” does correspond to reality5, no matter

who makes either statement.

But when the topic shifts from fact to judgments, such as “Michelangelo’s David is a

magnificent sculpture,” this statement seems to suggest that magnificence emanates from the

sculpture itself, when in fact magnificence is a subjective judgment that exists in the mind of

the viewer, not in the marble of the object. That many people concur in such a judgment does

not make it a fact; it just makes it a popular opinion. If we wanted to compose a statement that

corresponds accurately to reality, we’d have to say something like, “The sight of Michelangelo’s

David [evokes / doesn’t evoke] in my mind a sense of magnificence.” The problem here, clearly,

is that we’re in the habit of expressing our feelings about something, not as feelings, but as

properties of the object of our feelings. The solution, in most cases, is not to demand that the

speaker or writer express his opinions with rigorous precision (which in some cases might take

quite a while), but simply to interpret and understand them as they’re most likely intended—so

long as they’re in the context of art appreciation or other aesthetic judgment, not a

philosophical debate.

This topic is not quite as commonsense as we might suppose. It arises in philosophical

circles from time to time, especially in discussions of aesthetics, values, and such. A professor

of my acquaintance insists that he finds objects to be beautiful or ugly because the objects

5 This assumes that we start the count with George Washington, the first president sworn in under the

Constitution, and disregard the presidents who had previously served under the Articles of Confederation.

30

themselves possess qualities of beauty or ugliness, which they radiate to observers. I counter

that if this were true, then all observers should agree that one particular object is beautiful and

that another object is ugly, but we often find this not to be the case. Indeed, perception of an

object can vary even for a single observer. Consider that if, while not wearing my glasses, I

observe the professor approaching from a distance. If he appears blurry to me, this must be (to

use his reasoning) because he possesses the quality of blurriness and radiates that quality to

me. But the instant I put on my glasses, his image becomes clear and sharp, because he

simultaneously stops radiating blurriness (and presumably begins radiating clarity and

sharpness). I argue, and believe I’ve adequately demonstrated, that such a view is absurd. I

thus contend that subjective qualities, such as beauty and ugliness, are not properties of

objects, but are judgments formulated in the mind of the observer, just as blurriness is a result

of an imperfection in the observer’s eye, not a property of the object being observed. It’s just

that we’re so accustomed to expressing our perceptions and judgments of objects as if they

were properties of the objects themselves, that it seems natural to suppose what we’re saying

is literal truth, when in fact it’s a figurative expression, simply a customary, time-saving

shorthand, if you will.

As we see, the imprecision of language can give rise to many odd appearances, including

an illusion of alternate realities. It’s up to us as critical thinkers to identify and treat these

oddities as the ambiguities they are, and not to be charmed into thinking nonsense just because

there are often substantive gaps between reality and casual descriptions of it.

Truth

Truth means simply an idea that corresponds accurately to reality. The problem is that,

31

since human senses, minds, and communications are limited and imperfect, it’s impossible for

us to know with perfect accuracy and infinite detail what reality—and hence truth—is. Even if

we were to know something that is in fact real, we couldn’t be absolutely certain that this

knowledge is truly accurate and not possibly afflicted with some subtle or hidden flaw.

Moreover, except in the case of an abstraction, we’d find it difficult to express such knowledge

in words with absolute completeness and no possibility of misunderstanding. Thus, the phrase

“telling the truth” is usually interpreted with respect to a degree of clarity adequate for

practical purposes, rather than demanding absolute perfection from an inherently imperfect

process of understanding and communication.

On the other hand, we often say that someone speaks the truth when he makes a

statement that he earnestly believes true, especially when we ourselves are inclined to share

his view, even if it might turn out not to correspond accurately to reality. A person can

deliberately make false statements for a variety of reasons, some quite innocent and some not.

For example, a debater might state a false idea as a step in proving the absurdity of that idea;

an entertainer uses fiction to tell stories or jokes; a theologian might use a parable to illustrate

an underlying moral truth; a scoundrel might tell a lie in order to cheat others or escape

punishment. Someone can also innocently make false statements because he’s misinformed or

mistaken. Or, as in perhaps most cases, one might state a less than entirely true approximation

of reality, either because language is imprecise, or because a comprehensively true statement

about an incomprehensibly complex reality would be literally too complex for anyone to

comprehend or express with absolute completeness and accuracy.

With respect to these last matters of precision and complexity, we must often consider

32

the relationship of truth to reality within the frame of reference of the speaker or writer. We

can use a fictional falsehood to illustrate. Suppose it’s an utterly calm day, and an artist, a

geologist, a physicist, and a biologist are standing by the edge of a placid, mirror-smooth pond.

The artist, thinking to paint a picture of the scene, describes the pond’s surface as appearing

perfectly flat and still. The geologist objects, noting that the pond’s surface isn’t quite flat, but

slightly convex, following the curvature of the earth; extended far enough, the pond’s surface

would be seen to have the same curvature as the earth’s oceans. The physicist notes in

addition that some parts of the pond’s surface aren’t at all flat, or even slightly convex, but

instead bend to the curve of a meniscus wherever the surface of the water intersects a solid

object, whether it’s the pond’s edge, the stem of a reed, or the foot of an insect skimming

across the surface. The biologist comments that, at a microscopic level, the surface of the pond

isn’t at all as still as it appears to the others, but is actually teeming with the activity of tiny

organisms ranging from barely visible to microscopic. Though each of these individuals has said

something different about the surface of the pond, each has expressed the truth according to

his or her own perspective and understanding of it. The single reality of the pond reflects all of

these approximate truths and thousands more, and is independent of anyone’s opinion or

statement about it.

Now let’s suppose that a small boy joins the adults by the pond. The boy is carrying a

straight walking-stick, and he plunges the end of it into the pond at an angle. “Hey look,” he

shouts to the others, “the water broke my stick!” In this case, the boy is pointing out his

observation that, although the part of the stick above the surface, and the part below it, still

appear straight, the two images don’t line up at the point where the stick intersects the surface.

33

The truth, of course (according to current understanding), is that light passes through water

more slowly than it does through air. Thus, the light reflected from the different parts of the

stick, below the surface and above it, enters the observer’s eye at different angles. This

refraction of light through different media causes the stick, which is still actually straight, to

appear bent or broken. The boy’s statement may be in earnest, and he may earnestly believe

it’s true, even though in fact it isn’t. But when he pulls the stick out of the water, it once again

appears straight and intact. The reality of the straight stick is not in the least affected by the

boy’s observation, claim, or belief. Indeed, to make a truthful statement about his observation,

he’d merely need to be more precise about what he’s observed, to distinguish between the

appearance and the reality: “The border between the air and the water makes my stick look

broken!” In this way, we begin to see the relationship, not only between truth and reality

themselves, but also in the context of observation and evidence. Appearances are sometimes

misleading, so we must consider them with care to understand precisely what our senses are

telling us and what the implications are.

Evidence

As we’ve seen, observations can sometimes be misleading. Therefore, we should

critically evaluate observations presented to us as evidence of one thing, when in fact they

might be evidence of something else. The reason for this is exemplified by a real-world

example of the carbon-dating of a fragment of the shell of a live clam, in which the test seemed

to indicate that the creature was thousands of years old. But through thoughtful analysis, we

come to realize that the carbon date of the shell reveals, not the age of the shell’s current

owner, but of the seafloor material that the clam had consumed to grow its shell. This is

34

because what carbon-dating yields is the approximate time that has elapsed since the death of

the organisms that originally consumed and assimilated atmospheric carbon from the

environment at or near the water’s surface. Clams are not surface-dwelling, but the seafloor

deposits they consume contain the calcareous (calcium carbonate) remnants of surface-

dwelling creatures that had died and sunk to the bottom tens, thousands, or even millions of

years earlier.

Combining what we now understand about critical interpretation of evidence and the

confusion of concepts with their content, we might be better prepared to consider, say, a

widespread belief in the existence of ghosts as evidence for . . . for what? We’d be gullible to

suppose it’s evidence that ghosts actually exist. Without significant material evidence to back

up the belief, we’d have to concede it’s evidence only that many people are inclined to believe

bizarre things, and perhaps even to imagine the presence of such things. Our skepticism

doesn’t by any means rule out the existence of those bizarre things, but unsupported popular

belief clearly doesn’t serve as reliable evidence for anything other than the popularity of

unsupported belief.

Universal Reality

As we recall from the previous chapter, we feel justified in assuming that other people

we encounter are in fact beings like us. But does each of these people have his or her own

separate and individual reality? To hear some of them talk, we might be led to suppose so.

“That might be true for you, but it isn’t true for me,” is a common utterance we hear among

people of different persuasions. Natives of Alaska and Arizona might have wildly different

opinions about the “heat” or “cold” of the weather on the same late spring day on the same

35

street corner in Albany, New York, despite that they could instantly agree on the reading of the

thermometer on the side of a nearby building. Yet we observe that all humans, despite their

individual differences in ability, adaptation, aptitude, belief, custom, preference, wealth, and so

forth, seem undeniably subject to similar basic wants, needs, and limitations. Black, white, or

brown, we’re all biologically incapable of surviving for more than a few days without food,

water, and sleep. Male or female, we all go gradually crazy if deprived of companionship.

Stoned or sober, we all go splat if we fall out of a tenth-floor window onto a concrete sidewalk.

Creationists or evolutionists, we’ll all sicken and die from infection by the same mutated

tuberculosis microbe if we don’t seek modern medical treatment.

While there’s some evidence that multiple realities exist at the quantum level, we can

say with a high degree of confidence that at the human level there are no alternative material

realities. There are only alternative perspectives and opinions about the one reality we all

share, plus a variety of raw speculation about unknown probabilities and appealing

impossibilities.

Brief Review of Key Ideas

Reality comprises actual persons, events, and things. In the “things” category we must include

ideas, being careful to stipulate that the things we call ideas exist only as mental constructs—as

neural linkages in our brains, or as words or as diagrams or charts—but not necessarily as actual

material objects. We can have ideas about things that do not really exist as well as about things

that do exist; and any ideas we have about things that do exist might be either true or false. In

most cases, we can’t know exactly what reality is with absolute certainty, because the natural

limitations of human sensation and mind restrict what we can experience and comprehend.

36

But even if absolute knowledge is beyond our grasp, improved understanding of reality is the

attainable goal of the earnestly inquiring human being.

Truth is the accurate correspondence of an idea to reality. Knowledge of reality is the truth-

seeker’s goal, but it’s a goal that typically can only be approached, and seldom (if ever) attained

with absolute completeness and certainty.

Reification is a common error in reasoning. It happens if we confuse the existence of a concept

(as an idea) with the existence of the concept’s content (as something actual). That is,

reification occurs when we claim that an idea corresponds to an actual mind-independent

thing, event, or relationship, when in fact we have no clear evidence that such a thing, event, or

relationship has ever actually existed.

Evidence is something observed and verifiable. Used well with clear reasoning, evidence can

help guide us toward truth. Misinterpreted, it often leads to absurdity, and sometimes to

injustice or misfortune.

Universal reality, the idea that all humans inhabit a common material reality, is the most

plausible explanation for what we collectively experience as diverse yet interactive individuals.

37

Chapter 3: Belief

As we’ve seen, absolutely certain knowledge is a very rare thing. However, inquisitive

creatures that we are, we have tools to deal with the multitude of ideas that are less than

certain. Among these are theory, speculation, opinion, and belief, all of which are based on, at

most, inconclusive evidence. It’s conceded among honestly self-described theorists,

speculators, and opinion holders that their ideas are open to question and might turn out to be

wrong.

But belief? Well, that depends on the believer, the subject of belief, and the kind of

belief. Belief is a very useful tool that we can use to test ideas in light of experience. In our

efforts to know and understand things, we often seize upon ideas which are emotionally

appealing or easy to grasp, but for which there is little or no evidential support.

Conditional Belief

If, through experience, we consistently find that such an idea is never refuted and

perhaps even seems somewhat supported, then we might adopt it as a belief—a tacit

assumption that the idea is true, on condition that we never find it to be demonstrated false or

superseded by another idea with superior support and explanatory power. This conditional

form of belief is a healthy and sometimes even productive implement in the earnest human

quest to get to know and understand the reality of ourselves and our universe—whatever

reality might actually turn out to be.

“I believe that it will be sunny tomorrow” expresses a conditional belief that will be

either confirmed or refuted a few hours hence, and we can then decide whether to keep,

38

revise, or reject the belief on the basis of the new evidence. Or take “I believe that the sun,

moon, planets, and stars are embedded in concentric hollow crystal spheres that rotate around

the earth, which stands motionless at their common center.” This is also a conditional belief

that we might reasonably retain, so long as we find no evidence to the contrary, and so long as

no one develops a more convincing or better supported hypothesis. And indeed, this very idea

of a geo-centric universe was widely believed for many centuries—until one clear night when

Galileo gazed through a new gadget called a telescope and discovered four moons circling the

planet Jupiter, apparently passing effortlessly through the region supposedly occupied by the

solid crystal sphere bearing Jupiter itself. Galileo didn’t shatter the crystal; he just discovered

that it wasn’t there, and ventured a most reasonable guess that it hadn’t been there all along.

Committed Belief

However, churchmen rejected Galileo’s evidence, because they held a different kind of

belief in the pre-Galilean cosmology, a belief that is not conditioned upon available evidence,

but is rather committed to a certain rigid view of things. Obviously, this committed form of

belief—often distinguished by the phrase belief in6—is very different from the conditional belief

that we can readily revise or replace whenever experience demonstrates it isn’t as true as we

once supposed it to be. Probably most people use both kinds of belief, but for different things:

the conditional kind for everyday practical problem resolution, and the committed kind for 6 The sort of belief in discussed here implies willful belief of something despite lack of supporting evidence or even

despite evidence to the contrary. A different kind of belief in is exhibited by the example, “I don’t believe in sex

education.” By this, the speaker does not mean that he or she doesn’t believe that sex education exists, but that

he or she disapproves of it or believes it’s morally wrong. It isn’t truly an expression of belief or disbelief, but just a

sloppy use of language, which to some suggests sloppy thinking behind it.

39

ideology-driven pursuits like politics and religion.

A Reasonable Approach to Belief

Here I must ask the reader to pardon the following shift from “we” to “I.”

This seems to me an intensely personal issue, with which each individual must

deal independently, perhaps with differing results. I’m willing to share my view,

and will use it as illustration where it would benefit discussion, but I’ve no intent

or desire to impose it upon anyone else.

Like most people, I’ve used both kinds of belief. However, it’s been my experience that

committed belief leads one to evaluate information on the basis of its correspondence to

existing belief, rather than to independent reality. If the existing belief happens to be flawed in

any way, the subsequent chain of beliefs that unquestioningly rely on it can become seriously

out of step with reality. This seems a potentially hazardous way to conduct one’s thinking,

especially when the implications are of great importance. For one thing, it can make

communication difficult between individuals with different sets of beliefs. For another, it’s

been my experience that reality always trumps belief. It might lose a battle or two to tradition,

coercion, or misrepresentation, but reality always eventually wins the war through evidence,

reason, and the raw necessity of addressing real-world issues effectively. Thus, it’s wisest to

operate under the assumption that, if there’s a conflict between belief and reality, it’s best to

bank on reality and adjust belief to it, not the other way around.

Committed belief locks the mind into logically untenable positions and blinds it to

evidence that in some cases may have serious, even life-or-death, consequences. Even in less

40

dire circumstances, such skewing interferes with fair and impartial consideration of hard

evidence and the formulation of coherent reason; and in extreme instances, its effects are

functionally indistinguishable from those of dementia. In any case, committed belief interferes

with problem solving to the extent that it leads to solutions that are overly simplistic,

impractical, ineffectual, or even counterproductive in the real world.

Consequently, I’ve shied away from using committed belief in any aspect of my life,

adopting Hume’s maxim: “The wise man, therefore, proportions his belief to the evidence.7” If I

catch myself saying or thinking “I believe in X,” I consider this a warning that it’s time to

reexamine whatever X I’m so committed to that I’d be willing to overlook a lack of supporting

evidence or to dismiss substantive evidence to the contrary. Any idea really worth believing

doesn’t need belief in it to support it; it can withstand fair scrutiny and stand on evidence and

reason alone. Thus, I’ve come to the view that committed belief is pointless: It neither validates

ideas that cannot withstand scrutiny nor improves those that can.

The one belief to which I might admit to being committed is that there is a reality

independent of mind, and that I must deal with this reality in straightforward fashion, or else

consider myself delusional. Yet even here, I’m open to evidence that might refute this belief,

though I can’t imagine what form it might take. Indeed, once convinced that such evidence is

genuine and its implications sound, I expect I’d be inclined to accept it as simply a new (to me)

aspect of reality, and follow my habit of adjusting my view of reality to accommodate the newly

discovered evidence. Far from overthrowing my current thought discipline, such an epiphany

would fit right into my learning process with the same ease as any other paradigm-shifting

7 David Hume: An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding

41

concept or phenomenon that’s already come to my attention.

The main obstacle is my own worn down credulity. I’ve become a hard fellow to

convince. This isn’t because I’m habitually closed-minded, for I’m delighted to discover

something that changes my worldview in a way that broadens and deepens my understanding.

It’s because during my lifetime I’ve encountered countless hoaxers and hucksters peddling

bogus schemes and hoping to sucker people into surrendering their freedom, their scruples,

their sanity, their votes, or the contents of their wallets. Thanks to such predators and

parasites, I’ve grown generally suspicious of appeals to emotion, of offers that sound too good

to be true, and of any “opportunity” perched on obvious misinformation or fallacy. In other

words, I’ve developed a robust nonsense filter that activates on any of the aforementioned

triggers, indicating that some notion probably falls into the vast category of ideas that aren’t

worth studying further. It’s not that I lack trust, but only that it’s been abused to the point that

what’s left of it has become precious. So, like belief, I proportion it to the evidence, as well as

to the source’s demonstrated level of reliability.

God as Creator: An Illustration of Reasoning in Conditional Belief

It isn’t my intent to preach a certain view of deity. Your religious views are none of my

concern, and mine are none of yours. However, I need a handy example of a skeptical

viewpoint, for the purpose of demonstrating why thinking about “sensitive” topics needn’t

(indeed shouldn’t) be substantively different from critical reasoning about practical, everyday

matters. Why a skeptical view? Simply to show why a methodically critical thinker, beginning

with fewer assumptions, might come to a conclusion that doesn’t coincide with a less critical

consensus. Why my view, specifically? Because [1] I can’t presume to speak for all skeptics and

42

don’t want to be perceived as misrepresenting their views; [2] my own view is as handy as it

gets, and I’ve nothing to hide; and [3] you needn’t agree with the view, but only observe the

method used to progress from one point to the next. Moreover, it shouldn’t require much

time or effort, since the essential argument’s four points and its analysis together span only a

few hundred words, with peripheral and explanatory material relegated to footnotes—handy if

you need or want them, out of the way if you don’t. So, let’s get on with it.

Textual Outline for Premises and Inference of a Sample Argument

Premise (from observed evidence): The material world is founded on a universally consistent

micro-level order.

Rationale: I look at the universe as a person passably familiar with the precepts and

history of Judeo-Christian tradition, but also informed in, among other things, the basics of the

natural sciences. As I gaze upon what many contend is God’s creation, I note that, on atomic

and subatomic levels, the whole of nature appears governed by an intricate and absolutely

consistent micro-order, which gives rise to an apparent mix of order and disorder (within

certain limits) on the human scale and larger. Given what I understand and have observed of

nature so far, there’s little question in my mind that such an order exists, even though our

science has yet to probe it deeply enough to understand it completely.

Premise (proposition): The observed micro-level order might have been intentionally created

by a conscious being.

Rationale: Let’s speculate that the universe and its underlying order were intentionally

conceived and created by the mind of a conscious entity, which we may conveniently call

“God.” But if so, reason suggests that the conscious creator of such a universally consistent

43

underlying order must itself be one whose thoughts are no less consistent and orderly.

Premise (evidence): Scriptural accounts of God’s activities reveal numerous significant

inconsistencies 8 in God’s thought and action.

Implication: It’s implausible to suppose that any God exhibiting such inconsistencies

could be capable of creating the observed consistent order of the universe. If indeed it’s

impossible for a greater net level of order to arise from a lesser one in a closed system,9 this

would rule out as creator any God whose irrational will and aberrant behavior are described in

religious scripture with any degree of accuracy.

8 Beginning in the book of Genesis, for example, God lies to Adam and Eve about the consequences of eating the

fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil (warning them that they will die that very day; yet they do not).

Later, God brings about a flood to destroy all mankind, excepting Noah and his family, but then expresses regret

for having done so. In Hinduism, the various gods are portrayed with conflicting natures and often at odds with

each other, rather than being of a consistent, universal mind. Moreover, the creation stories of any established

religion, if taken as God’s own literal Word, turn out to be inconsistent with the reality of what is held by the same

believers to be God’s own Creation, as revealed in the fossil record.

9 This parallels a common Creationist argument invoking the second law of thermodynamics in an attempt to

disprove evolution. The Creationist account erroneously assumes that the earth is a closed system, when in fact

the main energy supply driving evolution—and even life itself—comes from outside: the sun. In contrast, the

skeptic’s argument more plausibly considers “God plus universe” to be a closed system.

44

Inference: No real creator God could be identified with any of the self-conflicted caricatures

found in the scriptures of organized religion.

In other words, I’m convinced that, if there really is a God, it couldn’t be what most

religious people suppose it to be.

Analysis of the Argument

Such a line of thinking pits independently verifiable factual evidence (a consistent order

in the material universe, as detected through critical observation and experiment) against

scriptural evidence (an account that, if taken as literal truth, indicates serious inconsistencies in

God’s thought and action) to rule out the existence of one subcategory of deity. Specifically, it

argues that alleged creator gods, whose scriptural accounts reveal significant inconsistencies,

are incapable of formulating and establishing a universally consistent order in nature. The

claim that God has supernatural power can’t compensate for Its being burdened with an

intellect too inconsistent to guide that power to create the consistent order that’s observed.

So, if we take scriptural accounts to be literally true, this would rule out the gods of most (or

perhaps all) organized religions, gods whose authoritative descriptions reveal markedly human

inconsistencies. For example, the Old Testament account of God reveals stark inconsistencies,

such as claimed truthfulness and actual deceit [Gen.3:17], claimed constancy and actual

variation [Gen.8:21], claimed justice and actual favoritism [Deut.7:6], claimed mercy and actual

wrath [2Chr.36:17]; plus some superhuman ones: giving life and commanding genocide

[1Sam.15:3], claimed perfection and any of the aforementioned or other imperfections. With

appropriate scriptural citations from any particular religion, such an argument could rule out

any creator gods for which there are authoritative accounts indicating anything from

45

performance-affecting mood swings to multiple-personality disorders.10

However, this reasoning doesn’t categorically refute the existence of all things people

identify as God. Gods which are not clearly described, such as the deist Jefferson’s “Creator”

and “Natural God,” can’t be easily dislodged by this method, because They offer few

identifiable points to which the levers of logic can be applied.11 Nor can we disprove the

existence of Gods defined as synonymous with something known to exist, such as the pantheist

Spinoza’s ambiguous God-as-Nature.12 We might argue that these things are not gods,

according to generally accepted definitions of the term. But the proponent of the idea might

counter-argue that his concept must be nearer to actual truth than the accepted definitions,

since those are clearly at odds with both logic and evidence.

10 I’m sure some might say, “We don’t believe in science or logic, so your argument doesn’t hold for us.” To them I

respond that they’re free to disbelieve anything they like. But no intensity of disbelief can remove a single atom of

the mountains of physical evidence from existence, and the evidence is what ultimately gives the lie to the belief.

11 We might yet dispute the seriousness of Jefferson’s contention, that all men are endowed with unalienable

rights of life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness, since the Creator evidently neglected to distribute the liberty and

happiness packages to more than a relative few for most of the history of civilization.

12 I suppose I could appease believers who feel threatened by a skeptic in their midst, by calling by the name “God”

something I believe exists, such as the consistent underlying order of the material universe, and affirming that I

believe in it. However, this would be dishonest. It would simply lead those who believe in a conventional God to

infer that I believe in the same thing they do (a purposeful, willful creator-king unaccountably fascinated with

human affairs and craving human adoration) and that I believe in it in the same way they do (devoutly,

worshipfully, and with no regard for evidence), and thus that I give my personal assent to such unquestioning

belief, when in fact none of these is actually the case. The predictable outcome of such a ploy would be contrary

to my mission, which I envision as exposing and dispelling misinformation, not condoning or promoting it.

46

Summary of the Argument’s Implications and Limitations

Those who assert it’s impossible to prove the non-existence of God are correct, but only

partly so. It isn’t possible to eliminate the entire category of all deities, if only because it can

easily be replenished simply by redefining what we choose to call “God,” 13 either as something

too vague to be logically analyzed, or as something already generally conceded to exist—

nature, money, power, or love, for example. However, some specific gods—including those of

the three currently most popular religions14 as described by a literal interpretation of their

scriptures—can be shown to be inconsistent with themselves, as well as with the unyielding

evidence of the observed universe (creation), and thus both logically absurd and virtually

impossible.

There are, of course, many other reasons for believing in a God, and thus many more

questions to ask in order to verify whether any creed’s answers are consistent and correspond

satisfactorily to a well informed view of reality. The short sample argument and analysis we’ve

just examined may serve as a rough example to follow in probing other fundamental issues,

such as origin, destiny, purpose, value, and morality. (Although there are skeptical arguments

13 The term “God” has different meanings to different people. However, there’s a danger in redefining God (or any

other term, for that matter) too radically, in that this can alter the concept to a point that it’s unrecognizable by

any commonly accepted understanding of the term. It then becomes functionally meaningless to anyone who

hasn’t been duly informed of the alteration. Of course, in some instances this might be the whole point of the

change—as in Spinoza’s case to avoid religious persecution for his disbelief in the biblical God.

14 The world’s currently most popular religions are Christianity, representing about a third of global population;

Islam, representing about a fifth; and Hinduism, about a sixth. We can add to this list Buddhism, which is well

known and dispersed throughout East Asia, and Judaism, representing a relatively tiny proportion of world

population, yet disproportionately influential in Western society.

47

addressing these as well, there’s no need to trot them out here. The point regarding the ability

to apply hard evidence and reason to at least some nebulous issues has been well enough made

already.)

48

Chapter 4: Free Will and Responsibility

Most people seldom, if ever, consider the possibility that their thoughts and behavior

might be predetermined. If asked about it, they typically respond, to the effect, “I’m a human

being, not a programmed automaton. I have free will to choose among any available

alternatives. Presented with two choices—or a dozen or a thousand—I’m equally able to opt

for any one of them.” This is the general perception of most individuals, that each person is

perfectly free to take any available option, either through deliberate choice or through random

selection. Even to use a flipped coin as the decision-maker is a choice.

This is the premise by which we conduct our activities and live our lives. Still, the

question arises: Is this premise false? Could it be that we really can’t help doing what we do

because something—fate, predestination, cosmic inertia, God—compels our every impulse, and

despite the happy illusion that we’re in control, we’re actually just “along for the ride”?

The “Free Will versus Determinism” Debate

This is a question that has puzzled philosophers for a long time, for they note that, on a

large scale, human behavior seems somewhat predictable. People’s thoughts and behavior are

obviously influenced by their physical and social environment: We can’t walk through brick

walls, except by way of doors or other openings. Most of us won’t intentionally consume

poison (at least the non-recreational kinds) because we fear the natural consequences of it.

And most of us dare not commit crimes, or at least try to avoid getting caught doing so, because

we find the prospects of arrest and punishment unpalatable. If these constraints and influences

weren’t there, many of us would probably behave very differently from the way we currently

49

do.

People are also influenced by their own make-up, conditioning, and experience. Those

with a certain genetic code that makes broccoli taste bitter to them make a point of avoiding it,

while those with a different gene either like that vegetable or are indifferent to it. Most people

brought up in homes where classical music is played choose as adults to go to symphony

concerts and operas more often than people raised primarily on country, folk, or rock music.

While it might be too strong a claim that behavior is determined by these influences, it’s

certainly clear that such factors cause people to have certain preferences, and thus usually to

act in ways that tend to satisfy these preferences.

Of course, it can get more complicated. To illustrate, suppose there are two philosophy

students, one who advocates free will (whom we’ll call Wilfred), and his friend who thinks

human action is otherwise determined (whom we’ll identify as Dieter). Now, these two

routinely join a group of their classmates at a local coffee shop on Friday evenings to discuss

philosophy. Upon arriving, everyone in the group except Wilfred orders a steaming mug of

coffee. Wilfred can’t stand the stuff, so he always orders tea instead. But one Friday, the

conversation turns to free will versus determinism. To prove his point that his behavior isn’t

controlled by influences, Wilfred changes his order to coffee, strong and black, and chugs the

entire mug. He makes an awful face and visibly suppresses an impulse to gag. His face is beet-

red, but presently subsides to a pale green. When he’s finally able to speak, he croaks, “See? I

may be strongly influenced not to drink this, but I can make a free-will choice to do so if I wish.”

But Dieter counters, “This is simply a matter of one influence—your strong aversion to coffee—

being overridden by another, temporarily stronger one—your desire to demonstrate what you

50

think is free will.” Turning to the others in the group, Dieter explains, “Wilfred’s seemingly free

choice wasn’t truly free, but was compelled by his desire, in the context of our current

discussion, to prove a point. With his argumentative personality and faced with this challenge,

this particular combination of influences was overwhelming and he could not have chosen

otherwise.”

Furthermore, even seemingly random choices might be governed or triggered by

unsensed influences: the sporadic secretion of a tiny amount of a hormone, or perhaps the

impact of a stray cosmic particle upon a neuron receptor in the brain. Dieter could plausibly

press this argument by supposing that either of these events could in turn have been the

inevitable result of a causal chain of events tracing back to the beginning of time and perhaps

even spanning the universe, thereby predetermining what Wilfred would do in this particular

place at this particular instant. Even if we might not be able to speak of this as “control” in the

absence of a conscious and purposeful controller, Dieter could contend that the cumulative

influences add up to a net determining force that alters not only Wilfred’s customary behavior,

but also our understanding of the word “choice.”

A variant of this thinking is that some unsensed influences on human behavior might be

random, as in the nuclear decay of a radioactive element, which produces a beta particle or a

neutron, which in turn happens to impact a brain cell, thus affecting whether or not the cell

transmits an impulse at some decisive moment. It’s important to note that randomness of the

cause does not translate to free will, but only adds the proposition that some influences on

human choice could be absolutely unpredictable. The implication of this is that some human

behavior might be determined moment by moment, rather than predetermined by a causal

51

chain triggered by some primordial event.

The frustrating part is that this conflict of views over free will has never been

conclusively resolved, because each side of the issue is animated mostly by conjecture, some of

which might possibly be true, but none of which so far has been testable or provable. There is

no known way to “rewind” real-world events and conditions to the exact same starting point

and conditions to see whether they play out exactly the same each time (as in a movie) or

differently (as in a video game), or whether differences in outcomes would signify true free will

or simply quantum-level randomness of behavioral triggers. Even if we could approximate such

a rewinding of events, there are just too many incalculable variables—including any effects of

the rewind itself, the events in it already having become part of memory and history (else we’d

have no reference for comparison in subsequent testing)—to be accounted for. Reason alone

has been inconclusive; hypothetical results of speculative free-will and deterministic scenarios

of identical problems would appear so similar as not to offer a way to distinguish which

scenario produces which result, and thus provides no clue to discern which process is actually

the one predominating in the real world when net influences become negligible.

Complicating the situation is the fact that many human decisions are not rational, but

are made on a basis of incoherent guesswork or sheer impulse. This leaves us to wonder

whether such an impulse might be the result of some failure, whether deliberate or accidental,

to consider all pertinent factors, and whether this failure is itself the result either of a caused

influence or of an uncaused, autonomous initiative. While it’s true that human action is subject

to some strict limitations and many influences, it remains unclear whether all human behavior

ultimately distills to cause-and-effect, or whether the mind actually contains an autonomous

52

decision-making mechanism that can indeed make one choice just as easily as any other in

cases where competing influences effectively cancel.

Implications of Free Will with Regard to Moral Responsibility

And so, without having resolved the free-will-versus-determinism issue, we return to

the ethical question: If it should turn out to be true that human behavior is not a product of

free will, but is predetermined, then how can we hold individuals morally responsible for

behavior over which they ultimately have no real control?

A Pragmatic Resolution

This is the puzzler. But if we study it awhile, sooner or later we note that the question

hangs on precisely how we interpret the term “responsibility.”

Attributability and Accountability

In this context, responsibility has two common meanings:

Attributability is the possibility of credibly attributing an action and its results to a certain

person, thing, or event.

Accountability is the apportioning of credit or blame to a person to whom an action is

attributed, perhaps taking into account whether the effects of the action were a matter of

deliberate choice, negligence, or innocent error.

If we know who or what brought about a certain action, then he, she, or it can’t escape

attributability; assuming that the attribution is true, it’s a fact and can’t be undone. For

instance, if we’re injured by a stone spontaneously falling from a cliff face after it’s been

loosened by wind and rain, we attribute the action to the cumulative effects of weather and, of

53

course, gravity; it’s a straightforward matter of identifying a cause-and-effect relationship

through evidence and reason. But we can’t hold the weather morally accountable, because

weather has no conscious will of its own, no intent to do either good or harm, but acts solely on

the basis of indifferent physics.15 If we’re looking for someone to blame, we’d have to blame

ourselves for foolishly wandering too near a crumbling outcrop.

However, if the stone had instead been thrown by a man, then in addition to attributing

our injury to him, couldn’t we also hold him morally accountable? If we knew that he had free

will to choose otherwise, that would be the naturally human thing to do. But if the man’s

actions were predetermined, if he was compelled by some overpowering influence or force of

destiny to throw the rock in our direction at that moment, then how could he be fairly

considered morally accountable for that action if he was powerless to choose otherwise?

The solution to this puzzle lies in understanding that attributability is a matter of

determining the facts in the causation of an event, whereas accountability is a matter of human

values as expressed in a social context. Attributability is mostly a matter of simple physics, and

carries no inherent value judgment with it. Accountability, in contrast, is all about values—

virtue or vice, merit or guilt, credit or blame, praise or shame, reward or penalty—or in the case

of a tie, ambivalence or indifference. Accountability is not an aspect of nature, but rather a tool

whereby society attempts to maintain its viability and stability by establishing and enforcing a

social order.

Society’s leaders accomplish this by imposing acceptable limits on the behavior of the

15 If, as some are inclined, we suppose that weather is controlled by gods or spirits, then perhaps we could hold

those controlling powers accountable for whatever good or evil results from its purposeful interference in

meteorology. But here we’re concerned with rational explanation, not mystical rationalization.

54

individuals and groups within it. When enforced by promise of benefit for conformance (e.g., a

paycheck for one’s labor), or by threat of penalty for their infringement (e.g., a fine or

imprisonment for theft), these limits become part of the environment of influences to which

we’re all subject. Whether, as members of society, our behavior is predetermined or freely

chosen, these influences clearly cause our inclination to behave a certain way to be stronger or

weaker than would be the case if the influences didn’t exist. And, to take this reasoning a step

further, whether the actions of society’s leaders are predetermined or freely chosen, their

decision to impose wise and just laws16 is influenced by what they understand to be the needs

of society and the necessity of keeping it viable, stable, productive, and reasonably orderly. If

human behavior is predetermined, then the behavior of leaders is no exception. Leaders are

obliged—determinists might say compelled—to enact and enforce some effective laws, or else

put society at an unacceptable risk of collapse, and consequently put their own prospects as

leaders in jeopardy.

Society’s Responsibility

Now we begin to see accountability in a pragmatic light, rather than under the more

traditionally abstract “honor versus disgrace” view. Survival is the primary objective of society,

for without the survival of society there’s virtually no hope of attaining the further goals of our

inherently social species, such as prosperity and justice. Accountability is simply a man-made

(or God-given, if we prefer) tool that society uses to attain its primary objective of survival. In

16 Of course, leaders sometimes have other motives, not all of which are in the public interest, and unwise and

unjust laws are often the result. However, we may consider these exceptions to the rule, and thus beyond the

scope of this elemental discussion.

55

the final analysis, it makes no discernible difference whether human behavior is entirely

determined or partly a matter of free choice. Accountability is in either case a crucial part of

our practical framework of social influences to encourage behavior that benefits (or at least

doesn’t harm) society, and to discourage behavior that clearly threatens it.

Obviously, these artificial influences aren’t powerful enough to guide the behavior of all

people, some of whom may be ignorant, misinformed, unreceptive, rebellious, desperate, or in

some cases deranged. Thus, the policy of accurately identifying and consistently punishing

wrongdoers serves as additional incentive for the rest of us to comply. And in the specific case

of incarceration, it also serves to restore stability to society by denying disruptive individuals

the ability to interact with, and thus to continue to exploit and victimize, those whose generally

positive behavior affirms their assent to the social contract.17

So, we see that applying penalties to offenders is simply a tool for maintaining social

order, a means to solve a problem. It isn’t society’s function to provide a channel for venting

public outrage upon the guilty. It isn’t society’s concern whether human behavior is

determined or arises from free will. The responsibility of society—meaning us, interacting both

individually and collectively through our chosen leaders—is to safeguard itself for the benefit of

17 Social contract is the term that philosophers John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau applied to the tacit mutual

agreement of each individual in society, to participate in obligatory duties, and to abstain from behavior which

threatens, harms, or otherwise abuses others, in exchange for all other members’ reciprocal agreement to do

likewise. For example, Smith gives up the right to take or damage anyone else’s stuff, in return for everyone else’s

agreement not to take or damage Smith’s stuff. A social contract is not a written document, but rather an

assumed commitment to mutual duty and restraint, expected of society’s members as the price of partaking of

society’s benefits, and affirmed through consistent compliance with society’s standards.

56

the people. To this end, society’s obligation is to use its influence to place prudent limits on

behavior, to provide incentives for people to abide by those limits18 and penalties to persuade

the less cooperative and the callously indifferent not to make socially harmful choices, and to

separate from society those who are not thus persuaded.

But it’s vitally important in the first place that we get attributability right—identifying

the true instigator and agent of an act—so that the subsequent process of accountability

reliably results in penalizing only the actual perpetrator, rather than some unfortunate

scapegoat.19 If instead we substitute indiscriminate vengeance for well considered justice, then

the deterrent effect of the penalty is lost. For when it becomes evident that the system

routinely imposes undeserved penalties upon innocent individuals, the incentive to behave well

is voided, since good behavior no longer ensures freedom from punishment. The incentive

then becomes not to do only what’s moral and lawful, but merely to do whatever one can get

away with—a very poor and ultimately counterproductive substitute.

Free will versus determinism isn’t a real-world concern. It’s a metaphysical red herring,

whose only practical use is to challenge sophomore philosophy students to think deeply, to

18 In most instances and for most people, the right to share in society’s natural benefits (e.g., organization,

specialization, efficiency, infrastructure, justice, security, education, prosperity, and common standards) is

incentive enough.

19 In the long run, it’s generally better to let a few suspected wrongdoers escape penalty than to penalize any

innocents, through either deliberate scapegoating or error due to insufficiency of evidence. However, allowing

actual wrongdoers to run free can, through their continuing misbehavior, result in the infliction of suffering upon

the innocent. Correcting this problem might well involve some readjustment of judicial philosophy and

restructuring of the justice system, and perhaps no system could be made perfect. Consideration of such reform

would be a worthwhile endeavor, but is beyond the scope of this discussion.

57

penetrate surface appearances and attempt to discover and understand the roots of issues.

What really matters is survival, and whatever further benefits we can derive from it.

Accountability is simply one of the methods we use to achieve these. Other common methods

include flattery, coercion, deceit, and bribery. However, despite their effectiveness, these

others seem categorically opposed to our current notions of fairness and justice (except

perhaps within the institutions of business, politics, and religion). Thus, well considered

accountability emerges among the least objectionable yet acceptably effective options known

for establishing behavioral influences to promote the viability and stability of society, and thus

to support and augment whatever advantages society can in return offer the individual.

58

Part II: Psyche: Mind, Spirit, Soul, and Being

Psyche is a Greek word (ψξχε) that embraces the interrelated and often overlapping

concepts of spirit, mind, and soul. Here we’ll discuss each of these concepts individually, but

also note areas of overlap. The word psyche has been chosen to avoid confusion when

discussing all three consciousness-related concepts as a group. Some romantics might object

that we’ve omitted “heart” as the emotional component of psyche, but they’ll find such matters

addressed under the topic of “spirit.”

The final chapter of this part concerns what we call “being,” and what significance the

term has for us human beings, as distinct from living things that are not beings.

59

Chapter 5: Distinguishing Mind, Spirit, and Soul

These terms have acquired several meanings in practice. In many cases, their meanings

overlap, and indeed they’re often used interchangeably. However, here we’ll be discussing

specific qualities applying to each concept, so it’s best that we specify what definitions and

distinctions we’ll be applying to each, in order to maintain clarity of thought about a topic that’s

often badly muddled. So, it’s appropriate here to reemphasize that your understanding of

these terms might be different from mine. You needn’t accept my definitions, but you must be

aware of what mine are for an accurate understanding of what you’re reading here.

Key to our discussion is the fact that, since the 19th century, much has been learned

about the human brain, senses, and endocrine system. With advances in both psychology and

neuroscience, much of human experience, having previously been attributed to supernatural or

mystical phenomena, now appears rooted in the biochemistry of these material components of

our bodies. 20

Spirit

We take up the concept of spirit first, because it has key implications for both mind and

soul. It’s a word with many meanings, ranging from “ghost” to “intoxicating drink,” most of

which are irrelevant to our discussion. However, spirit, as an animating force, is one focus of

20 Some object to natural explanations as “reductionism,” by which they generally mean they don’t like their pet

mysteries being objectively studied and explained. But if we truly want to know “how things really are,” we must

be willing to seek out reality, and to peer beneath the veil of mystery with which the collective ignorance of the

ages has cloaked it. The active intellect sees mysticism, not as an occult strength to be exalted, but as a human

weakness to be remedied by understanding whenever possible.

60

our inquiry. The animating (literally “life-giving”) force is an ancient concept related to

breathing (respiration), and has been attributed not only to humans but to animals and plants

as well, not to mention other objects (weather, fire, bodies of water, mountains, forests,

disease, crystals, and celestial bodies, for instance) that appear to move or change of their own

accord. Spirit is mentioned in the records of virtually all civilizations since the invention of

writing. There’s also symbolic and pictorial evidence for the concept in the artworks and

artifacts of illiterate prehistoric peoples on every continent except Antarctica. It’s been a

common facet of accepted philosophies until relatively recently. It continues to be significant in

Eastern philosophy, and remains a key concept in religious thinking.

However, since the late 19th century, the flowering of the sciences of biology and

chemistry has gradually brought to light the details of certain biochemical processes by which

life operates. While we don’t yet have an absolutely complete picture, we’re now close enough

to be able to draw numerous testable inferences from what we’ve learned so far—even to the

point of understanding many of the processes that give rise to consciousness itself, and

identifying the regions of the brain in which they occur.

Even if we’re still a long way from filling in all the blanks, it would appear that we’re well

on the way to doing so. The known and anticipated natural processes of chemistry and physics

are sufficient to explain most of what we know of life and its processes, and we’re continually

learning more. Biologists now understand the animating force of life in terms of biochemistry,

whose processes can be investigated, tested, and rationally understood. The mystical concept

of spirit, on the other hand, has never advanced to a level where it could be observed, tested,

or used to explain or predict anything in a way that enhances understanding; its failure in this

61

regard has rendered it essentially obsolete where science is concerned.

“Unfair!” the spiritists may cry. Very well, let them present verifiable evidence to

support their claims. Their response: “Our evidence is overwhelming belief!” Yes, widespread

belief is evidence. But evidence of what? Only that many people are eager to seize upon

appealing beliefs, not that the beliefs are true. There was a time when virtually everyone

believed that the Earth stands motionless at the center of the universe while everything else

revolves about it. There’s no question that this belief was overwhelmingly appealing and

popular; but it was also just as contrary to reality then as it is today. It isn’t reality that has

changed, but only our understanding of it, in a way that brings that understanding into closer

accord with reality. Popularity and intensity of belief are irrelevant to the question of whether

belief corresponds to reality.

Over a span of three centuries, biochemistry has come to explain, often in excruciating

detail, our verifiable observations of life, from major and minor body functions, to energy

production by incrementally controlled oxidation and fermentation in the cells, to DNA’s21 sub-

microscopic molecular mechanism of genetic coding, translation, and replication, as well as its

evolution through mutation and selection. In contrast, the vague concept of animating spirit

has filled the imaginations of countless generations, yet has never graduated from the category

of entertaining, poetic notions. It’s turned out to be one of those quaint attempts at

“explanation” that has never truly explained anything, and has never moved mankind a

millimeter closer to genuine understanding of anything demonstrably real.

In deciding what to do about this outdated concept of spirit, two options are available.

21 DNA: deoxy-ribonucleic acid, which forms paired helical strands of adenine, cytosine, guanine, and tyrosine

molecules, and which determines the characteristics of the organism in whose cells it resides.

62

First, we could simply declare our concept of spirit-as-animating-force obsolete and consign it

to history’s rubbish heap of charming but nonsensical notions. This option is straightforward,

but might be difficult for some people to accept, particularly if they’ve been inculcated in

religious belief in mystical spirits. Or second, we could say that the animating force we’ve been

calling spirit for thousands of years has actually turned out to be the natural array of processes

we are now beginning to understand in terms of biochemistry. Spirit, if we still choose to call it

that, should now be understood, not as a supernatural entity, but as a potentially

understandable (if not yet fully understood) natural process. Its meaning is no longer life-giver

(Latin anima), but has become life itself (Latin vita). This option would allow us to continue

using the traditional term spirit in this context as a synonym and convenient shorthand for

biochemical process. However, such use could be confusing and misleading if the context isn’t

explained in advance, for many audiences might be unfamiliar with the use of the word “spirit”

as a biochemical euphemism. (As one who prefers to avoid confusion, I’m inclined to

recommend the first option.) In either case, we can credibly retain the figurative definition of

spirit as an animated (rather than animating) state of mind related to some specific idea—a

spirit of community, a spirit of inquiry, a spirit of justice, etc.—and thus as a product of mind

rather than the source of it.

Mind

One of the most remarkable offshoots of this animating force of life is something we call

mind. Mind is an extraordinary level of self-awareness that enables us to contemplate, not just

how to secure our own immediate survival, and not just material objects in present experience,

but also concepts such as past and future, virtue and vice, purpose and value. We even possess

63

the ability to contemplate the workings of the mind itself, a self-reflective ability we think may

be unique to humans among all living creatures on Earth.

But as we’ve seen, spirit has turned out to be a non-explanation, as much for mind as it

is for anything else. In its place, biochemistry has led to a rapidly evolving understanding of life,

body, and now even mind, which turns out to be a natural manifestation of a physical organ we

call the brain. What’s our evidence? Abuse or damage the brain, and the mind inevitably

suffers the consequences. Destroy the brain—starve it of oxygen and nutrients, poison it

chemically, fry it with electricity, or batter it into jelly with a blunt instrument—and all functions

of mind cease, even if other body processes continue operating for a time. No working brain,

no mind. It’s hard to argue with evidence like that. In the old days, this is how we discovered—

usually by accident—that there was some connection between the material brain and the

processes of mind.

But nowadays there’s no need to damage or destroy a brain to see how it affects mind.

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) detects and displays real-time brain activity corresponding

to specific stimuli, activities, and thoughts. Electrodes implanted in various specific areas of the

brain allow experimenters to trigger predictable sensations, actions, and thoughts, and thus

map the brain’s functional areas. There’s now no question that the brain is quite literally the

nerve-center of all mental activity.

But let’s momentarily backtrack to a previous thought: the animating force of life and

mind. With animating spirit no longer a serious consideration, it would appear that

biochemistry neatly fills the void that spirit has vacated. Mind arises from, is sustained by, and

is entirely dependent upon, the physical brain and the biochemical processes going on within it.

64

Today there is no serious doubt about this among those who’ve investigated the matter in any

depth. Moreover, there’s another important aspect of mind about which there’s no doubt:

Mind exists. For, unlike an undetectable animating spirit for which no verifiable evidence

exists, we all have our own personal experiences as perceiving, remembering, believing,

reasoning creatures to convince us that the existence of mind is an irrefutable fact. If you can

understand this sentence, you’re able to do so only because you have mind.

Soul

Soul is an alleged immaterial part of psyche that presumably lives on after the physical

death of the body. However, this assertion is virtually impossible to confirm, since there seems

no verifiable evidence of disembodied souls, and no seriously investigated reports of them that

haven’t turned out to involve hoaxes or hallucinations. Nonetheless, we have a rough

compilation of soul’s alleged properties, which we can scrutinize and evaluate as to coherency

and consistency. To understand exactly what soul could be, we need to understand what parts

of psyche might survive the trauma of death. And—believe it or not—there’s some material

evidence that we can use to assist in this inquiry. However, we must bear in mind that

methodically investigating soul in this way is very different from the traditional path of

uncritically hopeful faith in our own immortality. Therefore, we must be prepared to have

some of our traditional views of soul challenged by a critical assessment of whatever we might

discover.

A necessary characteristic of anything that can transcend physical death is immunity to

(or at least ability to recover from) the effects of physical frailty and failure. Obviously, if an

immaterial soul can live on after the death of a material body that ultimately disintegrates and

65

decomposes altogether, then this enduring soul can’t be dependent upon the temporal body.

Indeed, any soul durable enough to transcend the catastrophe of physical death and

disintegration ought to rebound with relative ease from any lesser material trauma, perhaps a

bit sadder and wiser, but otherwise virtually unaffected, its fundamental identity and character

enduring intact. For the notion of an immaterial and immortal soul to be viable, such an entity

must be essentially independent of, and unharmed in any lasting way by, any material thing or

event that humans are apt to encounter in the temporal, physical world.

Yet such a notion would seem to defy the evidence at hand. While our psyche is indeed

resilient to a remarkable degree, there are clearly limits to its endurance, beyond which it

suffers irrevocable change. Material reality does affect mind, in many cases permanently. It’s

not uncommon, for example, for a person who consumes alcohol excessively to develop a

personality significantly different from his sober self, a difference greater than can be

accounted for by a mere numbing of inhibitions. The inebriate’s behavior may go well beyond

the mildly peculiar to the truly bizarre, exhibiting a personality fundamentally at odds with his

normal disposition—transforming from responsible to reckless, or from affable to violent, for

instance. Granted, in the early stages of alcoholism, the drinker typically reverts to his normal

self if he avoids alcohol for a time; yet while decidedly under its influence, he’s literally “not

himself.” Though he has the same body, name, and even memories, while intoxicated his mind

is clouded, out of control, subject to extremes of mood. When he recovers his sobriety, he

might not remember his drunken behavior; or if he does, he might be either dismissive of it or

thoroughly ashamed of it. His intoxicated self and his sober self are, for all practical purposes,

two different people who take turns occupying the same body, according to its chemical

66

condition at the moment.

If he continues to drink abusively over a long period, and if the material structure and

chemistry of his brain are progressively damaged as a result, then recovery eventually becomes

impossible. His brain becomes permanently altered by the material chemical substance. And

his mind, far from impervious to these material effects, continues to exhibit through his

behavior the inevitable results of neural damage, even if he ceases to imbibe for many days,

weeks, or even years. When he can no longer recollect the state of a whole and healthy mind,

when he becomes incapable of recovering it, when he accepts this chemically damaged state as

“normal,” then his sober self no longer exists, and he’s permanently become truly a different

person.

In this way, we know that psyche is affected by changes in the brain. Furthermore,

modern science now understands in considerable detail how ethyl alcohol influences and

disrupts the chemistry of living cells—including those of the brain. So we know that this

alteration and degeneration of psyche—including whatever part of it is presumably to be

preserved as soul—is the result of damage to the physical brain, and that this damage is

wrought by the chemical ethanol itself by disrupting normal cell processes, sometimes so

severely that the cells themselves are rendered permanently non-functional—they die. The

quaint notion, that the effects of strong drink owe to an immaterial, diabolical essence of evil

lurking in the bottle with the physical liquid, is as obsolete as the Greek wine god Dionysus.

Yet intoxication is but one example of the effects of material phenomena upon the

physical brain, hence upon its processes of mind, and hence upon the reflection of mind in the

presumably immaterial soul. The mind’s chemical nature is revealed by the effects not only of

67

alcohol, but of other drugs, of poisons, of surgical anesthesia, of malnutrition and dehydration,

of oxygen deprivation, and of prolonged exposure to environmental extremes. Its electrical

nature is demonstrated by our ability to detect reactions or trigger responses through

electrodes attached to the scalp or implanted in the brain itself. Its physical nature is evident

through loss of memory or skills, or sometimes drastic changes of personality or thought

patterns, following severe head injury, stroke, or brain surgery. Its biological nature is exhibited

by the natural disorders and diseases that afflict it, from hormonal imbalances to brain tumors,

from epilepsy to Alzheimer’s. In addition, mind is affected by both physical and social

environments through the senses, which are themselves physical biological structures that

convey impulses to the brain by way of an electrochemical neural network.

Now, most proponents of soul would probably not dispute that it’s a reflection of mind,

for after all, it presumably carries with it all reward of virtue and burden of sin acquired during

life. Immaterial though it might be, soul would inevitably have to be affected by mind, which in

turn is altered by changes in the physical brain, which are typically the results of an individual’s

environment and life experience. Thus, soul is influenced by events during physical life, and in

extreme cases can even undergo Jekyll-and-Hyde transformations resulting from material

causes. Thus, whatever soul might become after physical death has been shaped to a

significant degree by behavior and events during physical life.

Implications of Mortality

With mind so profoundly connected to, and affected by, the physical state of brain and

body (and, by extension, to their temporal environment), its demonstrated dependence upon

material existence rules out its survival after corporeal death. Still, we can’t rule out that some

68

immaterial aspect of psyche—soul—might cross over into some other phase of existence. So

our inquiring minds want to know: What form might immaterial existence take? Once we

identify the parts of human thought, feeling, and experience that necessarily vanish when

physical life ends, what part of awareness could remain? What part can see, hear, taste, smell,

or feel, when all the physical senses have gone blind, deaf, and numb? What part can think,

remember, imagine, or believe, when the brain’s synapses have stopped firing? What part can

experience joy or sorrow, love or hate, fear or anger, pride or shame, when the endocrine

system has shut down and the heart no longer beats? What inspiration can revive awareness

when the flesh has fallen into decay and the brain has rotted away? Without the living brain to

perform the functions that shape our personality, conscious experience, thoughts, feelings, and

even dreams, what dim and feeble trace of dark, silent, vegetative existence could possibly

remain, as anything we would recognize or appreciate from our accustomed material point of

reference? Since such aspects of awareness as sensation, memory, thought, and dreaming are

demonstrably dependent on the physical, living brain, we can safely reason that any immaterial

remnant of awareness that survives physical death would be devoid of these physically

dependent aspects. And since these indeed constitute virtually all of what most of us think of

as conscious existence, there would not seem much else left to be aware of—or with.

To salvage what little we might from the sparse evidence at hand, the existence of soul

disconnected from physical experience would likely be, at most, a dormant seed-like state,

subjectively indistinguishable from complete oblivion. But if we care to indulge in some

judicious speculation, we might imagine other possibilities without stretching credulity beyond

the breaking point. Perhaps our material existence is merely a blossom that first opens, then is

69

fertilized by material experience, and then fades, but in so doing creates the seed that ripens

and sprouts into an utterly different phase of existence. We might suppose that some unknown

process of disembodied awareness kicks in after physical death, and that the soul-seed awakens

into some new and unfathomable immaterial state.

The disappointment here is that we can’t rationally anticipate what such a state might

be like, for the chances are vanishingly small that an immaterial state would be even remotely

like anything we’ve ever experienced during our material existence. Forget about experiencing

anything through the senses, the emotions, or thoughts, for we’ve seen that these depend on

biological processes, which in turn depend on a living, physical body, which at physical death

ceases to be part of us. Moreover, to describe, with emptily glowing adjectives like “sublime,”

“glorious,” and “perfect,” a state which no living person has ever experienced, doesn’t help in

the least. It merely prompts us to admonish the describers: You make pretty noises, but you

tell us nothing. For indeed you know nothing, because you’re in no better position than anyone

else to know the unknowable. You’re neither seekers of truth nor teachers of wisdom; you’re

contemptible pretenders, mere entertainers! Even if we suspect that an immaterial after-death

state might exist, we’ve no idea how we ought to prepare for it, or even if preparation is

possible, let alone necessary. For the revelations of mystics, prophets, and priests are all

stubbornly rooted in references to familiar material existence. What have scriptural allusions

to material objects like trumpets and harps, chariots and swords, fountains and bridges, blood

and fire, virgins and palaces, streets of gold and gates of pearl, to do with the immaterial, for

the love of sanity?

If we’re honest, we must admit we can’t know the answers to such questions, or even

70

know whether there are answers, with even the slightest degree of certainty. Still, we run our

daily lives without certainty, so we may feel free to venture an educated guess as to what

seems most probable. Perhaps one of humankind’s many religions happened to get it right,

and soul goes to a dim and quiet realm of repose in Hades or Sheol, or daily wages glorious

battle at Valhalla. Maybe soul is judged and sentenced to spend eternity in Paradise or Hell, or

merges with the cosmic mind, or transmigrates to reincarnation in a new body, schlepping its

karma with it.

These are all pure conjecture. While there is endless wonder and discussion of them,

there’s no verifiable, unambiguous evidence for any of them. Perhaps it’s all just wishful

fantasy, a groundless hope born of a senseless dread of final oblivion. Yet why fear oblivion?

Why not anticipate it instead as the ultimate release from worry and suffering, the best slumber

we’ve ever had, a blissful passing from the lifelong struggle of being to the supremely serene

peace of not being? If there’s anything beyond this, then we’ll each find out when we get

there, and either deal with it or be dealt with by it, whatsoever it might be. Curiosity about the

unknown is a normal, healthy, and occasionally enlightening or profitable pursuit; but obsession

with the unknowable is pointless folly.

71

Chapter 6: Being

Human beings. Ha! Humans are animals. We’re part of a menagerie of living creatures

that can move at will and under our own power from one position to another. We take in

carbohydrates and oxygen, which combine in our cells to produce the energy we need for

movement and other functions, and we produce carbon dioxide and water as waste products of

this controlled oxidation. So, apart from the fact that we aren’t plants, fungi, bacteria, or rocks,

what makes us so special?

The Essence and Justification of Being

Specifically, we’re animals belonging to a class called mammals, so called because we

bear our young live (not in eggs) and suckle them when they’re infants. We mammals are

warm-blooded, which is to say we maintain a fairly constant internal body temperature, and

thus—unlike cold-blooded fish, amphibians, and reptiles—we can sustain high activity levels

even when the ambient temperature drops. Assisting in this temperature control is a layer of

hair that covers most of our bodies’ surface; exceptions to this are our marine cousins, whales

and dolphins, who instead have a layer of insulating blubber under their skins.

More specifically, we’re mammals belonging to the order called primates. As primates,

we’re characterized by well developed hands and feet (in contrast to the clawed paws, hoofed

feet, or flippers of other mammals) and by our shortened snouts and large brains. As a result,

we can grasp and manipulate objects firmly and precisely without puncturing or tearing them,

we have unobstructed forward binocular vision, and we have enough ingenuity to devise

solutions to simple problems.

72

Most specifically, we’re primates of the family known as hominids, who alone among

the primates walk fully upright and have fully opposable thumbs, and who also have the largest

brains of any animal, calculated as a percentage of body mass.22 And as modern humans, we’re

the only surviving species of the hominid family, the rest of whom became extinct more than

ten thousand years ago.

We aren’t the largest, fastest, strongest, most agile, most physically durable, most

prolific, or longest-lived of all creatures. However, we’re the only mammals with a speech

apparatus configured in a way that allows us to utter consonant and vowel sounds in rapid,

controlled succession, plus advanced speech, auditory, and associative centers in the brain,

which together have enabled us to develop highly elaborate spoken language. And we’re the

only animals with the brainpower to contemplate, not just our own immediate basic needs, but

also complex symbolism (e.g., writing, numbers, geometric figures, money), abstractions (e.g.,

past and future, origin and destiny, purpose and value, civilization and justice, evolution and

extinction, good and bad, spirit and God), and reason (methodical association, deduction, and

induction). And, as far as we know, we’re the only creatures on Earth able to turn our

brainpower inward to contemplate both the workings and the limits of our own minds, as well

as our own existence as individual temporal parts of a greater continuous whole. This unique

power to contemplate the implications of our own existence is our justification for

distinguishing ourselves from other species, not just as human animals, but as self-aware and

22 Elephants and whales have larger brains in absolute terms, but they also have enormous body mass, which

consumes some brainpower for its control. Humans incorporate a greater percentage of their body mass (about 2

to 2.5 percent) into their brains than any other species, and thus have the reserve mental capacity to engage in art,

science, industry, politics, religion, and philosophy.

73

self-contemplative human beings.

The Importance of Being

All this to justify the concept of being! “Being” is not just a tag-on title to make us feel

important. It is important. The unique qualities of being are likely at least partly responsible

for our own species’ survival, out of all the other hominid species who succumbed to extinction.

The components of being are what have enabled us not only to heal our sick, but to extend our

lifespan; not only to use language, but to preserve our ideas in writing and to communicate

instantaneously over long distances; not only to travel at will, but to design and build machines

that carry us faster than any cheetah and higher than any eagle.

The abilities of being empower us to have dominion over other creatures, to

domesticate them as pets, to harness them for labor, to cage them for amusement, to

exterminate them for convenience, to butcher them for food. But it is also this same state of

being that cautions us not to become abusive, either in our exploitation of the creatures that

serve us, or in our interaction with our fellow beings. (From this, we might infer that anyone

who fails to heed this caution is to that extent revealed as less of a being. And we might well be

right to do so, provided we remain mindful of our own failings as well.)

The components of being give us power to do great good—or great evil. But it is being

itself that offers us the discretion to understand the difference, and the concern and discipline

to act accordingly. It’s the understanding of being that prompts us, not simply to choose good

over bad, but to reject a lesser good in favor of a better one, or to commit a lesser bad to avert

a worse one, or to choose the optimum course from among available options, each comprising

portions of both good and bad. And it’s the burden of being that causes us to make such a

74

compromise in full knowledge that we must live with the regrets of any negative consequences.

Further Implications of Being

Unequal Distribution of Being

As we noted earlier, the abilities to reason abstractly and to communicate our thoughts

to others are the primary factors associated with self-aware being. However, not all humans

share these abilities to the same degree. Some people are star athletes, some are skilled

artisans, and some are innovative planners. Some are great speakers, others are great artists,

still others have a greater than usual capacity for reasoning, and probably most have a fairly

even mix of mostly mediocre talents. Perhaps some might say this isn’t fair. But life isn’t fair. If

you have a complaint, register it with the manufacturer, whether you believe it’s Mother

Nature, Father God, cruel Fate, or something else. Here we’re simply discussing what appears

to be the reality of the situation, like it or not.

What clearly appears to be the case is that people are different; each of us has his or her

particular set of strengths and weaknesses. We must play the cards we’re dealt, and it seems

obvious that some people just don’t draw a high card from the introspection suit. As a result,

we get someone rich in ambition but poor in empathy, or maybe an otherwise super business

strategist who’d rather not be bothered with safety and health issues, or a fumbling drunkard

who’s aware of little more than his own craving. As thinking, feeling individuals they still get

basic credit for being human beings, though their final score might be somewhat below

average.

75

Human Non-beings

There are some things which are human and alive, but which aren’t human beings,

according our basic “being” criterion of conscious self-awareness and introspective ability. Let’s

consider a few examples:

Groups of humans: A corporation is an entity owned and controlled by one or more individual

human beings. Thus, a corporation might be considered human in its general makeup, and may

even be legally considered the same as a human individual for tax purposes, considering the

corporation’s income separately from the incomes of its owners and investors. However, the

corporation itself isn’t truly alive as an autonomous biological organism. It isn’t truly a human

being with its own individual awareness, intellect, opinions, and civil rights. Human beings have

to eat, make rent or mortgage payments, make decisions about having and educating kids, and

worry about the quality of the air, water, and food they and their families ingest, whereas

corporations don’t. Corporations, as such, don’t worry about anything; any necessary

corporate worrying (which in most cases distills to such matters as profit, viability, and public

relations) is assigned to various individual human beings within it.

Much the same can be said of a non-corporate business or foundation, a union or guild,

a government, a political party, or a religious institution. The controllers of some organizations

assert that their organizations have opinions. But in most cases, the “organization’s” alleged

opinions are really just those of the few individuals who are its dominant leaders, who might be

eager to expend corporate funds to propagandize their own views, irrespective of a possibly

conflicting consensus of the organization’s general membership. The claim that an organization

comprising more than one individual has a human view and a will of its own is a fallacy of

76

composition, which falsely attributes to the whole of an entity the properties of its parts.

Parts of humans: An extracted wisdom tooth, a circumcised foreskin, or a surgically removed

appendix or colon polyp is human; but it doesn’t qualify as a human being, since it isn’t self-

aware on any level. There should be no moral problem with unceremoniously tossing such

items into an appropriate waste receptacle. Attributing the qualities of a whole human being to

each of its parts would be a fallacy of division (a reverse image of the composition fallacy).

Brain-dead humans: A helmetless motorcycle accident victim, whose skull has been crushed

and its contents reduced to bloody pulp, is still human, and might even remain biologically alive

for a while. But he has permanently passed out of the realm of conscious being. Without a

functioning brain, there is no hope whatsoever of his recovery to consciousness. Whatever else

of him might still be salvageable can be bagged and tagged “organ donor.”

Pre-conscious embryos and fetuses: A human fetus at gestation week 22 has a beating heart

and can react reflexively to stimuli—but so can a fetal pig at the equivalent stage. It’s never

been conscious, and has at least six weeks yet before it could begin to develop enough of a

brain to experience a glimmer of conscious sensation, be it pleasure or pain. So if, in the

prospective mother’s or her physician’s opinion, there’s any reason to terminate the pregnancy

at this point, there’s no rational humanitarian case to be made against doing so.

“Heartless!” some emotion-driven readers might exclaim. But what it really is, is myth-

less. We’ve approached the issue objectively and forthrightly, on the basis of available relevant

evidence, and with as few unsupported preconceptions as we can manage. It’s where evidence

and logic lead when emotion and mythology aren’t allowed to muddle the reasoning. I grant

this might be a strange new approach to the subject for some.

77

I also grant that some people strongly believe that the potentiality of a fetus to become

a self-aware being is a necessary point to consider. They’re free to believe this, and to be

guided by that belief with respect to themselves and their families. We haven’t done so here,

because we’ve concerned ourselves only with harm to existing awareness, which is to say, with

causing actual experienced pain, distress, or loss. The only existing awareness affected by

concern for a 22-week fetus is that of an overly empathic observer, not of the fetus itself.

Granted, empathy is a very desirable quality, but like many other good things it can be

overdone or misdirected. Empathizing with something that isn’t actually aware is like

empathizing with a hapless character in a novel, play, or movie: The feeling of empathy is

natural and real to the observer, but the object of the empathy—the seemingly experiencing

character—isn’t. Although the observer might experience an induced sense of loss, in such

cases no actual self-aware being experiences actual loss. Potentiality may be a necessary

consideration23 for those whose beliefs command it; but for everyone else, it’s an option, and

then only with respect to one’s own pregnancy.

23 Allowing potentiality as a factor introduces the problem that every ovum could be considered a potential being.

Thus, it could be argued that every human female of childbearing age should become pregnant at every

opportunity, in order to realize the maximum potential for new beings. This is a condition we observe in Third

World countries, where a high birth rate is needed to compensate for a high mortality rate. In a developed

country, it simply leads to overpopulation and the spread of urban slums, as in England following the Industrial

Revolution, and in India today.

78

Part III: Real-World Implications

So, is there some significant lesson to be learned from all this mental meandering, or is

it merely a procession of ultimately pointless points? Actually, there are real implications

affecting the quality of our thinking and the reliability of its results. Coherent, evidence-based

reasoning enables us, at the personal, family, community, and workplace levels, to make better

informed and reasoned decisions on a more consistent basis, and thus to lead better lives with

respect to happiness, health, longevity, morality, justice, security, and prosperity. It doesn’t

guarantee perfect results every time, but it vastly increases our odds beyond what we could

expect from random chance, guesswork, or reliance on blind ideology.

But the most important implications of relevant evidence and sound reasoning have to

do with how we govern ourselves as a society and as a nation. To be fully competent at self-

governance, we need to be familiar with a variety of subjects—probably more than most

people have the time or inclination to keep abreast of. However, we can probably make a

better than average showing by becoming basically informed in two categories: politics and

economics. By basically informed, we don’t mean expert, but at least acquainted with current

issues and with the competing positions taken on them. By applying our evidence-and-reason

skills, we stand a good chance of sorting through which positions are in fair agreement with

reality and which aren’t.

Before we get into particulars, I should openly declare (as if you hadn’t already guessed)

that I have my own biases, and in many cases they’re somewhat different from the American

mainstream. I admit my biases are, like most people’s, partly influenced by emotion and

personal background. But, unlike many, I do listen to and try to understand opposing points of

79

view—at least those I haven’t already heard countless times and long since found to be utterly

unsupported. Some of my views are better informed than others, but even those that aren’t

are mostly disciplined by evidence and reason, and steeped in introspection, none of which are

much in style in some quarters. This probably accounts in part for my intellectual departures

from the mainstream.

So, if your views and mine don’t exactly match, that’s not a big deal. My aim is not to

convince anyone to accept my ideas just because I claim they’re “how things really are,” but to

tempt you to use your own mind to explore the “and why.” I want to coax you to examine new

ideas with some criterion more vigorously and rationally discriminating than simply “I believe in

this” or “I don’t believe in that,” and to reexamine old ideas that might benefit from some

dusting off and updating.

So, let’s see what new light, if any, our previous discussion sheds on the real world of

the here and now. Let’s steer past transient topics that in a year or two we’d likely agree

weren’t really worth anyone’s time and attention, and concentrate instead on perennial issues

that have been a focus of importance and consternation for some time, and perhaps one or two

that are even now becoming prominent. Let’s see whether we can manage to break up any

intellectual (or ideological) logjams in the process.

80

Chapter 7: Politics

You can fool too many of the people too much of the time.

–American author James Thurber

Many Americans—maybe even most—would rather not think about politics. We have

other more pleasant or personally urgent things on our minds: providing for a family; running a

business; saving for retirement; rooting for the home team. If we bother to vote, it’s only in the

widely hyped presidential elections every four years. Who has time for politicians? The

common perception is that the only ones who aren’t scheming crooks and liars are morons

incapable of holding a real job. But this is precisely the point. As it stands, our political system

discourages most good and competent people from running for public office. We can’t expect

perfection. Unfortunately, many in politics are dishonest, greedy, incompetent, or sociopathic.

But some aren’t. Our job as responsible citizens is to sort through the lot, to find the few who

are clearly superior—or at least less inferior—and do what we can to get the marginally better

ones elected and the really bad ones thrown out. Like it or not, we need to get involved, even if

all our time and energy allows is getting informed through the news, making a small

contribution to our favorite candidates and maybe putting up a sign or two in the yard,

registering to vote, and getting to our polling place on election day.

Aside from the “getting informed” part, the rest might consume all of an hour or so a

couple of times a year for most people. It’s a small price to pay to help make government

incrementally better—or, perhaps in many cases, to keep it from becoming significantly worse.

For inaction has its price, too. There was a time not so long ago, when want of a little extra

effort by a relative few—a few more votes in one state—might’ve tipped the balance to keep

81

our nation out of a needless war that further destabilized a crucial region of the world, might’ve

kept our national budget deficit close to zero, might’ve allowed the nation’s longest continuous

stretch of prosperity in living memory to resume shortly after the “dot.com” bubble burst,

might’ve forestalled the worst economic calamity since the Great Depression. Make no

mistake: We pay a price for inaction. Acting in non-presidential elections is just as important,

and voting in primaries can help weed out the worst of the worst for the general election. In

the off-year election of 2010, many moderate voters failed to turn out, with the result that

extremists were able to pack many state legislatures and governors’ offices. They then

gerrymandered congressional districts, and rewrote election laws in an effort to keep

themselves permanently in power, despite that their non-factual ideologies run contrary not

only to reality but also to the will of the majority and the public interest. If we’re concerned

about our own well-being, we can’t excuse ourselves from getting informed and voting in any

election, whether the presidency is in question, or “only” members of Congress and state

offices, and local issues. Political decisions may be distasteful, but in the long run they’re

among the most important we ever make. With as many uninformed and severely misinformed

voters as are being stirred up by scare tactics, manufactured “facts,” and bogus reasoning, we

the soberly informed, as a matter of self-preservation, simply cannot afford to blow off our

responsibility at the polls.

As for getting informed—honestly and accurately through reliable sources—that’s

arguably the most important part, and what this discussion is mainly about. Whether we do it

methodically through evidence and reason, or haphazardly through ideology and guesswork,

makes the time and effort we put into it either worthwhile or worse than worthless. Issues and

82

candidates change from one election to the next. However, there’s one thing on which we can

count: that the fear mongers, having nothing better on which to run, will trot out their time-

worn smokescreen issues, and use them to persuade multitudes of gullible voters to vote

against their own interests and well-being. So let’s have a thoughtful look at some of the most

common.

Smokescreen Issues

Smokescreen issues are essentially non-issues. They’re stock-in-trade ploys for

candidates with no real proposals to offer, or with problems to cover up, to harp on in the hope

of stirring up enough emotional frenzy to distract the gullible into voting against their own

interests.

Enemy Groups

Take your pick: different ethnicities, different beliefs; women, men; homosexuals,

transsexuals; immigrants; the handicapped; the young, the old; the wealthy, the poor, the

middle class; the educated, the uneducated; liberals, conservatives; capitalists, socialists;

people who look, dress, talk, or act “funny.” Then take your best shot at both defending their

rights to be accepted as equals into society, and at providing verifiable evidence and coherent

reasoning to show why they should be denied full participation in, or utterly rejected from,

society.

Bear in mind, though, that, with the exception of convicted criminals and the criminally

deranged, all previous long-term attempts to exclude this or that group from participation in

society have ultimately been defeated. Typically, defeat occurs when the assumptions

83

justifying discrimination are found to be fraudulent, or the evidence “cherry picked,”

manufactured, or misrepresented. The general pattern is that defeat of discrimination is then

affirmed and sustained by after-the-fact evidence that experience of acceptance of the once

despised group into society hasn’t produced any of the dire effects predicted. The only

unhappy aspect of resolution is that the fear- and hate-mongers are then saddled with the task

of figuring out what other group to single out as a socially acceptable object of their

misanthropy.

Among the most recent manifestations is the so-called “Defense of Marriage Act.” The

DMA makes mandatory a legal definition declaring marriage to be restricted to the union of one

man and one woman, on the assumption that allowing other forms of marital unions will

somehow mysteriously degrade or destroy conventional marriage—the mystery being that the

degrading or destructive force is never explicitly identified, and its anticipated effects are never

described. We’re left to wonder just what it might be that DMA proponents warn about, yet

decline to specify, with the implication that everyone knows what it is, and anyone who doesn’t

know must be stupid. If we press the issue, confess our supposed stupidity, and demand an

answer, they either can’t or won’t tell us, or else toss us a red herring having no relevance to

the issue. It becomes evident that they don’t know either. If anyone—particularly a politician

—makes a claim with the intent of compelling the rest of society to comply with it, then he or

she should be able to support the claim with verifiable evidence and coherent reason, and

defend the claim against reasonable challenge. Groundless fear and prejudice might stampede

the gullible, but it can’t sway thinking people—at least not for long. The same vague claim had

been made decades earlier about interracial and interfaith marriage, and its threats turned out

84

to be just as empty then. To my knowledge, there has never been a satisfactorily rational

answer to the question, “What, exactly, is there about gay marriage that endangers

conventional marriage; what’s the specific nature of the alleged damage; and what’s the cause-

and-effect mechanism by which the damage is inflicted?”

Flag-Burning

Flag desecration became an issue back during the Vietnam conflict and the ensuing

protests. It hasn’t been a significant problem since. But this doesn’t keep politicians from

dredging up this red herring to demand a constitutional amendment banning it, in the hope of

rousing the gullible rabble to this non-cause.

Ceremonial burning of the American flag is the accepted method of disposing of

damaged, worn, or badly faded flags that no longer serve the purpose of symbolizing a strong

democracy. But herein lies a point: The flag is only a symbol, not the substance or essence, of

our nation. The flag is neither the nation itself nor the principles that define and support it.

Among these principles are the freedom of speech and the right to petition government for

redress of grievances. Without its initiative to enshrine and protect these and other rights, the

United States of America might just as well have foregone the bother and cost of revolution and

remained colonies of the British Empire.

Burning or otherwise desecrating the nation’s flag as a way to express either or both of

these freedoms is a protected right in this country—provided one doesn’t create a safety

hazard, and provided one supplies one’s own flag for the purpose and doesn’t damage

someone else’s. Ironically, the flag symbolizes the rights of free speech and petition (among

many others). This is the flag’s only true value and meaning, without which it’s just a piece of

85

cloth. So, if we deny the right to burn the flag in protest, then we trample the very thing the

flag symbolizes. In other words, those who deny the freedom the symbol represents in order to

preserve the symbol itself thereby render the symbol worthless, by effectively voiding its

meaning of “freedom.” They could do no worse by using it to wrap garbage.

In my experience (as an observer only, mind you), publicly burning an American flag on

American soil is intended to elicit a reaction, and it’s usually quite effective at that. However, it

typically gets a positive reaction only from the flag-burner’s support group, but draws a vast

negative reaction from everyone else, including many who might otherwise sympathize with

the protester’s cause. In other words, flag-burning may be a spectacular way to attract

attention, but it’s not a smart way for protesters to bring others around to their way of

thinking; indeed, the result would seem quite the opposite. Yet I think the right of free

expression must include the right to express oneself stupidly. If it didn’t, then every one of us

would be up on charges on a fairly frequent basis.

School Prayer

The issue of school prayer—officially organized group prayer as administered or

designated by teachers or principals acting as paid agents of government—comes up frequently

in some states, and not at all in others. It’s more prevalent where religion is loud, literal, public,

and perpetually at war with the stubborn evidence of science and history, where religious

leaders find it easy to hijack public schools in their quest to indoctrinate everyone’s

impressionable young. They fire up their support by loudly objecting to what they describe as

the heavy hand of godless government out to smother prayer in public schools.

In reality, nothing prohibits students or faculty from praying individually, quietly, and on

86

their own initiative, so long as this doesn’t interfere with the educational process for which

public schools are funded by taxes on all citizens, including those who don’t share the

predominant local beliefs. Public-school teachers and principals, as agents of government, may

not order, coax, or even suggest that students pray, meditate, or undergo any form of religious

indoctrination, and may not create a situation in which students who choose not to participate

become subject to ostracism or abuse. In other words, school faculty in the paid service of

government may not “establish” any religion as officially prescribed, and thereby inhibit the

“free exercise” of other beliefs or non-belief.24

The constitutional restriction upheld by the Supreme Court is not a ban on non-

disruptive, voluntary, individual prayer. That’s a straw man erected by churchmen who, not

content with peace, tolerance, and brotherhood, crave an adversary to justify their existence,

and by corrupt politicians to justify their election.

Socialism

Socialism is an economic plan in which the means of production are publicly owned and

controlled by government, in contrast to capitalism, in which the means of production are

privately owned and controlled by individuals. So, if socialism is an economic system, why is it

grouped here under Politics instead of Economics? It has to do with socialism’s having become

identified with communism (a theory of collective ownership and control), after Marxists

overthrew the Russian monarchy and in 1922 established the “Union of Soviet Socialist

24 Amendment I to the U.S. Constitution reads, in part, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of

religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…” This provision and others in the same amendment have

subsequently been interpreted by courts as necessarily applying to all branches of government at all levels.

87

Republics,” or “Soviet Union” for short. In practice, the theory never really materialized in the

benevolent way Karl Marx had envisioned (probably because Marx had been too naïvely

charitable in his estimation of human nature with regard to political ambition). What emerged

in the U.S.S.R., instead of a benevolent dictatorship of the proletariat, was a brutally

oppressive, aggressive, anti-religious, paranoid and truth-averse25 regime, which was

communist only in name and socialist only in an extreme totalitarian aberration of the concept.

Thus, the word “socialism” became identified in many American minds as synonymous with

oppressive totalitarian politics and the antithesis of liberty. The extreme sort of “socialism”

practiced in the Soviet bloc, and later in Mao’s so-called People’s Republic of China, is indeed at

least as much political as economic.

Communist-bloc radical socialism contrasts starkly with the more genial and benevolent

forms of democratic socialism as practiced in much of western Europe and elsewhere. Indeed,

socialism is the basis of some very popular programs in the United States, such as Social

Security and Medicare, national defense, law enforcement, emergency response, public

education, public roads, basic research, food inspection, drug testing, bank regulation,

agricultural subsidies, and many others. Socialism in this normal sense of the word isn’t

incompatible with liberty, democracy, or capitalism. It’s commonly used to perform necessary

or desirable tasks for which the profit motive either is insufficient or in some way undermines

the public interest. Prudently applied, socialism not only doesn’t interfere with healthy

prosperity, but can actually enhance our experience of it by lifting some onerous worries from

25 The erstwhile Union of Soviet Socialist Republics had about as much in common with true socialism as the

German Democratic Republic had with democracy, or the People’s Republic of China with rule by the people:

essentially nothing.

88

individuals’ shoulders.

The main point of bringing this up here is that we Americans need to shed our obsolete

notions about socialism, and overcome our knee-jerk association of the term with unmitigated

evil. We need to understand socialism for what it actually is in most of today’s world: an

alternative way of getting something necessary or desirable done, at public expense, when

capitalism either can’t do it at all or won’t do it as well.26 By shedding our misperceptions, we

can stop being the puppets of partisan pundits, reacting irrationally whenever they use

“socialism” as a buzzword to manipulate our feelings and judgment with nightmares of

totalitarianism. We can then calmly and matter-of-factly accept socialism as simply another

tool at our disposal, to channel resources to where they can serve the public well-being. It’s a

tool that developed democratic societies, including the U.S., have been using to mostly

beneficial effect for a century or more—except that Americans alone irrationally cringe at

calling it “socialism.” It’s now the 21st century—time to grow up and get real.

If a candidate bases his or her campaign on any of these smokescreen issues, pitching a

view for which the available evidence ranges from non-existent to diametrically opposed, it’s a

clear indication that he or she either has nothing real to run on, is trying to cover up an

underhanded scheme or severe failing of some sort, or else is hopelessly irrational and

dangerously delusional. The solution? Vote for whoever is running against the demagogue. If

there’s no challenger, or if the challenger is no better, then use the “none of the above” option

26 Steel industrialist Andrew Carnegie was an exception. He used a portion of his great wealth to build and stock

numerous free public libraries around the nation. However, he worked his labor force so long and hard that few of

them had the spare time and energy to better themselves through book-reading, free or not.

89

if it’s available, or else write in your own name on the ballot, in an effort to deny the bad guy or

gal a majority of votes cast and call the race into public question.

Real Issues

Abortion

In a previous chapter, we discussed a rationale for understanding what constitutes a

meaningful concept of “being.” This exercise might serve the individual reader as an approach

to defending or rethinking his or her existing views on the subject of abortion rights.

One item we might note here is that those vehemently opposed to reproductive choice

and abortion rights typically label their cause as “pro-life” and their opponents’ as “pro-

abortion.” Now, I don’t know of anyone who considers abortion a positive experience that

every woman ought to try. It’s an undesirable option that serves, not as a prime choice, but as

a last resort. At most, abortion seems the lesser of two bads in the earnest opinion of many,

and most thoughtful people would probably concede that an informed person of child-bearing

age ought to be allowed, in good conscience and without interference from politicians, to

choose whichever of available options he or she personally considers the least bad. So, no,

“pro-abortion” doesn’t seem to apply to any real person or attitude; it’s a made-up position to

portray in an unfavorable light those who don’t share the anti-choice opinion.

As to “pro-life,” the term would seem to apply not only to “anti-abortion,” but also to all

categories of “anti-death” generally. Is the self-proclaimed pro-life advocate also anti-war and

anti-capital punishment? Is he or she categorically opposed to the use of deadly force even for

90

defense of self and innocents? For that matter, is he or she anti-hunting? Does he or she eat

only things that are found dead and don’t have to be killed? If not, then pro-life is not truly the

appropriate term. For a person who abhors the thought of aborting an under-23-week-old

fetus incapable of consciously experiencing pain or pleasure, but a person who favors military

action over diplomacy, or who finds capital punishment appealing, specific applicable terms

would seem pretty much limited on the “anti” side to “anti-abortion” or “anti-choice,” or on the

“pro” side to “pro-meddling-in-others’-affairs.” But for a handy, general term that would serve

in any case, “hypocrite” would seem an honest fit.

Creationism

Our previous discussion of a skeptic’s reasoning, concerning the qualifications of God to

be creator of the universe, is probably sufficient example of exploring the path less taken, in

matters in which one viewpoint is widely taken for granted and other possibilities are not even

mentioned, let alone explored.

Gun Rights

The National Rifle Association trumpets “The right of the people to keep and bear arms

shall not be infringed” as its justification for claiming an absolute right of all citizens to acquire

and use any weapons they desire without answering to any authority. The NRA’s quoted

excerpt of Amendment II to the U.S. Constitution is intended to sound like an unqualified

blanket guarantee of unrestricted gun ownership to all citizens of the United States. However,

before we unquestioningly accept the NRA’s position, there are some facts we ought to chew

on.

91

The particular clause the NRA cites is their favorite part of the Second Amendment.

Now, if that’s what the nation’s founders truly intended, they certainly would have left it that

way. But they didn’t. The full amendment states,

A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to

keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.

The opening phrase, “A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state,”

which the NRA deliberately omits, is the sole explicit justification and qualification for

Amendment II. It clearly frames the constitutionally protected purpose of bearing arms in

terms of service to the state. Not hunting, not self-defense, not protection of personal

property, not target practice, not playing soldier, not making a racket on the fourth of July, and

most certainly not getting rid of duly elected officials or other people we don’t like.

But even in this very short, one-sentence amendment, a couple of terms bear critical

scrutiny. To clarify what’s meant by “a well regulated militia,” we must refer to the two other

places in the Constitution where it’s mentioned:

Article I, Section VIII, establishes the power of Congress “[15] To provide for calling forth the

militia to execute the laws of the Union, suppress insurrections, and repel invasions;” and

“[16] To provide for organizing, arming and disciplining the militia . . . reserving to the States

respectively the appointment of the officers, and the authority of training the militia according

to the discipline prescribed by Congress.”

Article II, Section II, states: “[1] The President shall be Commander-in-Chief of the Army and

Navy of the United States, and of the militia of the several States when called into the actual

service of the United States . . .”

92

Further relevant points include the following:

The meaning of the word “infringed” has significantly evolved since 1787. Nowadays, it’s

commonly assumed synonymous with “encroached upon” (perhaps suggesting to some,

“weakened around the fringes”). But this is a relatively modern interpretation. The word

derives from the Latin verb infringere, which means “to destroy.” By analyzing a variety of texts

from the era when the Constitution and the Bill of Rights were being written, language

historians have found that the accepted meaning of “infringed” was then much stronger than

today, closer to “defeated” or “invalidated” than to merely “encroached upon.”27 Thus, we see

the intention of the framers of Amendment II was to forbid destroying, defeating, or

invalidating the right altogether; it was not at all to imply that the right couldn’t be subject to

reasonable conditions, regulations, and restrictions.

Beyond this, it’s quite likely the framers intended the amendment to be somewhat

vague, to allow future generations to adapt it to conditions that might later arise. Certainly,

they could foresee some changes, such as the opening of the western frontier and the gradual

civilizing of the stabilized areas behind it, and perhaps the prospect of a musket in the hands of

a mentally unstable frontiersman struck them as an acceptable risk. But they couldn’t have

foreseen the invention of high-capacity automatic firearms or of chemical and nuclear

weapons,28 let alone their unrestricted availability to criminal gangs, terrorists, drug-addicts, the

27 That language changes over time shouldn’t surprise anyone who’s read material written half a century or more in

the past. To cite just one example, in the late 18th and 19th centuries, the word “welfare” meant “well-being,”

quite different from its late 20th century identification with “socialist charity.”

28 The founders were doubtless already familiar with early forms of biological warfare, such as the European import

of smallpox inflicted on the indigenous population—clearly a weapon of offense only, not defense.

93

mentally deranged, and the unsupervised young. Nor could they have anticipated the rapid

mass transport of weaponry, from a jurisdiction with lax standards, to one in which stricter

rules are necessary to the constitutional obligations of insuring domestic tranquility, promoting

the general welfare, and securing the blessings of life and liberty to those who prefer not to

bear arms as well as to those who do.

Owing to reluctance of the states to fund and maintain militias, in 1903 the militia’s

function and upkeep were taken over by the National Guard. The Guard’s local units are still

normally under the authority of the states’ governors, but can, if needed in the national

interest, be placed under the authority of the President. Thus, the militia’s functionality

remains intact, though its support now comes from higher up, with uniforms, equipment,

weapons, and ammunition being furnished at taxpayer expense rather than out of militiamen’s

own pockets.

These are the facts of the matter. Like them or not, this is what they are. This is what’s

written in the Constitution, and how those who wrote it evidently intended it under the more

obvious influences of their time, as well as how the political reality has been updated with

respect to militias.

Now the question is, just what do these facts imply generally, as well as particularly in

the here and now? Upon the established factual basis, we can build a superstructure of

reasoning. Amendment II definitely applies to the well regulated militia (now the National

Guard). However, the much ballyhooed claim, that its guarantee must apply as well to people

outside this militia, isn’t borne out by a critical assessment. This doesn’t mean that people who

aren’t militia members don’t have a right to bear arms; but support for the claim that such a

94

universal right is constitutionally guaranteed is far from clear, let alone robust. Still, there’s

another line of reasoning about this, which we’ll investigate shortly, after wrapping up the

militia matter.

Some try to argue either that the people are the militia or that the militia is the people.

But this is a classic oversimplification, a blanket statement that confuses the issue rather than

clarifies it. It fails to make the crucial distinction that, in reality, the militia is some of the

people, not all of the people. Some of the people are members of the militia, but some others

are not. Among those others are young children, the elderly or infirm, addicts, criminals,

otherwise unqualified, indifferent, conscientiously objecting, or simply too busy to participate in

militia exercises and missions. Consider that there might also be some of the people who feel it

their patriotic duty to mount an insurrection (say, to address a perceived injustice), while others

of the people (members of the militia) are obliged to suppress such an action. The category of

“the people” plainly overlaps the category of “the militia”—just as the category of “the people”

also overlaps “the insurrectionists” and all other categories of citizens as well. But to claim that

any two of these groups (or all of them) are one and the same is absurd.

Clearly, the well regulated militia is established, organized, controlled, trained, and

armed, either directly by government or under its authority. Militia members are given

training, are issued weapons, and act under the authority of government, while this is not true

of people who are not militia members. What the well regulated militia is clearly not is a

spontaneously formed gang of misfits who enjoy playing soldier, call themselves a “militia,”

choose their own “officers” who have no legal authority, and fancy their mission is to threaten

or overthrow the duly elected government and its millions-strong armed forces on account of

95

any grievance, real or imagined. To take Amendment II in the context of Articles I and II, it

would appear that, strictly speaking, the purpose and guarantee of the uninfringible right “to

keep and bear [though not necessarily to own] arms” extend specifically only to members of

the well regulated militia—not necessarily to freewheeling militiaman-wannabes, many of

whom might not measure up to real militia standards. Indeed, part of the well regulated

militia’s job is, according to Article I, to keep those more erratic amateur groups under control

(that is, to “suppress insurrections”). The power to extend the same or modified rights to

others, according to Amendment X, is “reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

Concerning this point, the Constitution’s framers certainly recognized a legitimate need

for frontier families to have firearms, both for hunting and for protection. Yet, as educated and

worldly gentlemen, the framers also understood that such need for weaponry would eventually

subside (if not entirely disappear) in former frontier territories that had become stable and had

been admitted to the Union as civilized states, where law and order presumably rule. The

framers understood that the need for personal firearms would vary from one area to another

as long as frontiers (or remote and isolated frontier-like conditions) existed. This is why they

left this particular point vague, and presumably up to state or territorial discretion.

When the framers were vague about an important point, it was for a reason. Number

one was conciseness; the Constitution was to be a brief, general, “framework” document, not

one overflowing with details, explanations, and exceptions. Another was that they simply

encountered irreconcilable differences of opinion among themselves, and couldn’t agree on

specifics. Certainly, a big problem of the time was that some of the pioneering steps being

undertaken in national democratic self-governance were brand new and untested, and would

96

require the experience of a few generations to smooth out difficulties—for example, as to what

fraction of a free citizen should a slave count in proportioning a state’s representation in the

Congress. Sometimes, the framers might have considered an idea so obvious in their time that

it shouldn’t need an explicit statement—such as, to get from Boston to Philadelphia in a hurry,

you must either ride a horse or take a horse-carriage. Or something crucial in the future hadn’t

yet come to light—such as submarines, tanks, warplanes, and automatic firearms. Or they

viewed an issue as requiring local or situational discretion, and thus not suitable as a blanket

rule for the entire nation or under all conditions. Certainly some of these factors, and possibly

others, came into play during the formulation of Amendment II.

But in any case, we’re left to ponder this rather glaring point: If the phrase, “A well

regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state,” is not key to understanding the

rest of the amendment, why bother mentioning it at all? Why would James Madison

gratuitously insert that long phrase, if the shorter “The right of the people to keep and bear

arms shall not be infringed” would, by itself, have been sufficient to his intent? Whatever the

answers, NRA leaders’ persistent attempt to pretend that Amendment II’s qualifying phrase

doesn’t exist suggests they realize it’s inconvenient to their agenda. And perhaps, in the course

of our inquiry, we’ve discovered why.

Note: The stream of reasoning in the previous item, “Gun Rights,” and the following one, “Gun

Control,” is continuous. Ideas developed in the second are rooted in, and constrained by, the

evidence and conclusions of the first. The two are intended to be read and understood as a

single unit. They’re separated here only to acknowledge the shift in focus, and to offer

opportunity for reflection before continuing—thoughtful reflection being an important part of

97

the methodical examination of evidence and its logical implications, as opposed to the

emotional rhetorical disputes that usually dominate discussions of this subject.

Gun Control

In the United States, there’s a long-standing consensus (dating from colonial times) that

a right to private firearm ownership for lawful purposes, such as self-defense and hunting, or

even for recreational pursuits, such as target-shooting and collecting, is permissible, and in

some cases even desirable or necessary. So, it’s a plausible proposition that people who want

or need such weapons, and who can be relied upon to use them responsibly, ought to be free

to obtain arms suitable for their legitimate purposes.

However, there’s the problem of keeping guns out of the hands of those likely to use

them irresponsibly or criminally. This problem can’t and won’t be dismissed, since failure to

address it effectively has consequences that are costly, tragic, irreversible, and increasingly

widespread. Likely irresponsible users of deadly weapons include children without direct adult

supervision, the mentally deranged and violently disposed, the emotionally disturbed, the

dangerously delusional, the habitually intoxicated, and convicted felons. In all cases, the

primary effort should be universal screening of all prospective customers in all legal public and

private venues for sale (or other transfer) of firearms and ammunition. This would screen out

the under-aged and those with records of criminal activity, chronic substance abuse, or

sociopathic disorders. By requiring that gun owners properly secure their weapons and

ammunition against misuse and theft, and by disrupting the flow of weaponry to the criminal

realm, the numbers of both illicit weapons in circulation and the traffickers who circulate them

would gradually dwindle. While this wouldn’t eradicate violent crime, it would make it

98

progressively more difficult and less lucrative, and thus less attractive to some as a lifestyle.

Such a move isn’t perfect. It might inconvenience sober, law-abiding gun owners, but it

wouldn’t infringe their legitimate rights. It could help trace stolen weapons and restore them

to their rightful owners, and would be a significant step to reducing gun-related fatalities.

Putting up with the inconvenience of two or three minutes’ delay in making a gun purchase

seems an acceptable trade for saving thousands of lives.

The case of “mass-murderers” is special, in three ways. First, many of these don’t own

their own weapons, but manage to steal or “borrow” them from the rightful owners who’ve

failed to secure them properly. Second, their weapons of choice are military-style, mass-killing

weapons, whose only legitimate purpose is military combat. Such weapons enable them to kill

large numbers of people in a short time, and to generate their own covering fire, without

frequent reloading. Third, they’re often suicidal: Their sole objective is death; their plans do

not include mercy, escape, or surrender; and few are responsive to reasoning or bargaining. As

a result, their premiere performances in many cases also turn out to be their final ones. Their

families, friends, and coworkers often describe them as quiet, good-natured, thoughtful, “not

the type” to commit such acts. For this reason, it’s hard to identify members of the massacre

mentality beforehand, or to institutionalize them against their will even if early behavioral clues

are detected. Consequently, screening isn’t a sufficiently reliable option in their case. Barring

psychiatric screening of the entire population, the only widely effective preventive measure

would be to remove the source of mass-murderers’ weapons of choice. This would entail

banning civilian possession of operational weapons having no legitimate civilian application that

couldn’t be more efficiently and safely managed with a six- or seven-shot handgun, a ten-shot

99

bolt-action game rifle, or a breech-loading shotgun, in the hands of a competent marksman.

Such a measure wouldn’t eliminate multiple murders, but it would drastically cut the numbers

of both incidents and victims, without infringing anyone’s legitimate rights to self-defense,

hunting, and recreation.

Truly law-abiding and mentally sound individuals might be inconvenienced by

precautions—just as drivers are inconvenienced by having to renew their licenses and vehicle

registrations. But in the end, the right to procure and use weapons appropriate to legitimate

civilian purposes would be upheld for truly law-abiding and responsible adults.

In summary, according to my understanding of a detailed close reading of the parts of

the Constitution and its Bill of Rights relevant to this issue, a general right of non-militia

personnel to keep and bear arms is not guaranteed by Amendment II, but is accessible through

Amendment X, with the consent of the states and subject to any conditions or restrictions each

state may deem necessary and proper. This might not be what many Americans would prefer

to hear. But here it isn’t anyone’s personal opinion that matters, but the methodical approach

to distinguishing what’s consistent with reality from what isn’t.

There’s one more important point to clear up, specifically, rhetorical remarks by Thomas

Jefferson and others regarding the desirability of an occasional bloody revolution to shake

things up and undo systemic corruption. Such remarks are not part of the U.S. Constitution—

and with compellingly good reason in this day and age. A second revolution in an infant

republic isolated along the Atlantic coast of North America in the early 19th century would have

been just another jolt in an already bumpy road for early Americans, and wouldn’t have ruffled

a feather elsewhere. But in 21st-century America, a revolution that would shatter the existing

100

intricate political and economic framework of what has become the world’s primary

agricultural, industrial, military, and economic power could well prove catastrophic to

civilization, casting the entire world into crippling depression, devastating famine, unrelenting

war and tribal rivalry, and a new dark age. Both as a nation and as a species, even the least

fortunate among us have too much to lose. Even if things turn really sour, we’d be insane to

risk such an event.

Fortunately, to help keep things from turning sour, we have the ballot box, and both the

right and the responsibility to use it wisely and at every legal opportunity. And if this fails, the

U.S. Constitution provides for constitutional conventions as a passably orderly way to make

fundamental changes to government. A constitutional convention is a big deal, and has its own

pitfalls; therefore, the framers decided that it should take a supermajority vote even to get one

started. But even at that, it has a far greater chance of success, and with far fewer losses in

both blood and treasure, than an armed insurrection whose outcome would be utterly

unpredictable. Even if a successful revolution were somehow possible in today’s United States,

there’s simply no need for it, and no justification for it that outweighs the risk.

So much for the arguments. Now, in a final reflection on this topic, let’s return our gaze

to the National Rifle Association. Its mission for the past three decades has been to captivate a

fear-driven membership, by scaring them into believing that the NRA is the only thing standing

between them and swarms of black helicopters full of “jack-booted thugs” itching to confiscate

their guns. But lately, NRA members are getting wise to this cartoonish nonsense. The only

helicopters in evidence are those chasing criminals, evacuating victims, and training the militia

on weekends. Now would be a good time for NRA leadership to run a reality check on their

101

mythology. Stop telling the dues-paying members what to think, and for a change listen to

what they actually do think: Stop treating us like morons; lose the paranoia and the

inflammatory rhetoric; only the crackpots buy into it anymore! And enough with the absurd

notion that the problem can be solved by putting armed guards in every school. The problem

isn’t only in schools; it’s in shopping malls, in theaters, in parks, in houses of worship, at clinics,

in the streets, even in homes—it’s anywhere and everywhere. Wake up, NRA, and get real!

Gun owners, like everyone else, need to think and work rationally and cooperatively to

help develop and implement realistic solutions. Gun owners in particular have a wealth of

knowledge to assist in this effort. Polls now indicate a majority of NRA members have been

awakening to the increasingly urgent, commonsense necessity of reasonable precautions and

restrictions that would reduce illicit gun traffic and deny the mentally unhinged easy access to

their mass-killing weapons of choice, while securing the right of truly law-abiding citizens to

responsible gun ownership. We probably shouldn’t hold our breath waiting for a sea change in

official NRA policy. But in any case, it’s already well past time for politicians to stop beating this

dead horse on behalf of a primarily gun-industry funded and controlled lobby, which has

departed from reality, reason, and credibility.

Voter Fraud

An exception to our pattern of discussing here only items of long-standing interest, this

issue has risen to national significance only since the 2010 mid-term elections, and most

particularly since 2013, when, in its Shelby County v. Holder decision, the U.S. Supreme Court

effectively crippled the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Fraudulent voting—voting more than once in an election, or casting a vote on behalf of

102

an unregistered, deceased, or fictional person, for example—has constituted an extremely

small proportion of total votes cast in recent elections in the United States. It’s difficult, if not

impossible, to find an instance in which votes illegally cast outnumbered the winning margin of

votes, and thus threw the result into doubt. As long as things stay this way, it isn’t a problem

troublesome enough for voters to make an issue of.

But, oddly, someone is making an issue of it. State legislatures packed by conservatives

during the 2010 mid-term election have been trumpeting voter fraud as a motive for an urgent

overhaul of voting laws. The troublesome thing here is that these revisions don’t affect voter

fraud to a detectable degree—if only because the rate of voter fraud itself is barely detectable.

What the new measures have done is make it selectively harder for people to vote in precincts

where voting tends to be liberal-leaning—urban, working-class, minority, university, and (lately)

elderly neighborhoods. The states’ first line of offense is to ramrod laws through legislatures to

weaken unions, so that they no longer have the resources to compete against corporate

interests in campaign contributions and advertising. Other worrisome strategies include:

restricting early voting;

abolishing election-day registration;

requiring forms of voter identification that many voters (mainly the poor and the elderly)

often don’t have or don’t carry;

consolidating or moving polling places so that they’re inconvenient to access and cause

voters to wait in line for hours;

posting “poll monitors” whose job is to intimidate and harass voters;

instructing poll workers not to help lost voters find their proper precincts.

103

In addition, unofficial measures have extended to “misplacing” or destroying absentee and

provisional ballots from target precincts.

Even more insidious is a recent plan hatched in several states to alter the electoral

college makeup in presidential voting. The scheme is to discard the accepted “winner-take-all”

(electoral votes) policy used in most states, and replace it with an apportionment of a state’s

electoral votes to different candidates. Now, without further details, this might seem a

reasonable and fair measure. But here’s the insidious part: This apportionment would not be

by the distribution of total votes in the state, but by congressional district, which systemically

favors the party in power at the state level as of the latest ten-year redistricting (currently, in

many states, the Republican party, as a result of the low-turnout mid-term election in 2010).

Periodic reapportionment is ostensibly to ensure proportional representation of a state’s

population in all of its districts, but in fact it’s usually used in an attempt to group liberal and

conservative precincts in such a way as to lock the incumbent legislature’s majority party into

power. And now, conservatives hope, they can lock themselves into the White House, despite

numerous polls showing rejection of their increasingly extremist ideology by a large majority of

Americans, often sixty to ninety percent, depending on the state and the particular issue. Had

such a plan been in place for the 2012 presidential election, the outcome would have been

reversed in favor of the Republican candidate, despite that the Democratic candidate received

over sixty percent of the popular vote. Democracy would have been nullified!

Voter fraud is a crime, but not a significant problem in recent American history. But

election fraud, committed, not by voters, but by government and election officials, is also a

crime, and is most definitely a problem, plotted and perpetrated by the very politicians raising

104

the greatest fuss about voter fraud. Their banner of combating voter fraud is a scare-tactic ruse

to cover their real intent, either to commit election fraud under pretense of fixing something

that isn’t broken, or to rig the system to produce equivalent results. It’s an act of desperation,

committed by double-talking extremists who know they can’t be elected fairly on the issues,

but can win only by duping or shutting out significant sectors of the public.

Election fraud had been a problem in the past, particularly in states and districts that

supported racial segregation or opposed labor unions; but it had pretty much dropped out of

the picture until 2010. Now it’s a real worry again, and it should be teaching us a lesson about

the ethics (or lack thereof) of the more “fringy” people whom we’ve elected recently—or whom

we’ve allowed others to elect by not voting ourselves. It’s essentially an admission by the

perpetrators that they know they can’t win an election on the issues, and so have to subvert

democracy in order to stay in power. But it’s also a lesson that should motivate us—liberals,

moderates, independents, and sober-minded conservatives—to get into the habit of

intelligently exercising our right to vote in every election—primary, general, and special—

before it’s too late, and we find it’s been effectively nullified by an unscrupulous minority.

How Are We Doing at Self-governance?

We might be super-patriots, fly the flag, sing the national anthem, and so forth. But

that isn’t the question. The question is, “How well are we at doing our part in the process of

governing ourselves within our constitutional representative democracy?” Do we do it fairly

and consistently, in rigorous accord with the evidence of reality and coherent reasoning based

thereon? Are the principles enunciated in our constitution and expressed in our laws—

representational self-governance, equality of individuals under the law, protection of minority

105

rights against tyranny by a majority, protection of the majority from undue influence by

minority factions controlling the major portion of the nation’s wealth and property—actually

carried out in practice? In protecting and promoting the well-being of the human beings who

constitute our society, do we have a realistic and consistent standard for distinguishing beings,

such as human adults and children, from non-beings, such as cattle, corporations, unions, and

embryos?

In practice, our record so far is spotty at best. In America’s proclaimed nation of liberty

and justice for all, many groups—Africans, Asians, American Indians, Hispanics and other non-

Nordic Europeans—have all been singled out for abuse in various forms and intensities. On the

religious front, Christian fundamentalists have long been at the forefront of a war of ignorance-

bred fear and hatred against not only Catholics, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Mormons,

Jehovah’s Witnesses, neo-pagans, and atheists, but also against mainstream Protestants, not to

mention scientists, historians, educators, writers, and artists. It took more than a century for

the unalienable Creator-endowed rights declared for all men to begin to apply also to women.

Homosexuals, long abused and unjustly lumped in with rapists and child-abusers, have only

recently been granted the dignity, rights, and protections enjoyed by everyone else. Our

shining principles have often seemed unattainable against the inclination of some, ruled by

generations-old prejudice, to stampede in the opposite direction, fairness and justice be

damned. Our culture has even shunned the poor, the mentally infirm, the handicapped, and

the disabled—our military veterans among them. It’s still a long, hard-fought struggle against

ignorance, illogic, greed, and, in the computer age, a flood of unchallenged misinformation. But

a look back over the history of the past two centuries seems to indicate we’ve been making

106

significant progress in the long run. Bit by bit, generation by generation, reality is winning out

over timeworn mythology and mistaken ideology, as people find themselves having to confront

reality and often discovering it isn’t what they’ve been told. Unfortunately, our lawmakers

have often been the last to get the message.

The United States of America is nominally a pluralistic society that respects and protects

the rights of all citizens, at least in principle if not always in action or in every state. A pluralistic

society is one in which diversity is valued and differences in ethnicity, sex, orientation, and

belief are tolerated, and in which no individual human being may be denied any legitimate right

on account of these differences. Just and reasonable laws apply to all citizens; prestige,

ancestry, wealth, rank, and influence are not acceptable excuses for non-compliance by any

individual or group. To be true to its principles, a society’s civil laws must be universally applied

and must conform to a view of reality governed, not by mere opinion or prejudice, nor by

mythology, ideology, or phobia, but by factual evidence and coherent reasoning based thereon.

Obviously we aren’t quite there yet. There are still some large pockets of prejudice, and there’s

a powerful faction that wants to revert to Gilded Age “robber-baron” days, when wealthy

industrialists and speculators controlled everything including elections, while working people

and everyone else had to settle for scraps, and the only middle class comprised mainly

landlords, merchants, and professionals. Since the end of World War II, we’ve known the true,

broad prosperity of which our system is capable, and we mustn’t allow a relative few to take

this from us, either by stealth or by force.

We must be mindful of the real-world implications of just what the law protects and

why. For example, the purpose of our laws is, according to our Constitution, “to form a more

107

perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense,

promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty.” In other words, it’s to serve

the interests of society and the individual human beings it comprises. So, we must also

understand with some degree of precision what a human being is (and is not), and what specific

factors consistently differentiate beings (who are entitled to certain rights and subject to

certain obligations under our laws) from non-beings (for which there is no evidential or rational

justification for such entitlement or obligation). In addition, we must bear in mind that the

distinction between non-self-aware non-being and self-aware being is not a sharp line, and that

the natural events during the course of the transformation from one to the other do not occur

all in one magical instant. Rather, it’s a gradual shift from one level to another, during which

the actual status at any point in between is not clearly defined, simply because the particulars

of transformations between categories are far more difficult to define than the general

categories themselves—an inconvenient facet of reality with which category-oriented human

intellect must deal as best it can. So, our laws must be designed to acknowledge and

accommodate such uncertainty, by establishing realistic (that is, reasoned and evidence-based,

not arbitrary) boundaries for regions of uncertainty, in order to safeguard possibly sentient

beings from injustice. This much is now well within our ability with the knowledge of

neuroscience; we no longer have to guess at it, though we may refine it as our science

improves.

Individuals, of course, are free to concoct or adopt any beliefs of their choosing—

including beliefs having no basis in reality, or even beliefs that directly defy reality—so long as

the practice of such beliefs doesn’t result in significant threat or harm to others or to society.

108

But the mere holding of beliefs, even with great devotion, doesn’t entitle the believers to

impose those heartfelt but unproved notions upon others, either by force of law or by any form

of pressure that encroaches upon those others’ legitimate rights to conduct their own affairs as

they themselves see fit and without undue interference. We are, as the saying goes, entitled to

our own opinions, but not to our own facts. In the service of people of all beliefs yet

constrained by a single common reality, only facts, and not opinions, are the legitimate criteria

of civil law. At least, that’s how it’s supposed to work, according to the framers of the

Constitution. As to when, if ever, it actually will work that way for everyone is anyone’s guess.

But if history is any clue, long-term momentum for the past four centuries has been on the side

of reality. So, like it or not, believe it or not, we’d best learn to live with it.

109

Chapter 8: Economics

In the long run, the free market spontaneously corrects itself. —conservative economic maxim

In the long run, we’re all dead. —economist John Maynard Keynes

NOTE: I am not an economist. However, I’ve been interested in economics for some time, and

have taken courses in both micro- and macro-economics as recently as 2009. 29 My thoughts on

the subject are guided by acknowledged experts, ranging from the moderately liberal Paul

Krugman to the moderately conservative Gregory Mankiw. In addition, I’m informed by my

lifelong immersion in a history in which the theories of John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946) have,

by and large, convincingly demonstrated themselves more consistently beneficial and more

accurately reflective of reality than their laissez faire30 competition.

We’re about to devote several pages to economics, which, like politics, is admittedly not

everyone’s idea of a fun read. Nonetheless, it’s a field of crucial importance to us all, for our

29 I count myself extraordinarily fortunate to have been taking a class in macroeconomics at the very time the

“Great Recession” struck in 2008-9. Our class enjoyed (to use a charitable term for the experience) a real-time,

real-world rollercoaster demonstration of the very principles we were discussing—and then some! I think I can

honestly say that observing the phenomenon under laboratory conditions, so to speak, took some of the panic out

of it. That’s why I recommend taking a course in the subject, and why I’m writing this piece as a poor but perhaps

practically adequate substitute for those for whom the preferred choice isn’t a ready option.

30 Laissez faire policy advocated by the administration of Calvin Coolidge (1923-1929), proposed minimum

government regulation of banking, business, and speculation, in the belief that unfettered capitalism is self-

regulating and inherently works for the common good.

110

own financial and material well-being, as well as that of our neighbors and nation, depend on

the good and bad decisions our elected representatives and appointed officials make about it.

Therefore, it’s in everyone’s interest to acquire enough of an understanding of economics to

trigger a mental alarm whenever political demagogues make simplistic ideological claims that

are completely at odds with reality. Besides, when framed as a question of “I’m no banker or

broker, so what’s in it for me?” answered by “A lot more than you imagine,” even the most

seemingly boring topic transforms into one of intense interest. So, it’s with this thought in

mind that we’ll delve into a what we may find to be a most fascinating subject!

Our discussion won’t be intensive, but will cover basic ideas and dispel common myths,

of which responsibly informed citizens ought to be aware. We’ll also outline some important

but easily comprehensible nuts-and-bolts issues, examine a few problems and propose some

solutions, all in layman’s terms, and with just enough simple math to illustrate a point or two.

Even so, the reader may find his or her eyes glazing over on occasion, so it’s wise to take this

material in manageable doses. When you find your mental buffer is full, take a break to process

its contents before continuing. Note, however, that it’s advisable to read this chapter in the

sequence it’s presented, since each part builds on those preceding. Skimming parts in random

order could very well leave the reader hopelessly bewildered and frustrated. So, let’s begin at

the beginning.

A Tale of Two Ideologies

Probably most readers of this material have at least heard of a couple of iconic figures:

Karl Marx and Ayn Rand. At the outset, I should clarify that I’m not a disciple of either, but,

taken together, they present an intriguing pair of opposites.

111

Marx (1818-1883) is most noted, along with socialist advocate Friedrich Engels (1820-

1895), for developing the socio-economic theory of communism, notably most popular among

the downtrodden and (at one time) sympathetic intellectuals. Marx’s theory failed almost

immediately in practice, as adopted and modified beyond recognition by the fledgling Soviet

Union in the early 20th century; but its brutal enforcement apparatus took seven decades to

collapse. Yet although very mistaken about the real-world prospects for his own idealistic

system, Marx accurately predicted some of the troublesome shortcomings of its burgeoning

competitor, free-market capitalism. Unfortunately, he didn’t realize that these weaknesses

could be remedied.

Rand (1905-1982) held a view diametrically opposed to that of Marx. She composed

very engaging and intriguing fiction, illustrating an ideology—perennially popular among

impressionable college sophomores—based on the one-dimensional notion that entrepreneurs

are all objectively clear-sighted and fair-minded, and that anyone who questions their actions

and motives is lazy, stupid, or socialist. Rand also wrote seriously about economic theory, but

her theory was seriously at odds with historical evidence. Her view of human psychology was

innovative and insightful, but in the main fatally distorted by her idealistic vision of the

superhuman virtue and flawless judgment of free-market capitalism’s entrepreneur class. Like

Marx, she was too enchanted by her own vision to pay much attention to reality. Whereas

Marx had failed to see capitalism’s potential, Rand chose to ignore its pitfalls.

Many people have come to hold an opinion, either that capitalism is good and

socialism is bad, or vice versa. But in a majority of cases, their reasons for either evaluation are

fragmentary, misinformed, politically dogmatic, and seldom coherently rational. When it

112

comes to economics, unlike idealists Marx and Rand, I’m a pragmatist. I’m for whatever system

works best at a particular task, so long as it’s ethical. Capitalism and socialism aren’t mutually

incompatible; they’re just different tools to accomplish different objectives under different

conditions. Indeed, the most successful nations of the developed world (including the United

States) use the two in combination, each for tasks for which it’s deemed best suited. Capitalism

is employed wherever innovation, competition, and profit motive serve the public interest, as in

the development and production of consumer goods and services at competitive prices.

Socialism is used for vital tasks for which a profit motive either doesn’t exist or would tend to

work against the public interest, as in defense, justice, and basic research. And in some

instances, socialism and capitalism work cooperatively, as in public contracting of private firms

for infrastructure projects or defense materiel. There are two major points to be made here.

First, taken realistically, capitalism and socialism are complementary, not conflicting,

approaches to various economic tasks. Second, most “isms” in their pure form leave much to

be desired when applied in the real world. Socialism must be diligently overseen by a

democratic process to prevent its becoming autocratic, and capitalism must be regulated, both

to curb abuse by an influential few, and to moderate its tendencies toward wealth stratification

and “boom and bust” cycles.

Economics is a topic often intertwined with politics. Partly for this reason, most people

are just as disenchanted with the one as with the other. Many at some point take an entry-

level course in microeconomics (economics concerning individual households, businesses, and

markets). Here they learn how forces of supply and demand interact neatly to establish a

natural pricing equilibrium in the marketplace, in a way that early economic theorist Adam

113

Smith (1723-1790) described “as if guided by an invisible hand.” Having learned this bit of

magic, plus a few graphs and some simple algebra to quantify everything, they’re inclined to

guess this is all there is to it. Guess again!

Macroeconomics? What Is It, and Why Should It Interest Me?

Perhaps a majority of people understand how, in a free market, prices are governed by

production and consumption, and by competition and “elasticity”31 on both sides. But most are

mystified about what forces are at work at the macroeconomic level. At one extreme are those

entirely unaware even that there is a macroeconomy at work. At the other are those vaguely

aware of it, but lacking any realistic understanding of it. In many cases, their ignorance leads to

a fear that it’s a vast global conspiracy by Jews and intellectuals to confiscate guns, abolish

religion, and change the national language to Russian or Chinese or Spanish, for reasons that

are never quite clear.

Most Americans are in between. They take economics for granted, or else assume that,

like nature, it’s magic and under the control of God, or maybe the President. They don’t

understand what causes inflation or recession, much less how to remedy them. They spout

nonsensical reasons for what stimulates hiring and reduces unemployment. They have little

idea of what the Federal Reserve Bank does or why. Likely they’ve been told (and firmly

believe) that the solution to everything is simply to balance the national budget and cut taxes—

31 Elasticity is an economists’ term for the relative flexibility of supply and demand. Supply of plentiful items is

elastic, while the supply of scarce items is inelastic. Elasticity of supply is controlled by the supplier’s ability to

produce more (or less) of the product. Likewise, demand for essential items tends to be inelastic, but demand for

luxury items is elastic. We can live without prime steak, but not without food altogether. The market price of an

item is governed by the less elastic side of the supply-demand equation forcing the more elastic side up or down.

114

not realizing that doing either makes it virtually impossible to do the other simultaneously and

humanely. Some aren’t even clear about the distinction between deficit and debt.32 The truly

alarming thing about all this is that many of these people are not only routinely elected to

public office, but even serve on committees charged with keeping lawmakers reliably informed

and advised about overall conditions and trends in the national economy, commerce, banking,

business, labor, wealth distribution, and the like.

Why is it alarming? Simply this: Macroeconomics is the study of what controls or

influences general prosperity—or the general ruin of runaway inflation or recession—at the

national and global levels. But though macroeconomic decisions are made in far-off places,

their results profoundly affect us all in both short and long terms. Having ignoramuses and

incompetents in charge is a formula for economic disaster. They may offer great

entertainment, but at an ultimate cost that we the people literally can’t afford.

Compared to centuries-old microeconomics, macroeconomics is a relatively new social

science. The large-scale methodical study of it didn’t begin until the 20th century, spurred

largely by events preceding or during the two Roosevelt administrations—progressivism and

business reform under Theodore (1901-1909), and work projects and social reforms following

the Great Depression under Franklin (1933-1945). Because this science is new, and because it’s

difficult or impossible to carry out tightly controlled experiments without risking the disruption

of millions of lives, there’s still much we don’t fully understand about it. Thus, macroeconomics

32 Deficit is the net loss for a particular budgetary period—typically a year. Surplus is a net gain for the period.

Debt is the algebraic sum of all accumulated deficits and surpluses over time. Balancing a budget doesn’t make a

dent in the debt; it just keeps debt from increasing. Debt can be reduced only by running a surplus—which would

mean that the budget is unbalanced in favor of revenues instead of expenditures.

115

is still largely a trial-and-error process. And even this innately slow learning process has to do

battle with entrenched ideologies based either on dubious evidence or on made-up notions

contrary to evidence.

Even so, serious economists have managed to learn enough about macroeconomics to

be able to make fairly reliable predictions and to devise safeguards and regulations to keep

instabilities and abuses from getting out of hand—but only if government officials listen,

understand, and act accordingly. Properly applied, the principles learned so far can help to

moderate the spontaneously occurring erratic swings of a free market system. Therefore, it’s

important for us to understand something about it, so we can make informed judgments about

politicians’ stands on economic issues. Does their thinking reflect lessons learned over the past

century, or are they still reading from the “leeches cure all” book?

My general advice is for people to take an entry level course in macroeconomics. It’s

not all that difficult, makes sense, and explains a lot. That’s the best option, but perhaps not a

practical one for those whose schedules are overloaded already. So, the second-best option is

to learn what the best and worst common notions about economics are, and to understand the

evidence and reasoning (or lack thereof) for each.

Essential Concepts of Economics

Following are important concepts that experienced economists have developed to

account for their observations of the normal and abnormal functioning of market economies

under various conditions and influences. The observed phenomena appear consistent enough

to have been accepted by experts in the field as highly reliable, if not irrefutable fact. They’re

disputed by few, save for those whose theories are dictated by ideology rather than guided by

116

observed reality.

Wealth and Money

What is wealth? Many people would probably say wealth is material goods, property,

and money. Some would add services to the list. Some might observe that wealth includes

what economists call “human capital,” personal training and natural ability. And some might

propose we include spiritual wealth as well; however, while material, service, and intellectual

wealth are to some extent calculable in terms of dollars and cents, spiritual wealth is not; it’s

wealth of an entirely different, non-quantifiable kind, and so can’t meaningfully be included in a

discussion of the observable and measurable effects of economics.

If we really want to home in on just what constitutes wealth, we’d have to say it’s

something from which we derive some sort of benefit. We derive material benefit—

nourishment—from the food we eat. We derive material benefit—comfort—from the

sheltering structures we call “home,” from the land on which they’re built, and from the energy

we use to heat, cool, and maintain such facilities. We also draw material benefit from

education—the increase in our personal store of information and our ability to evaluate,

analyze, integrate, and apply it. This makes us more knowledgeable, more skilled, better at

problem-solving and decision-making, and thus (presumably) more productive, all of which

increase our value to employers and clients, and hence our ability to attain a higher standard of

living. Thus, food, shelter, energy, and education are all examples of wealth, because we derive

measurable benefit from each of them.

What about money? Would you be surprised if I suggested that money isn’t real

wealth? Think about it: We can’t derive nourishment, comfort, knowledge, skill, or anything

117

else directly from money itself (except perhaps heat, by burning it). We derive no benefit from

stacks of money sitting idle in a vault. Even money we invest to generate more money

ultimately produces no direct benefit to us, unless and until we exchange it for something truly

beneficial: goods, services, property, and the like.

So, what is money? Money is what’s called a medium of exchange, a token whose value

is artificial, but which is universally accepted in transactions of all sorts. Although it isn’t real

wealth, money is an easily transferable symbol of wealth, or, more precisely, a symbol of the

labor and expertise required to produce material wealth.

Who or what produces material wealth? Farmers extract it, in the form of grain, from

the soil; bakers convert the grain to bread; and truckers haul the bread to neighborhood stores,

so customers needn’t trek to a bakery to pick it up. Likewise, miners extract wealth, in the form

of ore, from the earth; smelters convert and refine the ore into metal; then, according to

designs developed by engineers, machinists form the metal into usable parts, assemblers join

the parts into components. Then, either line workers assemble the components into usable

products (e.g., appliances, machinery, cars) to be distributed to consumer markets, or else the

parts are shipped to specific locations where the final products (e.g., buildings, pipelines, ships,

tracks) are erected on site. What induces all of these workers to produce this material wealth?

The ability to acquire things they need and want. That ability comes in the form of paychecks.

Money. A symbol of the worth of their labor and skill contributed to the wealth-producing

effort. They provide their time and labor in exchange for this symbolic wealth, which they can

then readily exchange for various forms of material wealth to benefit themselves and their

families.

118

So, what do non-producers, such as clerks, accountants, executives, and investors, do to

earn this monetary symbol of labor and skill? Although clerks, accountants, and other auxiliary

staff aren’t directly involved in production, their work is needed in order to handle and manage

inventory, cash flow, quality control, customer relations, and the like. The cost of their pay,

along with that of wholesalers and retailers, must be factored into the selling price of the firm’s

product.

Executives are the ones who provide the vision, the planning, and the organization to

design and build or expand the physical plant, to acquire resources, to recruit and train a work

force, to identify markets, and to arrange for transport of all materials and products from their

points of origin to wherever they need to go. Executives offer a special blend of conceptual and

organizational skills, specialized knowledge, and administrative know-how necessary to make

production happen, and to make it happen in such a way that the product can be sold for more

than it costs to produce. An executive’s combination of special education, connections, and

natural talent are scarcer and more expensive to develop than, say, the bolt-torquing, gauge-

reading, switch-setting, and lever-pulling skills of a line worker. In other words, the supply of

people with good executive skills is much lower than the supply of common labor. So, although

the firm needs fewer execs than laborers, its crucial need for executive skills is less “elastic,”

because those relatively rare skills make the difference between success and failure for the

firm. So, a firm must offer a somewhat larger salary to executives in order to attract and retain

their less common set of crucial skills.

Investors put up the capital to build the plant, to buy production machinery, and to

establish physical lines of supply and distribution. In a major industry, this investment is

119

substantial, usually requiring many investors. Each investor assumes a certain amount of risk33

in return for the prospect of a return on his or her investment, in the form of interest on bonds

and dividends on stocks, both of which are made possible by the profit—the difference

between the selling price of a product and the cost of producing it—earned on the sale of the

firm’s products.

But still, all this money—this symbolic wealth, representing the labor and expertise

required to produce real wealth—doesn’t in itself yield real wealth. It must be exchanged for

goods, services, or property that someone else has produced or developed, in order to derive

any material benefit. Although we tend to lose track of this fundamental concept in our routine

tallies of dollars and cents, it’s one well worth bearing in mind in any discussion of economics:

The overall health of an economy depends on how well the distribution of wealth corresponds to

the contribution of labor and skill required to produce it. When this distribution is proportional

to the contributions of individuals to its production, the money these individuals earn flows into

active circulation, and dynamic general prosperity ensues. When it isn’t proportional, when

cash is hoarded by a relatively non-productive few, then there is less money in active

circulation, and the outlook becomes not so cheery, as we’ll see presently.

The Multiplier Effect

Insofar as it represents the power to purchase material wealth (goods, services, and

property), money has a potential value as a medium of exchange. Money’s value propagates

through the economy whenever it’s exchanged for something else, and thus is much greater

33 The risk is that businesses sometimes underperform, or fail altogether, in which case, instead of reaping returns,

investors may lose part or all of their investments.

120

when it’s in active circulation, as opposed to resting quietly in a vault. A dollar in wages earned

by a construction worker goes to buy a burger for his lunch. The manager of the burger

emporium uses the dollar toward her next purchase of ground beef. The beef processor applies

the dollar toward his next shipment of live cattle. The shipper applies the dollar to buy fuel.

The fuel supplier applies the dollar to the next paycheck for a refinery technician. The

technician may take that dollar and put it into his retirement account. The account’s manager

invests the operator’s dollar so that it earns dividends, a percentage of which goes toward the

account manager’s commission as well. Every time monetary (symbolic) wealth changes hands

as it moves through the economy, material (real) wealth—goods and services—moves in the

other direction, benefitting each recipient along the way. Each time someone spends a dollar,

he or she receives something in return that is, to him or her, worth the expense. When money

goes out of active circulation, as when it sits idle in a bank’s reserve funds, it retains its static

value (minus inflation), but ceases to have the dynamic multiplier effect that contributes to

economic prosperity, until it’s eventually withdrawn and spent.

The Job-creation Cycle

Business operators are in business, not to create jobs, but to make money. Businesses

hire employees only when there’s enough money to be made by doing so to justify the expense

of hiring, training, and paying the employees. Business makes money by creating goods and

services that it can sell for more than the goods and services cost to produce. Its motive to do

this is demand, which consists of two things: a willingness to purchase what the business has to

sell, and the available cash or credit to pay for the purchase. The willingness to purchase may

come from government, from other businesses, or from private individuals, who need or want

121

what the business has to sell. In most cases, private individuals get the cash from their

paychecks, which they get for selling their labor and skills to businesses that hire them to

produce other goods or services. A business operator is motivated to hire more employees

only when an increase in production makes it necessary. A production increase is warranted

only when an increase in demand is experienced or anticipated. Demand is high when most

people have cash available; people have cash available when they have regular income; and the

greater part of most people’s income comes from wages and salaries earned from their being

gainfully and productively employed.

When people have more cash available, demand goes up, businesses are motivated to

increase production to meet the demand (and thus make more money), and they must hire

more employees to increase production. Once in motion and barring any serious snags, this

cycle tends to continue upward toward prosperity. On the other hand, if demand sags, a

business can’t sell all it produces, and so reduces production. When it reduces production,

business needs fewer workers and lays some of them off. Laid-off workers have less cash

available, so if many businesses lay off their workers, consumer demand drops further,

production slows further, and even more layoffs result. Once moving in this direction on a

broadening scale, the cycle continues moving downward into recession. Job-creation goes into

negative territory, and the job-creation cycle becomes a job-loss cycle. It can be reversed only

by a significant and sustained increase in demand. Such an increase in demand doesn’t come

from ordinary consumers, since in a recession too many of them are too afraid to spend what

cash they may have, because they fear they may need it to survive if they find themselves

unemployed. Nor does it come from businesses or investors, even if they’re sitting on cash

122

hordes, because doing so without universal cooperation offers only an increased risk of losing

any money they put into the effort, not making more. Usually, government is the only power

large enough to reverse the process of recession, short of simply allowing it to run its course,

with all the human cost that would entail.

Unemployment

Many people envision zero unemployment as the ideal toward which we must strive.

However, in a normal economy, an unemployment rate between five and six percent of the

workforce is normal. This is because it’s normal for people to be occasionally unemployed for

various reasons, such as scouting for a better location or position, acquiring education for

advancement or changing technology, or attending to family or health issues.

It’s also important to note that unemployment is linked to inflation. Artificial efforts to

reduce unemployment put pressures on job markets that cause inflation to increase. Attempts

to force unemployment below its normal equilibrium level become decreasingly effective and

generate more inflation. Thus, a pragmatic approach is to aim for the equilibrium level rather

than zero unemployment.

Inflation

Inflation is the tendency for the prices of goods, services, and labor to increase over

time, without a corresponding increase in their actual quantity or quality. Negative inflation—

deflation, or progressively decreasing prices—is dangerous, because it can trigger a destructive

cycle known by the justifiably fearsome name, “economic depression.” Since the precise

balance point between inflation and deflation shifts a bit from month to month, it’s better for

123

government planners to employ policies that encourage slight inflation rather than zero

inflation, so as not to risk a negative drift that might go unnoticed until too late to correct.

Over time, and all other factors remaining stable, inflation normally affects prices and

paychecks to about the same degree, so individual purchasing power tends to remain fairly

constant, rising only with productivity. However, savings do not grow with inflation. Even

though interest on savings adds to their dollar amount, this is seldom enough to compensate

for the inflationary erosion of the money’s purchasing power. This is why long-term savers (for

major purchases, education, and retirement) prefer other media, such as certificates of deposit,

bonds, stocks, and mutual funds, which entail increased risk, but usually come out ahead of

inflation over time.

Interestingly, a small amount of inflation can actually be beneficial. Since inflation

increases prices, it encourages people to purchase things they need or want sooner rather than

later, since the expectation is that we’d have to pay a higher dollar amount for an item

purchased next year than for the same item this year. This incentive to buy sooner rather than

later helps keep cash in active circulation rather than lying idle.

Hyperinflation (annual inflation of ten percent or more), on the other hand, is very

destructive, eating away at the value of one’s hard-earned money at a furious pace, and inciting

people to spend all their money before it becomes worthless. Hyperinflation is more common

in countries where government is unstable and economic policies range from non-existent to

clumsily overbearing.

Taxes

Taxes are the primary means by which governments raise the money to pay their bills—

124

for example, national defense, highways and bridges, general education, law enforcement,

emergency responders, the courts, legislative and executive staff, national parks, regulation and

oversight, service on debt. A thorough discussion of taxation would fill volumes, but here we’re

interested in just a few key points about how taxes affect other components of an economy.

Flat-rate income tax:

A flat-rate tax has the simplest tax structure: one rate fits all. A flat-rate system is one in

which every family pays the same percentage of its income in tax. For example, at a flat

income-tax rate of 20 percent, a family with an annual income of $20,000 owes $4,000

($20,000 × 20% or 0.2) in income tax, leaving $16,000 in after-tax income. A family with an

income of $100,000 owes $20, 000 in income tax, leaving $80,000 after taxes, and a family with

$1,000,000 in income owes $200,000 in income tax, leaving 800,000 after taxes.

Graduated income tax:

“Graduated” describes a tax system in which families with large incomes pay a higher

percentage of their income than families with modest incomes, and families with incomes

below a certain level pay no tax at all. To demonstrate, let’s use a hypothetical three-bracket

system (for simplicity’s sake), with a low-end bracket of 0% (no tax) for family incomes of

$20,000 and below, a middle bracket of 20% for incomes between $20,000 and $200,000, and

an upper bracket of 40% for incomes greater than $200,000. Under this system, a family with

an annual income of less than $20,000 owes no income tax at all.

A family with income between $20,000 and $200,000 owes a rate of twenty percent on the

portion of income over $20,000.

For instance, on an income of $20,005, the 20% tax rate applies only to the $5 that’s

125

above the $20,000 line; twenty percent of $5 is $1, leaving them with an after-tax income of

$20,004.

For a family with income of $200,000, the tax would be 20% of $180,000 (the excess

over $20,000), for a tax of $36,000, leaving an after-tax income of $164,000.

In our three-bracket sample system, families with incomes over $200,000 are in the

highest tax bracket, in which they owe 40% of their income in excess of $200,000, in addition to

the 20% of income between $20,000 and $200,000. It breaks down this way: The first $20,000

is tax-free. The $180,000 of income between $20,000 and $200,000 is taxed at 20%, for a tax of

$36,000. Any income in excess of $200,000 is taxed at a rate of 40%. If the family’s income is

$200,005, then the tax is $20,000 x 0% = $0, plus $180,000 x 20% = $36,000, plus $5 x 40% = $2,

for a grand total tax bill of $36,002, leaving an after-tax income of $164.003.

A common misunderstanding:

Some people who are “on the borderline” between a lower and a higher income bracket

purposely keep their incomes below that level, because they labor under a misunderstanding

that increasing their income just a dollar or two into the next higher tax bracket subjects all of

their income to the higher tax rate. As we’ve just seen, it does not. Earning one dollar above a

tax bracket’s minimum level does not affect the tax burden on amounts earned up to that level

in any way; it imposes the higher tax rate on only that one extra dollar. Each bracket’s tax rate

applies only to the portion of income that exceeds that bracket’s minimum level, not to any

income below that level.

The graduated income tax is more complicated than the flat tax, but is both fairer to

taxpayers and a far more effective way for government to gather the revenues it needs to

126

operate without placing a crushing burden on anyone, least of all those of minimal or modest

means. Some critics often characterize this as “soaking the rich” or “punishing success.” But

from a fairness standpoint, it’s a way for the economic system to demand a disproportionate

“price” from those who derive disproportionate benefit from the system. Or from a pragmatic

standpoint, it’s simply a way for government to acquire the greatest portion of the cash it

needs from those with the greatest ability to supply it, which is to say those with the greatest

surplus of cash in excess of what’s needed simply to survive and to prosper moderately. In

addition, a graduated tax system serves other useful purposes, at least one of which (the

multiplier effect of money in active circulation) we’ve already mentioned.

Progressive versus regressive taxation:

A tax is progressive if it reflects the taxpayer’s ability to pay, as with income tax; it’s

regressive if it’s linked instead only to what the payer owns or spends, as in the case of property

or sales tax. The difference is significant in the effects each type of tax has on different sectors

of the economy.

A progressive tax places a greater dollar-value burden on those who have larger

incomes, and may even absolve those with near-poverty level incomes and below of any

income-tax burden. Some critics berate such a system as taxing the wealthy into poverty, or of

depriving the poor of a personal stake in the system. In reality, the poor have the same

fundamental stake as everyone else: survival. As for the wealthy, some individuals suddenly

find themselves sunk in poverty as a result of unforeseen calamities or their own ignorance or

unwise choices; but it’s mathematically impossible for a progressive tax system, which imposes

a burden only on income above poverty level, to tax anyone into poverty—whereas a flat or

127

regressive tax can indeed do just that.

A regressive tax system tends to place the greatest burdens on those who spend the

most or who own the most property. A wealthy person may well spend more dollars than a

poor person, but there’s a catch: Both must spend about the same amount to acquire the

necessities for basic survival. But having done this, the poor person’s income is virtually

exhausted, while the rich person has barely dented his, and can afford to spend some of the

rest on luxuries, donate some to charity, and put the rest into savings and investments to

generate still more income. The upshot is that, although the rich person spends more dollars

than the poor person, the rich one needs to spend a much smaller percentage of his or her

income than the poor one must; thus, a regressive tax places its most significant burden on

those with the least ability to pay.

Deadweight loss:

This is a term economists use to identify a loss in the calculated efficiency of the market

system whenever a tax or some other non-market influence skews supply and demand curves

away from their natural equilibrium. In the big picture, however, this supposed loss typically

turns up as a gain elsewhere, most often in the form of government jobs and services, but in

some cases also as incremental advances in public health, safety, security, and quality of life,

which can hardly be considered “dead weight” by any thoughtful individual.

Common Myths about Economics

It’s understandable that many people are underinformed or misinformed about

economics. What’s surprising is that many people in banking, business, government, and other

positions requiring up-to-date understanding of the topic, cling to ideologies long discredited by

128

abundant historical evidence. If today’s doctors practiced medicine this way, many would still

be using leeches to treat headaches and high blood pressure.

Myth: Increasing taxes kills jobs.

This can be true if tax increases are exorbitant, ill-timed, or ill-targeted. On the other

hand, in a prosperous economy, a tax increase can reduce a budget deficit and help damp

inflation. Tax increases fund the construction, maintenance, and upgrading of infrastructure, as

well as education of the workforce, both of which are necessary to thriving commerce,

competition, and job creation. This is precisely what happened in the late 1990s, when taxes

were increased during a long run of economic growth. Few complained seriously about the

higher taxes, because nearly everyone who wanted a job had one, the purchasing power of

personal income was high, and production and profits were heading steadily upward. And the

decade ended with the first projected federal budget surplus in a generation.

Taxes can be one factor among many in determining where a business chooses to

locate. But once a business is established, the tax rates that most businesses pay are seldom, if

ever, a significant factor in hiring. Recall that, in the 1950s during the Eisenhower

administration, the highest income tax rate was ninety percent, and except for a couple of

bothersome recessions, job creation was rolling along in the Korean War and postwar era.

Again, in the 1990s during the Clinton administration, tax rates went up, but few complained

because long-term prosperity had blossomed at the same time. Workers, their employers, and

shareholders were all happy; only conservative politicians were grim-faced, because reality

refused to conform to their ideology that taxes inhibit job growth.

Our highest federal income tax rate is currently less than forty percent. And very few

129

actually pay the highest rate, because those with incomes sufficient to put them into that top

bracket derive much of their income from unearned capital gains and dividends, which are

currently taxed at rates closer to fifteen percent—lower than what an entry-level clerk or

secretary pays on the income from his or her daily toil and skill. What truly suppresses job

creation is lack of demand for goods and services, increased demand being the actual incentive

for business owners to earn more profit by increasing production and hiring more workers.

Taxes are typically the last concern for savvy business people when opportunity knocks.

Myth: Income redistribution punishes success.

In most instances, what redistribution punishes—or rather attempts to begin to correct

—is the initial grossly disproportionate distribution of wealth, away from the workers whose

labor and skill actually produce the wealth, and into the pockets of corporate executives and

shareholders whose contributions to the per-unit value of the product are, though admittedly

important, relatively small on a per-unit basis. If we choose to call this “punishing success,”

then we must ask, “Success at what?” In this case, it’s success at steering a disproportionate

share of wealth away from the many who actually produce it and into the pockets of the

moneyed few who are in a position to make the rules—curious rules that say the contribution

of an executive who spends his afternoons at the golf course is worth from several hundred to a

thousand average productive workers, and deserves a seven-figure bonus, even if he trashes

the company and destroys the jobs of thousands. Yes, an executive must have extraordinary

vision and talent to run a company. But to suppose, that he or she contributes as much as a

thousand hourly workers do to the value of the products that attract buyers and produce profit,

seems an exaggerated claim that deserves, if not categorical rejection, at least serious scrutiny

130

and impartial evaluation.

Yes, they’re very “successful,” sardonically speaking.34 But is this a kind of success that

deserves to be rewarded to such a degree that it devalues practical ability and honest labor,

squelches incentive and opportunity, diverts large amounts of cash from active circulation,

tightens credit, and strangles the economy? The ideal solution would be for businesses

voluntarily to distribute wealth in proportion to the calculated contributions of those who make

it possible and whose efforts design and create it. But as long as there are influential factions of

overweening greed determined to keep this from happening, government redistribution in

some form is a partial remedy to help ameliorate the consequences of disproportionate

distribution.

One of the greatest problems of disproportionate wealth distribution is economic

stratification, in which a small wealthy class, imagining itself to be “privileged,” unscrupulously

accumulates and hoards the major portion of the nation’s money, thus squeezing the vitality

out of the middle and working classes, and leaving those with little or no income in desperate

conditions, with little to lose by resorting to crime and violence in order to survive. Economic

stratification leads to social unrest and instability, and to widespread scapegoating, as people

look for some group to blame for their problems and to victimize in retaliation for wrongs

actually precipitated by unmitigated greed. Crime, violence, and unrest rise, and the rich find it

increasingly necessary to sink more of their wealth into security measures to fend off the

desperately needy, and into taxes to fund prisons.

34 Taking disproportionate distribution by corporations into account sheds a very different light on the conservative

talking point of “[wealthy] makers versus [poor] takers,” revealing that those who provide the labor and expertise

to create wealth are the true “makers,” and grossly overpaid execs and greedy speculators are the real “takers.”

131

Half-truth: A free market left to itself spontaneously corrects fluctuations.

Most economists believe this laissez-faire theory is true—but with a big qualification: “in

the long run.” Spontaneous recovery from a serious recession takes time; it could span many

years, decades, or even generations in the case of a catastrophic swing. As interventionist

economist John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946) observed, “In the long run, we are all dead,”

acknowledging the obvious reality that, unlike economics, mortal human beings operate within

a biological timeframe. People can’t wait a decade or a generation to be able to buy food and

pay for rent and utilities, let alone send their kids to college or save for retirement. The primary

purpose of an economy is not to enshrine the theories of ideologues, or to reward non-

productive speculation, but to serve the needs of people and business with a mechanism that

balances stability and prosperity, and fairly rewards value with value. An economy in distress

needs timely and effective help, if it’s to serve the needs of all who both contribute to and

depend upon its regular day-to-day operation. Appropriate, sufficient, and timely government

action pays for itself by nudging the economy back on track and by restoring and moderating

the normal business cycle. Government is the only humanly controllable force with enough

clout and flexibility to curb recession, speed up recovery, or rein in inflation. Clout and

flexibility have a stiff price; but when applied appropriately and sufficiently, anyone who’s been

paying attention would have to agree that the result is well worth the investment.

Myth: High-end tax cuts trickle down to everyone, and ultimately pay for themselves.

The notion that tax cuts for the rich pay for themselves is based on anticipation of the

following chain of events:

1. that tax cuts for the wealthy promote investment;

132

2. that investment promotes production;

3. that increased production promotes hiring;

4. that hiring increases aggregate personal income;

5. that hiring and higher aggregate income increase the tax base;

6. that a broader and higher tax base increases overall tax revenues from the working class

to pay for the tax cuts for the wealthy.

This so-called theory has long been preached by conservative politicians, but in practice has

never performed as advertised. No such tax cut has ever paid for itself, and no such policy has

ever led to self-sustaining prosperity. The supply-side or “trickle-down” scheme has been tried

many times—in the 1920s, the 1950s, the 1980s, and the 2000s—each time in the devout (or

perhaps desperately hopeful) belief that it ought to work, yet each time yielding the same

disappointing results.

Why doesn’t it work? Let’s take a look at what actually happens—and what doesn’t,

and why. Giving federal aid to people who already have considerable wealth does very little to

promote spending on goods and services, but has the primary effect of spurring investment of

the spare cash. (This squares with the first link in the supply-side chain.) Investment generates

demand for stocks, which spurs a rise in stock prices. But this has little effect aside from giving

those at the top end a sense of marginally increased wealth, which produces a pleasant illusion

of greater prosperity among the already well off. So, once stock prices even out, and nothing

else has changed, things go back about to where they started, except that now the rich are

indeed slightly richer, the government is a bit deeper in debt because of the lost tax revenue,

and everyone else is awaiting the promised trickle-down that never comes. Hiring hasn’t been

133

budged, because nothing has prompted an increase in production, because the only increase in

demand has been for investments, not for goods and services. As we’ve already noted,

business operators are not in business to hire people; they’re in it to make money. They hire

only when there’s a money-making reason to do so. So, in reality it turns out that the second

(investment promotes production) link in the supply-side chain theory doesn’t exist.

Otherwise, it would seem a plausible plan; but a chain with even one missing link is just so

much junk. This is why the supply-side theory consistently fails.

What else has to change? If you’ve read “The Job-creation Cycle” discussion under

Essential Concepts of Economics, it should be obvious. But we’ll reiterate it here, because it’s

so important: Hiring is justified by increased production, which, if significant, raises business’s

manpower requirement—something investment doesn’t do. Production is stimulated by the

need to increase supply of the firm’s product, which in turn is motivated by an actual or

anticipated increase in sustained demand for the product and the prospect of increasing sales

and profits. Behold: Economics 101! So, what stimulates sustained demand? Plain and simple:

steady and larger paychecks for lots of people. Demand is the target, and widespread income is

the projectile we must use to hit it! The main question now is how best to guide the one to the

other for optimum effect. Tax cuts for the already well-off being an obvious non-starter, what

else is available?

Historically, tax cuts have stimulated prosperity only under certain conditions. First,

they should appear in the form of a marginal increase on regular paychecks (most of which will

likely be spent) rather than as a lump-sum payment (much of which would likely be saved and

not spent). Second, it should be directed toward the middle class and the working poor. This is

134

because lower-income people must spend a greater proportion of whatever income they have

just to survive; so, they spend most or all of the tax break in each paycheck, and thus get the

cash circulating. Once in active circulation, the cash generates both a multiplier effect and

consumer demand, which produces more profits if businesses ramp up production, which

means hiring more employees to produce enough output to pace demand.

Unfortunately, an income tax cut has little if any effect on the population bloc with the

greatest propensity to spend. Unemployed working-class people typically don’t have enough

income to owe any tax. So, the effect of an income tax cut on them is zero, and this prime

opportunity to put more money into circulation is missed. So, what would make good use of

this cash-propagation channel? Starting a major war to mobilize all the nation’s manpower and

resources is one way that’s been shown effective. (World War II was what finally completed

recovery from the Great Depression.) But all-out war is usually undesirable for many reasons.

Other, more practical approaches, ones that can actually work if adequately supported, include

large works programs,35 food stamps (which translate to cash for grocers and their suppliers),

extended or expanded unemployment benefits, job-related education assistance, and

suspension of regressive sales taxes on non-luxury items.

Myth: Government doesn’t create jobs,

Anyone in public office who makes such an absurd claim is either lying or delusional,

because government created his job and pays his salary. Government creates millions of jobs—

35 Those who claim that government work programs are make-work with no value or purpose should consider that

when one is involuntarily out of work, any job is still a job, any wage is still a wage, and government programs have

undertaken some enormously beneficial projects that private enterprise wouldn’t touch, like installing

hydroelectric dams, electrifying rural America, and building the Interstate highway system.

135

usually not “for profit” jobs, but salary-paying jobs nonetheless. Besides political and

regulatory offices, government operates the armed forces and funds basic research, plus

thousands of offices and agencies. It builds and staffs offices, schools, and prisons. It hires and

pays police, judges, firefighters, paramedics, teachers, inspectors, civil engineers, and such. It

creates public works projects, and it contracts with private firms to have work done and

products supplied. In all cases, these jobs provide income, which employees then spend in the

general economy on the same things that people working for private businesses do—thus

creating demand, prompting increased production, prompting hiring, and so forth. Where per-

capita income is concerned, the distinction between public and private sector jobs is utterly

irrelevant.

Myth: Small business accounts for most hiring.

This would be true only if we specify “new” hiring, simply because the employee

turnover rate is greater for small businesses. Small businesses do more hiring and firing than

big businesses, because most larger firms tend to be more stable and to require more highly

trained employees. Firing or laying off highly skilled individuals constitutes a loss to the firm of

its investment in human capital, so there’s some incentive for large businesses to keep people

on the job even through a slack period, an option not as accessible to smaller firms. We should

also note that small business is strongly dependent on big industry. A community with a single

large industry can support hundreds of small businesses, both as suppliers of parts, materials,

and services, and as a source of consumer demand in the form of well paid workers and their

families. If that community’s only large industry shuts down and is not replaced, many of the

smaller businesses will also close when their local customer base dries up. Small businesses are

136

part of a successful employment environment, but they can seldom manage on their own to

sustain a thriving economy in a town larger than a few hundred, because the big businesses are

the ones that attract big outside money and talent, and buy and sell into major markets.

Myth: Government regulation is unneeded; responsible businesses and banks can self-regulate.

This assumes that marketplace competition can and will deal automatically and justly

with all problems. But because it’s influenced by sometimes short-sighted, irrational, or

unscrupulous human behavior, the free market generates some problems of its own. No-holds-

barred competition virtually ensures that not all operators will be responsible, by encouraging

some to take advantage of unscrupulous measures, such as using inferior or even dangerous

methods and materials in order to lower their prices, with which honest and ethical business

operators must then compete. Despite the resistance of the ethically minded, unchecked

competition becomes a race to the bottom, to the detriment not only of workers and

consumers, but also of ethical business leaders, and ultimately of the general quality of life.

Relatively recent examples include the savings-and-loan failure crisis of the 1980s,

resulting from banking deregulation; the bursting of the tech “bubble” in 2000, an effect of lax

regulation in securities valuation and trading standards; and the Great Recession of 2008, a

consequence of a combination of excessively risky real-estate, banking, and securities practices

encouraged by hopeful but unwise bipartisan deregulation decisions made over the preceding

thirty years. In other fields, lack of proper regulation or oversight has allowed numerous

instances of pollution, food contamination, and product malfunction to endanger the health,

life, and environment, not only of humans, but also of their pets, their livestock, and other

species.

137

Myth: Economic problems can be fixed simply by balancing the federal budget.

There’s no historical evidence to support this claim; indeed, there’s considerable

evidence to the contrary. My guess is that this myth arises from the popular notion that

balancing a budget is categorically “good” for households and businesses, and that anything in

the category of “good” is bound to help in any situation. It neglects the question, “Good for

what?” Rat poison is good for killing rodent pests, but not good for seasoning your soup. A

balanced budget is usually good for households and businesses, but not for a national economy

that needs more cash to recover from a recession, or less cash to counteract inflation. Where

government is concerned, a balanced budget is a long-term guide, not a quick fix.

This cannot be stressed enough: A balanced budget is the result, not the cause, of a well

running and prudently managed economy. Balancing the national budget is virtually impossible

during a recession or a recovery. It’s a ham-fisted attempt to treat the symptom rather than

the disorder that causes it, and the consequences of such a misguided approach are invariably

counterproductive. Budget-balancing as a remedy for economic decline has been tried in the

1930s, the 1950s, and the 1980s. Each time, the resulting austerity caused the economy to

backslide into deeper and more prolonged recession.

The reason for this should be obvious: During a recession or recovery, when large

numbers of people are out of work and business is slack, tax revenues plummet while relief

costs skyrocket. Unless we’re willing to put up with crime waves of poverty-driven desperation

and multitudes of citizens starving, dying, and rotting in the streets, budget balancing at such a

time isn’t a realistic option. The only recession remedy we know from experience to be

effective involves massive deficit spending, to spark demand, to motivate increased production

138

and hiring, to get money flowing steadily into people’s pockets, to create and sustain more

demand, and so on. Until recession comes under control and unemployment returns to normal

levels, and thus relief spending bottoms and tax revenues recover, we can’t even dream of

budget-balancing. The realistic and opportune time to balance the national budget is when

prosperity is charging ahead. The problem then is that no one wants to “spoil the party” by

imposing austerity. But it has been done, most recently in the late 1990s. And surprise! The

self-sustaining momentum of rolling prosperity continued despite higher tax rates, and even

generated a $500 billion projected surplus.

Myth: Balancing the federal budget should be mandatory.

This contention is based on the idea that balancing budgets at home and in business is

always a desirable (if not always feasible) thing to do, plus the assumption that whatever is

good for households and businesses must be good for government, too. This, in turn, is based

on an assumption that government operates both functionally and financially just like

households and businesses, which reflects a gross misunderstanding of the unique capacity and

purpose of government as the instrument of the people, especially in times of widespread

distress or emergency. It presumes the universality of simple virtue, but is impracticable in an

arena that operates under a different set of powers and responsibilities from households and

businesses, and where the highest callings are not individual virtue, but human necessity, the

common well-being, and the stability and survival of the republic and the liberties it supports

and defends.

Yes, it’s a good idea to balance government’s budget over the long term, if for no other

139

reason than to keep the debt from rising beyond our ability to pay the interest on it.36 But as

the servant of the people, government must have the flexibility to protect the people’s

interests, particularly when natural, man-made, or economic disaster strikes. Government

must deal with such things as wars, terrorism, hurricanes, earthquakes, floods, and wildfires, as

well as the enormous relief efforts these entail and the material and human losses they cause.

In addition, the national government’s ability to regulate the money supply—including the

unique power to print and mint new money and to issue and redeem treasury bonds—is crucial

to mitigating economic recession and inflation. Putting large amounts of money into circulation

can reverse a recessionary trend, and taking money out of circulation can help curb inflation.

Without government’s ability to run deficits and surpluses (budget imbalances) when

necessary, such economic swings can become intense and protracted, thus transforming the

economy, from what people rely on for day-to-day business, into a faceless public enemy that

robs them of their buying power and their life’s savings. Mandating a balanced federal budget

would end abusive spending sprees, but it would also nullify government’s ability to act when

necessary, to defend against an aggressor, to respond to a disaster, to damp disruptive

economic swings. When economic hard times hit, a hamstrung government would be

powerless to do anything but ride it out—along with people and businesses. As a consequence,

36 There’s a theoretical absolute maximum for debt, at which interest on the debt exceeds the gross domestic

product. In such a case, even taxing all income at 100 percent wouldn’t be enough to cover the interest payments,

let alone pay a penny against the principle. But long before such a situation could occur, other things would

become humanly intolerable, and civilization would likely revert to some primitive state of universal war and

famine, physically incapable of supporting the billions who rely on it. That possibility is still a long way off, but it

bears keeping in mind, and we should take steps to forestall it whenever feasible.

140

a largely bewildered and desperate public would have to figure out for themselves how to

survive from one calamity to the next, as they watch their assets dwindle to nothing, and as

mounting social unrest threatens even families who’ve for generations smugly fancied

themselves immune to catastrophe.

Macroeconomic Problems and Solutions

Cyclical Economic Swings: Inflation and Recession

Wealth Stratification and Redistribution (The Two Sides of “Class Warfare”)

Wealth stratification occurs when the aggregate wealth of an economy accrues mostly

to a relatively small segment of the population. Concentrating a major portion of the money

supply in the hands of a relative few reduces overall demand in an economy, by limiting the

number of people with disposable income that can be put into active circulation—which, as

we’ve seen, inhibits demand, production, employment and profit, and so on. Stratification thus

imposes a drag on the overall economy, thereby disadvantaging everyone—ultimately even

those who’ve amassed the lion’s share of the money supply, since, when invested, that money

earns significantly lower returns (interest, dividends, and capital gains) in a constricted

economy than if businesses were optimally productive and profitable. There has long been a

growing suspicion to this effect, yet little correlation of evidence and coherent thinking to

complete the picture. But recently, French economist Thomas Piketty (b. 1971) has used data

accumulated over 250 years to demonstrate convincingly that wealth stratification is a real (and

141

non-self-correcting) phenomenon in market economies.37 The question is no longer whether

such a problem exists, but what to do about it.

Piketty’s proposed course of action is a tax on wealth. But this probably wouldn’t be

well received in the United States, where free-market absolutism dominates an influential neo-

know-nothing political sector dogmatically devoted to minimalist government (except in

bedrooms). However, our discussion here might shed light on other ways to remedy the

problem, or at least trim it back to a tolerable level while we work on a satisfactory

comprehensive fix.

Symptomatic of public concern about wealth stratification are cries for “income

equality.” But this is a misnomer. True income equality—with everyone from day laborers to

professionals and executives earning the same size paycheck—just isn’t feasible, because it

removes incentive for anyone to aspire to greater training or responsibility than that required

of a supermarket checkout bagger. If minimum wage were all everyone made, why would we

go to the bother of educating ourselves for jobs that are more stressful and impose greater

responsibility, without prospect of a correspondingly higher reward?38

In the real world, we acknowledge that some kinds of work are worth more than others

with respect to the production of wealth. It costs more to train a skilled technician than to train

a menial laborer, more to train an engineer than a technician, more to train a scientist than an

engineer. And in addition to cost, there’s the matter of personal ability: people have different

37 Piketty, Thomas: Capital in the Twenty-First Century, 2014 (English), Harvard University Press.

38 Marx’s communism attempted to solve this problem through a principle of contribution according to ability and

distribution according to need, a system whose incentives involved penalties for failure to fulfill production quotas,

rather than rewarding ability, initiative, and efficiency. As we recall, that system didn’t work out very well.

142

natural talents, and some are more conducive than others to learning and applying higher-level

skills. Corporate executives, for example, ideally must possess an extraordinary skill set,

including natural talent, academic credentials, and practical experience; communication,

interpersonal, management, and organizational skills; comprehensive knowledge of the

business; strategic planning and problem analysis; connections to other business and banking

leaders; and yes, and a firm grounding in ethics, including a keen sense of responsibility to

employees, customers, investors, and community. Obviously, such a skill set is of great value to

a company and its productive effort, and must be rewarded accordingly in order to attract and

retain such talent. It might be a reasonable guess that, in a small firm, a year’s contribution of

the leader’s talents to the per-unit value of the firm’s product are worth the annual

contributions of two or three technicians to that per-unit value of production. In a large

corporation with top-end talent in its highest offices, the CEO’s contribution might be worth as

much as that of fifty technicians. So, if technicians in the large firm earn annual wages of

$50,000 apiece, then the CEO would earn a salary fifty times that, or $2,500,000 per annum.

Obviously, fifty thousand does not equal two and a half million, so that isn’t “income equality.”

But if such distribution of earnings to each individual is indeed proportionate to his or her

actual contribution of effort and expertise to the firm’s wealth production, then we have a fair

arrangement we can call “income proportionality.” It’s an easy, almost intuitive concept to

grasp; but there are some problems to be dealt with in implementing it.

Problem: establishing proportionate compensation rates

Since the progressive reforms of the Theodore Roosevelt administration, and

increasingly since the since the end of World War II through the 1970s, businesses, often in

143

collaboration with labor, have established reasonable compensation structures passably

reflecting the relative contributions of their labor, technical, engineering, and low-to-middle

administrative staff. These structures incentivize work and advancement, and reward natural

talent and skills acquired through training and experience. But as we progress into the upper-

tier executive realm, this structure becomes less structured, often unrealistically out of touch

with proportionality to one’s actual contributions to productive output. When, in an afternoon

on the golf course, an upper-level executive rakes in what one of the firm’s ordinary laborers

earns in a year or more, or if an exec receives huge bonuses even when his company is failing

because of his decisions, and when his compensation package is determined solely by his own

cronies on the corporate board, it becomes appropriate to question whether the distribution-

contribution proportionality at his or her level has exceeded the bounds of reality. If it has,

then the disproportionate rewarding of a less productive few at the expense of the most

productive many is the moral equivalent of either grand larceny on the part of the exec, or

gross incompetence on the part of the board. Clearly, it is not in a business’s best interest to

reward executives so lavishly, unless their talents and contributions are indeed so

extraordinarily outstanding as to be truly worth the expenditure. A firm that can’t afford to pay

its workers a wage sufficient to raise them above poverty level can’t afford golden parachutes

for its execs. Perhaps mandatory consultation with a few independent accountants would help

guide the board’s judgment back into the territory of sober credibility. If not, then government

regulation might be a more consistently effective alternative.

Problem: “special” tax rates on unearned income

Compounding the front-end problem of overcompensation for less productive tasks,

144

there’s an odd back-end situation, that unearned investment income (dividends and capital

gains) is taxed at a lower rate than income earned by productive individuals’ time, effort, and

expertise. The rationale—proposed by corporate lobbyists, of course—has been advanced that

tax breaks on such income are needed to stimulate investment. However, the returns on such

investments are, in the main, already significantly higher than those on interest, and thus

provide their own incentive; there seems no rational justification for, in effect, higher taxes on

earned income subsidizing unearned income from the already profitable activity of others. 39

Moreover, who receives unearned income? Investors. A fair number of them are retirees,

most of whom live on a mix of pension or investment income and Social Security, and are of

modest means. But the bulk of investments are held by the wealthy. Indeed, it’s often the case

that the wealthy derive most of their income from investments rather than salaries.

Thus, it would seem reasonable to tax all income—earned and unearned—at the same

rate, depending on the taxpayer’s overall income bracket. Raising the tax on unearned income

could have either or both of two benefits: first, enabling government to improve services and

pay down debt; second, reducing the general income-tax rate somewhat. In addition,

eliminating the special tax rate for unearned income would help to simplify the tax code—

something for which we often hear a great deal of clamor but seldom see any result.

Problem: income from non-productive activity—something for nothing

We’ve earlier explained how laborers, technicians, and engineers contribute directly to

39 So-called unearned income is actually earned, but not by the recipient’s productive effort. Rather, it’s earned by

the productive employees of the firm invested in. The recipient receives his investment return in exchange for

risking part of his own wealth to support the firm, and the firm takes part of the profit from consumer sales to

reward investors’ passive risk-taking.

145

wealth production, and how the auxiliary efforts of clerks, accountants, secretaries,

transporters, executives, and investors contribute indirectly to that production. However,

there’s one group that makes money from the process without contributing anything of value

to the product: speculators. Now, there’s a certain amount of speculation inherent in the

routine exchange of any sort of property, commodities, or securities. But those who make a

living solely from trading at a profit contribute nothing of value. The only “service” they

provide is to inflate the price of the traded commodity to the end purchaser, whether it be

grain or gasoline, real estate or stocks. Since speculators benefit without offering anything of

value in return, we can consider professional speculation as an essentially parasitic activity,

whoch might be tolerated within limits, but not encouraged. Yet the existing lower tax rates on

unearned income, already mentioned, do indeed encourage it. Granted, the current tax code

makes a feeble attempt to damp excessive speculation by imposing a higher tax rate on income

from speculative holdings held for less than one year—the arbitrary transition point between

“short term” and “long term” investment. Yet the tax rate on short-term investment income is

still lower than that on earned income. The system is rigged to reward non-productive activity

over productive activity—and this would appear to violate Americans’ much touted work ethic.

Now if, as previously proposed, we discard the tax break for unearned income, and treat

taxation on all personal income according to the individual’s standard tax-bracket, this does

away with even the token disincentive for parasitic speculation. However, if it is reimposed as a

surtax on short-term unearned income, such that it is taxed at a rate higher than that on

general income, then it becomes a true disincentive to rely on speculation as a primary income

source, with the result that price swings on widely speculated commodities would moderate

146

significantly, to the advantage of everyone—except the career parasites, who might then finally

find the incentive to become productive.

Problem: subsidies for profitable enterprises

Tax breaks and subsidies have been around for such a long time they’re accepted as

tradition. Originally intended to help family businesses and fledgling enterprises to get started

and to survive through temporarily unproductive conditions, they have now been

grandfathered to provide taxpayer support to large, mature, or even obsolete industries. This

unneeded support to long established firms interferes with the free market system’s normal

mechanisms of rewarding performance and innovation. It puts taxpayers in the uncomfortable

position of having to support businesses that their government has deemed harmful (e.g.,

tobacco), and of artificially depressing prices for fossil energy and thus impeding development

of competing renewable and non-polluting energy resources that are mankind’s future (if it

doesn’t destroy itself first). Removing huge subsidies to the immensely profitable petroleum

industry and agribusiness would bring their true costs of production into scrutiny by the free

market, and motivate consumers to exercise realistic options, such as conservation and shifting

to long-term, non-polluting40 technology that isn’t ultimately chained to dwindling finite

40 Many people think electricity is non-polluting, because there’s no exhaust from an electric car, tool, or appliance.

True, the end product doesn’t pollute the area immediately around where it’s used. But electricity isn’t an energy

source; it’s just the transmitting and storage medium for energy generated from some other process. If your

electric company uses a hydroelectric, wind, or solar power for generation, then yes, that is indeed non-polluting.

However, if your electric company uses fossil fuels to generate electricity, the pollution resulting from their

combustion is released at the generating site. So, if your electric company uses coal-fired generators, your

seemingly clean-and-green electric car or mower is actually powered by coal. It’s just that the exhaust is located

far away, where you can’t usually see or smell it.

147

reserves of dinosaur remains in unfriendly countries.

148

Part IV: Popular Mythology

In addition to considering how things really are, it can also be enlightening to consider

how a number of things most probably are not—not only in politics and economics, but in

general. In this section, we’ll examine miscellaneous ideas held by many to be true beyond

question, but which actually range from reasonably questionable to utterly incoherent, from

somewhat improbable to categorically impossible. Some popular notions are simply not

supported by clear and verifiable evidence, some are believed even in the face of evidence to

the contrary, and some are ruled out by their own contradictions.

But before we begin, we should understand that, though the words “myth” and

“mythology” carry a popular connotation of “fictional stories,” it’s important to note that myths

often have a factual basis. Many myths start with a factual account that’s subsequently

embellished to make a point. Some are mostly fiction wrapped around a kernel of truth. Still

others are purely fictional. But most prepared myths, whether factual or not, have a purpose,

such as to teach values, principles, and other lessons by example, to condition attitudes and

rouse enthusiasm, to try to explain the inexplicable, or simply to make a dull subject more

interesting.

The point is that it’s a mistake to dismiss all myths as lies (as some do), even if they’re

far from factual. There are many shades of falsehood, most of them benign. There is innocent

error, entertaining fiction, humor, and such. Lies are intended to deceive, whereas many myths

are intended to instruct or explain, albeit indirectly. For allegorical myths, the fiction is merely

to illustrate a meaning that is the real point. It’s the responsibility of the reader or listener to

decipher the meaning to get the point; this is usually an easy and intuitive task for anyone

149

familiar with the mythmaker’s culture and background. Problems arise, however, if people fail

to grasp the underlying meaning of a myth, and instead get sidetracked into a futile effort to

reconcile the literal wording of the myth with fact. If this distraction causes them to miss the

true meaning, then the lesson is lost to them.

In contrast, myths that spontaneously balloon from misperception or misinterpretation,

even if containing a grain of truth, can turn destructive by appealing to people’s worst instincts.

Even honest misunderstanding can lead to suspicion, suspicion to fear, fear to hatred, hatred to

wrath, wrath to violence, and so on. There is no good purpose to be served by myths of this

sort. They should be rooted out and debunked.

150

Chapter 8: Myths about Religion and Belief

Religion is rich in tradition, ritual, morality, history, legend, and mythology. The

mythology of religion takes two general forms. First, there is foundational mythology, the

ancient legends that accompany long established religions. Foundational mythology typically

concerns stories of origins, afterlife, miracles, mysteries, heroes, and such. Second, there is

contemporary mythology, which continually accrues to a religion through its vision of the world

as seen from the religion’s unique frame of reference (biases). Contemporary mythology

concerns assorted perceptions and misperceptions, both about people who hold beliefs

different from our own, and about the general authenticity and purpose of our own belief.

Here we’ll consider both foundational and contemporary mythology. But since the two are

very different in character, it’s appropriate that our approach to each be different as well. And

where the two kinds overlap (for example, current attitudes about ancient myth), our approach

will be appropriately nuanced.

Myths about Scripture

Mythology has been a staple of virtually all major religions, from ancient Sumerian,

Egyptian, and Hindu beliefs, through Persian, Greco-Roman, and Norse legends, to

contemporary Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and even to relative newcomers Mormonism,

Christian Science, and Wicca. It isn’t our aim here to nitpick individual ancient myths, but to

understand and appreciate them for what they are and the purpose they serve. In other words,

we shan’t concern ourselves so much with foundational dogmas, as with an over-simplistic

contemporary mythology about how scriptural mythology ought to be understood. We’ll take

151

on the big problem that seems to afflict certain factions of many religions: scriptural literalism,

also known as fundamentalism. For this, we’ll use the Judeo-Christian Bible41 as a convenient

example. It’s familiar to believers with whom I’m most frequently in contact, yet the general

concepts and practices we’ll explore apply passably well to other religions, too, along with their

scriptures and doctrines.

Myth: Religious scripture is one hundred percent literally true.

It doesn’t require too much study to reveal that at least parts of religious scripture are

not literally true. Let’s start with a familiar example. David—the shepherd boy and giant killer

who later became king—was also a poet. In Psalm 23, he begins, “The Lord is my shepherd.” If

we accept that “The Lord” signifies “God” (in David’s case, Yahweh, the Hebrew deity), and that

“shepherd” literally means a herder of sheep, this statement could have two literal meanings:

(1) I employ God to herd sheep; or (2) God herds sheep, and I am one of his sheep. It’s fair to

say that no one credits the first interpretation, that David is God’s boss. The second

interpretation is generally accepted—but not literally, even by fundamentalists. David writes

poetry; but sheep do not write poetry. So, David is not a sheep. Therefore, the statement is

not literally true. Yet it has a meaning we can grasp. It’s just that what it says and what it

means are two different things. In his poetry, David describes his relationship to God, not

literally, but metaphorically: God is to me as I am to my sheep. God guides and protects me,

and provides for my spiritual needs, in much the same way as I guide and protect my sheep, and

provide for their physical needs. In other words, David’s poetic statement, “The Lord is my

41 The Bible I have on hand is a King James Protestant Version. I grant it’s a bit slanted in some respects.

Nonetheless, it enjoys wide readership in the English-speaking world, and so serves well enough as a convenient

common reference for discussion.

152

shepherd,” does not express an idea that is literally true. But he uses this poetic metaphor to

teach a lesson about the relationship, not only between God and himself, but between God and

man generally.

In the New Testament, Jesus uses parables—stories—as fictional examples to illustrate

how faithful people ought to conduct themselves in real life. The stories aren’t literally true—

that is, they don’t recount the involvement of specific actual individuals in specific actual events

—but they effectively illustrate the results of good and bad behavior generally. This is the

intended purpose of the fiction: not to tell entertaining stories or to propagate misinformation,

but to lead by an illustrative example. All religions make extensive use of fiction—material that

is not literally true—as a teaching tool.

The Old Testament is a mix of legend, law, and a presumably historical account of

various pivotal events—exiles, wars, plagues, and such. There are entire books—Genesis and

Job, for example—that would appear to be mostly or entirely fiction. It is fiction intended to

teach, not literally that the material universe was magically created in six days, but to instruct

primitive people in the importance of trusting and obeying God. If we’re diverted by the notion

that the text must be literally true, and obsess over defending this supposed literal truth against

clear evidence to the contrary, then we’re liable to overlook the underlying meaning, and

foolishly fail to learn its real lessons.

Moreover, a literal reading of scripture gives rise to conflicts, not only with the observed

real world, but even within the scripture itself. Among the most glaringly obvious of these is

God’s warning to Adam, “But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil thou shalt not eat of

it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die. (Gen.2:17)” Yet Adam doesn’t

153

die until he’s 930 years old (Gen.5:5). This logically necessitates one of three possibilities:

Either (1) the length of a day back then was at least 930 years42; (2) Adam waited until his 930th

birthday to eat the forbidden fruit; or, If neither of these is true, then the only other possibility

is (3) God’s warning was not literally true. Even so, it can be taken as figuratively true, if what

God meant was that Adam would experience, not actual death, but a metaphorical death, when

he would cease to exist as the innocent creature that he was created, and be transformed into

a different person, a morally enlightened being clearly superior to the other creatures. In this

light, the concept of virtual death is not unlike the New Testament idea of spiritual rebirth.

Once we free ourselves from the notion that every jot of religious scripture must be

literally true, we can shed a multitude of conflicts, and graduate to a fuller level of

understanding. We can grasp and appreciate the true teachings underlying scriptural

storytelling. Simultaneously, we can accept and understand the marvelous material reality that

scientific discovery reveals to us. And, guided by our moral values, we can put this evolving

understanding to productive and beneficial use.

Myths about Believers

In addition to belief in their own religions, many believers believe things about

themselves—things which, in the aggregate, can be strangely conflicting. One of these is that

42 If the length of a day was 930 years or more until Adam partook of the forbidden fruit, this would have further

implications. The six days of creation, plus God’s day of rest, would have lasted at least 6,510 years. This would

put the biblical date of the beginning of creation, not at 4004 BCE, but sometime before 10,000 BCE—before the

scientifically established end of the last ice age and the beginning of human settlement and agriculture. But if we

grant 930 years as the minimum duration of a day at the time of creation, then the maximum duration of a day

could have been a thousand years. Or a million, or even a billion years, for that matter.

154

one’s own belief is the One True Belief, and that all beliefs that differ from it must therefore be

false. For instance, Smith devoutly believes his belief is true and Jones’s is false, while Jones

just as devoutly believes his belief is true and Smith’s is false. Odd, isn’t it? But it gets even

odder, if it turns out that Smith and Jones both derive their differing beliefs from the same holy

book. But it does happen, and quite frequently, in fact.

But there’s another odd belief that appears to operate the other way around.

Myth: All who believe in God share a universal belief.

It seems common sense among a religious majority that everyone who believes in

something they all call “God” shares a universal concept of such an entity. But consider other

things that may share a common name. (Following a practice we’ve discussed earlier, we’ll use

a fictional story to make a real point.) Suppose Smith has a dog he calls “Rex,” and suppose his

neighbor, Jones, also has a dog he calls “Rex.” Are they the same dog? Possibly. Without

further details, it’s not unreasonable to suppose they might be. Maybe, unknown to either

Smith or Jones, Rex alternates between both their homes for meals and comfort. But suppose

the Rex who shows up at Smith’s home loves pork and hates chicken, but the Rex who goes to

Jones’s home loves chicken and won’t touch pork. Same dog? Not very likely. Now suppose

the Rex that goes to Smith’s home and likes pork is a bulldog, while the Rex that goes to Jones’s

home and likes chicken is a collie. Same dog? Same “Rex”? No way!

If we dare ask a diverse group what they believe God is, and what its characteristics are,

we find great disagreement about what different English-speaking people call by the same

name, “God.” While Christians believe in a trinity—a single entity with three manifestations—

what Jews and Muslims call God has only one aspect. And that aspect is different from one sect

155

to the other. All Abrahamic religions organize days into seven-day weeks; however, the Jews’

Yahweh rests on Saturdays, the Christians’ Jehovah on Sundays, and the Muslims’ Allah on

Fridays. All (except Christian Protestants) observe dietary taboos ostensibly declared by God,

but the specifics of what’s permitted on the menu at any time of the week or year are different

for each culture. Hindus also have dietary taboos, but what they call “God” turns out to be a

group of beings, each with special and separate powers (creation, sustenance, destruction),

some with multiple pairs of arms, and even one with an elephant’s head. Furthermore, there

are great sectarian differences of opinion, even within a single religion, about the nature of

God. At one end of the spectrum are fundamentalists, who typically embrace a rigid or even

militant stance opposed to all others. At the other end are liberals who suppose that all people

will be blessed, regardless of their behavior in life. Between them are the mainstream, which in

most cases constitute a vast body of mostly moderate and tolerably harmonious, if not entirely

unified, opinion.

In addition, there are areas of religious belief that lack the traditional trappings of

organized religion. What deists call “God” is an intelligent but otherwise impersonal power that

created the universe and invented morality, but since that primordial time has not interfered

with the workings of nature or the affairs of humankind; in the deist’s view, God may have

preferences, but lacks either the power or the will to impose them. In contrast, what

pantheists call “God” is not a distinct being, but nature itself. Thus, a pantheist is as certain

that his God exists as he is that nature exists; but he cannot credibly claim that what he calls

“God” is the same thing that others call by the same name.

Since, to different individuals and groups, the word “God” has substantively or even

156

irreconcilably different meanings, the word becomes ambiguous in any setting where opinion

about the nature of God is not uniform. So, to phrase the issue in terms of logic, the claim, that

all people who say they believe in God believe in the same thing, is an equivocation fallacy, a

logical error arising from indiscriminate use of a word or expression having multiple meanings.

The commonality that it suggests may be comforting, but it is utterly illusory.

Confusion about Non-believers

I am myself a non-believer (a catch-all category for both disbelievers and unbelievers),

and also an ex-believer (a former non-denominational Protestant Christian). My non-belief has

shifted its parameters somewhat over the years, and I cannot presume to speak for all non-

believers. Still, there are some general distinctions that seem fairly constant, so perhaps

they’re worth clarifying for those who’ve never experienced any form of non-belief.

What are atheism, anti-theism, agnosticism, and atheistic religion?

What most people think of when the word “atheist” is mentioned is “someone who

doesn’t believe in God.” This casual definition is rather vague, and actually includes various

points of view. What we usually call atheism is of two major types, often referred to as

“strong” and “weak” atheism. Strong atheism is active disbelief in the existence of any and all

gods (and usually all other things supernatural as well). Weak atheism is passive unbelief, or

lack of belief in gods, usually simply for lack of clear evidence of such beings. Ironically, so-

called “weak atheism” is the logically stronger of the two positions, since it makes fewer

assumptions. Even so, lacking clear evidence for the existence of gods, many weak atheists

tentatively suppose that gods do not exist, and conduct their lives accordingly, though they

reserve the option to change this view if convincing evidence to the contrary should ever come

157

to light. Weak atheists often self-identify as “agnostics,” although agnosticism technically falls

into a different category, not of belief (or disbelief), but of knowledge—specifically, the

impossibility of certain knowledge of first principles (God, for example, or other things outside

of nature). So, one can be agnostic (in this strict sense of the word), and also be either a

believer or a non-believer, for there’s no conflict in having belief in the existence or non-

existence of something without having certain knowledge of it. This is why religious belief is

called “faith,” not “fact.”

An activist offshoot of strong atheism is an assertive category sometimes called anti-

theism, characterized by vigorous or even militant opposition to religious belief in others. Like

religious fundamentalists, anti-theists tend to be more noisily noticeable, but also far less

numerous, than their moderate cohorts. Most moderate atheists observe a live-and-let-live

philosophy. They’re indifferent to religion, so long as religion does not seek to impose its will

on them, or to divert tax dollars and public resources to its support.

In addition, there are religions that do not embrace a god concept (Buddhism,

Confucianism, and Daoism, for example). These are technically atheistic, though being spiritual

in other respects, such as ritual ceremony, meditation, prayer to spirits, or reverence of

ancestors.

Is atheism a religion?

The short answer is no, atheism is not a religion as such, since it lacks religion’s

integrated features of dogma, doctrine, ritual, morality, and belief-related objectives.

However, the long answer would add the qualifier, that atheism is a category of religious belief,

insofar as it constitutes belief about (but not in) the supernatural. This is analogous to saying

158

that black is not a color, since color is a quality of light, yet black is a category of color

exemplified by absence of light.

Is humanism a religion?

No. Humanism itself can exist with religion or without it. Humanism is a philosophy

that acknowledges the importance of human beings seeking the well-being of their fellow

humans and humankind. Although humanism originally arose under the aegis of religious

humanitarians, it serves primarily secular interests—“secular” here meaning indifferent to

religion, not necessarily opposed to it.43 The main difference between religious and secular

humanism concerns the presumed source of the importance of humans. Religious humanism

assumes that humans were created by God for some important purpose, and from this reasons

that, if we’re important to God, then we ought to accept that we’re important to each other as

well. Secular humanists see the importance of humanity as a natural extension of self- and

community-interest: humanity is important to us as humans and as social creatures, because

our own well-being depends on the well-being of our entire species. In addition, religious

humanists are likely to count worship as a factor in human well-being, whereas secular

humanists see human well-being in a more exclusively pragmatic light. Beyond such nuances,

though, the general goals of humanism, both religious and secular, are virtually

indistinguishable: to protect, and where feasible to advance, the well-being of human beings in

43 Humanists come in a variety of flavors: some religious, some anti-religious, some indifferent to religion. Many

self-identified secular humanists are the anti-religious sort; however, many believers mistakenly tag all humanists

with the “secular” modifier. Though this unwarranted assumption seems to simplify matters for those believers,

it’s actually in conflict with reality and thus problematic, for it needlessly erects barriers between people who

might otherwise happily work together toward common goals.

159

particular and of humankind in general. Humanism doesn’t inherently oppose religion, except

when religion opposes human well-being—slavery, injustice, treatment of women and children

as chattel, holy wars, persecution, and propagation of intolerance, fear, hatred, superstition,

and the like. Humanistic ethics are similar in aim to religious morality, except that they do not

concern themselves with strictly religious issues, such as piety or heresy. In other words,

humanistic ethics are not in competition with religious morals; in most cases, they reinforce

each other, religion providing authority and humanism providing thoughtful rationale.

Myth: Atheists choose not to believe in God because they don’t want to be moral.

Some people have the ability to choose whatever they wish to believe, even when there

is no evidence for it, or even despite evidence to the contrary. Some notions believers find

particularly attractive are a caring father or mother figure that guides and protects them, fixes

all their boo-boos, and relieves them of the horrendous responsibility of making thoughtful

decisions for themselves; a prospect of eternal life for themselves and their loved ones; and a

prospect of eternal punishment for their enemies. Probably most people are attracted to such

ideas, but not everyone can accept them on the sole basis of their attractiveness. But some

decide to believe anyway, out of fear of the supposed unpleasant consequences of not doing

so. Both approaches furnish abundant motive for professing to believe, but neither offers

evidence that the belief is actually true. (The mere popularity of ideas is not evidence that they

correspond to reality.)

At this point, it’s proper that we touch upon an item of peripheral interest. Some

people are more serious than others about their beliefs. Some believe out of conviction, but

others adopt beliefs on the basis of social convenience. The latter claim to believe whatever

160

others in their chosen social group profess to believe, not as a matter of conviction, but simply

as a means of fitting in. As children, they subscribe to the religious traditions of their families.

If they later attend a college where religious skepticism is the accepted norm, they switch from

believers to doubters. After graduating and finding jobs, they adopt the beliefs of their bosses

and coworkers. When moving into a new neighborhood, they adopt whatever beliefs their new

friends and neighbors hold, and attend their local house of worship if that’s the fashion. It’s

important to distinguish consistent and loyal belief from conviction from the free-flowing

attitude of social conformity, because the distinction applies to believers and non-believers

alike. And here we’re concerned, not with social opportunists, but with conscientious believers

and non-believers.

Atheists—the serious ones intellectually anchored to their atheism, not those who idly

drift in and out—are typically people who lack the knack of believing whatever they choose.

They find it to their advantage to embrace reality instead of illusion, and they distinguish

between the two on the basis of evidence and reason. Unless or until they encounter

persuasive evidence for something, no matter how appealing it might seem, they’re inclined to

suppose it isn’t real. In other words, without clear evidence to the contrary, atheists judge the

gods of modern religion to be in the same category as Odin, Zeus, Osiris, and little green men

from outer space.

In most cases, an inclination to godlessness is not a matter of amoral craving. Maturely

responsible atheists are thoroughly aware that standards of behavior are necessary for society

to function and to remain stable, and thus for people—whether believers or not—to contribute

to society and earn the benefits that it has to offer. Atheists see morality, not as fear-

161

motivated, blind obedience to a set of commandments, but rather as a matter of purely

practical concern.

But what about the burden of sin? What about salvation?

So, what is sin? Sin is a religious concept, defined as the deliberate violation of the will

of God. But atheists are persuaded that gods do not exist. If God doesn’t exist, then it can’t

have a will. If there’s no divine will, then it can’t be violated. If there’s no violation, then

there’s no sin. If there’s no sin, then there’s nothing from which to be saved. If there’s nothing

from which to be saved, then salvation is meaningless.

But how can the atheist be sure he’s right? What if he’s wrong? What happens when he

comes to final judgment?

No one can be absolutely sure of anything except his own existence, let alone anything

for which evidence is sketchy or non-existent. But the atheist will at least have the advantage

of being honest, of not professing a belief that he doesn’t actually hold. What would be the

point of trying to fool a supposedly omniscient being one believes to be imaginary? Wouldn’t

such a being, if it turns out to be real, be offended by the pretense? If God values honesty, then

that much is in the atheist’s favor. And if God does not value honesty, then perhaps it isn’t

worth worshiping.

On the other hand, how does the believer fare if, at the moment of judgment, the judge

turns out to be something other than the particular deity he’d worshiped? Would this judge

forgive the error? Or would it be roused to jealous fury? There’s no getting around this

dilemma; it’s a gamble any way one approaches it. Everyone must deal with it the best he can

in light of available evidence—which, if we’re entirely objective about it, would appear scant

162

and ambiguous at best.

Myth: Without religion, people are without morality.

By itself, atheism, as simple disbelief or unbelief in gods and the supernatural, contains

no code of morality. However, most thinking people, religious or not, acknowledge the

practical need for standards of behavior that make it possible for society to function, and for

people to interact easily within society. Atheists, like everyone else, are bound by the civil law.

And there’s nothing to prevent atheists from “borrowing” moral codes from religion, and

indeed many do. But contrary to popular opinion, religion isn’t the sole source of morality. To

maintain intellectual integrity, many atheists look to secular sources for moral guidance. Of

particular interest are systems employing rational methods to distinguish right from wrong with

respect to core principles, instead of simplistic lists of rigid dos and don’ts. Various secular

ethics have been in widespread practice for centuries, and new ones are developed by

conscientious individuals and groups to fit the needs of contemporary society, either as

adjuncts to conventional morality, or as stand-alone replacements for it. We might add that, in

most cases, the practical results of rational ethics turn out tolerably similar, or even identical, to

those of religious morality, except that secular ethics are indifferent to non-secular matters,

such as piety, blasphemy, and holy day observances. The main difference between doctrinaire

morals and rational ethics is that morals simply decree which behaviors are right and which are

wrong, whereas ethics enable us to understand why a behavior is right, wrong, or of no moral

consequence, in any situation. Morals require only memorization and obedience, and thus are

handy and easy to apply in simple situations. Ethics require disciplined thinking and prudent

judgment, and so require greater investment of brainpower to apply, but provide ways to

163

resolve moral conflicts and to adapt to new or unusual circumstances never envisioned by

traditional moralists of bygone ages.

Myth: Without religion, life Is without purpose.

Try telling that to Isaac Asimov, Clara Barton, Ambrose Bierce, Arthur C. Clarke, Andrew

Carnegie, Emily Dickinson, Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein, Stephen Hawking, H. L. Mencken,

Bertrand Russell, Carl Sagan, Mark Twain—as purposeful and religionless a bunch as you’re ever

likely to encounter. Well, you might have trouble telling those folks anything, since they’re all

dead. But the names may offer an idea of the caliber of purpose that can arise in the absence

of divine inspiration, if one simply opens one’s eyes and applies a little intellect and effort. And

there are still a billion or so live specimens—mighty or modest, take your pick—actively

defining and fulfilling their own purposes, if you can find one with the spare time to grant you

an interview.

Religious people are used to being told what their purpose in life is: to serve God—

whatever that means. It typically translates to leading a virtuous life, becoming educated,

earning one’s keep, supporting and caring for one’s family, serving one’s community, respecting

nature, periodically performing religious rituals and attending services, and so forth. In other

words, mostly secular stuff.

Atheists mostly manage to figure out the secular stuff for themselves without being

told. To them, it’s part of fulfilling one’s practical obligations to oneself and to society. The

part that atheists don’t get is the part about worshiping an imaginary being. It seems to them a

purposeless distraction, having to do with conformity, not with an actual purpose. A religious

person would likely claim that the purpose of devotion to God, if nothing else, is to avoid

164

damnation and attain a happy afterlife. But the non-believer sees this as a non-starter, for it

isn’t just the existence of gods that he doubts, but the whole package that goes with them:

Paradise, hell, salvation, redemption, sin, damnation; or reincarnation, it’s all fantasy to him,

and the only purpose he might find in it is entertainment.

Surely, the non-believer can find more entertaining and purposeful things to do than

sitting in a church pew on a gorgeous day, serving as an easy target for fellow congregants’

communicable diseases. Purpose is abundant for those who look for it: leading a virtuous life,

becoming educated, earning one’s keep, supporting and caring for one’s family, serving one’s

community, respecting nature, and applying one’s own set of natural abilities, acquired insights,

and learned skills to make the world a better place than he found it. Or just taking time out to

have fun. Even recreation, after all, has a restorative purpose.

Myths about Belief

Hyperbole: It’s a miracle!

To understand this claim properly, we need to know just what constitutes a miracle. A

typical dictionary defines a miracle as an event that can’t be explained by laws of nature, and is

thus believed to be supernatural. In other words, a miracle is something that appears to defy

nature—which in the Bronze Age might have been most anything, but in the era of modern

science is a rather high bar.

Still, it’s common to hear “miracle” used to describe the commonplace. The so-called

“miracles” of life and birth, for example, were once thought to be supernatural, but are now

readily understood (by anyone who takes the time to study them) in terms of chemistry and

biology. In such terms, the natural birth of a human is perhaps admittedly more complex, but

165

certainly no more miraculous, than the natural cell division of one bacterium into two bacteria.

The same general rules of reproduction apply, but with the additional steps of cell

differentiation, sex, and gestation for multicellular creatures.

Gratuitous overuse of the word “miracle” to describe a natural event follows the same

general pattern as overuse of “great” to describe the mediocre, “extraordinary” to describe the

ordinary, “awesome” to describe what awes only the far too impressionable, and “incredible”

to describe what’s believed by multitudes. That is to say, such overuse not only robs such

terms of their ability to convey a truly superlative meaning, but also forfeits the credibility of

those who engage in such sensationalist hyperbole—which is why the credibility of advertisers

tends to rank on a par with that of politicians, petty criminals, and religious fanatics. If

someone routinely claims whatever he talks about to be “unbelievable,” then, to take him

literally, we can’t believe what he says. Likewise, someone who applies “miracle” to routine

events evidently isn’t much of an authority on what a miracle is, so his judgment of such things

isn’t to be trusted.

As for me, I’ve experienced a number of things that I haven’t fully understood, but

nothing that I’ve assumed couldn’t ultimately be explained in terms of nature. If someday I

ever do experience something that seems beyond the bounds of nature, I think my response

would be, not to assume it’s supernatural, but rather to expand my concept of nature to

include it. Before resorting to a non-explanation as frivolously speculative as “a miracle,” I’d try

to exhaust all natural explanations. And if unsuccessful in this, I’d frankly concede my

ignorance in the matter, rather than fish for fantastic notions that explain nothing and are

utterly devoid of supporting evidence. Being human, I might indulge a little speculation for

166

amusement’s sake, but I don’t pretend to turn fancies into fact by sheer force of make-believe.

167

Chapter 9: Myths about History

History is made by everyone. But it’s written by the victors, not the vanquished; by the

masters, not the slaves; by the powerful, not the downtrodden; by the educated, not the

ignorant. In addition, there are times when history is “adjusted” to favor a prevailing opinion of

the times. On the other hand, history is sometimes revised upon discovery of facts previously

unknown: artifacts found at the site of an old barn, yellowed letters tucked into an ancient

desk, testimony of the elderly, and the like. Thus, we can’t always expect recorded history to

be an accurate and unbiased account of actual events. But we can expect the recording to be

updated occasionally—sometimes to add a bias, sometimes to expunge it.

Glaring examples of wholesale historical tinkering include suppression of the true plight

of slaves in the American South, and claims by the Soviet Union that many modern devices,

from electric lights and refrigerators to television and computers, had been invented by Russian

scientists. But truth has a way of eventually breaking back into the open and shining its glaring

light upon lies. In the United States, some of the most popular myths about history involve

religion.

Myth: Immigrants to England’s North American colonies were seeking religious freedom.

Many elementary school History books of the 20th century claimed that religious

minorities migrating from England to Massachusetts Bay Colony in the 1620s were escaping

sectarian persecution in the Old World and seeking religious freedom in the New. The part

about escaping persecution was true enough, but what these immigrants actually had in mind

was setting up a religious tyranny of their own, and persecuting any who harbored dissenting

opinions: Anabaptists against Quakers, Congregationalists against Baptists, Protestants against

168

Catholics, Christians against Jews and deists, and everyone against “freethinkers.” It’s not that

there was evil intent; it was just the way things were done in those days: adherents of any

religious sect attempted to protect their beliefs by isolating themselves from competing

opinions, and by forming community power bases within which they could dominate,

persecute, and ostracize others. Real religious freedom wouldn’t appear until 1636, when,

upon being banished from Massachusetts, reformer Roger Williams established a refuge for

religious minorities in Rhode Island. And even then, the religious freedom idea did not receive

nationwide support until the Bill of Rights was added to the U.S. Constitution in 1791.

Myth: The United States was founded as a Christian nation on Christian principles.

Another American myth that continues to enthrall many to this day is that the United

States of America was founded by Christians, based on the tenets of their religion. It’s true

enough that there were Christians among the founders, but this is not to say that all, or even

most, were Christian. Private letters and other writings, written either by the founders

themselves or by others who knew them personally, reveal them to have been far from a

unanimous congregation of Christians, and few if any of these were of the charismatic Bible-

thumping variety. Several, including some of the most prominent, were deists—believers in a

non-biblical “Natural God” or “Creator.”

George Washington (1st U.S. President, 1789-1797) was very tight-lipped about his religious

beliefs, regarding them as a matter of strictly personal concern. He attended Episcopal

services with his wife Martha, but always departed before communion was to be taken.

When challenged by the rector about this, Washington simply declined from then on to

attend any service at which the Eucharist was to be celebrated. Moreover, he refused to

169

have clergy present at his deathbed. His rector speculated that Washington was not a

Christian, but a deist, and that it seemed he attended church mainly to please his wife.

John Adams (2nd U.S. President, 1797-1801) was a Christian—a Calvinist (Methodist), to be

precise. However, his correspondence with others reveals a decided disdain for organized

religion. And when, as the second U.S. President, he signed the Treaty of Tripoli, that

document contained a clear disclaimer to the Muslims who were the other party to that

agreement: “The government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the

Christian religion.”44

Thomas Jefferson (3rd U.S. President, 1801-1809) invoked a “Creator” and “Natural God” in

the Declaration of Independence, reflecting his belief in a non-biblical God, but in a way that

would also artfully suggest reverence for the God of the Anglican Church, of which the

Declaration’s intended recipient, King George III, was the political defender. In other

writings, Jefferson expressed high regard for Jesus as a great teacher, but extreme disgust

for the Christian church. As President in 1802, he invoked “a wall of separation between

Church & State”45 to defend religious minorities (in this case, Baptists) against abuse by their

political adversaries.

James Madison (4th U.S. President, 1809-1817), primary author of the Constitution and its

Bill of Rights, had been reared a Presbyterian, but had long since developed a profound

loathing for Christianity, and had become a deist by the time he undertook his duty as

scribe for the Constitutional Convention. Madison’s later writings reveal he continued to

44 John Adams: Treaty of Tripoli, 1797

45 Thomas Jefferson: letter to the Danbury [CT] Baptists, 1802

170

share Jefferson’s staunch support of “total separation of the Church from the State.”46

Benjamin Franklin described himself as a “rational Christian,” but strongly disapproved of

the intermingling of religion and government. He expressed the opinion that a religion

could be considered good as long as it managed to support and take care of itself with

God’s help; but if it asked for government endorsement or support, “’tis a sign, I apprehend,

of its being a bad one.”47

46 JamesMadison: letter to Robert Walsh, 1819

47 Benjamin Franklin: letter to Richard Price, 1780

171

Chapter 10: Myths about Science

Prior to the 17th century, “natural philosophy”—what had passed for “science” for

thousands of years—was conducted primarily on the basis of observation and measurement.

Much detailed data had been compiled about the appearance of the heavens, and the cyclical

movements of celestial objects could be predicted with a fair degree of accuracy. But minimal

efforts to explain these movements, or even what kept these objects from falling to earth, were

entirely speculative. There was no systematic testing to verify these speculations—not because

there was no desire to do so, but because there were not yet any instruments that would make

such verification possible.

In the year 1610, Galileo Galilei learned of a new Dutch navigational device called a

telescope, and built one for himself. After verifying that it worked as designed to enhance the

images of distant ships, it occurred to him to train the gadget on the night sky. At that point,

Galileo’s empirical observations were brought to bear on the then currently held theory,

formulated by Aristotle 2,000 years earlier, elaborated upon by Ptolemy, and long held to be

true by the Roman Catholic Church. Aristotle’s theory proposed that the earth stands

absolutely unmoving at the center of the universe, and that the planets and stars are

embedded in hollow concentric crystal spheres that rotate at different rates about the earth at

their common center, thus explaining both the motions of heavenly objects and why they did

not fall to earth.

Galileo aimed his telescope at the planet Jupiter, where, in addition to the planet itself,

he noted four tiny points of light from objects utterly unknown at the time. As he continued to

observe on successive nights, Galileo noted that these four objects were not locked in place,

172

but were revolving about Jupiter, just as our single moon—presumably embedded in its crystal

sphere—revolves around our Earth. But for this to happen, Jupiter’s moons would have to be

moving freely through the region supposedly occupied by the crystal sphere holding Jupiter

itself. So obviously, there couldn’t be any crystal there, or else it would block the motion of the

moons and lock them in place. Moreover, this left no explanation for why these objects revolve

around Jupiter, because Aristotle’s theory claimed that everything revolves around the earth.

And indeed, until that time, nothing had ever been observed to the contrary—by the naked

human eye.

Over the span of a few nights, Galileo’s empirical observations refuted Aristotle’s long-

standing “divine” theory of the heavenly spheres. Modern, evidence-based science was born.

And the Church was furious. Galileo was compelled by threat of torture to renounce his

findings, placed under permanent house-arrest, and forbidden to publish anything further. But

by that time, the word had already gotten out, and the facts remained clearly observable to any

heretic who chose to peer through a telescope.

Myth: Science is just another belief system.

In the 17th century, French philosopher René Descartes mused that the only thing a

person can know with absolute certainty is the fact of his or her own existence. One’s body and

senses, one’s fellow humans, and one’s universe (and, we might add, even one’s thoughts),

might be mere illusions; yet one cannot explain the existence of his or her own conscious

experiences except by acknowledging the inescapable evidence of his or her own existence as a

consciously experiencing entity. I think, therefore I am.

Beyond this fundamental certainty, though, everything else that enters our

173

consciousness requires at least a little faith. We assume, for example, that what appears to us

as our own body is indeed a physical body more or less under our own control. We assume

that the senses of this body tell us something about a real, external world independent of our

imagination, and that this world is populated by other beings more or less like us, with physical

bodies (and presumably conscious awareness) more or less like ours. And we assume that our

behavioral choices are made of our own free will. Although it’s possible that these things might

be illusions, we’re persuaded that they’re probably true, since supposing otherwise—for

instance, that we can walk through walls, fly out of upper story windows, or refuse to pay the

rent—can have unpleasant consequences. In our world of experience, most of us prefer

pleasure to pain, and so try to adjust our behavior to increase the former and reduce the latter.

The results usually affirm our beliefs, so we accept them as true.

But some things require more faith than others. Language, mathematics, and logic are

abstractions that take some work and practice to grasp and apply. But once we come to see

that, used properly and consistently, these abstractions yield a new and useful level of

understanding, we use them to learn even more. Perhaps most fundamentally important, the

fact that this level of understanding is non-random and, for the most part independent of our

personal preferences, furnishes additional evidence that the natural world we experience is

something real and not merely a product of imagination.

The sciences provide still more information about the external world. Natural

phenomena can be observed or detected, measured, and verified. As we seek to satisfy our

curiosity about our observations, we speculate about possible explanations. We formulate

testable hypotheses, and then carry out the tests to verify objectively whether or not these

174

hypotheses are in consistent accord with reality. If a hypothesis can withstand, not only our

own intense scrutiny, but also that of others whose aim it is to prove it false, and if it yields

both explanatory and reliably predictive power about nature without conflicting inexplicably

with evidence, then we eventually develop enough confidence in it to promote it to the level of

scientific theory.

Nowadays, we’ve developed enough confidence in this reliable scientific method to

trust it with our lives. And that trust pays us back with tangible results: the doubling and

trebling of human life expectancy, the ability to travel swiftly and to communicate almost

instantaneously, the capacity to support billions of humans on a planet that once supported

only a few thousands, and a grandly expanding vision of the natural universe in both space and

time, beyond the wildest imaginings of even those just three or four generations before us.

The natural sciences offer a comprehensive understanding of material nature, and the

social sciences can teach us much about human nature. But because science is based on

empirical evidence, it’s limited to the study of things that can be observed, detected, and

measured. It can’t tell us much, if anything, about intangibles, such as human values, purpose,

morality, justice, and liberty—concepts that have no direct concrete references that can be

reliably observed, tested, and independently corroborated by people who subscribe to different

sets of suppositions and traditions. Thus, we transition from the realm of substance to the

realm of supposition. Belief systems are predicated primarily upon notions of tradition,

ideology, duty, and blind loyalty, not upon empirical evidence. There are many belief systems,

but the two major fields that significantly affect our lives are politics and religion.

In this frame of reference, we can say that politics is a system of belief about the

175

legitimate objectives of society and government, what they ought to do (and ought not to do),

and how the ruling and the ruled should interact. Politics has an abundance of historical record

and some prehistoric evidence to inform us of the outcomes of various social orders and forms

of government that have been tried so far. However, much of his evidence is complex,

fragmentary, opinionated, and subject to rather liberal interpretation by no less opinionated

historians trying to sort out the implications of ancients’ situations and intents, in order to

extract some degree of truth about what actually transpired in earlier times. Needless to say,

such a process can be very imprecise and misleading. But at least the historical evidence we

have—fragmentary, opinionated, and confusing though it might be—serves as an overall guide

to set limits on our own speculations.

But when we get to religion, all bets are off. We enter a completely different realm,

where the concepts we discuss—spirit, soul, deity, afterlife—are utterly outside of observable

nature, and thus cannot be detected or measured by natural means. While there must be

strong and unambiguous empirical evidence to confirm a scientific theory, and at least some

acceptably reliable recorded evidence to guide political historians, there’s no verifiable

evidence for most of the concepts with which religion is primarily concerned. Religion is

predicated on the existence of supernatural beings, powers, and states of existence for which

there is no empirical evidence. There is evidence of a sort—scripture and popularity of belief—

but these are evidence only of the thinking of the ancients, and of the popularity of belief

among both ancient and modern peoples. It is evidence of the existence of beliefs as concepts,

but not evidence of the truth of the content of those beliefs. The mere popularity of an idea,

even if unanimous, is evidence only that the idea is appealing, not that it’s true.

176

Science relies upon a universe of empirical evidence, and disciplined reasoning based

thereon. But in the absence of empirical evidence, religion must be believed solely on the basis

of unquestioning faith—faith in the truth of the dogmas of the religion, and faith in the

authority that formulates and preaches those dogmas. Each religion is one of many such faith-

based belief systems, but solidly evidence-based science is most certainly not just another of

these.

Myth: It’s a scientifically proven fact!

During the 19th century, it was becoming a widespread view that science was learning so

much so fast that it would soon reach a point when it would have discovered everything

important about nature. Even many scientists had begun to believe this. Then, beginning in

1887, along came Michelson and Morley, followed by Curie, Einstein, Planck, Hubble, and

others. Over the span of a few decades, our view of the universe, its complexity, its size, and its

age, suddenly expanded roughly a millionfold, in both macro and micro directions. Presumed

“natural laws” that had held fast since Newton’s time were suddenly called into question, and

all bets were off. Science had to reconfigure its attitude, from one of being smugly on the

threshold of omniscience to one of gaping, awestruck wonder and humility at the newfound

scope of things.

Nowadays, science takes a more sober stance. While accepting credit for its

accomplishments, it also acknowledges its weaknesses, and has in effect downgraded its

“master of the universe” self-image to “student of the universe.” Science observes facts and

tries to interpret and explain them. It does not prove them. Science does not make the laws of

nature (for only nature itself can do that); it merely tries to understand them, to improve that

177

understanding as methods improve, and to express that understanding in a thorough but

concise way. The most science can prove is that a hypothesis or theory is false, by the

detection of a single inexplicable instance in which the hypothesis or theory is clearly not borne

out. Hypotheses that consistently withstand intense scrutiny over time may eventually be

elevated to the status of “theory,” not because they’re ever proved true, but because they’ve

never been found to be false. We can never be absolutely certain, even after millions of

successes and zero failures (so far), that the next time we test a scientific theory it will yet again

turn out to confirm our expectations. It almost always does. Almost always. But occasionally

not, and that’s when science advances, by learning something so different from the current

view that it must revise its thinking. Though hardly a routine occurrence, this is an essential

part of the self-correcting process, without which science would no longer be science, but “just

another belief system,” as its detractors mistakenly claim. This is the power of science: to

maintain a firm grasp on reality by adjusting its theories to the evidence, not the evidence to its

theories. All we can be sure of is that anyone who claims “It’s a scientifically proven fact…”

clearly shouldn’t be considered a credible authority on science, proof, or fact. It is not in spite

of its self-critical nature, but because of it, that science has matured into a self-correcting

discipline that turns out to be the most reliable method yet devised to discover what’s most

probably true about the natural world.

178

Part V: How Things Might Someday Be

To this point, we’ve mainly discussed how things are (as I see them) in the here-and-

now. Obviously, despite thousands of years of progress, civilization hasn’t yet achieved

perfection. Nor is it ever likely to do so, since perfection itself is a nebulous concept with

numerous interpretations, some mutually conflicting. Still, there’s clearly room for

improvement, if only we can discover what constitutes “improvement” in terms that might be

agreeable to most people of sound mind and good will.

So, let’s explore the possibility that what we’ve covered so far might lead us to any

plausible predictions about the future, and perhaps indulge in some conjecture about how we

might want to alter our present course in the interest of preserving society and improving

conditions for future generations. In the course of this speculative adventure, I admit I’ll be in

over my head at times, since I have little or no formal training in some of these areas, and my

connections to the many cutting edges of development are rather hit and miss at best. My

intent here is not to provide the reader with reliable information, but to sow a few seeds of

inquiry, some of which might germinate and flower with the help of others far more

knowledgeable than I.

179

Chapter 11: Justice

As I write this, the United States of America has the dubious distinction among

developed nations of having the highest percentage of its citizenry in prison. Moreover, many

of those imprisoned are serving time for relatively minor and non-violent transgressions, such

as smoking a little marijuana, while corporate CEOs and investment bankers are rewarded with

“golden parachutes” for wrecking not only their own businesses but also the national economy.

And the icing on this dung-cake is that the U.S. is the only developed country in the free world

that has not yet abolished capital punishment. Do we know something the other countries

don’t? Or is it we who need to learn something from them?

One thing the United States has, which most other countries don’t, is an institutional

assumption of innocence until proven guilty. How’s that working out for us? If we’d ask some

of those multitudes now in prison, we’d find our institutional assumption is working only part

time, if at all. It isn’t that the concept is bad, but only that it’s so spottily applied as to seem the

exception rather than the rule.

Perhaps we wouldn’t need instruction from others, if only we’d think through the

reasons society has for crafting laws and punishing violators. Let’s take a step back, and

consider whether what our legal and justice systems do accomplishes the legitimate objective

“to protect and serve” the people and their society. And if we find it doesn’t, if our presumed

solutions fail to address specific problems, or if some of what we have identified as problems

are actually inconsequential transgressions of tradition, then let’s make the changes necessary

to restore both the integrity and the consistency of justice, as well as public respect for it.

The problems involve lawmaking, interactions of law enforcement with the public, the

180

fairness and impartiality (or lack thereof) of the justice system, and the penal system. There is

already active involvement in identifying and resolving problems in most of these areas. But as

to the matter of punishment, there seems much confusion, and not much serious reflection,

about what its true purpose is. I admit that this is one area in which I’m not even an amateur,

let alone an expert. For the most part, I’m a passive (but concerned) observer via the news

media. My few interactions with the criminal element have been transient, resulting from my

early work experience in a hospital emergency room, and later on jury duty. Still, being

relatively detached from a system sometimes affords an analytical mind the opportunity to

examine it with fresh eyes. So here’s my take on it, for whatever it may be worth.

Let’s consider just what the legitimate duty of a justice system is: “to protect and serve.”

It should protect society’s citizens against abuse, exploitation, and negligence, whether by other

individuals or groups, by businesses or banks, or even by government itself. And it should serve

the purpose of providing a means for people to resolve their disagreements peacefully and

fairly. It’s supposedly to these ends that government makes and enforces laws, and that the

judicial and penal systems exist to deter abuse, by imposing penalties upon convicted

offenders. The two most common forms of penalties fall into the general categories of

deprivation and isolation.

Deprivation, in the form of confiscation of wealth or property, imposes a material

burden upon offenders by requiring them to pay restitution to their victims, plus a punitive fine

or confiscation to discourage further misconduct by raising the odds against its successful

outcome. A severe (and usually irreversible) variant of deprivation strategy is incapacitation:

inflicting injury to prevent wrongdoers from repeating their offenses (e.g., amputating a thief’s

181

hands or castrating a rapist).

Isolation from society typically involves imprisonment, or psychiatric detention and

treatment for mental or emotional disorders contributing to criminal behavior. Imprisonment

may involve forced labor, both as an additional punitive measure, and as a way for prisoners to

earn their room, board, and health care while confined. It may also include rehabilitation,

conditioning prisoners for good citizenship and training them for productive occupation once

they’re discharged from prison. A severe (and irreversible) form of both isolation and

deprivation is execution.

I admit this is an oversimplification, but it should suit our purpose here of considering

the underlying assumptions of the system. So, can we spot any problem areas, and are there

any workable solutions?

First, like any other human endeavor, justice isn’t perfect. Witnesses are sometimes

mistaken (or dishonest), and implications of evidence are sometimes unclear. The system

sometimes has technical or political glitches, and some laws are unjust. And attorneys are

under pressure to “win” cases, rather than to seek justice. Result: Sometimes people are

wrongly convicted and punished for wrongs they haven’t committed. Therefore, society should

categorically abolish any punishment that can’t be reversed or compensated in the event of

wrongful conviction or repeal of an unjust law.

Second, just as the human institution of justice isn’t perfect, neither are humans

themselves. Not everyone is inclined to behave in what the rest of us consider a civilized

manner. Not everyone is trained or experienced in thinking rationally, or is adept at pushing

emotional impulses aside, especially when under pressure. This applies not only to prisoners,

182

but also to the guards and officials responsible for managing them; psychological experiments

have shown that the very nature of the prison environment tends to break down empathy and

encourage dehumanization of “the other,” regardless of on which side of the bars one happens

to be. Brutality breeds brutality, no matter which side initiates it.

Third, effective rehabilitation requires that prisoners learn to behave as responsible

members of society, to perform useful work to earn a living, and to earn respect (not fear) and

trust from others, by being respectful and trustworthy themselves. But humans who are

treated as animals learn to behave as animals, acting on impulse rather than reason. So, in an

environment where brutality prevails, rehabilitation is virtually impossible. Therefore, brutal

treatment of prisoners must be eliminated. Prisoners must be treated with firm but humane

control and discipline, and with basic respect for their humanity. Even if some prisoners don’t

return that respect, prison staff must have the extraordinary strength of character to maintain

the moral high ground. Yet even the best of people can crack under the strain. Those who do

must be immediately relieved of duties involving direct interaction with prisoners, if

rehabilitation efforts are to succeed.

With those matters taken care of, we can turn our attention to society’s legitimate

obligation in dealing with injustice. Simply put, as we’ve already noted, it’s “to protect and

serve.” Ideally, this would be accomplished by creating and preserving an environment in

which no injustice is ever perpetrated by or upon any person, group, or business. Realistically,

though, people and situations are often more complicated than simple textbook cases.

Abstract ideals are seldom humanly attainable, and we must settle instead for a practical

“optimum.”

183

So, let’s outline the fundamental objectives of the justice system to which this

“protection and service” are legitimately directed: maintaining a social order that is stable yet

flexible enough to accommodate progress, deterring abusive activity, correcting problems that

result from abuse that isn’t effectively deterred, and protecting all persons under its

jurisdiction.

What is not the duty of the justice system is to exact revenge or perpetrate vendettas,

either against offenders themselves, or against innocent parties, such as offenders’ families or

ethnic groups. If it indulges in such practices, justice is replaced by vengeance, and society

reduces itself to the criminal level, by perpetuating injustice rather than discouraging and

ending it. Any society that does so deserves neither respect nor trust, but only a very poor

substitute: fear.

It’s also justice’s duty to take every reasonable precaution to ensure that no person is

wrongly convicted. For if a pattern emerges in which innocent people are convicted and

punished for offenses actually committed by others, then word will spread, not only that crime

pays handsomely, but also that those who do nothing wrong can expect to be penalized for the

acts of others. When that happens, any incentive to play by the rules is lost. The de facto

moral standard becomes “whatever I can get away with.” Crime skyrockets, and justice and

social order become nothing but a sad joke.

So now, let’s take a look around. Does this last scenario reflect actual prevailing

conditions in our community, in our nation, and in our world? If it does, this is a clue that

something in the system is broken and needs to be fixed. And we can be sure that neither

ignorant apathy nor impulsive wrath are parts of the solution. For these are what gave rise to

184

the problem in the first place, and will continue to plague us until we deal with them.

185

Chapter 12: Rebalancing Work and Leisure

At the end of the Second Millennium CE, America had just experienced an

unprecedented eight years of steady prosperity, fueled by economic growth and underpinned

by government services. The government services were funded by taxes, and, as usual, there

were complaints about “waste” and “handouts to the undeserving.” But the complaints rang

hollow, for both wages and business were consistently good. Employment was up, the stock

market was soaring, and, for the first time in decades, the federal budget had been balanced

with a projected surplus.

However, in 2001, the first year of the Third Millennium, a new American leader was

inaugurated. Seeing the word “surplus” (and ignoring the accumulated debt), President George

W. Bush, Jr. declared the nation was “rolling in money,” and immediately cut taxes.

Accordingly, the surplus turned into a deficit. Government services became underfunded.

Personal income and purchasing power became stagnant, lagging behind inflation. And the

economy reverted to a succession of rolling recessions similar to those of the 1980s. Then new

wars in the Middle East erupted, and the administration’s solution to the added expense was

magical accounting: Simply don’t include war in the national budget! Seven years later, the

banking system locked up and the Great Recession set in.

Of course, there were additional factors in this collapse. Some (like deregulation) were

directly attributable to the new administration. Others (such as risky lending practices and job

outsourcing) had emerged from past practices of both political parties, going back to the 1970s.

The risky lending started as a venture combining good will with poor judgment: to help poor

families purchase homes. Many of the jobs outsourced went to foreign countries with cheap

186

labor—South Korea, China, Malaysia, India, Mexico—thus pricing American workers out of

some job markets.

But computerization and automation were (and continue to be) additional factors in the

loss of semi-skilled and skilled jobs. Even if America were able to recover all the jobs now

outsourced to foreign labor, many of them would be displaced by computers and robots—

which in many cases can do the same work faster, cheaper, and (in some cases) better, without

weekends, holidays, vacations, or sick leave. Even with domestic manufacturing running full

tilt, there would still be millions of Americans either unemployed or working for starvation

wages. To fix this, we need to think outside the customary box.

Fortunately, there’s a precedent that we can glean for hints on how to go about it. The

Industrial Age began in the late 18th century, with the invention of an abundant power source:

the high-pressure steam engine, fired first by wood, and later by abundant coal.

Among steam’s first applications was textiles, production of which until that time had

been by hand, and spread out over the countryside in hundreds of family-size “cottage”

operations, spinning, weaving, and sewing from dawn till dusk. When steam power was

adopted, it was necessary to consolidate operations into centralized manufactory facilities

(“factories” for short), where the power could directly drive the semi-automated equipment

through systems of belts, pulleys, shafts, and levers. The machinery replaced the labor of many

pairs of hands. But it still required hands, eyes, ears, and even a few brains, to set it up and

keep it running smoothly all day, every day. Yet the labor supply—mostly women and children

—was cheap and plentiful. (Employment was a take-it-or-leave-it deal in the days before

organized labor and collective bargaining.) This made “sweatshop” operation efficient enough

187

to produce huge volumes of product at low per-unit cost, thus generating a handsome profit for

the owners and investors.

But the machinery, operating at high speed just inches away from busy hands and

without safety shielding, was physically dangerous. It also generated clouds of airborne fibrous

dust, which, it soon became tragically apparent, presented both a health hazard and a fire

hazard. Consequently, the injury, illness, death, and turnover rates in the industry were high.

Similar conditions attended many other early industries when machinery came to

farming, mining, wood- and metal-working, transportation, and many other productive fields,

vastly increasing efficiency and productivity, but also keeping wages at starvation level and

introducing new hazards. Since then, incremental reform has reduced the standard work day,

from 16 hours to 12, then 10, then 8. Minimum wages and ages have been mandated. Safety

and health standards have been imposed. And workers’ quality of life has correspondingly

improved. Plus, instead of laboring to exhaustion in factories, children can now spend time in

school being educated for the more intellectually demanding jobs of the future.

Thus, the per-unit cost of production has increased. Yet this hasn’t adversely affected

profits over the long run! What kind of magic is this? Well, it isn’t magic at all. When we

consider the entire operation in its environmental context, what stands out is that workers now

earn enough to buy the products they make—not just textiles, but food, appliances, cars, and

computers—thus driving up demand, and profits as well.

So, can we apply any of this knowledge to reduce hardship in the face of continuing

automation? Counterintuitive though it might seem on the surface, there’s reasonable hope

that we can. Though I haven’t thoroughly worked through the details of the economics

188

involved, I believe we could devise a workable plan to adjust the business and work

environments to the new realities of globalization and automation. Suppose we do something

like the following:

First, ensure that the minimum wage provides a level of weekly full-time pay above the

poverty level, and maintain this level with periodic increases to compensate for inflation.

Second, reduce unemployment by shortening the standard work-week, from 40 hours to

perhaps 36 (a 10-percent reduction), while using additional employees to maintain the

same level of production. (We must also consider that this would increase the business cost

of providing health care coverage and fringe benefits for more employees. On the other

hand, if the 36 hour week were divided into four nine-hour work days, some savings could

be achieved in start-up and shut-down efficiency.)

Third, as individual work time is reduced, raise the hourly minimum wage to keep the

weekly pay for a full-time 36-hour-per-week job above poverty level. (Any professional

economist would correctly point out that these two steps would be inflationary. Thus, the

changes would have to be gradual, to soften economic impact and avert hyperinflation.

Spreading the 10-percent adjustment over four years would mean a tolerable 2.5 percent

non-compounded change per year for four years.)

Fourth, with more people working fewer hours each for living wages, and with more leisure

time available, expect to see a corresponding increase in consumer demand (thus justifying

the additional hiring and maintaining acceptable profit margins), and also in tax revenues

(from more people earning a living wage). These tax revenues could help offset the next

step.

189

Fifth, be aware that, under such a plan, businesses would be assuming the brunt of the

burden during this transition, and so may require temporary government assistance to

remain solvent. Such assistance would be phased out as overall market equilibria stabilize

under the new standards.

I must point out that these are my own admittedly non-professional thoughts. I offer

them only because I haven’t recently come across any thinking on this seemingly pressing issue.

However, if my half-baked ideas serve to spark better informed and experienced thought and

action among seasoned economists and businesspeople, they will have served their intended

purpose.

190

Reflections

In this work, we’ve progressively covered overlapping topics of knowledge, truth, belief,

responsibility, mind, spirit, soul, and being, plus others that provide useful background and real-

world perspective. Most of these are of basic interest to most people, but are generally

considered so commonsense that we needn’t bother thinking about them. Yet, as we’ve seen,

they’re worth a second glance, just to double-check the basic assumptions of our thinking,

especially whenever new evidence comes to light, casting shadows of doubt here and there.

Our investigation has deliberately avoided so-called common sense—which, it turns out,

often isn’t all that common or sensible. Instead, we’ve blazed a more philosophical trail of

rational thought that has led, step-by-step, through the whole sequence. We’ve taken

advantage of relevant evidence where we can find it, and used methodical reason to tie the

evidence together and make it meaningful in human terms, while discrediting stale myths that

color our beliefs and thoughts. Each step has built on the understanding of those previous.

Thus, our current view of basic human understanding should be more coherent and

integrated—and, with our myth-filtering, perhaps a bit more streamlined—than it was

previously. Granted, there’ve been gaps in our progress, but this work is intended more as a

“sampler” than as a comprehensive dissertation, on the intricacies of methodical thinking about

reality and truth. Even so, the going might have seemed tedious at times. Yet we’d hope that

the resulting enhancement of understanding has been found worth the effort, and furthermore

that the experience may serve as a springboard to independent critical investigation of other

related subjects, such as ethics and logic.

=SAJ=

191