MEMBER MONDAY

There's a fantastic question I was asked several years ago that has stuck with me. The question was, "what important truth do you believe that few people agree with you on". 

At the surface, to find an answer seems simple. One quickly discover, however, that most answers are not novel but in fact common knowledge. "Education is important", "we need to learn to work together", "progressive taxation is good", etc. Though these are all answers that are widely agreed upon, they don't satisfy the "very few people agree with you" constraint. 

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Here's one Whitey who listens from the heart. Kyle Korver, the NBA shooting guard for the Utah Jazz, provides the most tender, personal, and affecting commentary on the subject of racism that could ever be delivered on the white side of the tracks (link: Privileged). While no white should ever presume to speak for a person of color, the piece does invite an honest discussion at a fundamental human level. This Member Monday session is dedicated to the proposition that failure to openly and honestly address the topic of racism only drives it further underground where it continues to metastasize.  

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There are times when nature, even if temporarily, mocks our attempt to control her. Take public health. The ebola outbreak provided a glimpse of the skull beneath the skin of post-industrial civilization. That was preceded by the AIDS epidemic. Before that, poliomyelitis infected 600,000 Americans, ten percent fatally. The epidemic of Spanish influenza in 1918-19 killed more than half a million in this country alone. And so on, back to fourteenth century Europe where "Ring around a rosie!" described the telltale symptom of the Black Death which wiped out half of that entire continent.

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"Many of my friends and City Club members tell me they are sick of politics, and have had it with the extreme partisanship that has divided our country more than anytime in our history, other than the Civil War." Sina Simantob, The Weekly.

Amen to that. Note the underlying dynamic:

“Imagine your boss, who is kind of a jerk, needs your help to finish his projects. If you help him, he’ll keep his job, maybe get a promotion. If you refuse to help him, you’ll become his boss, and he might get fired. Now add in a deep dose of disagreement — you hate his projects and think they’re bad for the company, even the world. That’s basically American politics right now. Bipartisan cooperation is often necessary for governance, but irrational for the minority party to engage in.” That principle, from our focus article (link: The political scientist Donald Trump should read - Vox), speaks volumes of where we find ourselves today -- bloodsport politics, gridlock, and the dialogue of the deaf. In its most basic terms: once a political party has decided the path to governing is winning back the majority, rather than working with the existing majority, the incentives transform; instead of cultivating a good relationship with your existing colleagues across the aisle, you need to destroy them because you need to convince the voters to destroy them, too. 

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Psychologists sometime speak of the false self. Now apply the term in the most literal sense to the unfolding world of the elite college selection process -- from the extremes of the reported world of photoshopped faux athletes and bribed entrance exam proctors to the more mundane examples of the oft-cited ghostwritten essays, fudged transcripts and tightly focused preparation courses. The notion that certain applicant "positioning" may be quite legal (e.g. one's check-the-box performance for years and years in advance as if to edit oneself into some sort of standout doppelgänger) does not change the fact of the underlying motivation is essentially one of creating an inauthentic self.

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It's hard to know if we're being played. We are confronted with anecdotal evidence of free-speech suppression on the campuses e.g. feminist critic Christina Hoff Sommers dissed at Lewis & Clark Law School; Jordan Peterson, the self-described free speech warrior, shouted down at McMaster University. Such events certainly make for compelling coverage by the mouth-frothing, feed-me, feed-me, 24-7 omnivore television news network…

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It's not like we've ever shied away from taking a hard look at capitalism. An earlier Member Monday discussion centered around a synopsis of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, the unapologetic embrace of the free market (see Capitalism: MM 05/22/17). There was much "energy" about the real-world implications of her credo (Objectivism), especially given today's reality of resource constraints, global interdependence, deepening income disparity, regulatory capture, and a distorted monetary system…

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Would you choose to die for the sake of principle? If so, what principle(s)?

We will wipe the figurative dust off a few old Greek marble statues and resurrect a discussion some 2,500 years ago, this time through modern eyes. Socrates back then was facing the death penalty. The facts of the case would evoke an eye-roll, even laughter, today (and perhaps back then). The charge: studying things in the sky and below the earth, corrupting the youth through inappropriate questions, and believing in unauthorized gods. Jury: about five hundred random, "non-expert" citizens. Sentence: death by mandated suicide. Rationale: hard to tell. Possible exacerbating circumstances: Athens' recent stinging loss to Sparta; the accuser's (Meletus) demagoguery, and maybe a touch of chutzpah (not a Greek word).

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The debate in Paris in 1975 resonates even today in the world of machine learning. The topic: the nature of human cognition. Noam Chomsky, the noted linguist and intellectual, held that babies are born with in-built rules and instincts that help them develop the knowledge needed to navigate the world; Jean Piaget, the Swiss psychologist, argued rather that babies are effectively blank slates that acquire knowledge on-the-fly from their world experiences.

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One version has it that Valentine's Day originated in the Middle Ages to commemorate the warbling of songbirds as they finally emerge from the dead of winter to start looking for a mate (another version marks the beheading of a holy priest ordered by Claudius II in 278 A.D. after performing marriage ceremonies for otherwise-eligible army conscripts ). In any event, the mating dance for us creatures with a neocortex involves a little more than just warbling.

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Start with the dollar bill in your wallet. Actually, this piece of paper is labeled a Federal Reserve Note. A note suggests it's a debt instrument i.e. that someone owes you something. What does this even mean? There's no real obligor, no claim against some balance sheet or, in fact, a claim to any real asset at all. The "legal tender" language thus suggests its worth is presumed without regard to something tangible. That legally imposed (fiat) presumption is supported by an intangible called full faith and credit.  All one can do with this irredeemable piece of paper is trust the next guy will value it the same way. 

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If there were ever a film to cure any nostalgic pangs for the good old days this would be it. Originally titled "Tell Your Children," this church-financed American propaganda piece made in 1936 revolved around melodramatic events that ensue when high school students are lured by pushers to try marijuana -- hit-and-run accidents, manslaughter, suicide, attempted rape, hallucinations, and descent into madness. This would-be morality tale smoldered in the shadow of the 40s and early 50s (at one time panned as one of the worst films ever made) until it was rediscovered and relabeled Reefer Madness to wonderful satirical effect. Watch the trailer . . . . and be thankful you now live in such an enlightened world Reefer Madness ORIGINAL TRAILER - 1936 (Not the full film)…

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It's the major rite of passage, perhaps second only to one's trip through the birth canal. Most of us sat for the SAT. Break the seal with your No. 2 pencil . . . . and go! The ensuing four hours could determine one's future. A few achieved the holy grail of 1600 (or equivalent) -- name in the local paper, acceptance into the scholastic pinnacle assured. For others, the results could relegate the test-taker to the backwaters of academia, maybe to life itself.

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It's probably the best one-line take on the subject of history: History is just one damn thing after another. Yet, as we once discussed (MM 3/20/17), these damn things are said to occur in patterns. Our book subject back then -- The Fourth Turning -- stands for the proposition that history, far from being a collection of random events, moves in predictable cycles. Each grand cycle, a so-called saeculum spanning the length of a long human life of roughly eighty years, contains four generational "turnings" that arrive in a fixed pattern as life phases intersect with events and react to the generation which spawned it. Five hundred years of Anglo-American history demonstrate how history creates generations just as generations create history.

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Judge not. Seek first to understand. We humans are flawed. What makes us that way is the subject of our focus article (link: The Worst Of Human Nature), a very readable digest of the extensive research into that which makes us . . . . what, exactly?

Three philosophical views have prevailed historically on the subject of man and child development: the Original Sin (children born bad, necessitating societal constraints for proper development); Tabula Rasa (John Locke, children a blank slate); Innate Goodness (Jean-Jacques Rousseau, children born pure and should thus be left alone to grow naturally without societal contamination).

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The prospect of death invites a peek into the world of metaphysics. Member Monday (12/10/18) is dedicated to the two Highland community members we recently lost. Actually, it is dedicated to each and every one of us -- to us, simply different cars on the same train. May we endeavor to share our respective views on the nature of the soul, spirit, and the other immeasurables even if in doing so it feels like both an accommodation to the necessity of language and proof of its inadequacy.

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Smart Steve: 2008 investment portfolio so defensively oriented that it totally avoided that year's market crash; stupid Steve: maintained said portfolio and thereby totally missed the entire three-times equity gain during the ensuing ten years. The story of man and money, and the degree to which intellect intersects with emotion, is the subject of The Psychology of Money. The report describes the twenty flaws, biases, and causes of bad behavior when people deal with money. You will wince or smile knowingly.

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Thought experiment: "What's striking about capitalism is that we're all trying to escape it because it makes us so miserable, mean, and foolish . . . we all want the freedom to live lives with meaning, purpose, and fulfillment -- instead of being crushed with anxiety, bruised by competitiveness, and suffused with fear . . . . so here is the real question, if these are the things we're really after, why don't we just give them to one another?"

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One personal life regret was my failure to pay closer attention at the family holiday dinner table sixty years ago. What I would give today for the opportunity to ask my maternal grandfather -- just one more time (promise, I'll pay attention!) -- about his life, his background, the stories of his Austro-Hungarian birthplace, his Parisian dress designer father, 1901 emigration to America, dealing with all the hardships. And the same goes with other relatives -- all of whom, at the time, seemed to fit into one category i.e. old.

Threshold question: whence comes a generation? Take the so-called Greatest Generation -- born 1910-1924, coming of age amidst the crushing jaws of the Depression, only to emerge from the dust to plant the flag at Iwo Jima -- and one wonders whether such greatness is somehow innate or is forged by circumstances. Imagine that the same gene pool had instead been born in the 1946-1964 era only then to act out in the same overprivileged, Spock-coddled, pretentious, self-important way (as some would have it) of the baby boomer generation.

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