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Dualism

by | Mar 1, 2021 | 0 comments

Dualism

A 17th century philosopher named René Descartes struggled to make sense of the mind-body problem. He understood that thoughts originate in the brain, but he observed that mental activity is ephemeral, without physical substance. How can this be? he wondered.
Ever since, philosophers have called Descartes’s philosophy “dualism.” They concur that what occurs within the mind exists in a separate reality from what occurs in the physical world.

The 16th century writer Michel de Montaigne tried to describe the way a human mind works. “Men do not know the natural disease of the mind; it does nothing but ferret and inquire, and is eternally wheeling, juggling, and perplexing itself like silkworms, and then suffocates itself in its work.”

He compared the human mind to: “A mouse in a pitch barrel.”

An issue that upset Montaigne was the abundance of laws on the books, designed to curtail crime. He wrote, “We have more laws in France than all the rest of the world put together,” and then he quotes the Roman historian Tacitus, “As we were formerly overburdened by crimes, so we are now by laws.”

Mind vs. body; crime vs. law.

Edmund Burke, the late eighteenth-century British politician, read of events unfolding in France during its revolution, and was horrified. He wrote, “Everything seems out of nature in this strange chaos of levity and ferocity, and of all sorts of crimes jumbled together with all sorts of follies.” “Levity and ferocity.” Wild hilarious laughter matched point for point with rage and harsh words. Crimes jumbled with follies. Mind vs. body; crime vs. law; levity vs. ferocity; crimes vs. follies.

Thomas Paine witnessed events during the French Revolution, but unlike Edmund Burke, Paine was pleased, because he detested France and England’s monarchy. He wrote, “Reason and Ignorance, the opposites of each other influence the great bulk of mankind. Reason obeys itself; and Ignorance submits to whatever is dictated to it.

“The two modes of government which prevail in the world, are government by election and representation; and government by hereditary succession. The former is known by the name of republic; the latter by that of monarchy. “Those two distinct and opposite forms, erect themselves on the two distinct and opposite bases of Reason and Ignorance.”

Only Thomas Paine could write that way. Whenever he put ink to paper, he exuded confidence, certainty, fearlessness, and intellectual snobbery. Only he would dare to fix a republic upon a solid base of Reason, but place a monarchy upon a slippery slope of Ignorance.

Mind vs. body; crime vs. law; levity vs. ferocity; crimes vs. follies; Reason vs. Ignorance; a republic vs. a monarchy.

In a recent podcast, I heard the author Simon Winchester describe how journalists and politicians have moved from a former-day respectful “suspicion” of each other to a now distasteful “cynicism.”

Back in the mid-twentieth century, journalists expected politicians to lie, or to embellish, or to leave crucial pieces out of their statements. As a result, a reporter’s boss expected his or her journalists to confirm everything from multiple sources, in order to ferret out the full truth.

But today, suspicion has given way to a raw brand of cynicism. Each party is convinced that the opposing party is wrong about all issues, distrustful of their intentions, anxious to crush them, even to annihilate them, and unwilling to ever cooperate with them to achieve a meaningful result.

The Founding Fathers envisioned a different outcome.

Another example of dualism: deference or democracy. Some people’s minds are geared toward getting in line and following a leader. These people want someone to lead them.

We all know of pitiable examples where a woman will submit to a man, or a man to a woman, or a political party to an elected official, or a flock to an ill-advised theology, or a committee to the loudest and most forceful member, much to their detriment. Yet, they do it.
Democracy though relies upon equality. Each member in the group has a vote. The group’s body of delegates votes and selects a leader to represent them. If that representative fails to perform his or her duties, the group can and will fire him or her, and hire another.

In a democracy, it is the group that retains the power, not a king or an elected official.

Mind vs. body; crime vs. law; levity vs. ferocity; crimes vs. follies; Reason vs. Ignorance; a republic vs. a monarchy; suspicion vs. cynicism; and deference vs. democracy. Each an example of dualism.

George Washington

George Washington

by | Feb 15, 2021 | 0 comments

George Washington

The Father of our Country was born on Feb. 22, 1732, and he died on Dec. 14, 1799, at 67 years of age. He was a proud Virginian, fourth generation. His father Augustine married twice, and George was the eldest child by the second wife.

Augustine died when George was 11, and, thereafter, he became a ward of his half-brother, Lawrence. As a child, George did not receive a full education, not unusual for a young Virginian.

John Adams said of George Washington, “That Washington was not a scholar was certain. That he was too illiterate, unread, unlearned for his station is equally past dispute.”

One thing George did learn and took to heart was a French Jesuit priest’s list of 110 “Rules of Civility and Decent Behavior in Company and Conversation,” that at the age of 13 young George copied onto pages, memorized, and worked hard to apply to his own life. He wrote,

“Every Action done in Company, ought to be with some Sign of Respect, to those that are present.”

“Sleep not when others Speak, Sit not when others Stand, Speak not when you should hold your Peace.” “At Play and at Fire it’s Good manners to Give Place to the last to arrive.”

“Let your countenance be pleasant, but in serious matters somewhat grave.”

His lack of formal education though did not hinder his ambition. The historian Paul Johnson said, “There was a powerful drive in this big young man to better himself. He developed a good, neat, legible hand.” His collected works include 17,000 letters that have survived, but no memoir.

Johnson also said, “He neither gambled nor drank immoderately. From early youth he imposed upon himself a severe code of conduct which formed a kind of frame into which he fitted himself.”

As a young man, Washington felt severe disappointment when he came to understand that British military officers looked down upon him, and considered his experience and skill worthless, because he was a colonial military officer. His ambition to receive a royal military commission was crushed.

Yet, “He knew that he was a first-class officer with the talent and temperament to go right to the top.” He chose to forge ahead and would soon create his own army and his own rank.

In 1751, George, with his brother Lawrence who was suffering from tuberculosis, sailed to the Barbados Islands, for Lawrence’s health. While there, George came down with small pox, that left his face scarred. This was George’s single journey outside the 13 colonies.

After Lawrence passed away in July of 1752, George inherited Mount Vernon, plus eighteen slaves. He loved farming this land, and said, “No estate in America is more pleasantly situated than this.”

George married Martha Custis, a well-to-do widow with two small children, on Jan. 6, 1759. George so impressed one of his slaves that he said of him,

“So tall, so straight! And with such an air! Ah, sir; he was like no one else! Many of the grandest gentlemen in their gold lace were at the wedding, but none looked like the man himself.”

Martha brought to the marriage 15,000 acres and dozens of slaves. For the most part, George refused to sell any slave, and said, “I am principled against this kind of traffic in the human species.” His oversight and correction was mild, and thus few slaves ran away.

When delegates from twelve colonies convened in Philadelphia at the 2nd Continental Congress in May of 1775, George took his seat dressed in full uniform, hoping to receive a military appointment. By a unanimous vote on June 14, the delegates appointed him commander-in-chief.

Over the next six and a half years, George demonstrated a hard resolve. Johnson says, “He was no great field commander, but he was a strategist. He realized that his supreme task was to train an army, keep it in the field, supply it, and pay it.” And to not lose a decisive and final battle. In the meanwhile,

“Legislatures functioned, courts sat, taxes were raised, the new independent government carried on. The British were up against an embodied nation, and in the end the point sank home.”

Washington defeated Cornwallis at Yorktown, Virginia, in Oct. of 1781, and the war ended.

In early December, Washington met his officers at Francis’ Tavern on Pearl Street in New York City, to bade them a fond farewell. He said, “I now take leave of you. I most devoutly wish that your latter days may be as prosperous and happy as your former ones have been glorious and honorable.”

“I cannot come to each of you, but shall feel obliged if you will come and take me by the hand.”

George retired to Mount Vernon, but in 1789, voters elected him the new nation’s first president, and he served two terms, until 1797.

In Dec. of 1800, a year after George’s passing, Martha Washington signed a deed that freed her deceased husband’s slaves. They would be emancipated on Jan. 1, 1801.

Illusions

by | Feb 6, 2021 | 0 comments

Illusions

In recent days, I reread Daniel Boorstin’s book, “The Image, or What Happened to the American Dream.” Boorstin trained as a historian, but in his 1961 book, he steps away from history long enough to peer deep into American’s modern-day thought processes.

He identifies certain illusions that, he insists, hamper correct thinking.

I would agree. Illusions abound in modern-day America. We wonder, “what is true, what is false, what is real, what is fake?” We fill our minds everyday with truckloads of information, but we are at a loss what to do with it. The illusions float upon the wind. We imbibe them in the water. They live in us.

We repeat them. Others repeat them. The illusion bounces into our ears again and again, as if we reside in an echo chamber. If we hear the illusion enough times, we believe it true. Boorstin says, that “the thicket of unreality stands between us and the facts of life.”

In the first chapter, Boorstin points at an American illusion that he calls “extravagant expectations.”

He writes, “We expect too much of the world. We expect new heroes every season, a dramatic spectacular every week. We expect everybody to feel free to disagree, yet we expect everybody to be loyal, not rock the boat. We expect everybody to believe deeply in her religion, yet not to think less of others for not believing.

“We expect the contradictory and the impossible: compact cars which are spacious; luxurious cars which are economical. We expect to be rich and charitable, powerful and merciful, active and reflective, kind and competent.

“Never have people been more the masters of their environment. Yet never has a people felt more deceived and disappointed. For never has a people expected so much more than the world could offer.”

Is he right about our extravagant expectations? Do we expect too much from our employers, our spouses, our children, our friends, our communities, our government? He thinks so. I wonder.

A second illusion that Boorstin points to is the “pseudo-event.”

True news reveals a new event: a birth, a marriage, a death, a tornado, an earthquake, a volcano, an election result, a revolution, a battle, a wheat harvest, and so on, each a legitimate form of new news.

But Boorstin argues that the daily news now in America revolves around what he calls, “pseudo-events.” Into that category he lumps “press conferences, interviews, and leaked information.”

At a press conference, a politician or a company official stands before a gathering of journalists and answers a series of their questions by drawing from a stack of memorized canned answers. In an interview, a single journalist directs the same questions to the same politician or company official.

Leaked information is more often an unsubstantiated rumor, and few can judge its veracity.

Boorstin says that we suffer daily from “A Flood of Pseudo-Events.” They “are more dramatic, are planned for dissemination, repeated at will, cost money to create, are more sociable, more conversable, more convenient to witness, and they spawn other pseudo-events in geometric progression.”

He concludes, “Counterfeit happenings tend to drive spontaneous [real news] out of circulation.”

Boorstin then points at a third illusion: when American society mistakes a celebrity for a hero. A hero is a person who achieves a worthwhile goal. For example, consider the scientists who developed the Covid-19 vaccines in record time. I say, give them a Nobel Prize. We call them heroes.

But a celebrity is someone different.

Boorstin says, “she is neither good or bad, not great or petty. She is the human pseudo-event, fabricated on purpose to satisfy our exaggerated expectations of human greatness. She is morally neutral, made by all of us who read about her, see her on television, and who buy her songs.

A hero makes new news. “A celebrity hires a press agent.”

On May 21, 1927, twenty-five-year-old Charles Lindbergh became a global hero, when he flew the Spirit of Saint Louis across the North Atlantic and landed in Paris, France, but then newspapers decided to convert him from hero into celebrity. They asked him to inspire, to lead, and to speak.

Boorstin says that when Lindbergh “gave into these temptations, his pronouncements were dull, petulant, and vicious. He acquired a reputation as a pro-Nazi, and a crude racist. When in Germany, he accepted a decoration from Hitler. Very soon the celebrity was being uncelebrated.”

A celebrity is known for being know, not for any remarkable achievements.

Ralph Waldo Emerson ended his essay on Illusions, saying, “The mad crowd drives hither and thither, now furiously commanding this thing to be done, now that. What is he that he should resist their will, and think or act for himself? Every moment new changes and new showers of deceptions to baffle and distract him.”

Four Presidents

Four Presidents

by | Jan 20, 2021 | 0 comments

Four Presidents

Four outgoing Presidents have boycotted the incoming President’s inauguration: John Adams, his son John Quincy Adams, Martin Van Buren, and Andrew Johnson. The second President, John Adams, was first elected in 1796, by defeating Thomas Jefferson 71 electoral votes to 68. Four years later, in 1800, Jefferson won the election by defeating Adams 73 electoral votes to 65. A bitter Adams refused to attend Jefferson’s inauguration on March 4, 1801.

Four men ran for President in 1824: Andrew Jackson, John Quincy Adams, Henry Clay, and William H. Crawford. Jackson won the popular vote, 153,544 to Adams’s 108,740, with Clay and Crawford each earning less than 50,000 votes.
Jackson also won the most electoral votes, 99, to Adams’s 84, with Clay winning 37, and Crawford winning 41. Officials pointed out though that Jackson had not won a majority. A winner needed 131 electoral votes.

The issue went to the House in early 1825, to let the Representatives vote and decide who would become the next President. Because Clay detested Jackson, he swung a deal. “Clay met privately with Adams and assured him of his support.” On the first ballot, the House elected John Quincy Adams.

Days later, Adams announced that Henry Clay would serve as his new Secretary of State.
Jackson and his common folk supporters were livid. They shouted a roar of protest against Adams and Clay’s “Corrupt Bargain,” and that roar accelerated throughout the next four years.

In 1828, Andrew Jackson, a popular candidate, won the election, 178 electoral votes to Adams’s 83. John Quincy Adams though refused to attend Jackson’s inauguration. He had had enough of Jackson.

Martin Van Buren also served one term, 1837 until 1841, but he lost to William H. Harrison in the 1840 election. For reasons never clarified, Van Buren chose not to attend Harrison’s inauguration. Harrison’s speech on March 4, 1841, was the longest of any new President, 8445 words. Three weeks later, on March 26, he caught a cold that turned into pneumonia, and he passed away on April 4, after serving as President for just 31 days, the shortest term of any President.

Vice-President Andrew Johnson became President after John Wilkes Booth shot President Abraham Lincoln on April 14, 1865, Good Friday, at Ford’s Theater. Lincoln died the next morning. Johnson clashed with the Radical Republicans in Congress over the issue of Reconstruction. These Congressional firebrands submitted one law after another to Johnson for his signature, and he would veto each in turn, because he argued that they were unconstitutional. The Radical Republicans dubbed him “Sir Veto,” and “Andy Veto,” and they in turn would override each of Johnson’s vetoes.

“Not content with curbing Johnson’s authority, the Radical Republicans decided to remove Johnson altogether by constitutional processes, and replace him with the Radical Senator, Benjamin Wade of Ohio, then the Senate’s president pro tempore.” Wade had gone so far as to pick out his own cabinet.

In 1867, the Radical Republicans passed the Tenure of Office Act, over Johnson’s veto. It required a President to receive Senate approval before he could terminate any of his appointees. In 1868, Johnson fired his Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton, because Stanton sided with the Radical Republicans.

On March 3, 1868, the House voted 126 to 47 to impeach Johnson on 11 articles of impeachment, for “high crimes and misdemeanors,” because he had not received Senate approval to terminate Edwin Stanton, a violation of the Tenure of Office Act.
On May 16, the Senate voted 35 to 19 on the first article of impeachment, a single vote short of the necessary two-thirds majority. Ten days later, the Senate voted on two more articles, and the vote was the same, 35 guilty and 19 not guilty.

Ten independent-minded Republicans had refused to vote for Johnson’s conviction on the three articles, and Johnson remained President. Ulysses S. Grant won the 1868 election, but Andrew Johnson refused to attend Grant’s inauguration on March 4, 1869. He had had enough.

U. S. history includes a constitution, laws, elections, popular votes, and electoral votes. It appears messy. Voters push aside one man or woman in favor of another. Feelings get hurt.

The 2020 election is not that much different than what has happened throughout the 233 years of U. S. history. Trump is not the first president to clash with Congress, to suffer impeachment and a trial, to lose an election for a second term, or to boycott an inauguration for a new President.

What is unique about the 2020 election is the attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021. Never before has a president provoked a mob to interfere in Congress’s duty to verify an electoral count. How can anyone make sense of that? Democracy is messy, but it is not violent or destructive.

Beau Miles

Beau Miles

by | Jan 11, 2021 | 0 comments

Beau Miles

It is summer-time in Australia.

While scrolling though YouTube in recent days, I came across a most unusual character from “Down Under.” Story-teller extraordinaire, adventurer, and filmmaker, Beau Miles sports a bright orange beard, a mop of wavy dark hair, an infectious smile, and speaks in Australian-accented English.

“He has traveled to all corners of the globe on a shoestring budget, always in search of backwaters and backstories.”

Beau achieved a PhD in Outdoor Education at Melbourne’s University of Monash, where he has lectured for a dozen years, but he lives in Jindivick, Victoria, 90 kilometers east of Melbourne, on a farm, surrounded by the greenest of pastures, and thick groves of old gum and eucalyptus trees.

He made a video once of how he walked 90 kilometers to the university, where he gave a lecture.

Four years ago, Beau ran the 655-kilometer Australian Alps Walking Track, that follows the alpine areas of Victoria, New South Wales, and the capital of Canberra, first person to achieve that. He also kayaked 2,000 kilometers from Mozambique, to Cape Town, South Africa, along Africa’s east coast.

Three years ago, Beau kayaked across the Bass Strait between the city of Melbourne and the island of Tasmania, and recorded his adventure in a video, “Bass by Kayak.”

In recent years, Beau married Helen, and in October of 2019, she gave birth to their daughter May. With a family, Beau now stays closer to home, and Helen and May both appear in his videos.

Beau collects wood and old planks of lumber that others have tossed aside, and that he stores underneath his house. He admits, “I have a love affair with wood.” Two years ago, he made a video showing how he made a kayak paddle from odd pieces of junk lumber he picked up alongside the road.

Two years ago, Beau decided to run a marathon, 26+ miles, but do it over 24 hours. He measured the road that loops around his farm and discovered that it completes a full mile. At noon on the first day, he ran three laps, and then at the beginning of every hour thereafter, he completed a single lap.

Between laps, Beau shifted into high gear, was in constant motion. He says, “The rest of the time I do as much as possible; making things, odd jobs, fixing stuff. It’s about running, doing, and thinking.”

He planted a series of small trees. He cooked vegetables and baked a loaf of bread in pots over hot coals. He and Helen then ate the vegetables and bread. He pulled out some of his junk lumber, grabbed his power saw, power sander, power drill, and made an outdoor table.

On a grease board, he listed all the things he wanted to accomplish that day, and once completed, he crossed each off. One of his items was, “eat an orange.” Once he ate it, he crossed it off.

But at the beginning of each hour, he stopped, headed to the road, and ran another lap. Helen ran a lap or two with him in the dark that night, their way lit with a light strapped to Beau’s forehead.

Beau completed the marathon just before noon the following day.

One guy who watched this 17-minute video, said, “This guy is having a manic episode on YouTube, and we are just cheering on his madness, lol.” Another said, “This is the most productive mid-life crisis ever!” A house wife said, “This is every wife’s dream, a man actually doing all the tasks in one day.”

The video’s title is “The potentials of a single day—A mile an hour,” and towards its end, he says, “I may have just had the ultimate day of running and making and fixing and being.”

Yes, without preaching, Beau Miles demonstrates how a man or a woman, a boy or a girl, could accomplish in one day far more than what they would dare to believe. How?

Beau’s techniques are not extraordinary. They include a plan to run, a simple to-do list, and a steady supply of needed goods within easy reach: power tools, scraps of lumber, a shovel, small trees, flour, yeast, vegetables, iron pots, hot coals, running shoes, and an old-fashioned alarm clock.

He follows the advice I heard decades ago, “plan for tomorrow by writing down tonight all you want to accomplish the next day.”

Beau’s single day reminds me of a poem written by the Scottish poet, Thomas Carlyle, “To-Day.” “So here hath been dawning another blue day; Think, wilt thou let it slip useless away? Out of Eternity this new day is born; into Eternity, at night will return.”

You and I are blessed. We head into a new year, 2021, and we now have a few days less than 365 to live. Do we dare give each day over to “running and making and fixing and being?”

Oh, yes, it is summer in Australia, a pleasant thought these cold days in January.

The Kolyma Highway

by | Dec 23, 2020 | 0 comments

The Kolyma Highway

Bill Benson

December 23, 2020

The Kolyma Highway begins at the port of Magadan on Russia’s Pacific Ocean, heads north some distance, but then veers to the west, and ends at Yakutsk, a city of 311,000 people, deep in a Siberian wilderness called the taiga. Travelers see only spruce and fir trees in every direction.

All together, this highway of gravel, mud, ice, and pavement that cuts through the endless forest extends across 2012 kilometers, or 1260 miles, of the Russian landscape.

Early in the 20th century, the Soviet Union’s dictator, Joseph Stalin, decided to build the Kolyma Highway with conscripted slave labor, prisoners convicted back east on trumped-up charges. Each received years-long sentences, and each were transported by railroad or ship to Magadan.

Stalin sent both men and women to the prison camps that dotted the full length of the highway. His stated purpose for the highway was to extract gold, tin, and uranium from the mines, but his actual purpose was to bully, intimidate, and terrify the Soviet Union’s people into submission.

The Kolyma Highway was a make-work project, “Stalin’s citadel of repression.”

Andrew Higgins, a reporter at The New York Times, wrote a recent article on the Kolyma Highway, that appeared in the Sunday, Nov. 22 edition. Higgins quotes from Varlam Shalamov’s short story collection, “Kolyma Tales.”

“There are dogs and bears that behave more intelligently and morally than human beings. A man becomes a beast in three weeks, given heavy labor, cold, hunger, and beatings. The men were not shown the thermometer, but that wasn’t necessary since they had to work in any weather.”

Historians estimate about one million men and women worked on that highway throughout the 30s, 40s, and 50s, and that tens of thousands of men and women died there. Either guards shot them, other prisoners murdered them, the cold froze them, or the relentless work killed them off.

A survivor named Antonina Novosad recalls “how a fellow prisoner was shot and killed by a guard for wandering off to pick berries just beyond the barbed wire. Prisoners buried her there. This is how we worked. A camp is a camp.” Russians now call the Kolyma Highway “the road of bones.”

In the 1960s, Stalin’s replacement, Nikita Krushchev, dismantled the prison camps, but the highway remains. Traffic is sparse. People have deserted the towns. “Hundreds of miles separate the road’s few inhabitants.” The mines are shuttered. The factories are crumbling. Memories are fading.

Evidence of the mighty struggle prisoners endured when they built the highway have vanished.

Some distance off the highway, but near its midpoint, is the town of Oymyakon, “the coldest permanently inhabited settlement in the world. Called the Pole of Cold, its inhabitants suffer from an average January temperature of minus 58 degrees Fahrenheit.”

Although officials set the workday at ten hours, guards often worked the prisoners a full 12 hours, even on Christmas Day, considered “just another workday.” When Soviet officials in Moscow first came to power, they outlawed all religious celebrations, including Christmas.

In the winter of 2018, a young Moscow blogger named Yuri Dud traveled the 2012 kilometers of the Kolyma Highway in a van, and along the way he heard people’s stories. He decided upon this adventure, because, he said, “nearly half of young Russians had never heard of Stalin-era repression.”

Early in his two-hour video, entitled, “The Birthplace of Our Fears,” he comes across a wooden star, no bigger than three feet across, wired with colored electric light bulbs. A Kolyma Highway historian named Rostislav Kuntsevich explained to Yuri.

“They usually put stars like this one atop factory roofs. The star was wrapped in red fabric. If the prisoners met the quota on time, the star lit up with a red light in the evening.

“When they did not meet the quota, additional work hours were ordered, and the star wouldn’t light up. So prisoners knew they had hours of work ahead of them.”

Imagine the hopelessness that the people dispatched to the Kolyma Highway must have felt their first day on the job. Cold, work, beatings, and hunger stretched far ahead of them into a bleak future.

Imagine the sheer agony they felt on Christmas Day. No family gathering. No turkey or ham meal. No respite from the work. No presents. No smiles of joy. No phone calls with loved ones. No mercy.

Joseph Stalin’s most famous quote, “One death is a tragedy; a million is a statistic.”

In the New Testament, shepherds reported that they heard angels sing the words, “Peace on earth. Goodwill to all men.” A message of hope, of a better life, of rest and comfort, of joy to the world.

Yet, in Stalin’s Siberia, Christmas surrendered to hopelessness.

To my faithful readers, at this season, I wish each of you a Merry Christmas.